Serving Better: A guide for local authorities
Reports
Serving Better: A guide for local authorities
This report from UK NGO Eating Better offers guidance for local authorities on how to source and serve healthier, more sustainable meals, for example in schools. It focuses on meat and dairy and proposes a 25% reduction in the amount of meat (of all types) and dairy served by local authorities, as well as sourcing 25% of meat and dairy served from “better” production systems. “Better” in this case means farming that uses lower levels of antibiotics, emphasises local feed sources and promotes animal welfare. The higher costs of “better” meat and dairy can be offset by increased use of vegetables and plant protein.
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Image: johnrp, Cumbrian sheep Herdwick, Pixabay, Pixabay Licence
Essay
On flesh and the spirit: understanding British Muslims’ meat consumption
Hibba Mazhary is a part-time PhD student in Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. Hibba first entered the department as a BA Geography undergraduate in 2013, before going on to complete an MSc there in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance. She divides her time between fieldwork, teaching undergraduates, and undertaking various part-time research assistant roles, including a project on parenting and the gut microbiome, one on meat normalisation media narratives, and one with the RSPCA on laboratory rat welfare. Hibba is interested in all things farm animal welfare and food sustainability. Her first TABLE blog, in which she sets out the aims of her PhD research, can be found here: Distancing death: slaughter, welfare and consumption in the British halal meat industry.
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The high cost of agribusiness consolidation in the US
Reports
The high cost of agribusiness consolidation in the US
This report by ActionAid USA examines corporate consolidation by US agribusinesses. It attributes the high degree of market control by a small number of multinational companies to decades of policy choices that supported corporate consolidation and larger farms. The report summarises the impacts on rural communities, such as loss of autonomy for farmers when using pricing models based on data-driven corporate recommendations. It also sets out an alternative model: a network of small-scale, localised farms and markets.
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Food Research Collaboration
News and resources
Blog: False Economies of Scale - why big isn’t always better
Industrial-scale supply chains in the fresh produce sector are forcing farmers to adopt environmentally damaging practices, argues this Food Research Collaboration blog post by Rebecca Laughton of the UK’s Landworkers’ Alliance. Laughton suggests that local or decentralised supply chains are a better option for farmers, for example vegetable box schemes that connect agroecological farms to consumers.
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