Sustainable healthy diets | TableDebates

Victory is in the Kitchen! Wartime lessons for today’s food systems? A blog by Eleanor Boyle

‘Victory is in the Kitchen’: Wartime lessons for today’s food systems?

During World War II, the British government transformed the domestic food system, implementing laws to cut food imports, encourage citizens to grow more of their own food, reduce food waste, and ration scarce foods such as meats, butter and sugar. In this blog post, educator and food writer Eleanor Boyle draws out the lessons that this historical case study offers for transforming today’s food systems in the face of the environmental crisis. She argues for reducing food waste, introducing modern versions of “British Restaurants” to offer low-cost meals and, controversially, rationing some foods including beef and dairy. About the author: Eleanor Boyle is an educator and writer in Vancouver, Canada. Formerly a journalist and college instructor, she holds a BSc in behavioural science, a PhD in neuroscience, and more recently, an MSc in food policy from City University London, working with Professors Tim Lang, David Barling, and Martin Caraher. Her publications include High Steaks: Why and How to Eat Less Meat (New Society 2012) and Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today (FriesenPress 2022). Eleanor has deep ties to Britain through family, study, and travel.

Sustainable Food Trust

News and resources

Podcast: Tim Spector on the microbiome and health

In this podcast by the Sustainable Food Trust, Prof Tim Spector (of Kings College, London and the nutrition analysis company ZOE) talks about the influence of the microbiome on both human and livestock health.

Why Europe needs a health-oriented food policy

European policy must support healthy food environments

In this position paper, the European Public Health Alliance argues that the European Farm to Fork Strategy should be strengthened to prioritise the health of people, planet and animals - instead of abandoning the strategy in the face of COVID-19 and the Ukraine war, as some have suggested. It calls for impact assessment methodologies to include health risks (such as dietary links to non-communicable diseases); for a “less and better” approach to the consumption of animal foods; and for a comprehensive approach to creating healthy food environments to be adopted, including a food labelling scheme and regulation of the marketing of unhealthy or unsustainable foods.

Image: bourree, Kimchi Korean food, Pixabay, Pixabay Licence

Journal articles

Probiotics increase the effectiveness of depression treatment

This randomised controlled trial of 47 patients experiencing depression found that taking a multi-strain probiotic supplement for a month experienced reduced depressive symptoms compared to patients taking a placebo. All participants continued to receive their usual treatment as well. The authors say the study shows the importance of the connections between the microbiome, gut and brain.

Image: Pexels, Cow Horns Cattle, Pixabay, Pixabay Licence

Journal articles

What is “less but better” meat?

The concept of “less but better” meat (sometimes preferentially called less and better) has become influential in discussions about health, sustainable diets, particularly in higher-income countries. Definitions of both “less” and “better”, however, are still diverse. This paper reviews the definitions and interpretations of “less but better” meat used in 35 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Image: klimkin, Chickens birds poultry, Pixabay, Pixabay Licence

Journal articles

Do European think tanks link meat with climate change?

This paper analyses how over 100 European think tanks talk about the links between animal-sourced foods and climate change, seeking to understand how they have influenced policymakers’ attitudes to the issue. It argues that the failure of many think tank documents to link the two issues contributes to a wider lack of attention to the environmental impacts of diets.

Image: RitaE, Carrots, Pixabay, Pixabay Licence

Journal articles

Degrowth plus efficiency for net zero food system by 2100

This paper models the impacts of a “degrowth” approach to reducing the environmental impacts of the global food system. It finds that reducing and redistributing income, alone, leads to only limited climate mitigation from food systems, because the shift towards unsustainable diets occurs at low income levels. Instead, a “sustainable transformation” scenario (incorporating income redistribution, and “efficiency-based” carbon tax, a shift towards the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet, and reduced food waste) is able to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions for the food system by 2100.

Putting climate on everyone’s table

Putting climate on everyone’s table: the IPCC on food and diet

In this policy brief, the Food Research Collaboration summarises points relevant to food and diet in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group 3 report, published in April 2022. The summary notes that both individual and policy-level choices about food are highly relevant to climate change and could make significant contributions to climate mitigation; that action is required on both consumption and production; that demand-side interventions can have beneficial effects for health; that individual action alone is not sufficient; and that “choice architecture” can influence demand patterns.

Image: Ksenia Chernaya, Wooden Kitchen Utensils And Vegetables, Pexels, Pexels Licence

Feeding the Future: What do modern Brits actually eat? Contribute to important new research

Dr Keren Papier is a Senior Nutritional Epidemiologist working in the Cancer Epidemiology Unit (CEU), based in the Oxford Department of Population Health, at the University of Oxford. Her research at the CEU includes investigating diet and disease associations using large-scale cohort data (including the Million Women Study, EPIC-Oxford and the UK Biobank). She is also the principal investigator for the Feeding the Future Study (or FEED).