’Tis the season to be harried. Especially when doing The Big Food Shop. Author Anne Enright nailed the stressiest splurge of the year in her novel The Green Road. The capable sibling Constance takes on the “Apocalypse” of a Christmas Eve supermarket trip, forgets the Brussels sprouts, returns and buys another trolley load of extras, before remembering on the drive home that she’s forgotten the potatoes. She imagines pulling over and scrabbling them out of the earth in a roadside field, “lifting her head to howl”.
Throw in climate concerns and we might just tip over the edge but it turns out there’s an app for that. We need system change in our food and farming practices. Food is a problem, but the good news is it’s also a fix. Productive soil can sequester carbon. Better grass with mixed swards of clover lets the plants themselves fix nitrogen, protecting soil life and giving animals a better diet. But turning this tanker will take time, not least because the fertiliser industry makes huge profits and farmers and their advisers focused on endless expansion have to unlearn what they know.
In the meantime choosing a climate-friendly diet is an action each of us can take. Hugh Weldon and Ahmad Mu’azzam met studying mechanical engineering in Trinity and over a dinner conversation their app Evocco was born.
“It started with a simple philosophy; you can’t change what you can’t measure. So, we built an app to help people track the climate impact of their food shopping.” The user scans their food shopping receipts and the app keeps count. The sustainable diet aim is to keep the per-person emissions from food below 65kg of CO2 per month.
The app gets straight to our dietary footprint. Reducing plastic waste is a good thing but the vast bulk of carbon (and biodiversity loss) cost of our food comes from how it is produced, not its packaging. As you scan your receipts you will see that meat and dairy purchases push up your carbon count. The fastest way to keep to 65kg of CO2 per month is to eat more plant-based foods. Flexitarian eating with high-welfare organically produced meat is healthier (and cheaper) for everyone. www.evocco.com
But after all the hassle of buying it will we bin a third of our festive food, or the average amount of food wasted? Reducing food waste is a massive climate fix. The social enterprise FoodCloud has put together a series of fun cook-offs between celebrities and their charity partner chefs to show how to use up leftover food. A series of great All Taste, Zero Waste videos is available on its website (food.cloud) along with all the recipes. I took away the two Fs for what makes random leftovers sing: fritters and flatbreads. They help to give it all a delicious end.
Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests
