 Welcome, everyone. My name is Paul O'Cain. I am a member of the Scottish Parliament and the deputy convener of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee. I would like to welcome you all to the special online edition of the Festival of Politics 2021, in partnership with the Parliament's think tank, Scotland's Futures Forum. This afternoon's panel is entitled, Cut Your Food's Carbon Footprint, and it is being held in partnership with the Robert Institute of the University of Aberdeen. We are delighted that so many people are able to join us online today. I look forward to hearing comments, discussions and questions as we go through this afternoon, focusing on a very important and relevant topic. I am sure that everyone else is looking forward to seeing questions and comments. This is a time when it is critical to ask questions about where food comes from and the production process that is involved before it lands on our plates. How will climate change affect our weekly shop? What practical changes can we make to minimise our carbon footprint from rethinking food miles to innovative urban farming or embracing new forms of bug foods? The panel aims today to try to address all those questions within the next 60 minutes, so please stay with us. As I have already said, I encourage you all to take part. Today is very much about an interactive experience, so please use the event chat function to introduce yourself, stating your name and your geographical location and any questions that you would like to pose for the panel to respond to. That brings me to our panel, and I am delighted to be joined by four panellists today. Professor Staira Bridal is Professor of Food, Climate and Society at the University of York and author of the book Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air. Professor Jenny McDermid is Professor of Sustainable Nutrition and Health at the University of Aberdeen and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Challenges in Health, Nutrition and Wellbeing. Abbey Morden is co-founder of the Glasgow Food Policy Partnership and Pete Ritchie is director of Nourish Scotland. He is a very warm welcome to all of our panellists today, who are all very busy people but have kindly agreed to join and help to lead our conversation. As I said, there will be an opportunity for the audience to put questions and views to the panel throughout the event. I will keep an eye on those and bring them in as we go along. As I said already, if you want to put your comment or question, please use the chat box. We will try to get through as many as possible, because I know that people are keen to contribute. However, what we will do just to start is to ask each of our panellists to perhaps comment on those predictions that we have cited in the report from Oxfam that most people will start to directly experience climate change through the impact on their food, what do they eat, the price that they have to pay and the availability. If we can have some initial thoughts from each of our panellists on that. I will come first to Professor Sarah Bridle, then to Professor Jenny McDermid, then to Abbie, followed by Pete. We will start with Professor Sarah Bridle. I think that this is really important to get across. A lot of people will not necessarily feel that climate change is going to be something very tangible to them. Over the past year, we have become much more aware of the fragility of our food system and how it can actually be affected by events, including in the future extreme weather. I think that this is really helpful to emphasise the fact that food is going to be affected by extreme weather events in this country, but it could also be by extreme weather events in other countries that impact what we can access. Also, there could be changes in how much people are prepared to export, as we have seen that happen before, for example in 2008, with protectionism, which could also affect what we can get hold of. I think that this is a really tangible thing that is emphasising the importance of climate change. I welcome the highlighting of these topics from Oxfam. Thank you very much. We will come to Professor McDermid next. Yes, hello. I agree with what Sarah just said. Adding to that is probably the cost of food. As the systems deal with climate change and what impact that is going to have on our food system and production of food, food prices are going to probably increase. The concern there is the inequality that that might create in terms of who can afford to eat it and who can't. I think that what we are paying for food is going to change. That is the ability to access to food and what can actually be produced with the climate changing, because what we can actually produce will also change, not just with extreme weather events, but as climates get warmer, get colder, flooding more drought, that will affect what we can produce as well. I think that this is going to have serious implications for changing what we eat to mitigate climate change, as well as to adapt to it. Thank you. I know to Abby. From my perspective, many people in countries in the global south have been experiencing challenges to their food supplies through disruptions to the climate system for a very long time. We are just starting to experience that here. A huge amount of what we produce in Scotland is not actually what we eat in Scotland particularly. We are quite reliant on imports from countries of quite fragile climates, for example rice from the global south and vegetables, largely speaking, from Spain and Italy. Those countries are much more on the front line, I suppose, if you might say, of climate change than we are. The availability of the produce and food that we used to eat is going to become a lot scarcer, unless we start paying attention to what we produce in Scotland and how we produce it. Just to echo Jenny's comments on availability and the price point of these products as well, we will definitely, as the basic economics supply and demand, the more scarce resources, the more expensive it becomes. Thank you for that, Inesol Insight, and we will come to people tonight. Thanks Paul. It wouldn't be much for a debate if we all just said the same thing, so I'm just saying exactly the opposite. The cost of transport has fallen dramatically in the last century. The cost of food has fallen dramatically in the last century. Our problem isn't too little food, our problem is too much food that we can produce in the world. We have a capacity to produce far more food than we need, and the reason people go hungry is because they don't have any money. I don't think that we can rely on the threats of climate change to influence our—to drive our decisions about food policy. We need to have a more sustainable food system. We need to limit red meat consumption, high—well, and white meat consumption, that part. We don't want that, and farm fish consumption in our high-consuming countries, because it's a grossly inefficient use of resources, and we need to level up in terms of our impact on biodiversity and climate in the way that we eat. As other speakers have said, we need to make sure that people on low incomes can eat as good a diet to be on the high incomes, but that's a matter of social policy. We certainly can't rely on droughts and pestilence to change our food choices. We have to rely on some choice editing, and it's interesting that Compass has already taken air freighted food off their menus. Some of the big retailers and caterers will do some of that choice editing for us, which they wouldn't have done 10 years ago. Then we have to look at some of the fiscal measures in terms of things like carbon pricing to actually re-internalise the externalities in our food system. That's something that has to happen through, probably, certainly at EU level, actually trying to change the market, so that the market failure that we have at the moment in our food system is reversed. At the moment, all those things—the degrading of our natural ecosystems, the driving of climate change, the exploitation of workers—are not reflected, and the poor health that some of our food produces are not reflected in the price of food. It's getting the price right that we need to do, and that's a policy issue, not primarily a natural process. We can't rely on natural processes. We have to take charge of the policy. Thank you very much. I thank our panellists for setting the scene for our conversation. I think that decent and debate are always welcome in the discussions, because it informs, perhaps, our thinking more richly. Someone in the chat has asked for the Oxfam report link that has now been posted up, so people are able to digest that as we go through and, indeed, after the event, as well as a very detailed piece of work. Just to remind everyone to get your questions in, but I'm going to perhaps kick off and ask some questions to our panellists that are based on their comments so far. I think that I'll come to Jenny McDermid first. Jenny, how do you think that we can encourage or, indeed, support people to make better carbon choices, perhaps, when it comes to food? Do we have to look at issues around labelling, or is it perhaps something more fundamental than that, do you think? I think that we need to look at multiple aspects of this. Labelling is important, but we know from a nutrition perspective that labelling isn't sufficient to change what people are doing. Those who are concerned about it provide them with helpful information, but it doesn't get people in the mainstream population to change their diet. I think that we need to look at availability to alternatives. We need to look at the whole food chain, so what can be done in terms of what's happening in the terms of production of food, the supply of food that reaches the consumer, because I don't think that we should leave any one sector to solve this problem. It's got to provide consumers with the choice of food. If that's more low-carbon alternatives, so maybe less meat, then we need to look at that, but we also need to look at people's lifestyles as well. I think that this is something that we forget quite a lot in terms of trying to change behaviours, is how do we get it to fit into a certain lifestyle, what people desire, etc. It's interesting at the moment that we're seeing more and more convenience food that are plant-based, and this talks to people's issues around we need to have something that's convenient. I don't want to spend time cooking, I don't know what to cook, I just want something easy. I think that that's one way, but I come also from a nutrition perspective. My concern there is that the two aren't running in parallel at the moment, so a lot of the convenience foods that are coming out aren't necessarily healthy. The plant-based ones aren't necessarily healthy, so I think we need to make sure those still run in parallel, but we don't forget one or the other. I think we do need to encourage people, we need to look at ways that we can make alternatives attractive, because one of the barriers that people say, I enjoy eating meat, I don't want to give it up, the alternative wouldn't be tasty. I think we need to do multiple things across the whole food system that doesn't just rely on the consumer having to make all the changes. It's got to be something that's done across the whole food system. I think that that's very true. We have seen a substantial growth in plant-based burgers, being the kind of thing, and those meat alternatives. Jenny, you're right that we see those often in perhaps a fast food environment now, and a really big marketing push on those. Equally, restaurants such as the Grubb kitchen in England, which is attached to a bug farm, is trying to make more of a process around that, of understanding how we get to that product being available. I don't know if, Salah, do you have any thoughts on that at all, from that point of view? I think that what we find when we talk to people about this topic is that there are a lot of people who are already trying to eat two foods in an environmentally sustainable way who don't necessarily have access to the right information. For example, you might think that their solving climate change by reducing their plastic use is very common misconception that we run into. While I take on board totally Jenny's point and agree with Jenny's point that the research shows that giving people more information doesn't change what they eat, but at the same time, I believe that the research also shows that, if you give people more information, for example, on sugar-causing obesity, it does change people's receptiveness to changes in policy. What we saw yesterday coming out, there was a bit of a kerthuffle with a document appearing on a Government website, which then was removed again or clarified in terms of what the Government meant about its potential to put climate taxes on food. This is something that is really politically toxic and very difficult for politicians to come out and say, I'm going to do a new policy on the climate impacts of food, for example labelling or even taxation, but we have to have that as a first step. Otherwise, we're all talking cross-purposes potentially about the size of the impacts of different types of food. You spoke quite—it was quite interesting to hear you talk about choice and about perhaps some people failing that their choices are often limited, so they want to make the right decision, but there has to be a variety of ways to make that happen. Something that we've seen is that quite a lot of people want to make choices within their weekly shop even about how they're purchasing, if you like, but sometimes they feel constrained by the fact that they may live in a tenemental property or flat. Over the course of Covid, we've seen a lot of that to do with physical and mental wellbeing, of not having a garden space, of not having access to a place where you can be outdoors. For a lot of people who might want to grow their own, there's not always that option, and we know the challenges that there are around allotment provision and things like that. Do you think that there are alternatives? Do we need to look at more urban farming? Do we need to think about the spaces that are available in cities and things like that? That's a very different question, but we absolutely need to grow urban farming in Scotland. We've got so much land in our city, so much derelict vacant land from the industrial revolution and brownfield sites. We've got potential to put controlled environment glasshouses on that, grow all our own med-veds and stop having to bring them in, relying on a lot of water from very arid parts of Spain, but also slave labour, to be honest, in a lot of our food. We can create good, oily, round jobs, growing those tomatoes and other things that we do prefer to turnips. I know that we should eat turnips, but we actually prefer the tastiest stuff, so let's grow it in Scotland. I think that it's a really good idea. Let's welcome it and get Abby to say more about urban farming, because that's her thing. It delivers on so many things. It's not just food production, it's everything else, but let Abby say more about that. We haven't mentioned food waste, but obviously that went down during the pandemic, because it was such a drag going to shops, and we looked towards it in our fridge first, and it's gone back up again. That's the obvious thing, but we need to support people and create a food environment where it's easier not to waste food. Just to say in terms of your weekly shop, there is an information overload for people, and there's a nice wee browser that's been developed by the University of Glasgow, which is a plug-in to your Tesco shop or your Sainsbury shop or whatever, and it'll give you real-time feedback on the carbon footprint during on some of the databases that people like Jenny have developed, so it'll actually tell you how you're doing. You don't have to read labels, it does that for you. Things like that can help if people want, because a lot of people do want to be more aware of their footprint. If things like that work and in tests that's reduced people's footprint by about 14, 15 per cent, it's the sort of thing where actually the supermarkets could all agree to provide that sort of information to people. Already caterers have put in carbon labelling on their menus, so we will see more useful information coming forward to help people to make those choices, but I'll hand it over to Abbie on the urban food stuff. Great. Abbie, tell us about urban farming. I do want to come to you on some of the global issues as well, but go for it. Sure thing. Obviously I've been working in and around Glasgow for the last 15 years, mostly around community foods, and I think food education has a huge part to play in all these topics that we're talking about, both at a community level but really trying to get really good all-round food systems education into schools from a very, very early age so that people have a very thorough understanding really of how our food is produced but not just the carbon impacts on that but the impacts on nature, biodiversity and so forth. An excellent physical manifestation of that is through urban farming. Glasgow's great. It's got three market garden collectives operating in and around the city, so the wash house garden in Parkhead, Tenement Veg who have got a couple of different sites, and Locavore of course who currently occupy the Bella Houston site. The Bella Houston site is an ex-council nursery site, so massive greenhouses, lots of polytunnels, as well as an outdoor space. The wash house garden is a very small social enterprise and they provide quite an affordable box scheme to people within the east end of the city and they have an excellent, really excellent volunteering and on-site education programme. So, as Pete said, so much vacant derelict lands, some of it green space, some of it controversially under maintained or disused golf courses that the city council are currently relinquishing out of their control and so there's a huge opportunity to develop urban agriculture on quite a large scale within the city boundaries itself as well as looking into the sort of, you know, the peri-urban kind of environment as well. Another really good site, Glasgow specific again, is the Dal-Dawi site, another kind of an ex-training centre of the Glasgow City Council for Horticulture and that sits between sewage works and the crematorium. So, you know, from a kind of heat capture kind of perspective for heating and lighting greenhouses and kind of increasing the kind of growing season, then we can get those peppers and aubergines and tomatoes of really quite quality in a scale that Pete's talking about. In addition... Oh, I think we have lost Abby, unfortunately. Abby thought you dropped it there for a minute. You were just about to start your next point and then we lost you, so if you want to just start that. Sorry about that. Yeah, there's quite a few projects popping up that are doing indoor vertical farming. So, Glasgow Greens, another really good example of this. They've just taken on 11,000 square feet, I think it is, under what was the Arches Nightclub on Argyll Street and they started off with microgreens that are now growing full-size vegetables and again loads of food education kind of caught up and bound up with that as well and they've got these kind of aspirations to supply fresh green produce to all the schools in Glasgow, so really tapping into that procurement side of things as well, which is a total game changer definitely on a not just an urban context but in a kind of rural context as well. So, yeah, I think in a nutshell, urban farming both indoor and outdoor can provide a kind of multitude of opportunities around training, skills development, food education but of course food production and supply to the inhabitants of the cities. Thanks for that, that's a great insight. I have also seen some great examples that work on a larger level and a smaller level. In my region, I was down in Greenock, a number of the community garden and projects there that are growing their own food. One of them in Belville is actually on the site of former high flats that were taken down a number of years ago and that whole area has been reclaimed and is being put to really productive use. And finally, in the village where I live, we have an incredible edible project which is quite small scale but again allows families and people, just my dad was telling me the other day, popped along and borrowed a courgette, essentially didn't borrow it because he didn't give it back. I think it went into the soup but there are these opportunities, I think, when people are far more switched on to that, is just how do we upscale and support communities to do more of that, I think. We're getting a couple of comments in now, I think, just to pepper the discussion, if you like, something about, I think, farmland being, making sure that we use farmland well and that there's a rush to grow trees to plant woodland upon, you know, farms that aren't in use anymore and I think I'm concerned that that then doesn't allow us to have as productive farmland. Indeed, I visited a farm the other week there and they were discussing that and perhaps some of the carbon offsetting that goes on by big companies, companies who buy a farm and then plant it up. Does anyone have a perspective on that, they want to say, or perhaps? Or you can just wave at me yet Sarah? Yeah, I think that this often comes up, you know, we want to use nature to help to reduce climate change and I just want to put that alternative view out there which is that actually, if we look at the use of farmland, about 80% of land globally is used to feed animals which then, you know, and that uses relatively more farmland over 10 times as much land is needed per calorie of animal food than it is of plant food. So I'm not saying that we need to stop eating animals but we actually do have a huge amount of land there to play with in terms of, you know, reducing the amount of land we use to reduce food if we're going to also reduce greenhouse gas emissions that will inevitably be less to reduce the amount of animals we're eating so that then that could free up land to help reduce climate change. Moving PN as well on that? Yeah, I mean, just to say not all animals are equal and, you know, we spend most of meat we eat, let's be clear, is monogastrics, it's chickens and pigs and we're feeding them on high quality protein and high quality calories which humans could eat. We're also feeding a lot of our farmed fish on a high quality protein that humans do eat, you know, and so there's a real question with ruminants as we know generally not in feedlots but in most of Scotland eat grass we can't eat and they convert human inedible protein into human edible protein and they don't use a lot of calories in the process, right? So and they don't use a lot water in the process unlike feedlot beef so we do have to say not an all animals are equal. I think we're really clear that, you know, we need to moderate our meat consumption and we need to make our farms much more diverse particularly our grassland farms. We need a lot more trees on them, they need more diverse species and they need a lot less nitrogen on them, you know, but I think trading, you know, a diverse grassland for a citrus roof plantation to make some money for a hedge fund is not a good use of public money and at the moment we're putting public money into making that happen. Yeah, I'm good at this. I've got everyone's hands out which is great but I'm going to just kind of, I think, I think the discussion and where we're headed in this at the moment is essentially that tension perhaps between helping farmers to transition the more sustainable farming, you know, are the two aims, you know, of essentially, because food demand is going to increase, we know that, particularly, you know, 35 per cent by 2030. So are those two aims mutually exclusive, you know, can we, can we do both? But I know people want to comment on what they've heard as well, so maybe start with Abby, then go to Jenny and then come to Sarah. Yeah, I just started picking up on the sort of exchanging farmland for forestry kind of perspective. So I relocated in April 2020 down to Dumfries and Galloway out of Glasgow to start running a market garden down here. And I'm in one of the areas of Dumfries and Galloway that is, it's kind of, we've got sicker spruce plantations popping up all over the place, as well as wind turbines and wind farms. And it's a huge, it's a huge issue facing farmers who have been kind of, you know, eking out a living in the uplands for such a long time, raising, as Pete has said, you know, for the majority of that time, grass feds, pasture feds, cattle and sheep who, you know, can actually bring huge benefits to carbon sequestration and nature and biodiversity if they're managed in the right kind of way. Cattle particularly on a sort of low density livestock kind of ratios can be really good for diverse and mixed grasslands and trees, the right kind of trees, the right trees in the right place can provide a huge amount of benefits to livestock as well through shelter, through nutrition, lots of plants, for example, willow, you know, contain nutrients, benefits of nutrients and medicinal qualities for cattle and a lot of the livestock. Yeah, so mixing those two together can have huge benefits, planting hedgerows, for example, can have huge benefits. And just to follow on for your next question, my current work down here is kind of working quite a lot with farmers in this region, which is primarily beef and dairy and lamb. And we've been kind of working on this project for the last year called the Folk to Farm Dialogs. It's part of Norrish's work in the run-up to COP26 and I've been organising groups of farmers and food producers to meet with local authority policy officers to talk about agriculture and climate change and what we can do collectively to challenges to sort of, you know, respond to some of these challenges that are facing us. And I think some of the outcomes from that is really that we're going to set up a kind of nature-friendly farmers network for this area going forward into 2022 because one of the best ways to encourage farmers' transition to sustainable farming is to peer-to-peer learning and support. And for farmers that have done great staff in terms of grassland management or hedgerow planting to kind of go look what I've done, you can do that. You can do that too. It's entirely replicable. But the other side of that is, of course, is that farmers need support financially to do that, not just to implement those changes, but also to continue to manage those kind of changes that they've made, for example, woodland planting and so forth. I'll let someone else come in now. Thank you. Jenny. Well, yes, I mean, some of these points have obviously been raised. And I think two things that I wanted to add to it in terms of land is, as Abby said, if farmers are being encouraged to transition to some sort of other farming that perhaps will have a lower environmental impact, there does have to be financial support for that, where will the subsidies go and can actually the subsidies be set so that they have that as their main focus going forward. Just going back to the issue around planting trees, I think we have to also just be mindful of how long it takes trees to grow. Particularly if you want some of the broadleaf trees, then they do take a long time to grow. What we don't want to do is see the solution now is to plant trees, and we don't need to do anything because the trees will sort out the climate emergency for us. And I think, as we'll see at COP, we don't have much time. We need to be taking action now and just planting them and waiting for 30-something years, etc. But we actually really see some benefits of trees. Then we need to be planting trees, I agree, but we also need to be looking at changing what we're doing because we don't have the time to say, well, we'll wait for that. So as we're talking about today, what we're doing in terms of our food, what people are eating, is something we've got to look at and try to change. I don't think that we have the time to wait for the trees to grow to a level where they are mitigating climate change. Sarah, did you want to come in on that as well? That would be great. I'm not sure if I said that we should plant trees. I was saying nature-based solutions to cover a broad range of possible ways forward. It doesn't have to be either or. It doesn't have to be not having the livestock. As others have said, you can have a mixture of different nature-based solutions on a farm. But I'm really concerned that we need to have a sense of the scale of this problem, alluding to what Jenny was saying there about the amount of time in the agency. Factually, different animals are not equal indeed, but beef and lamb are causing the largest amounts of greenhouse gas emissions per gram of product by quite a large margin at the moment. We need to look at the quantities, not necessarily to stop doing some of these things, but we are actually going to free up a lot more land as well, because they do use more land than the other animals as well. I'm not saying what the solution should be. I think what is raising is that we need a conversation that brings in the stakeholders to decide which of those options we are all going to do together, but in a quantitative way, where we can all see how much different things are going to really have an impact. That is a really good point. Speaking to the farmer and the farm that I was on last week, it was about what is the cumulative impact of action as well and the different actions that people will take depending on their context. The balance of hedgerow planting and some tree planting that they had done was having an impact, as was the way that their cattle were being raised in terms of their grass consumption and all those sorts of things, so they wanted to look at it in more of a cumulative way. As a policy decision maker, we need to look at that in the round, certainly. I will move on to audience questions, but Pete, do you want to come in briefly on this? Obviously, not all land is equal. On my farm, you can't really grow crops, most of it. It's good for grass, it's good for trees, it's good for grass and trees together. Just to remember that, what's swallowing out the best quality land is urban sprawl. It's only 2% of the world is covered in houses and roads at the moment, but it's still often the best land. This thing about reclaiming some of that for urban farming is also really important, because that's where the best land is and often the best climate is. Having served on a planning committee and a local authority in a previous life, I'm going to segue away from that quickly, but I think that it's a fair point about land use and about local planning, and we need to think about that as well in the round. We have a couple of questions really about how do we move food service and restaurant industries around when it comes to sustainable foods and get them to think differently? I think that the rise of plant-based and fake meats, if you like, is that about profit margins for biotech multinationals and does it signal a move away from perhaps more traditional farming in local markets? Is that a problem? Is that a problem, I suppose, for that industry more widely? Abby? I think there's a range of different things that we can do here. One of the projects that we've been working on in Glasgow for the last few years through Glasgow Community Food Network has been the chef's challenge. It's a very much a stunt, it's an event, it's an annual thing, but it's really around raising awareness amongst the hospitality sector in the city, around what's out there that they can possibly use and these misconceptions around what we produce in Scotland or what can be grown in Scotland, for example. The chef's challenge has taken place every September for the last few years and it's got a competition between 20 different chefs and restaurants to use a mystery box of locally sourced vegetables to create a very much a plant-based, veg-based, veg-centred dish and that gets judged. They go through a couple of rounds and the final three sort of have a bit of a cook-off, which gets judged by Gary McLean and Kate Devine, who are both quite well known within the food sector and food writing scene. So I think things like that that raise awareness, chefs like to be competitive, but ultimately there's, I guess my work with the hospitality sector and food economy and food businesses is that, you know, people want, so those businesses want, they want continuity, they need a single point of ordering. They can't be faffing about trying to find, you know, courgettes from over here and, you know, broccoli from over there. So, yeah, it kind of needs a sort of better joined up supply chains, really, that kind of maximise on what we've got available at the same time as increasing the availability of the diversity and range of what we can produce. So it's multiple things, but I think pressure from hospitality sector would be very helpful and procurement as well, you know, because that's kind of their big bias, big bias of large quantities of foods on a regular basis, so we absolutely have to be working with them. Pete? Just to echo that, we've seen a transformation in the last few years in this. We run a project called Peace Pleas across the UK, which is about trying to change the food environment to help people to eat more vegetables. We work with all the multiple retailers, but also all the big catering companies, and catering companies have been biting our hands off basically to get into this, because obviously going to plant-based protein is more helpful for them, it reduces their costs, increases their margins, but they've also got a genuine commitment to some of this stuff. You speak to the chief executive of Compass UK, absolutely on board with this, and you'll have noticed that Compass at the SEC that hosting the COP, they've gone to 80% Scottish, high welfare, sustainable agriculture, and they're absolutely on it. You know, they are serious about this and reducing their food waste and reducing their packaging, and when you see their menus for the COP, you know, this is completely different from what we would have seen five years ago, to dexer the same, back to the story the same, you know, the caterers are moving, the big caterers are moving faster, farther and faster than we'd have expected, but, and we will also know, you know, the restaurants in Glasgow have been crying out, and we've been getting calls all the time, how do we source more local stuff, who's the best place we can source from, where can we get stuff that really shows our climate credentials, because we've got the COP, and that, you know, we're seeing more and more and more restaurants, you know, the place, the ordinary places, not the sort of organic places, the vegan places, but the ordinary places being really interested now in actually understanding about sourcing locally and about sourcing sustainably, and I think, because the caterers directly put stuff on our plates, that's a really important place to start, because they do do choice editing for us. Okay, thank you. We're getting some more audience questions in now, and I suppose maybe linked to that, it's about choice, and how can we make choices more easily, you know, a lot of people are keen to try and do the right things, so perhaps more of a flexitarian diet, I think might be the expression that's used, where reducing meat several days a week, or not eating meat several days a week, is certainly something I've tried to do, but what are the kind of, maybe perhaps, strategies around that, or what are the good ways to do that, that are easy for people to understand and sustainable? Jenny, I know you wanted to come in on the last point as well, so would you be able to take this and then I'll come to Sarah? Okay, well, I was going to come on the last point, because I was going to ask Peter a quick question, which you can maybe come back and answer in a minute, is if everybody's going to source local food, how much local food can we produce? Anyway, so that, Pete, can maybe answer that in a minute, because if every restaurant in the whole of Scotland want to source local food and produce that, is that possible, and if it isn't, what is the next level? But going on to the question about what we want, how can we persuade people to do it? I think there's a number of things that we know from our research that are barriers to this, because people perhaps don't think it tastes good, people, it can be more expensive, I mean, if you look at some of the convenience foods they are more expensive than the meat equivalent, but I think the language we use around this is really important. We keep talking about protein replacements, protein alternatives. We don't need more protein in our diet. Vegetarians and vegan eat more protein than they require, and so there's a fear if you talk to people that if they change their diet and don't eat meat, they will become protein deficient, and there's lots of evidence to support that, that that is one of the big barriers that I'll become protein deficient, particularly among men. The more we talk about protein replacements, the more we're reinforcing that, so I would like to see us talking about alternatives, food alternatives or something like that, because if we were switching to a plant-based diet, protein is the least of our worries in terms of nutrients, so I think there is a language thing that we need to change here as well to overcome that health concern people have. Okay, we're going to say that and then I'll come back to Pete on that first point. Yeah, I mean, I think some of the things I've got to say have already learned from Jenny or reading Jenny's papers, so I think that in terms of the language that it is very much about how you phrase these things, you know, if you put on a menu, for example, you know, meat-free, whatever, that sort of is quite a negative concept, but on the other hand, if you say it as a delicious, you know, whatever, then it can change the uptake of those things, so there's research showing that that's the case. But also, you know, we need what we find is that when we talk to people, they do want to change things, and there's the civic charter just coming out today from Scotland, which has got a huge amount of consensus around, you know, having more on labelling and having more information available, so we can put that information available on the canteens, for example. And that's something that children in schools as well have been asking us when we've talked to them that they're actually going to start labelling some of their foods. So, you know, I think there's a lot to take in every single time we choose what to eat, but still those broad information and information about the great work that maybe Pete's doing on this farm and how that is actually really good, you know, low-impact meat potentially. We want that information to get through to consumers. Great. I'm going to come to Pete, but before I do that, we've got another audience question and to ask about practical steps to encourage more people to use local veg schemes and move away from supermarkets. So, in addition to your comments on this, Abby, I'm going to come to you after Pete's responded, just to pose that as well. So, Pete, do you want to respond to some of those comments? Yeah, it's a really good point, Jenny, about markets and supply and demand. I think it's be fair to say that Compass certainly and Sodexo, they're now talking, to pick up Sarah's point, about plant forward menus, you know, and that's the framing they're using, the plant forward. They're talking about, you know, 75% of their plate being veg, all these sorts of, you know, changing what's normal, changing what people expect, putting, if there is a choice on the menu, they put the non-meat choice at the top of the menu rather than the bottom of the menu, where it used to be. So, all those things, they're really conscious of trying to make a difference there. But I think supply and demand is interesting if you, you know, if you look at the organic stuff in Denmark, you know, to begin with, the organic procurement sucked in imports and then the local market picked up. And to some extent, you know, they send market signals to producers in Scotland to go, actually, do you know what, you could produce more of this and that would be, you know, something that people would buy. So, even things like grain legumes, which we can grow in parts of Scotland quite well, you know, clava beans, you know, we don't grow because it's too much of a fath and we don't have a certain market for them. But actually, when you get market signals that people are looking for this stuff, then the markets can change. You know, you're always going to have cost production issues in some parts of Scotland for some crops. But I think that, and it's not just about local, it's also about sustainable. But I think we will see the caterers probably leading, leading away on some of these procurement practices. And then we need to make sure that public sector caterers are at least as good as private sector caterers and sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're very, very excellently good and sometimes, actually, they're buying the cheapest food and they're not even, you know, the fact that we can't always give away free school meals means that we've got a little way to go in terms of how we're doing our public food. Yeah, and as someone who, and so recently, also served as an education community in our local authority, I think that's a really fair point. You know, I think our young people, the choices aren't always the best for them in catering and we do need to look at that impact as well. Abby, give us your thoughts. Yeah, there's quite a few points to come back on here, isn't there? Where to start? So I was thinking, firstly, I was kind of thinking about Sarah's comments on, I guess, the plant-based versus meat-based dishes. Yeah, I don't think it is one or the other. I think it comes back to the education sort of, you know, the root of that again and kind of looking at the system as a whole. There is, as I said, you know, I think there's this danger of kind of vilifying farmers and kind of going, it's all your fault. And we have to think about rural livelihoods here at the same time, you know, and what makes a thriving rural community. And as Pete said earlier, not all soils are made equal in the same way as not all animals are made equal. And certainly some parts of this country are definitely better for raising livestock on it. It could be done in a better way in a more regenerative way. And I think that's kind of what we need to focus on is kind of where we are raising our livestock. We need to make sure that it is done in a way that is beneficial for our ecosystems and our environment and that people know that that meter is available and know where they can get it if they choose to eat it. I do agree and take the point completely that we need to eat less of it as well. On the production and supply kind of issue, yeah, we don't grow anywhere near enough vegetables in this country in Scotland for us to be eating these plant-based plates that we kind of aspire to. Something like, along the lines of 185,000 hectares in Scotland is under a barley wheat and maize production. And the vast majority of that, if not all of it, is for either whisky and brewing, all for animal feeds and most of that whisky is for the export market. And that compares with about 18,000 hectares under vegetable production. And one hectare is about the size of one ruppent pitch just for the context for folks that don't know land stuff. So, yeah, there's a huge disparity around kind of what we currently produce and certainly that needs to change. I was told when I first moved to Dumfries and Galloway that you can't grow vegetables in Dumfries and Galloway, but I've got an acre of vegetables just over there. So it is possible to build soil and change the way we produce things by care for management. It's not the easiest right. And again, it comes back to farmers and food producers being supported to do that, not just through peer-to-peer support but also through financial mechanisms. And that includes vegetable production because that's a big piece of the vigil that's missing from the current Scottish Government consultation on the agricultural transition in Scotland. They're not really talking about vegetables, as far as I can see. So that really needs to come into it and vegetable producers need to be better supported. Thank you. We're coming into kind of our closing minutes. I'll take Jenny just on that point and then I'm going to kind of pose the final question for us. So, Jenny. I'm not looking for an answer to this. I'm just throwing it out there. Abery, you mentioned the fact that most of the huge amount of our land is used for the whisky industry and brewing industry. I'm just wondering how we're going to square that so going forward. Do we produce food or whisky and what that means for the Government in terms of economics? I'm not expecting an answer. It's just a comment. Thank you very much and a very relevant one to be fair as well. I think with COP on the very close horizon now and thinking about what governments have to do and indeed what we need to try and push corporations to do more. What are the incentives that might convince the industry and those industries that produce our food to make dramatic changes and to drive forward the change that we would want to see coming out of something like COP? That's a massive question, I appreciate that. Let's start with Pete. I don't want to go to too much policy, one career here, Paul, but one of the things Scottish Government is doing at COP is presenting the Glasgow Declaration of Food and Climate. That's a global declaration on integrated food policies and adopting integrated food policies at policies on health, on waste, on environment, on climate to tackle climate change. Scotland is presenting that at COP26 with over 100 cities from all around the world. That's sending a very strong message that we need sustainable food systems. Scotland is also bringing forward the good food nation bill, which fits really well with the EU law that's just coming out on sustainable food systems. At EU level, we're producing a law on sustainable food systems, and Scotland is very much marching in step with that with its good food nation bill. I think what people like Jenny have done over the years on sustainable food is actually bearing fruit. People are making that connection that we can have a sustainable food system, but we need policy action and we need to pull the levers a different way from the way we've been pulling them. We'll see an agricultural bill in the next couple of years, and there's every hope that we can change the way we invest in farmers so we really support them to do the right thing. I think there's cause for some optimism in here. Taylor, do you have some thoughts on COP and what we may want to see in terms of action? Well, I think that it's really exciting the way that we've got this resolution now, this amount of detail, I should say, on what the plans are from various countries, and obviously we're still digesting the announcements from yesterday, two days ago. I think that what's even more exciting for me is the level of public interest. What I would love to see is if we look, say, back five years about plastics, how consumers, citizens are actually driving policies of businesses and governments and supermarkets to reduce the amount of plastic they're using. Now, whether you agree with that or not, the fact is that citizens are driving change now in terms of what policies around food, including plastic packaging, I want to see that same level of enthusiasm with that same shift for climate policies around food. Instead of this sort of governments being so frightened of announcing new climate policies around food, I want to see the public driving that, and politicians in Scotland responding to that. The audience question there is about incentives. Is it about carrot or stick? Are we in that space where we want to talk about, from the point of view of legislation? Jenny, do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I think, as Sarah says, we do need to do something to incentivise whether or not it's coming from citizens pushing it or from industry helping it. I think that we do need both sides. I think that we are going to have incentives. We've talked about farmers, and as we're talking about reducing our meat consumption, how are we going to help farmers transition to something else? How are we going to make sure that industry, what happens within that process, can also make the environmental changes that are needed in the production side? I think that we do need some political support at all stages of the food system. Exactly as Pete says, it's got to be joined up. We need to bring all the departments together. If we're talking about taxing a particular type of food, the health and environment sectors are speaking about this together. Again, you've got this greater movement behind it, rather than one department talking about it and maybe not quite joining up with the other. Going back to COP, I really hope that food is high on the agenda of this. If we look at global food insecurity, what's down the line for us? If we're not talking about food within the COP, it's going to be a huge disappointment. Thanks, Jenny. I'm sure that everyone here will be watching Glasgow very, very closely over the coming weeks of COP. Particularly, I think, that absolutely food and sustainability has to do with that. Indeed, that invitation that I was talking about to a farm came off the back of one to share what was going on in farms ahead of COP. It was one of the first times that I went and was invited to visit, so it's already opening up doors that should have perhaps been opened—or gates, shall we say—that perhaps should have been opened a long time ago. Can I thank our audience for their contributions today? Before we close our event, I think that it's important to hear a final word from each of our panellists on this topic and on what they've heard so far. Each panel will just take about a minute, if they can, to give us their concluding remarks. I'm going to start with Abbie, and then I'm going to go to Pete, and then Jenny and Sarah in that order, so Abbie, over to you. Yes. Everything that I do within my work is trying to build collaborative movements. People are talking about the citizen-led and people-led movements, and I think that it's really important that our food systems change is very much people-led and citizen-led, and that we aspire to a future where everybody has equal access to affordable, good, healthy food. We aspire to a future where our food has been ecologically produced in a way that is beneficial for biodiversity and for our ecosystems, and to a future where everybody working within those food systems has just respected and paid a fair wage. I don't think that's too much to ask for, but rooting within that, I think, at the root of that anyway, is that I keep coming back to food education in a myriad of ways, both through connecting people with their food comes from understanding how food is produced both here and elsewhere in the world, and building that citizen-led movement, that food sovereignty movement that can help achieve people-led food systems change. I think it's so important. It needs to be a very true collaborative approach, not top-down, not co-operation-led, a collaborative approach that involves everybody. Thanks, Abby. Pete? Yeah, thanks. We've spent most of human history not having enough food, not being able to use enough food. In the last 30 years, that's changed, and we haven't come to terms with the fact that production is not the main problem, but nourishing people and not screwing up the planet is now the main problem. What we need to do is to realign the food system purposes that Abby talked about. What is it that we're trying to do here? It's not producing more. We're trying to realign that with nourishment, and that means ensuring access to a healthy, sustainable diet for everybody, everybody in Scotland, everybody in the UK, everybody globally. Therefore, we need business models for farmers and for food businesses that work to that new paradigm. That means levelling the playing field with things like taxes on methane, taxes on nitrogen, which means that those operators need to now work in a new world, but it's on a level playing field. We need to create those sorts of different rules of the game so that the farmers and the food businesses can actually realign what they do with nourishing people and looking after the planet. That's the goal. We're coming back to the title of this cutting-off food carbon footprint. I think that we need to be aware of the evidence that shows that we're not going to achieve the reduction in emissions that we need just by the production system. We can only achieve it if people change their diets as well. We've got a big challenge here in changing people's diet, and we can't underestimate how hard this is going to be, but we really need to think of some innovative ways of doing this. Just on another point, if you saw recently published that meat consumption is going down in most parts of the population, among young people it's slightly increasing, which is interesting that it's the sector of the population that we assume is more signed up to carbon issues, wanting to make a change, but there's obviously some resistance still there. We've got to look at how we can overcome this. The only way we can really do this is to have a proper joined-up approach. What is happening within the whole food system is driving some of these things, so we have to take a full food system approach to this. That's a global approach, not just within Scotland. We need to change what we're eating and what we're producing. We need to do that in a way that involves the stakeholders in the system, not just the citizens but also the farmers. We need to have this giant-up conversation with the quantitative information available. Even though young people are increasing their meat consumption, they are also more aware and more interested in changing their diets, motivated by climate change than older generations. There are two steps. One is education, to raise the importance of food climate policies. We need to have the policies themselves being brought in in a way that brings everyone together into that conversation, motivated by the demand for those policies. We need to do all those things in one go. Thank you very much. We must end there. We're just coming on for four o'clock, so I'd like to thank you all for joining us today and for making such a big contribution to our discussion. Thank you to our panel that I brought to you in partnership with the Rowett Institute at the University of Aberdeen. I thank Professor Sarah Brydo, Professor Jenny McDermid, Abbie Mordden and Pete Ritchie for giving up your time and taking part in the festival of politics. I also have a few plugs to do before we all go, just to remind everyone that there's a discussion on the very topical issue of male violence against women at 5pm today. Over the next few days, we'll be discussing everything from fast fashion to climate action, diversity in politics, radical solutions to poverty and resilient cities. Indeed, I see a message there about whether we should stop eating fish as well as the sessions. It's all very topical and interesting, and I hope that you can join more of those discussions as we go forward. Thank you very much and take care.