News / Festival of Nature
George Monbiot shares hard truths about the future of food in sell-out talk
What we eat is destroying the planet, but there is another way says the author, journalist, activist and environmentalist George Monbiot.
Speaking to a packed room at Waterstones in The Galleries as part of the Festival of Nature, Monbiot and former Black and Green ambassador Olivia Sweeney discussed food, farming and his new book Regenesis which explores a world beyond traditional agriculture.
With topics ranging from religion to soil microbiology, Monbiot painted a troubling picture of how our food is produced and the harm farming is doing to the planet, from habitat destruction to biodiversity loss to soil erosion.
is needed now More than ever
Speaking to Bristol 24/7 Monbiot said: “I’m not deliberately trying to disturb people but the facts of the matter are very disturbing, there’s no question about it.
“It’s not just that we’re in a climate emergency and an ecological emergency, but there is also a food system emergency that we’re facing which is already being felt by many people even in this country,” said Monbiot.
Monbiot, who worked on a pig farm as a teenager and has spent many years researching and writing about food production, said livestock farming is “possibly the most destructive industry on earth.”
Globally, animal agriculture uses 83 per cent of farmland and contributes over half of food’s greenhouse gas emissions, but provides only 37 per cent of the protein we eat and 18 per cent of our calories.
Meanwhile, said Monbiot, even as global food production increases and prices fall, hunger and malnourishment are rising.
“Structural instability in the global food system which is beginning to look very much like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008 and it is, frankly, terrifying,” he said.
“You can bail out the banks with future money but you can’t bail out a failing food system with future food,” he added.
The talk at Waterstones in the Galleries was a sell out – photo: James Ward
Monbiot’s prescription for the future includes rewilding, or turning over pastoral land to nature, precision fermentation to produce protein without photosynthesis, and growing perennial crops to increase yield and reduce land use.
Speaking about what Monbiot’s ideas might look like in Bristol, Sweeney said: “Growing and green space and access to food in urban settings is more around connection with nature and mental health and those kinds of things, not necessarily about productivity.”
“I’m not expecting everyone to be able to grow all their stuff in their back gardens or on their window sills but the effort of doing that allows people to connect and understand and have that care and compassion to act on the larger level.”
Making the changes Monbiot want to see is not easy, but he said it can happen if enough people get behind the idea.
“If we can reach that critical threshold we can make this change happen,” he said, adding: “It can’t happen passively, it has to happen through mobilisation, it has to happen through activism within our communities, activism at the national stage, the global stage.”
“I think we’re about to see a whole new phase of environmental activism kicking off,” he said.
Sweeney said: “I think you’ve got to be optimistic otherwise you stop trying.
“Now that problems that have been known around the world are starting to hit the Western world, I feel like that, as upsetting as it is to say, is going to catalyse change at a rate that we haven’t seen before,” they continued.
Last year Bristol won a Gold Sustainable Food City award, the second city in the UK to do so, for addressing food inequality and reducing the impacts our food system has on public health, nature, and the climate.
Next week is Food Justice Week and will see the launch of Bristol’s Food Equality Strategy, to continue the city’s efforts to become a place where everyone has access to food grown, produced, sold and consumed in socially and environmentally sustainable ways.
Main photo: James Ward
Read more: Bristol achieves Gold Sustainable Food City status
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