On 17 June, Yorkshire in UK hosted it’s very own sustainability festival, and food was top of the agenda for day 1.
Yorkshire is home to 8 major cities & 5.5 million as well as having the highest concentration of food businesses in the UK. This makes it a hotspot for getting #beansonthemenu and helping everybody from Hull to Huddersfield and everywhere in between to eat more beans.
During the festival, Beans is How campaign advocate, Ali Morpeth joined the panel: “The Triple Trifle: How do we tackle under nutrition, over consumption and sustainable food?”.
Ali shared key thoughts relating to beans as part of the solution to healthy sustainable diets in Yorkshire and beyond:
- Transitioning to a sustainable food system that delivers healthy diets for all 5.5 million of us is a huge challenge & needs all food actors across Yorkshire to be part of the heavy lift.
- One of the simplest most cost effective solutions we have available to us is to grow, produce and eat more beans. Beans are for everyone, and helping people have more of these nutritious foods in their diets is part of the solution to Yorkshire’s triple trifle challenge.
- Leeds and other key cities across our region have declared climate emergencies & local authorities have asked food businesses to make it easier for everyone across the city to choose healthier more sustainable foods. The obvious solution is to support food businesses to cook and serve more beans. Activations like #beansonthemenu are a great place to start! What are we waiting for…?!
- The magic is happening in schools and communities that are growing, cooking and sharing more beans. Community groups like Incredible Edible are out in the wild working with people to grow beans in their homes and use them in home cooking. We should support groups like this scale up their activity everywhere in Yorkshire so all households have the chance to grow and eat more beans, supporting their health and the health of the planet.
Ali was joined on the panel by Dev Sharma, Youth MP, and folk from Leeds City Council, Fix our Food and Fare Share. Together they sent a resounding message to the audience: healthy and sustainable food should be accessible for everyone. We need everybody with a role in the food system to put sustainable diets at the heart of their strategies and support people’s health and the health of the planet.
