News • Children's Food Campaign
Government's food 'vision' offers only more of the same
The Government's Food 2030 report was slammed today by campaigners for failing dismally to tackle the unsustainable nature of our food and farming system. The report is recommending only “soft” measures, such as wasting less food and avoids tough issues such as reducing children's consumption of junk food by, for example, properly protecting children from junk food marketing.
Jeanette Longfield MBE, Coordinator of Sustain, said: “The Government's 'Food Vision” is hardly worthy of the name. The document proposes a series of minor tweaks to our fundamentally unsustainable food system and ignores obvious ideas to help British farmers, like improving the food that Government itself buys.”
She continued: “What we need is an ambitious programme of investment in British farming so that it can produce healthy and sustainable food. If Government is serious about making our food system sustainable, it must put its money where its mouth is and only spend tax payers' money on good quality and sustainable food. What we have got is more of the same policies that have caused the food system's current problems.”
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For further information please contact Jeanette Longfield on 0203 5596 777 or Richard Watts on 0203 5596 777 (mobile 07710782719).
Notes to editors:
1. Sustain is the alliance for better food and farming, which advocates food and agriculture policies and practices that enhance the health and welfareof people and animals, improve the working and living environment, enrich society and culture and promote equity.
2. Despite this report highlighting the dangers of the growing obesity crisis, the Government is currently consulting on proposals to allow product placement of junk food into
3. Sustain recently released a report showing that the Government has wasted £50 million in the last decade on weak voluntary schemes to improve food in hospitals. The Government is currently pushing another weak, voluntary scheme to improve public sector food, The Healthier Food Mark. For more info: https://www.sustainweb.org/news/dec_09_government_hospital_food_failure/
4. The impact of the food system is immense: According to latest figures from the United Nations, animal farming globally causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the cars, lorries and planes in the world put together, and the effect is increasing. At the same time, the Government itself states that 70,000 people die in the
Published Monday 4 January 2010
Children's Food Campaign: Better food and food teaching for children in schools, and protection of children from junk food marketing are the aims of Sustain's high-profile Children's Food Campaign. We also want clear food labelling that can be understood by everyone, including children.
