Lecture Report : Interactions between Food Systems and the Environment: a Two-Way Street
12:39 PM
The London International Youth Science Forum 2014
Date: 30th August 2014
Date: 30th August 2014
This morning, the LIYSF participants from group E had received a golden
opportunity of attending a very interesting lecture by Dr. John Ingram, from
the University of Oxford about the Interactions between Food Systems and the
Environment: a Two-Way Street. The lecture which was held in one of the seminar
rooms at the Sir Alexander Fleming building emphasized on the inter-related
connections between human activities related to food security and the
environmental conditions.
Dr. John Ingram had brought all of the participants to ponder about all
sort of processes that take place right from harvesting food materials in
agriculture towards processing, packaging, storing, retailing right to the
meals that we have on our plates everyday. He also highlighted on how human
activities can affect the environmental conditions, habitats and the ecosystems
which will eventually have an impact on
our way of doing things as well. From the lecture, I've learnt that food
security is one of today's big issue. For example, it was a surprise to know
that currently about a billion people are not getting enough food and about 2 billion
people are suffering from micro-nutrients deficiency. On the other hand, over
one-third of all adults all over the world are obese, which sums up to
approximately 2 billion people!
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| Dr John Ingram, University of Oxford |
From the lecture, I was also made aware
of the term 'food security' which is a state or condition when all people, at
all times have physical, economic and social access to sufficient, safe and
nutritious food to meet their needs and food preferences for an active and
healthy lifestyle. This can be translated into 3 big components which are food
access, food utilization and also food availability which play a big role in
indicating the level of food security that we are currently having from time to
time. According to studies being done, in a matter of another 12 years we will
be having another billion of more people in the world. With this larger
population, it is estimated that the number of people who would suffer from
inadequate consumption of food will still remain the same which is about a
billion people unless initiatives are being taken on a global scale to reduce
this number.
Throughout the lecture, we had also discussed
on how human activities in the food industry including processing, packaging
and retailing gave some negative impacts on the environment such as messing up
the ecosystem, consuming a lot of energy, releasing green house gases and many
more. One of the thing that I found interesting in this lecture was how
everyone was throwing out their ideas on how to deal with this problem. To
quote Dr. John Ingram, "There is not a magic bullet that can shoot this
global-scale program right away. You guys are the diversity and this diversity
of ideas will be the solution to this problem." Among the solutions
suggested are consuming insects for proteins because they take much less land
space compared to beef and others to be grown up for the same amount of
protein. Anne from Norway suggested practicing Vegetarian diet because that way
the amount of energy needed to process food can be reduced. On the other hand, Dr.
John Ingram himself suggested so that everyone eat in the right amount and
control over-consumption. Of course, there are the pros and cons for each
method but every effort will count towards reducing the world hunger maintaining
our food security.
At the end of the lecture, Ciara Judge, on behalf of the participants
gave an appreciation speech to Dr. John Ingram for all of the useful and
interesting information that he had been sharing throughout the lecture which
ended with a warm round of applause from everyone.
Report prepared by,
Achmad Bakhtiar M Yuni (Malaysia)
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