Achmad Bakhtiar

Journal

The flight was great. I thought of not sleeping at all throughout the 13 hours long flight, but, yea I failed miserably. I've read somewhere in the Internet that in order to avoid jet lag if you're traveling from the east to the west, you must try to stay awake as long as possible during the flight. But again I've failed, haha. I watched a movie for an hour, paused it, and went to sleep. I woke up after 7 hours of sleeping, had my sahoor, fajr prayer and continued watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Man of Steel. Inder was feeling nauseus and I told her to puke in the toilet and it did help! *feeling a lil bit proud*

We arrived at Heathrow Airport somewhere around 5.30 a.m (London Time). I took my luggages and rode Mr Tarmizi's car(He is one of the staff at the Education Malaysia UK and Ireland) to the London Malaysia Hall. In the room, I spent some time replying to text messages and took a short nap while waiting for Inder(well, jt turned outvshe was the one who was actually waiting xD) We took a walk at the roads nearby, went into some shops and as expected, almost everything was expensive to our standard.

We reached Imperial College London at around 10.30 a.m. Had to walk quite a distance because we stopped at the wrong place. We're supposed to register at the SouthSide Hall but we stopped at the Beith Hall. So we checked-in and were brief about the welcome pack that we got by John, one of the student staffs. Later, I've made a new friend named Anne from Norway. We went to the cafe nearby. Inder and Anne were having their lunch while I was just watching as I was fasting. From our conversation, I discovered that Anne is actually brilliant as she passed the IB(International Baccalaureate) with an amazing score of 44 out of 45! Now that is something really amazing! She is really nice, friendly and also funny.

Later on, I got to know another 2 people from Norway - Ole and Tonje. We went for a stroll around the streets in search of food. Fortunately, we got into a souvenir shop and managed to grab a sandwich. After that, we headed to the Hyde Park. Along the way, I talked a lot with Ole about his country, education system, bugs and much more. Sometimes I didn't really got certain words due to the unfamiliar accent(my bad) so I just nodded and said, "Oh, cool!" while smiling at the same time xD

We had an 'usrah' at the park. It was really nice to relax and get to know one another better. At this point, I really missed my usrah in Malaysia. Those amazing people, I just missed them. However, it was also fascinating to be talking and exchanging views with people from many different background. At 2.00 p.m, I got my room card and purchased thr wifi service for £5. And of course, the receipt is something compulsory for the spending report later on :3

I went into my room - 315 Falmouth Hall. I just put my luggage at a corner and straight away took out my laptop and tablet. I tried accessing the Internet for several times but I can't seem to get connected. Well, maybe there was a problem with the key and password. That night, I was supposed to attend a briefing session but hey, I still had a lot of time! Out of exhaustion, I fell into a deep sleep....

*Pictures will be added later on*

Lecture

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

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!

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)

See, Stop and Think

#Travelogue - London- Day 1

Lecture Report : Interactions between Food Systems and the Environment: a Two-Way Street

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