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The issue of food and diets had never particularly crossed my mind until I started writing Local. I've always been interested in physical exercise and being fit, but never paid a great deal of attention to how important nutrition was in a broader context.
But spending a year wandering around my local map highlighted two issues to me virtually every week:
- 1: Our country is strewn with the discarded plastic wrappers of processed junk food.
There's a massive environmental problem with single-use plastic (only 9% of plastic is recycled) and a massive health problem with our appalling diets, plus the additional difficulties unhealthy people face with getting out into nature to enjoy it and to exercise.
The intersection between these feels ripe for some adventure + purpose (A+P) campaigning.
- 2: So much of our land is devoted to agriculture (70% of the UK), leaving very little for nature or roaming adventurers. (Watch The UK in 100 Seconds to see what our country is made up of.)
Initially I just shrugged my shoulders at discovering how much of the UK is farmland. After all, we've got to eat, right?
But then I started to learn that not all food is equal in terms of its demand on land, its impact on biodiversity, or the pollution it causes.
The realisation that what I choose for lunch has more impact on climate change, nature loss, and clean rivers than almost anything else I can do in my life was astonishing.
(I confess I didn't really enjoy all that I was learning: it was pointing some pretty damning fingers at some pretty, damn, finger-licking tasty foods!)
I'll write about many of these issues in later emails, but the point for today is this:
There are strong links between many of the problems us outdoor-loving adventurous folk worry about:
- loss of nature
- climate change
- pollution
- litter
- unhealthy people missing out on the fun of running through the woods
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