No other aspect of Scottish life illustrates the gap between aspirations and reality as well as food. We want to be green; but we’re bottom of the league for organic food in Europe, and for eating fruit and vegetables. We have a huge gap in diet between rich and poor, an iceberg of malnutrition of which food banks are the very visible tip: and the most unequal system of land ownership in the developed world. We are top of the European league for obesity, and bottom for life expectancy. So we need to be smart and determined, if we want to change this pattern. Determined to achieve the work to be done, but smart, knowing that the problem can’t be reduced to the rhetoric of individual responsibility. The challenge is to re-purpose the food and farming system so that we make it easy for everyone to eat well while enhancing natural capital in Scotland.
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