Eating ethically is a challenge. We try to do all the ‘right things’, but the messaging is so often inconsistent. We are inundated with labels we don’t trust, food that comes from who knows where, picked by people in conditions we don’t see. It’s all very unsatisfactory.

Some people think that eating vegan is the catch-all for ethical eating, but did you know that both wildlife and habitat can be negatively affected by crop production methods, particularly when chemicals such as pesticides and artificial fertilisers are used routinely? And are the people who are planting and harvesting experiencing a good quality of life? Who knows?

We can’t all be farmers growing our own food, but there is help available. Unravel Your Food, UYF, is a website that is trying to help people identify and follow their own individual food journey. UYF has done a couple of things that could make that journey a bit easier.

The first is the Good Food Framework, available to download here: How we rate food labels – Unravel Your Food. Commonly available food labels have been rated in four categories:

· the environment and wildlife

· people

· farmed animals

· label reliability

You can use the website Directory - Unravel Your Food to look up labels on food, and see how different labels for all sorts of foods score across these four categories.

Secondly there is a growing library of Articles – Unravel Your Food that help you to decide, for example, if soy milk is a good alternative to cow’s milk, or to understand more about the lives of farmed animals.

Unravel Your Food doesn’t tell you how to eat - that’s up to you. It’s there to provide the information necessary for you to make informed decisions for yourself and your family.