We all have different opinions about what constitutes ‘Good Food’. In this article we unpick our UYF approach.
Food connects us to each other, to land and to nature. Producing it provides livelihoods for billions of people and remains the single biggest use of land on our planet.
Much of the mainstream conversation about food focuses on the negative aspects: global heating, biodiversity loss, poor animal welfare, or human rights abuses. Similarly, much of the advice about ‘eating better’ focuses on choosing foods that do less harm to people, our planet, and farmed animals; the implication being that food systems are inherently damaging.
We want to turn this on its head.
In our Good Food Framework, we consider food through a lens of positive impact. We started with a blank piece of paper and asked the question: ‘What does Good Food look like for people, for our planet, for farmed animals?’
On this basis we created a set of criteria that characterise Good Food across these three interconnected domains: people, wildlife and the environment; and farmed animals.
The way much of our food is currently produced is incompatible with several elements of our Good Food Framework. Even where progress is being made, gains in one area can come at the expense of another. These trade-offs are often treated as inevitable. We see them differently. If improving one requires a compromise in another, then that is telling us the system is fundamentally flawed.
That’s a bold statement, but it’s precisely the reason why we champion a different vision for how we produce our food: one that has the potential to be compatible with all aspects of the Good Food Framework: a vision characterised by farming that restores nature, looks after its people and provides a genuinely good life for farmed animals.