Last Thursday, Bord Bia – the Irish Food Board hosted “Going Green from Farm to Fork,” a virtual pre-St. Patrick’s Day briefing for U.S. media on the central issues of farm and food sustainability through a conversation with Bord Bia CEO Tara McCarthy and chef, author and sustainable food advocate Dan Barber.
One of those issues was COVID-19 and its impact on consumer preferences, food production sustainability, and community health.
McCarthy said:
- “Consumers are becoming much more sustainability aware in the course of COVID their become much more conscious of their diets of their impact on Society on diet meets helped meets the sustainability. We’ve seen that 15% of global consumers are actually looking to purchase more sustainably in this last 12-month period and 23-25% of them are prepared to pay more for products that are more ethically produced and more sustainable as well.”
Barber said:
- “COVID is about 94% diet-related. Many people dying of COVID in [the United States] have one of three conditions: obesity, diabetes, or hypertension. All three of those are related to diet, and all three of those have direct relationships to how we eat meat and how we eat dairy. It’s clear that our agriculture system in [the United States] is suffering from diets that are not about grass-based systems, they are about interventions with heavy antibiotics, corn, soybeans all the things that are leading us to disastrous results on our environment but especially on our health.”
- “I believe strongly that we’re going to come out of COVID with a new appreciation for food. We actually already had a vaccine, it’s called food, and it is food that is raised in the most biodiverse, healthy environment.”
There’s more background on the event HERE, as well as a recording of the full event HERE.
