This week’s headline figures concern vegetable oils, a ‘first’ in hospitality education, a controversial sweetener and a new analysis of emissions from big meat and dairy companies.
7. The number of hours it took for the UK’s “first qualification in sustainable hospitality” to sell out. “When you go to catering college you are taught virtually nothing about what sustainable hospitality actually means, in terms of, for example, procuring food or beverages or local sourcing. The issues are extremely complex, nuanced, and not well understood,” explains Geetie Singh-Watson, founder of the Bull Inn, which has launched the course in partnership with the Sustainable Restaurant Association and the Apricot Centre.
37%. “Vegetable oils are everywhere, and almost everyone has an opinion about them,” wrote two UK academics in a piece for The Conversation this month, as they presented three studies exploring how nutrition, sustainability and transparency “intersect” in the world of vegetable oils. Used in cooking, processed foods, cosmetics, plastics and biodiesel, the global demand for these oils has quadrupled in 50 years, making them “a cornerstone of both diets and economies. An estimated 37% of agricultural crop land is used by oil crops, such as soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sunflower, the researchers noted. However, there is little transparency about what ends up on supermarket shelves.
350,000. This is the number of citizens that have signed a petition calling for an EU-wide ban on aspartame. Foodwatch, an NGO, together with the French Cancer League (Ligue contre le cancer) and Yuka, handed over the petition relating to the controversial artificial sweetener classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”. Aspartame is commonly found in diet soft drinks, sugar-free chewing gum, yoghurts, flavoured waters and many other “low-calorie”, “no-sugar” or “protein” products consumed daily across Europe.
1bn. An analysis of 45 major meat and dairy companies showed they emitted more than 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases, comparable to the emissions of top fossil-fuel producers, according to a report by civil society organisations including Foodrise, Friends of the Earth US, Greenpeace Nordic, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
