Archive | Interviews

Suzie Brown cares about sustainable food! The food we eat – and the food we don’t eat – makes up the largest chunk of most people’s environmental footprint.

Suzie – a sustainability consultant and activist – tells the story of how she learnt about the environmental impact of her food choices and uses her expert knowledge to give you seven tips on how to source sustainable food, avoid waste and deal with food choice dilemmas.

Tell us how you started to think about sustainable food

When I first looked into the best way to reduce my personal impact on the planet–how to cut my eco-footprint–it was glaringly obvious that food was the place to start. Add to this the whole health dimension of our food choices, plus human rights issues relating to how it’s produced and sold, and you’ve got a lot to think about! Continue Reading →

Anne O’Brien talks good food. Slow food, fair food, supermarket food and affordable food.

How effective do you think consumers can be in creating positive change through better purchasing decisions?

I think better purchasing decisions are one tool in the toolbox that we, as consumers, have to build more ethical economies. This is used well in combination with collective actions: when together people call into question the supply chain decisions of companies, and when they build cultures around the different ideal of economy that they want to support. A good example is the farmers market. I don’t have much time or money at the moment to go regularly, but when I do, I am inspired by the way they can nourish people socially, nutritionally and economically. Continue Reading →

Alex Neville, surfer and writer, talks surfing and waste, the value of pre-loved boards and the power of researching on the net.

How effective do you think consumers can be in creating positive change through better purchasing decisions?

I think that consumers as a collective can have an immense influence on what is and isn’t produced. It just depends how people decide to use that influence.

The issue is that the consumer needs to be able to make an informed decision, and that has to be done amidst advertising pressures, PR talk and marketing all making noise in the background. It’s a challenge. We’re in a sort of information overload situation at the moment. What we need are better resources that provide reliable and accurate product information, and ideally we need that information at our fingertips. Continue Reading →