Slow Food London puts campaigning for a better food system at the core of its activities.
Not only do we respond to every DEFRA, EU ad local consulation on Food, Agriculture and Fisheries we attend each meeting of the All Party Agro-Ecology Group in Parliament.
These meetings bring together key stake-holders from Food, Farming, Scientists and of course Members of Parliament and Peers.
A meeting on Glyphosphate (the key ingrendient in Roundup) brought together the eminent scientists Prof Don Hubert, Prof Malcolm Hooper and Drs Peter Myers and Michael Antoniou where clear evidence of its toxicity and endocrine disruption was presented, but also evidence showing that 80% of Glyphosphate remains in plants once sprayed.
This is a particuarly an issue with GM food - over 80% of which have been engineered to resist dying from Glyphosphate when sprayed - as this means humans are ingesting Glyphosphate either through sprayed plants or animals consuming animal feed: blood, urine and breast milk samples are testing positive Glyphosphate at levels where endocrine disruption has been shown to occur.
Slow Food also attended the True Cost Accounting meeting, which discussed the true cost of cheap food. Because industrial farming does not pay to clean up the waterways from pesticide run-off, or the dangers of flooding and soil errosion, sustainable farming can seem expensive in comparison. This meeting in partnership in conjunction with the Sustainable Foot Trust set out a new metric for calculating the real cost of farming. Suddenly cheap food becomes very, very expensive.
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