Sustainable Food and Beveridge

The food we grow, eat and throw away, raises many questions about the society we live in.  How can food production become environmentally sustainable whilst still feeding everyone?  How does inequality shape the type of food we eat, and how does that affect communities’ health?  What can we do about the mountain of food wasted each year in the UK? 

Join Sustainability at LSE to explore these questions with a group of academics, practitioners and activists, as we examine Beveridge’s ‘giants’ of poverty and health – as well as more modern concerns around sustainability – via the medium of food. 

Sample some tasty sustainable food, including rescued pastries and beer made from toast – and even take part in an interactive experiment studying sustainable food choices led by LSE PhD candidate Ganga Shreedhar.

Stall holders include Food Cycle, Day Old Eats, Get Wonky, Crunchy Critters, LSE catering and Union Coffee.

Schedule of events:

12:15 Welcome address

12:20 ‘Grow Dat Youth Farm: growing community in New Orleans’ - Jeanne Firth

Jeanne Firth is a PhD Research Student in Human Geography and the Environment at LSE. She is proud to be on the founding staff team of Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans, Louisiana, and to have served as the organisation's first Assistant Director. Jeanne holds a MSc with Highest Honors from LSE in Gender, Development and Globalisation and a B.S.S. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Cornell College (Summa Cum Laude). Her current PhD research studies philanthropic engagement in foodscapes/agri-food systems in post-Katrina New Orleans. 

12:35 Get Wonky - Maciek Kacprzyk 

Maciek Kacprzyk is the co-founder and managing director of Get Wonky, an award-winning start-up that tackles foodwaste by producing fruit juices made from misshapen produce that would otherwise be discarded. He has recently been awarded `Young Entrepreneur of the Year‘ at the 2017 Great British Entrepreneur Award’s, and was also the winner of the Shell LiveWire Award 2017. In addition to this, he is passionate  about helping local charities, such as FareShare, and is achieving this by donating his `Wonky` drinks to help eliminate food poverty.

13:05 Food poverty and inequality, examples from India - Elisabetta Aurino

Elisabetta Aurino started her Imperial College Research Fellowship in December 2017. Prior to this exciting award, she held a Guido Cazzavillan Research Fellowship as well as academic appointments at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London, and at the University of Oxford. Her work is at the intersection of food security and child & adolescent development to provide rigorous evidence on key policy issues in the context of low and middle income countries. She is currently focusing on the impact of household food insecurity on child development in India; the food security, health and educational effects of an innovative school feeding programme in Ghana, and the impact of conflict in Mali on child development and household food security.  

13:20 The Felix Project - Daisy Nicholls

Daisy Nicholls is Deputy Central London Co-ordinator for The Felix Project, a charity that works with food suppliers and charities to reduce food surplus and food poverty. They collect fresh, nutritious food that, for whatever reason, cannot be sold and then deliver this surplus food to charities so they can provide healthy meals and help the most vulnerable in our society. 

A live research project by LSE PhD candidate Ganga Shreedhar will take place throughout the day running from 10:00-16:00.

Ganga Shreedhar is pursuing a doctoral degree in environmental economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (Department of Geography and the Environment and Grantham Research Institute) and is currently an LSE Fellow in Environmental Economics. Her research interests lie at the interface of environmental economics and environmental psychology, and include pro-environmental and pro-social behavior in environmental dilemmas, persuasive communication and behavioural change.

Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEBeveridge #LSEFestival

This event is part of the LSE Festival: Beveridge 2.0 running from Monday 19 to Saturday 24 February 2018, with a series of events rethinking the welfare state for the 21st century and the global context.