How a food sustainability expert’s No 1 book shapes everything her Hong Kong-based business does
- Heidi Yu Spurrell, founder and CEO of food sustainability consultancy Future Green, read the 2017 book ‘Sustainable Diets’ as part of a master’s in food policy
- The book taught her the importance of questioning food labels, buying from ethical brands and farmers’ markets, and the power of big agriculture
Sustainable Diets: How Ecological Nutrition Can Transform Consumption and the Food System (2017), by academic food policy experts Pamela Mason and Tim Lang, is a manifesto for addressing the many issues of sustainability, public health and governance in the system of food supply.
Heidi Yu Spurrell, founder and CEO of food sustainability consultancy Future Green, formerly known as Food Made Good Hong Kong, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
I was responsible for purchasing food and feeding my young children when we lived in Boston, and it became very apparent that it was crucial by default to read the food labels, because there was so much controversy around unhealthy foods being the norm in supermarkets.
We moved from Amsterdam to Belgium (about 10 years ago) when my husband was headhunted; we uprooted and settled in Brussels. The beautiful irony is that our moving allowance included a specific fund to support studying in the new country, which I used to immerse myself in learning.
The master’s programme I chose was food policy (at City, University of London), which has a module on sustainable diets. Sustainable Diets, which I read as part of my studies, is the book that I go back to time and time again.
It helped me gain a holistic perspective on the topic. There was nothing that hadn’t been thought of in their approach to why we need to shift to eating more sustainably.
Even though my interest started from the health aspect, the more I read the more I understood that food is part of a system. We cannot look at it in silos if we want to make change; there are so many people involved and so many policies that drive the current system.
The topic is big and sprawling, and not easy to get your arms around completely, but that’s what’s exciting about working in the space.
The book taught me not to take the first piece of research and believe in it as truth – there will always be vested interests somewhere in the system. It taught me to be critical of everything I read about food and sustainability.
I started to question every label on food. Anything that seemed like a silver bullet solution was something I’d be interested in investigating further, but was unlikely to be what it seemed.
It absolutely shapes what we do at Future Green. It reminds us that we should never just look at one side of a story
Most of all, I understood the importance of shopping with ethical brands where possible and buying from smallholders at farmers’ markets, supporting small businesses and also understanding the power of big agriculture.
This course gave me the impetus to start my own business, partly because I hadn’t worked for quite a few years, and because it gave me clarity in terms of the direction I wanted to take.
This book is incredibly informative, and anybody with an interest in sustainability through a food lens should have a copy.
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It absolutely shapes what we do at Future Green. It reminds us that we should never just look at one side of a story.
