A food strategy for Tameside: how can we improve health, protect the environment and cut the costs?
The Tameside Food Partnership is developing a healthy and sustainable food strategy for Tameside. They’d like to hear what you think – about your experiences and what matters to you in terms of food and health, the cost of food and the impact of food on the environment. It has launched a survey at www.tameside.gov.uk/foodsurvey, which will close at midnight on Monday 29 April.
Some food for thought:
- An unhealthy diet can lead to a range of health problems including obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure and heart disease.
- Tameside is ranked the 17th highest local authority area in England for the density of hot-food takeaways. Takeaway food is often high in sugar, salt and fat and calories.
- In Tameside 1 in 4 of our children live in poverty. Many households are experiencing financial hardship and may not always be able to afford healthy food or even enough food.
- In the EU as a whole we waste 89 million tonnes of food every year. That’s worth about £950 per household.
- In Tameside alone we collect 10,618 tonnes of food waste every year.
- 250,000 tonnes of the food that goes to waste each year in the UK is still edible. That’s enough for 650 million meals.
- Britain’s leading supermarkets create more than 800,000 tonnes of plastic packaging waste every year.
- A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute, and this is expected to increase by 20% by 2021. In the UK alone 38.5 million single-use plastic bottles are consumed every day, and only 57% of those are recycled.
- Around 700,000 plastic beverage containers are littered every single day in the UK.
- Food production can be a major source of degradation of water, soil and biodiversity.
Your views will help Tameside Food Partnership – which has members from the Council and the voluntary, community and business sectors – to develop a food strategy for Tameside.
The food strategy will be intended to help people access healthy, affordable food while minimising the environmental impacts. This will also cut the costs to our economy and the public purse which are associated with diet-related illness, food poverty and the environmental impacts related to how we produce, process, distribute, package and waste food.