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“If you were on a ship taking on water, you wouldn’t ask the captain if we’re screwed; you’d pick up a bucket and start bailing out water.” –Jason Smerdon, climate scientist at the Columbia Climate School. Some climate actions demand big behavioural changes of us. They feel difficult, slow, and unlikely to get widespread adoption. […]

This blog post was written by Sylvia Black and edited by Anneke Hobson. Whenever we talk about climate-friendly diets, one message that comes through again and again is the need to reduce our intake of meat from ruminant animals, which for many Canadians means less beef. But some advocates in the restorative agriculture movement argue

The media and activists alike tend to focus on, and cycle through, pet solutions for sustainable food. What should we do to make the food system more sustainable? Beyond burgers! Cell-cultured meat! Regenerative farming! Vertical farming! Novel, dramatic solutions tend to have an advantage. Sometimes, when I notice a new sustainable food trend emerging, I’m

This month, our communications dietitian Sylvia Black wrote a summary on cell-based agriculture for the blog. There are a ton of possibilities for the future of agriculture in a changing climate, each with their own trade-offs. We don’t usually report on supply-side food solutions to climate change, because we’re dietitians and not farmers, agricultural scientists,

This month, our new(ish) communications volunteer, Sylvia Black, is our guest blog writer!  When I (Anneke) attended the Canadian Nutrition Society conference recently, a keynote speaker (and beef farmer) made a casual observation: that people are not going to eat less beef. I even wrote the quotation in my notebook, because the lack of substantiation

On May 3rd, I drove to Quebec City to speak at the Canadian Nutrition Society’s annual conference (a pre-conference workshop called Advancing Food System Sustainability). As a small, fairly new organization, this opportunity was a huge honour for me and for Drawdown Dietetics. I spoke on May 4th, in a big conference room in front

This month, our nutrition student volunteer, Natalie Nguyen, contributed to our blog again! Here she unpacks a commonly conflated view on sustainable food: the assumption that food that is healthy is also environmentally sustainable. Have you come across the phrase “What’s good for you is good for the planet”? This is a great example of

One of the difficult parts of sustainability (and health!) is that there are so many proposals to make our lives more sustainable. This often causes truly impactful solutions to get lost in a sea of possibly, somewhat impactful proposals. As with food and nutrition, people latch on to instructions to live more sustainably, and this

Happy 2023 everyone! I thought we could start the year with a light topic—research methods! About 5 years ago, I met Basak Topcu at the Canadian Association for Food Studies conference. We (Renita and I) were presenting on the same panel as Basak, who presented research from life-cycle assessment. I immediately recognized the power of