Finalist category: BT Young Pioneer Award
BT Young Pioneer Award, Finalist, 2021
When my parents first banned chocolate spread in our household due to concerns about the palm oil inside the product and the links with deforestation, I started to wonder, where does my food come from? How can I know whether it’s causing environmental damage or climate change? When I started doing some research, I found that over a third of all CO² emissions come from food systems.The only thing I had heard about food and climate change was that I should reduce the dairy and meat in my diet, but I realised that there was a lot more to the challenge than just that.
As I researched more, I learned that there was huge amounts of data about how and where different food products were made, but either it was inaccessible, or it was too complicated to understand. When I talked to my friends, I realised that we all want to know more about where our food comes from and whether it’s contributing to climate change. I heard that according to many surveys, it is our generation, young people, who are most concerned about the link between consumption and climate change. Looking at what we eat every day and what impact this has on our world seemed like a good place to begin.
When I saw the BT Young Pioneer Award 2021 in The Week Junior, I realized what a big opportunity it was. GFS aims to take inaccessible and complicated data, and put it into an easy to read score that anyone (but particularly young people) can understand and use to make decisions about what they buy and what they eat. I hope that GFS can help people like me to be better informed about their eating habits, and therefore influence food suppliers and producers to improve their practices and promote products that don’t destroy our planet.
