The Food Fight: Local versus Global

Available for over a year

We come from a farmers market in the heart of London, where all the food is grown within a hundred kilometers. There are big green irregular cooking apples and gnarly potatoes and carrots caked in earth, all out in the crisp winter sun. The locavore movement is sweeping areas from San Francisco to Sydney to London. The question is does it actually benefit the planet? As the global population rises from 7 billion to 9 billion, how can we best feed ourselves? There is a big debate over whether the industrial globalised food system can do the job or whether we need to go back to local eating and farming. Steve Evans speaks to Jessica Prentice who invented the word "locavore" - to describe food that’s produced and eaten locally and an historian of agriculture James McWilliams who throws cold water on the idea that eating locally grown food helps the environment. Plus author Steve Ettlinger tells us about that symbol of the globalised food system, the Twinkie.