Ahead of the Grand Opening of Sustainability Week and the Sustainable Food in a Changing Climate event on 19th May, we interviewed Kimberly Nicholas from LUCSUS about her contribution during these two events.

What will you focus on in your two talks during Sustainability Week?
I will focus on the environmental impacts of what we eat, from local to global. How do our diets affect climate change – and what can we do about it? 

What are the challenges for switching to a plant based diet?
One challenge is that there seems to be a disconnect between individual food intake and the rest of the world. Not enough people seem to care about where the food comes from. People may recognize the link between food and their personal health, but not between food and the health of the planet.

Food habits are very fundamental. We base our food choices on cultural and historical habits. But the truth is that what we eat today in the Western diet is not based on any long standing tradition at all – we didn’t eat this type of unhealthy diet in other time period.

I see cultural norms as more of a barrier to a protein shift than many technical challenges – since technical challenges often arise because we are so entrenched in our thinking.

What would you like the public to take away with them after attending the events?
The most important thing I want to highlight is that, for the climate, what you eat is more important than where it is grown – meaning that eating imported vegetables is better than eating locally reared cattle. I also want to emphasise to the audience that a plant based diet is the only way forward if we want to a healthy planet – and a healthy you.