Articles

Most of us associate flowers with beauty and nature. The Victorians even had a language of flowers: bluebells for kindness, peonies meant bashfulness, rosemary was for remembrance, wallflowers represented faithfulness in adversity – and the red rose, true love. But that was yesterday. This is today when the cut flower world is far from romantic […]

They say what we do to the bees we do to ourselves. Equally, it seems that what we do to ourselves we are more than happy to carelessly inflict on any other living thing, including our bees. If bees are in decline it’s not due to some unexplained phenomena. It’s due to human activity; and […]

Why do farmers use pesticides? Many will tell you that it is to reduce crop losses due to a wide variety of pests including weeds, insects and fungi. Reducing crop losses equals more food for the farmer to sell and more for us to eat. In a world of climate change and population explosion this […]

Increasing quantities of ‘hidden GMOs’ are finding their way into our diet, writes Pat Thomas. They are coming mainly in US imports for supermarkets and caterers, and in animal feeds used for meat, dairy and egg production. It’s time for chefs, pubs, takeaways and restaurants to take responsibility for the food chains that supply them […]

You are what you eat, as the saying goes, and while good dietary choices boost your own health, they also could improve the health care system and even benefit the planet. Healthier people mean not only less disease but also reduced greenhouse gas emissions from health care. As it turns out, some relatively small diet […]

It is truly amazing that we can get so much food to so many on any given day. But, as the food supply chain grows larger, more complex and more competitive, it is also a place where things get lost, where information gets obscured or glossed over and key issues can get pushed aside. I […]

European campaigners have joined together to petition the European Parliament to ban glyphosate. The groups have launched a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) calling for a ban on the toxic herbicide, as well as for reform of the EU pesticide approval process, and mandatory targets to reduce pesticide use in the EU. The ECI is backed […]

This time of year many of us turn our thoughts to healthy eating. I was struck by reports of recent research which suggests that most shoppers operate under an ‘intuition’ that more expensive food is the healthier choice. The soon to be published studies in the Journal of Consumer Research rightly says that while this […]

Parkinson’s disease affects an estimated 10 million people worldwide. The incidence of this disease increases with age, but an estimated 4% of people with Parkinson’s are diagnosed before the age of 50 and men are one and a half times more likely to have Parkinson’s than women. Parkinson’s is caused by the accumulation of abnormally […]

Achieving ‘good health’ is now one of the single biggest preoccupations in modern society. But if pressed most of us would struggle to define exactly what ‘good health’ is. At a pinch most of us would define it by the absence or presence of minor or irritating symptoms  Yet clearly good health is more than […]