In response to the complete absence of action on Dimbleby’s meat reduction recommendation in the National Food Strategy, Humane Society International/UK’s executive director Claire Bass, issues the following statement:

“The National Food Strategy was a critical opportunity to create a more healthy, sustainable and equitable food system, but sadly it appears to fall very far short of that goal. We welcome that it dips a toe in the water of catalysing alternative protein production, but it falls massively short in terms of tangible commitments to increase uptake of plant rich foods in schools or other public sector catering. Many major caterers have set targets to be 20-30% plant based by 2025, and the high street is continuing its is rapid transition away from damaging meat and dairy. But the government, which spends £2.4 billion every year on food in schools, hospitals, prisons and the like, has essentially ignored the Dimbleby report it commissioned, which recommended a 30% national meat reduction by 2032, and is instead myopically fixating on trying to catch cow burps.

Through HSI’s plant based culinary training Forward Food programme, we have been knocking on open doors with some of the country’s largest catering companies and universities, helping them create change at scale by nudging consumer choices towards an expanded, tasty, healthy range of plant-based choices. The Food Strategy is a massive missed opportunity and leaves it to not-for-profit organisations like ours, retailers and the wider hospitality sector to step up to the plate and hasten the shift to more plant-centric diets that is so urgently needed to protect the health of people, animals and the planet.”

HSI runs the Forward Food programme which provides free, plant-based culinary training to chefs at universities, large foodservice providers like Compass and Baxter Storey and companies with in-house canteens and 100+ staff. To date we have trained over 240 chefs in the UK alone and our goal is for a third (45) of UK universities to reduce their procurement of animal products by an average of 18%, saving over 100,000 animals and 4,418 tonnes of greenhouse gases, each year, from 2024.
Headed up by our Forward Food chef – former UN Ambassador for pulses Jenny Chandler – the training is designed to educate and equip chefs from the world of institutional catering with the skills they need to implement large scale meat reduction and serve more delicious and nutritious plant-based food. We also provide greenhouse gas assessments to identify the top 20 foods on their menus with the highest impact so that we can model the impact of switching 20% and 50% of the menu to plant-based alternatives.

At the University of Winchester, for example, we have helped reduce their emissions by 39.61%, making cumulative emissions savings totalling 176,968 kg CO2e – equivalent to taking 63 cars off the road for an entire year. In the last year, Winchester’s procurement of meat and dairy alternatives increased by 21.4%. At the same time, Winchester has significantly reduced their procurement of high-climate impact food items.