Transforming food systems

​When merely a teenager, Sophie Healy-Thow and friends decided to enter the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. Quite simply, for a trip to Dublin instead of a day in school. Unknown to Sophie, that decision would be the catalyst for her activism in food and nutrition, and just a few months ago at an award ceremony in New York, she received the prestigious Global Citizen Prize for her work.

“When my mother moved my sister and I from Kildare to the South of Ireland in Cork, I became aware, because we were living with my grandmother a little bit, of the difference in food cultures between where we were living to where we ended up with my grandmother. My grandmother lived in a time where the only option was to be sustainable in food. So that meant baking your own bread, picking peri winkles off the rocks of the shore, having apple trees. She made me aware of that food culture in Ireland.

“It was in my third year of participating in the BT Young Scientist in a group project, where we used naturally occurring bacteria to increase the germination rate of barley, wheat and oats, by up to 50% compared to crops treated with just water alone. The project became really successful and we won the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition with what we call ‘do it yourself’ science,” said Sophie.

Recognising farmers

After the success at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, Sophie found herself in a lot of ‘big rooms’ feeling like the token woman. Removing herself from those environments, Sophie began to collaborate with other young people and co-founded Act4Food, a global youth led campaign aiming to transform food systems.

Eventually, Sophie was drawn back into those spaces working with the United Nations and is a Global Youth Campaigns Coordinator for Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. Whilst not a farmer herself, Sophie champions their importance as food producers.

“I think over the last ten years the narrative around farmers has been really villainizing them. That has been so completely unfair because again, they’re the beginning and end of food. We wouldn’t have food without them and a lot of farmers are actually using very sustainable practices in their farming,” says Sophie.

In 2019, the EAT Lancet report was published on sustainable food production. The media coverage and how it was communicated created a frenzy that could have been avoided.

“There was one small line in the middle of this report that said we need to reduce red meat consumption down to zero. This was a very tiny line and it was talking about the future of food and if we needed to cut carbon emissions down to zero we really needed to do this. But the whole report was more about valuing local knowledge and local indigenous foods, and supporting local farmers to be able to harness knowledge that was lost over the years.

“The Irish media picked this small line out of the middle of the report and blew it up. One of the main authors of that report came to the University College Cork, and held a presentation about the report as a whole.

“There was a Q&A session at the end. This farmer stood up and was like, ‘Why didn’t you just say this then? This is what we want. For us to be more sustainable we need you to tell us what you need from us’. He was saying this is what my ancestors were doing like 100 years ago, we can do this again, we just need modernised ways of doing it,” said Sophie.

Nutritious food

Within the work that Sophie does, there is recognition that not all food is equal nutritiously, and that the quality of soil it is grown in plays a major part. If people struggle to access nutritious food, this then seeps into the development of a country.

“We have the largest number of young people to ever exist across the world. We also have the largest population of young people to ever exist in Africa. A lot of these young people are born to very young mothers. These young mothers when they have their children, are usually quite undernourished themselves. So these are children born malnourished from the get-go. So this is a generation of young people who will never reach their full brain potential because they were born malnourished.

“When you have a generation of young people who aren’t reaching their full potential, that’s a generation of a country which will not reach it full economic impact and growth levels either. It all connects.”

Victim and aid lens

Food security is extremely fragile even in the western world. A prime example being the fruit and vegetable shortages in the UK in early 2023 due to the cold weather in Spain and Morocco, as well as the impact of the Ukraine war. However, it’s an issue that can be impacted by personal circumstances too.

“Food insecurity can mean that you just can’t afford healthy, local, nutritious food. So you’re more inclined to buy the frozen chicken nuggets or the chips that are cheap. Not all of us in Ireland are lucky enough to be able to afford the food that we see in shops.

“The knock on effects of that are that we have a population of young people who are becoming obese because of high calorific, high sugar foods and that’s going to be detrimental to the future of our population. Food insecurity takes a lot of different forms and it’s completely there in Ireland,” says Sophie.

Food waste

The education piece around food production remains vital and improving our attitude towards leftovers can make a massive difference.

“If we waste food, we have to buy more food, and a lot of time and energy goes into producing food. I think anybody who grows tomatoes at home on a windowsill will realise just how long it takes to grow a plant, and to be able to harvest one tomato from a plant.

“You only realise that when you see it firsthand I think, because food looks in such abundance, so the value of that food declines when you don’t understand the time and the effort that goes in to producing that food for you.”

To listen to the full podcast with Sophie, visit Spotify and search, UFU podcast Farming 24/7.