Alcoholic beverages make up a greater proportion of the UK food supply than fruit does.

We talk a lot about cutting down on food waste, but what about things we consume that we don’t really need? Growing sugar cane for fizzy drinks has all the environmental impacts of farming foods of nutritional importance, yet simply makes people less healthy. Maybe it’s time we all considered a approach to drinks as well as animal products. I’m not planning to completely give up alcohol, though I will definitely keep it below my fruit consumption and remember it is a luxury. Adding the effect of packaging into the equation makes the impact of many drinks even higher, so I personally have a near total ban on drinks in cans.

Scientists in Taiwan are introducing genes from wild relatives into domestic tomato.

They’re doing this through conventional breeding, which is slower than genetic engineering but more acceptable to consumers. Interesting that using wild relatives in breeding programmes is very palatable to most people, yet using genetic engineering to introduce these genes from another species is often not.

The wild relatives used by the Taiwanese scientists are from the Galapagos – a reminder of what we are set to lose if such unique ecosystems are destroyed. Save the Galapagos!