Almost everybody has heard of the ‘farm to table’ movement, with its suggestion of a direct connection between the fields and the plate, mediated only by a brief sojourn in the kitchen. For some foods, like fruits and vegetables, this picture is more or less accurate. But for others – like bread, or hummus – this narrative passes over a key piece of the puzzle: processing.

The 5th of December is World Soil Day, an annual event held to celebrate soils and advocate for their sustainable management. Globally, our soils are under threat—from salinisation, from erosion, and from a loss of biodiversity. But what exactly is soil biodiversity? And what does it have to do with our own health, and with the food on our plates?

It’s an overcast Saturday, the skies threatening showers. Children are running about, faces painted with brightly-coloured butterflies as the late-summer Community Butterfly Day comes to an end. Out the back, in a bright room at one end of the black-painted barn, cook and baker Henrietta Inman and a troupe of helpers are making their final preparations for the long-awaited, Covid-delayed launch of her new bakery.

In September this year, construction is due to finish on Ray Valley Solar (RVS), which, once completed, will be the largest community solar energy installation in the UK. Near Bicester in Oxfordshire, the solar farm is projected to generate enough renewable electricity to power 6,000 homes, replacing 4,200 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year—the equivalent of someone flying 4,200 times back and forth between Paris and New York each year.

With Fairtrade Fortnight kicking off this week, we are encouraged to vote with our wallets, to recognise and reward the people behind the food we eat and the coffee we drink. Fairtrade often, and rightly, focuses on the unfair ways that distant workers are treated, but data revealing that supermarkets have some of the most unequal pay distributions of any UK company are a stark reminder to also pay attention to unfair trade closer to home.

If there's one thing that the powerful movement for Black Lives made clear in 2020, it is that we are, in many ways, still living out the long-tailed consequences of our histories. In Britain, and elsewhere around the world, the legacies of empire, colonisation, and slavery are still very much alive: legacies which many of us have never before thought to question. These legacies are often profoundly violent, and they are threaded through almost every aspect of modern life, from the clothes we wear, to the names of our streets, to the museums we visit—and the food we eat. Food—its production, processing, transportation and consumption—is filled with echoes of this violence. We are all caught up in these echoes each time we pick up our forks—whether we hear them or not.

It was mid-September, and the last of the summer sun was slowly burning off the morning mist rising from rivers and fields between Reading and Bristol. I was on my way to Somerset, to visit Field Bakery, Bristol-based baker Rosy Benson’s new enterprise.

As the world grinds to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it's easy to think that this has to be a good thing for the climate. And certainly, there are plenty of positive consequences of the virus for the environment. There's the dramatic impact that this is having on the air-travel industry (a 4.3% decline in global air travel in February), and travel more generally as people around the world are encouraged (or required by law) to stay home. Plus, the strong coupling of economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions means that a global slow-down of the economy could lead to a fall in emissions. In China, the lockdown over recent weeks has led to a 25% reduction in energy use and emissions over two weeks compared to previous years. ​ But unfortunately the news isn't all positive.