Is English viticulture carbon-negative? A pre-registered Life Cycle Assessment of 40 vineyards with carbon stock modelling

Author

Tom Griffin | Research Assistant

I love food. Like I really really love food. I love the way food is used to celebrate and commiserate. I love the way food raises us up, and yet, levels us all out. We are all subject to food and we all make the subject about food. I love the growing of food, the processing of food, the selling of food. I love the people involved in food and their passion towards their foody lives. I love that food is a tangible necessity for us and that it poses one of the greatest threats to mankind. Yes, you read that right, I love that food production is threatening our way of life, because that threat has given me purpose. A drive. A reason to work. A reason to wake up with a smile on my face knowing the work I do will mean something. I work on understanding the environmental impact of food, I engage with the people who can lead a change and challenge this impact and hopefully, when all is said and done, we can share some food at the end of it.

My first job, when I was 13, was in a micro-brewery. I learnt to love food production. The science, the skill, the sheer magnificence of producing. I was employed to assist brewing and to tend to the polytunnels. In those polytunnels is where I fell in love with plants, Raspberry plants to be precise. From this small micro-brewery, on rainy Sundays, and from my school allotment volunteering, is perhaps where my love of biology and food was nurtured. These memories are perhaps why I keep asking the same question: how can we produce enough so that we can all eat and prosper, and nature can too?.