10 Frightening Food Facts for Halloween
As associations go, food and Halloween go together like witches and broomsticks or vampires and blood. We light pumpkins in windows,...
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Nick Hughes Freelance Writer & Editor
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- Oct 22, 2015
- 3 min
Milk crisis exposes tension in UK policy
The milk crisis rumbles on with dairy farmers converging on Brussels last month demanding an end to the collapse in the farmgate price....
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- Aug 13, 2015
- 2 min
In the line of fire
Food and drink companies are no strangers to activist campaigns. From historical boycotts of Nestlé over the promotion of infant formula...
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- Jul 20, 2015
- 3 min
What does a Conservative government means for food policy?
There’s been a discernible sense of euphoria emanating from Conservative MPs and their supporters ever since the party won a surprise...
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- Jun 22, 2015
- 2 min
A divine intervention
I can’t claim to have read all 246 paragraphs of Pope Francis’s Encyclical On Care for our Common Home but I’ve read enough extracts...
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- May 13, 2015
- 2 min
Think global, act local
Food has long since ceased to be a local business. Just as empires were built on commodities shipped from all four corners of the...
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- Apr 22, 2015
- 3 min
Food politics – what the manifestos say about the parties
Earlier this week I spent a disheartening afternoon conducting an unscientific experiment on the manifestos of the three main political...
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- Mar 30, 2015
- 2 min
The real price of our food
The price of food is big news right now. Food price deflation, along with a rock bottom oil price, is the primary reason why here in the...
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- Feb 25, 2015
- 2 min
US blazes trail on sustainable diets
Intriguing news has emerged from the US where, against all expectations, sustainable diets have landed on the food policy agenda. By...
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- Feb 11, 2015
- 3 min
Taxation – an important but complex measure
There are few more divisive issues in the world of food policy than that of taxation. For some people levying taxes on unhealthy or...
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- Jan 26, 2015
- 3 min
The illusion of choice
The recent Efra Committee report on Food security: demand, consumption and waste made some entirely sensible proposals for enabling UK...
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- Jan 16, 2015
- 2 min
Safety in Science
The European Commission is not known for its ability to unite public opinion and sure enough the EC was at its divisive best in November...
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- Dec 19, 2014
- 2 min
New Year's revolution
During the past week I’ve attended two conferences, both of which shone a light on current blockages within food policy. Both the...
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- Dec 9, 2014
- 2 min
Fat tax? Fat chance.
There’s precious little agreement on how best to tackle the scourge of obesity. Policy options put forward by various stakeholders range...
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- Nov 24, 2014
- 2 min
The business case for sustainable diets
As someone working in food policy, I often find myself mulling over the question of who is responsible for making our food system more...
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- Nov 13, 2014
- 2 min
To tax or not to tax?
Important news has emerged from Mexico in recent weeks where a pioneering soda tax has been in force for almost a year. The preliminary...
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- Oct 21, 2014
- 2 min
Crisis, what crisis?
The supermarkets are in crisis, or so the narrative of the financial press goes. To anyone familiar with the figures at stake such talk...
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- Oct 2, 2014
- 2 min
Slow death of our living planet
In times of austerity, environmental issues have to wrestle their way onto the national agenda by any means possible. Protests and...
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- Sep 15, 2014
- 2 min
Can the public sector do sustainable procurement?
The supply chains of the major supermarkets are under near constant scrutiny by the media, NGOs and consumers. Rightly so, as between...
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- Sep 12, 2014
- 2 min
Meat campaign heats up
A global campaign encouraging people to give up meat on a Monday is gathering pace. Launched in 2003 in the US and now active in 34...
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nickjhughes
- Aug 30
- 3 min
Nutri-Score is a pragmatist’s best friend
It’s the middle of August; peak holiday season, and in the grand tradition of national newspaper columnists I have managed to contrive an...
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nickjhughes
- Feb 13
- 5 min
Labelling landscape continues to confuse
Devising the metrics that underpin an environmental score for food products is a notoriously difficult task, although not nearly as...
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nickjhughes
- Aug 30
- 3 min
Nutri-Score is a pragmatist’s best friend
It’s the middle of August; peak holiday season, and in the grand tradition of national newspaper columnists I have managed to contrive an...
4 views0 comments
nickjhughes
- Feb 13
- 5 min
Labelling landscape continues to confuse
Devising the metrics that underpin an environmental score for food products is a notoriously difficult task, although not nearly as...
4 views0 comments
nickjhughes
- Dec 14, 2023
- 3 min
Investment in water can’t run dry forever
As I stare out of my office window (and defer writing this article for the third time this morning) the sun is streaming in through the...
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nickjhughes
- Aug 20, 2023
- 3 min
It's time we paid the true price of food
How much do you pay for your morning cup of coffee? Now let me rephrase the question: how much would you be prepared to pay for your...
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nickjhughes
- Jun 20, 2023
- 5 min
Comical food policy is no laughing matter
“The UK food system, the largest industry in the country by a country mile, is a puppet of a failing, shallow, ignorant and low...
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nickjhughes
- May 12, 2023
- 4 min
Theme park junk food does little to amuse
Who is responsible for the UK’s obesity crisis? Is it we as individuals? Or does responsibility ultimately rest with governments and food...
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nickjhughes
- Feb 1, 2023
- 3 min
Bosses should speak truth to power
In the spirit of this post I will get straight to the point. I have a polite request to make of business leaders in the foodservice...
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nickjhughes
- Oct 21, 2022
- 4 min
Time for businesses to think big
It’s not often I read a book that stops me dead in my tracks but George Monbiot’s Regenesis proved an exception to the rule. In it, the...
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nickjhughes
- Sep 15, 2022
- 4 min
No time to stall on sustainability
The appointment of a new prime minister – and cabinet – brings a fresh opportunity for organisations to push their own particular agenda....
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nickjhughes
- May 27, 2022
- 4 min
Vigilance needed to fend off food crime
Next year will mark the tenth anniversary of the ‘horsegate’ scandal in which horsemeat was illegally substituted for beef in a range of...
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nickjhughes
- Apr 30, 2022
- 3 min
Government must see past junk food chicanery
The cost of living crisis is biting and the statistics make for grim reading. Even taking into account measures announced in the...
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nickjhughes
- Dec 15, 2021
- 3 min
Johnson continues to swerve the pig issues
At least 16,000 healthy pigs have been culled and incinerated in the UK since the summer due to a shortage of capacity in abattoirs; yet...
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nickjhughes
- Sep 9, 2021
- 5 min
Will labour be Johnson's undoing?
As parliament resumed this week the prime ministerial in-tray will have been piled unusually high with issues of national importance. Any...
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nickjhughes
- Apr 21, 2021
- 7 min
Get real about the race to net zero
Has your business set a net zero target for carbon emissions? If the answer is no then there’s every chance you’ll soon be in the...
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nickjhughes
- Dec 11, 2020
- 9 min
Brexit: a giant leap into the unknown
So here we are: 1,635 days after the vote to leave the European Union and the UK’s future outside the world’s largest single market...
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nickjhughes
- Dec 4, 2020
- 5 min
Is blue still the colour of the food industry?
There was a time not so long ago when the food supply chain was largely gilded in Conservative blue. Farmers by and large have...
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nickjhughes
- Aug 6, 2020
- 5 min
Dimbleby keeps us waiting over food system fix
Those hoping for a 10-point plan to fix the food system will have been disappointed by Henry Dimbleby’s much-anticipated food strategy...
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nickjhughes
- Apr 6, 2020
- 3 min
Covid-19: Year dot for CSR
Corporate social responsibility has always been a difficult discipline to assess. Almost every large business will present to the world a...
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nickjhughes
- Mar 6, 2020
- 3 min
The price of ending foreign labour
Some years ago, after graduating from university, I spent several months working in a newly opened branch of Carluccio’s in Tunbridge...
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nickjhughes
- Feb 10, 2020
- 4 min
Unconvincing Villiers leaves more questions than answers
When she took to the stage at this month’s annual Oxford Farming Conference Theresa Villiers had the opportunity to set out a grand...
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nickjhughes
- Dec 6, 2019
- 4 min
Parties make their New Year's resolutions
‘Tis the season to be jolly: to sing carols around the Christmas tree, eat your bodyweight in mince pies, and … trudge to the polling...
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nickjhughes
- Feb 22, 2019
- 3 min
Why the silence from the high-street health alliance?
Brexit is all-consuming. So say 32 food and drink trade associations which claimed last week their members have neither “the physical...
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