Lauren Wallis is still FED UP
Lauren Wallis is a 16 year old student at Haydon School. In March she attended a Science Gallery London workshop at King’s College London, which invited sixth form students to examine the role of sustainability, sensory experience and perception in determining the future of food as part of our FED UP season.
Inspired by the workshop, Lauren took part in our Cress Challenge: to grow and harvest a small crop of cress in a petri dish. As winner of this competition, Lauren was invited to visit the lab of King’s College London Cellular Agriculturist PhD student Abi Glencross to learn more about Abi’s cutting-edge research, aiming to make lab-grown meat a viable future food-source. Lauren talks about becoming vegan and shares her experiences…
Did the workshop change anything about your food habits, or those of other people from your school who attended it?
The FED UP workshop was really eye-opening for me, as I am a teenager from a town where new and controversial ideas are rarely emerging, which has caused me to be quite secluded from the incredible discoveries and revolutions that constantly seem to become evident from London. Therefore, experiencing the content from the FED UP workshop made quite a large influence on the attitudes of my friends and I. The biggest impact was our change in food habits. Since the workshop, four of my friends have gone from full time meat eaters to vegans, which is obviously a significantly vast change. As well as that, me and my closest friends have been cutting down on meat in our diets and trying to buy more organic food and food that is produced in a sustainable way. This involves cutting down on fast food, stopping buying packet products from large supermarkets and eating in places that produce fresh food from sustainable sources. We have avoided most meat, and mainly been sticking to fish-based diets; hopefully this will soon lead to a full vegan diet by September.
What do you think was the most important factor in bringing about these changes? Is it to do with food sustainability, or something else entirely? Can veganism be an “excuse” for people to make changes that are more about body image?
I believe a lot of people become vegan in the hope that it makes them appear healthy and inspirational to others, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it is the initial change in diet that is the important part. However, it still shows most people are uneducated when it comes to the detrimental effects of a meat-based diet and how they impact the environment, animals, the health of society etc. I believe that if people were more aware of these consequences, the most important factor in bringing about a change in people’s food habits would be because they were concerned about food sustainability in a capitalist world where money is always the priority rather than preserving Earth’s resources and looking after personal health. Workshops like ‘FED UP’ are extremely important in influencing people to change their diets for the right reasons rather than any potential superficial reasons, and this will hopefully cause a change for the better.
Tell us about your visit to Abi Glencross' lab.
Visiting Abi was an amazing experience, as I was introduced to an area of Science which I didn’t even know existed prior to this trip. I was about to see some ground breaking research in action, which has the potential to completely revolutionise the world's eating habits. It made me excited for the future, and I felt privileged to meet someone like Abi who didn’t even plan to go into an area like that but was prepared to alter all her previous aspirations after deciding it was more important and interesting to go into an area which concerns some of the most important, whilst simultaneously unrecognised, issues of the world. It showed me that there is hope for the future.
Can you imagine a future in which lab-grown meat is a part of your regular diet?
Yes, but before the FED UP talk and meeting Abi, probably not! I think it is quite a scary idea before looking into the details of it, which causes a lot of people to be hesitant and continue pursuing their unhealthy and damaging diet choices. However, this is an area of science that needs much more focus. As much as engineering and technology and areas like that are a really important part of changing society, the developments and positive effects that they bring can feel distant to the wider community. However, deciding what to eat is a part of day to day life. Learning about and understanding the problems with agriculture, and looking at ways to modernise eating habits, is an area of science that everyone can access and take positive action within. I hope that more people get to have similar experiences to me.
Find out more about future workshops at the MOUTHY event listings page.
August 23, 2016