Did you know the Greens want to ban most food advertising on TV?

I’ve been reading the Green party food policy. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. So much there that needs to be shared with the world. Here’s some highlights.

Studies show that the majority of the ecological footprint of food comes from food processing, storage, packaging and growing conditions. In addition plant-based diets are recognised as having a reduced impact on the environment as less land is used to produce the same number of food calories. For example, a cow eats five plant calories to produce one milk calorie, and ten plant calories to produce one calorie of beef.

Societies whose food energy comes mostly from starchy plants rather than livestock have smaller environmental impacts because they only require about a quarter the land area to produce the same number of food calories

From a global perspective, the current New Zealand way of life is not sustainable because the world cannot afford to follow our dietary and land use patterns. The typical Western diet could support less than 2.5 billion people – which is less than half the world’s current population.

So bye bye western diets, and hello plant based diets!

Promote, by labelling and education, dietary choices that have a reduced impact on the environment, recognising that these will differ in different places. For most people in New Zealand this will involve eating more locally grown organically produced seasonal food with less processing or packaging and eating less meat and animal fat.

You will eat your organic food, and like it!

Ensure that all food and drink advertisements screened on television meet the criteria for nutritious food that is recommended as a routine part of a healthy, balanced diet. 

This is the big one, The other two are more aspirational (if one can call turning the clock back 900 years aspirational), but this is a specific commitment – their policy is to ban all food advertising from television unless they deem it nutritious.

Goodbye to all advertising for Magnums ice-creams, among others.

You think you’ve seen nanny state in the post. Wait until we have a Green Party Minister of Food!

This is just one of many loopy Green policies I will be highlighting over future weeks. Please do not go and read them all yourself, as our mental health budget is already under strain.