Food Security: Insects for Dinner?

Philae is the lander that shot to fame when it landed, not once, but, in fact, three times as it bounced across the surface of comet 67P.  It's part of a mission that was decades in the making and also a YouTube sensation thanks to "that" reaction from team-member Monica Grady when it landed.

Philae, and the Rosetta probe that delivered it, are both now nearing the ends of their operational lives. Connie Olbach has been looking over what the first mission ever to land on - and analyse - a comet has achieved, beginning with mission scientist, Andrew Coates...

Andrew - What's happening now is that the comet, the spacecraft Rosetta and Philae, the lander, which is still on the surface of the comet, these are all getting further away from the sun, further and further with every second as we speak, of course.  As we get towards the end of January, then the temperature in the lander is getting lower.  There's a particular temperature limit of -51 degrees centigrade where it gets too cold for the batteries, and too cold for the electronics to work, so we give up hope really after the end of January

Connie - A sad thought for those of us who have become attached to the little lander.  But all is not lost, Rosetta is still in good shape and will keep orbiting until September.  For now though, let's say our goodbyes - Philae lander this is your life...  Let's start by delving back into our archives.  This is Ian Wright, a scientist working on the Rosetta mission.

Ian - Rosetta was born as a comet nucleus sample return mission.  So this was not merely going to go to a comet; it was going to drill down 3 metres into the surface, collect the core and bring it back to Earth undisturbed.  It turned out that this was technologically quite challenging and beyond the financial means of the world space agencies, because this was going to have to be a joint venture.  So eventually, in the early 90s, that  idea was sort of knocked on the head, at which point ESA decided to go it alone and do this one way mission.  And then all of a sudden there was absolutely no chance of doing that so the question was, well, if you can't bring the sample to the instrument, can you take the instrument to the sample and that's ultimately what we had to do.

Connie - Rosetta launched back in 2004.  It was then a good ten year wait for it to reach the comet 67P.  This was the site of the first ever soft landing of a probe onto a comet, and the scene of the celebration made news around the world.

"How audacious!  How exciting!  How unbelievable! To be able to dare to land on a comet..."

"We are the first to have done that and that will stay forever."

"Hollywood is good, but Rosetta is better."

Connie - But, amid the excitement, not everything was going exactly to plan.  Here's Andrew Coates again.

Andrew - Something was obviously going wrong.  You could see it in the eyes of the controllers and some frowns and so on from the control room, and we found out it had bounced to about, something like, 100 metres - a little bit more than that perhaps - away from the surface, and then came down again, bounced off the surface again, and came to rest finally in this really difficult place with boulders and next to an icy cliff, and in an orientation with one leg up in air of the lander, which you can see on the images.

Connie - The problem with this slightly awkward landing was that Philae was in a shadow; meaning no light could get to it's solar panels and the batteries only lasted two and a half days.  But it wasn't all bad news - the bouncing gave Philae exposure to different areas of the comet and it still managed to send back 80% of the data...

Andrew - Anything you get from a lander like this is actually really good information.  So we were able to get several new organic molecules identified by the mass spectrometers.  Those have never been seen in remote sensing, or in in-situ measurements of comets before and also finding that the magnetic field of the comet is non-existent and so that puts constraints on the importance of the magnetic field in the beginning of the solar system.  Now, there have been some theories about magnetism being very important in terms of bringing the early planetesimals together - these are the building blocks of planets.  And it turns out now, according to the results from Philae and the Rosetta orbiter - the combination of those two - that actually turns out not to be the case.  And so magnetism actually didn't play a role in the early solar system.

Connie - Maybe it's just me, but we've all got a bit attached to Philae.  We give it human characteristics and the idea of sending it off is so much sadder, I think, because Philae seems like a friend almost.

Andrew - So both the orbiter and the lander have their own twitter accounts and it was amazing; they were effectively giving both of them their own personality and getting Philae to contact and say - yes, I'm alive and able to be sending data. It sounded so familiar and really does make you identify with these space projects.  This is a great way of getting the public involved in space missions. I mean, they seem very remote, of course, and to actually be able to empathise with it  and be there with it almost was fantastic and a new way of doing outreach.  And I think that particular aspect of it, with Rosetta in particular, has been extremely successful.

Connie - So Philae has gone but, hopefully, not forgotten...

Andrew - Absolutely...

Connie - What's the legacy that Philae's left behind?  There will be learnings, I'm sure,  and are we going to see any more Philaes going out afterwards.  Maybe Philae babies landing on more comets?

Andrew - I'm sure we will.   And at some point people will propose more cometry landers.  There will be, you know, one type of comet which is becoming more, and more important now are main belt comets.  So this is a new type of sort of  asteroid, but it's in between an asteroid and a comet and these are objects which appear to have water, have activity, in the same way that a comet does but it's in the asteroid belt.  And so these are maybe the more likely things to have actually brought water and, possibly, organic molecules to the Earth and so, that type of object is something which will have exploration in the future, I'm sure.

Each week Kat takes scientific dogma to task and she asks "is there actually any evidence for that?"  - and this time the term 'mythconception', which is what we call this bit of the programme, is rather appropriate...

Kat - If you're a woman in your 20s or 30s and enjoy idly scrolling through social media, there comes a time when you realise that the pictures of people having fun in the pub seem to have been overtaken by photos of your friends with bulging bumps, rapidly followed by pictures of their bouncing babies.

And inevitably, there will be comments about 'baby brain' and 'preg head', or 'momnesia' as it's known in the US - the commonly held idea that being pregnant and having a baby somehow affects your memory, making you flakey and forgetful. But is there any scientific evidence to support this?

The fact is that the evidence here is mixed. Some studies have shown that compared with women who weren't pregnant, baby-bearing women do worse at certain memory tasks, particularly if they involve short term memory. There's a particularly notorious study from 1997 showing that women's brains actually shrink during late pregnancy, and take a full six months to go back to normal.

Research with rats has shown that females actually seem to get mentally sharper after having a baby, and are better able to find food than those who've never had pups.

And a small 2015 study found no difference between pregnant women and mums, and those who had never popped a baby out.

Finally,  a recent analysis in the New Scientist magazine in January this year attempted to gather together all the evidence, concluding that while pregnancy and its hormonal storm does cause major changes in the brain and body, these aren't specifically linked to a change in mental agility.

So what other explanations can science offer for women who do feel that their faculties have gone to pot while they're baking their bump? Well, for a start there's the well-known effects on memory and learning of a lack of sleep - something that can certainly affect pregnant women and new parents. Then there's the psychological effects of shifting priorities and a new routine that a new baby brings. Some things just become less important and slip through the net when there's a tiny new life to think about, and it's impossible to remember everything.

Finally, there's also the phenomenon of confirmation bias: we all forget stuff and make mistakes - women with or without children, and men too. But if you're pregnant, you might be more likely to ascribe your errors to baby brain. And because women who've had children are still more likely to be discriminated against when coming back into work than the "sprog-less", it's high time to forget about the myth of baby brain.

In today's scientific world, why are people still going hungry and what what more do we need to solve the food security challenge? Tim Benton is Professor of population ecology at Leeds University and the UK Champion for Global Food Security. He outlines the problems and possible solutions to Chris Smith...

Tim - Food security roughly means having access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food for a healthy life and, clearly, when this term is used, most people think about the 800 million people or thereabouts who suffer chronic daily hunger but it's also important to the poorest in all societies.  So, for example, in the developed world the poorest often have access to lots of cheap calories in terms of fat and sugar, but very poor nutrition and that leads to an association between poverty and obesity, and obesity and other diseases like diabetes.  So food security is not just about starving people in Africa, it is about health, nutrition, and well being, and all of the things that flow from those.

Chris - It sounds slightly paradoxical, doesn't it, that - in a bigger world and a hungrier world - that actually one of the problems could be obesity; but, as you say, food security equals good nutrition too...

Tim - Absolutely.  Yes.

Chris - Now how is the situation actually evolving or changing?  We know that world population is increasing; it's increasing at the rate of maybe 1% per year, which doesn't sound like much, but if you do the compound interest formula that's a doubling every 70 years or so.  Hence the prediction of as many as maybe 10-12 billion by 2050?

Tim - Yes, so there were two things.  One is the population growth and the other one is as on average as the world gets richer, people eat different things and they eat perhaps more intensively produced food, which comes with a bit of an environmental impact.  The projections are that over the next 35 years, up to mid-century, demand for food is set to rise by between 50 and 100% depending on who you listen to.  And that's absolutely not impossible because over the last 35 years, looking back over the same time, production has increased by just over 100%.  The issue, I think, is not over whether we can do it but whether we can do it in a way that's sustainable.

Chris - Can we just go business as usual?  If we just carry on as we are, will we just run out of food?

Tim - I don't think we will run out of food.  I think this issue is that the environment will suffer.  It's not just that, at the moment, a quarter of the world's soils are degraded, agriculture is the biggest threat to biodiversity, a huge polluter of water through nitrogen fertilizer but, actually, agriculture and food between them, in terms of the greenhouse gases they emit, accounts for about the same as all lighting, all cars, all air travel,all washing machines, all heating, and all air conditioning. That means that if we carry on in the way that we're going with yields growing in the way that they are and demand growing in the way that it is, by 20150 agriculture and food will account for about 2 degrees of global warming. And that is more than all that the governments have just signed up to try and limit in Paris, and if we miss the Paris targets through agriculture and food alone, then clearly there isn't any space for any of the other things that we use energy for and that locks us into a world of 4 or 5 degrees of global warming by the end of the century, which is truly horrific to think about.

Chris - Should we not just invest the money, instead of trying to, as they put in "The Martian" so well, "science the hell out of this" and increase our food production... shouldn't we just get to the nub of what's causing this, which is there are just too many people, and spend the money on population control instead?

Tim - I don't think it's just that there were too many people.  I think it's also that we place very significant demands on the environment to produce what we want.  So, for example, if you look at the fact that about a third of the world's production is lost or wasted; if you look at the 2 billion people that are overweight and consume too many calories, and if you look at the amount of resources that we grow and feed to livestock for meat production.  If we changed our diets, we could easily reduce demand by somewhere up to about a half.  So it's not just about how do we grow more food, although clearly we do have to grow more food?  It's also what are the ways that we can change the societal demand so that we can live within the planetary boundaries.

Chris - So to meet those obligations, and to avoid destroying the planet in the way you've outlined, and probably leading to the gross increase in the amount of CO2 and, therefore, the attendant climate change it may drive.  What's this going to take?  What do we have to do right here and now?

Tim - Well.  So I think the three broad classes of solution; one is that we can do better in the field, we can improve yields - we know we can improve yields using modern biotechnology and modern plant breeding - whether or not it's GM is another discussion.  But we can also increase efficiency of our agriculture either by changing the plants or by using smarter machines or we can improve the way that we use land and use land much more smartly to reduce some of the environmental impacts. Clearly, there's a lot we can do to reduce waste, which is the second of the three things.  At the moment, Europe and North America throws away from the home about the equivalent of all production from Sub Saharan Africa, each year.  So it's that sort of scale of things. And the third basket is the changed diets.  So, in an American situation, I did the analysis last year, a family of four eating an average amount of meat, driving two cars an average amount, they emit more greenhouse gases from the meat than they do from driving the cars.  So, just by reducing their meat to about half of what they would normally do, is about as equivalent of getting rid of a family car. Perfectly possible to do.

In a modern globalised food system, agricultural production is only the beginning of the story. Eventually, foodstuffs make their way to the shops and that is where you come in, or where you "think" you come in! Felicity Bedford went to do her weekly shop and took along marketing expert Eric Levy to see how it's actually supermarkets that decide what you "want" to buy...

Eric - Our behaviours in the supermarket have a big influence on our health, and there's a lot of things going on in the supermarket that we don't always realise but I'm sure we'll encounter some of them with our shopping trip here.

Felicity - Let's go shopping... The first thing that I'm picking up is some apples.  In front of me I've got deals, I've got different prices, different types of apple.

Eric - Well Felicity,  the first thing I notice here is that one of the apples in particular is on sale and I think consumers will probably be drawn to getting a lot of apples - whether they eat all of them or not, who knows.  But it's kind of the attention thing; it's attention grabbing and we really like to think we're getting a good deal.

Felicity - So the deal stickers themselves are much more brightly coloured and you're right, it's the first thing I spotted when I came up to this stall but, I'm going to pick up the other pack of apples.  And only the one - there's only one of me - I don't need 12 apples for my weekly shop. Here at the milk aisle, I am presented once again with an amazing array of choice. Turning around behind me the puddings and yogurts within the supermarket; this is not something I would normally pick up but I'm sensing they've been positioned here for a reason.

Eric - So there's something in psychology called the "licensing effect" where, if you buy something healthy, all of a sudden you're going to feel really good about yourself.  You'll think "wow" I just bought this item that's really healthy, so what that allows us to do is indulge in something that's less healthy.  So, after picking up the milk, turn around and all of a sudden there's these chocolate mousse desserts and, they're on sale, we're going to be more likely to pick them up because we've just gotten the milk.

Felicity -   I'm looking toward the six for £4.  I can eat those over a couple of weeks.

Eric - Mmm.  That sound's like a good deal, doesn't it?  The number six, that's kind of, in psychology that's called an "anchor".  So consumers tend to anchor on a number that's recommended for you on the label and we might actually be more likely to get six, or maybe even four or three, compared to if there were no number there for us to anchor on.

Felicity - So, basically what the supermarket's doing is telling me - buy six?

Eric - Definitely.  One of the things supermarkets try to do is increase the amount that we purchase through some of these psychological techniques.

Felicity - And also, the fact that I'm now considering buying six is obviously having an impact upon my diet over the next few weeks.

Eric - When we have more of something there, right in front of us, we're actually more likely to eat it more quickly.  So we may think, well if I buy the six, I'll have one a week for dessert but what tends to happen is you say "well, look I have all these chocolate desserts maybe I'll have one per night" because it's there, and it's in front of you, and you're looking forward to the next dessert already.

Felicity - Finishing up the list of things that I need to be picking up today, we're going to grab some cereal and you've picked up a couple of things off the shelf for comparison purposes.  What should I be looking at on these two packets.

Eric - Well looking at these Felicity, I noticed that we have two brands of cereal that look like they're both healthy but, looking at this one, it actually has a lot, lot more sugar.  So people might think just by seeing it has bran, they're going to assume it's a very healthy cereal, maybe without comparing it to other cereals.  So it's really important to compare.

Felicity - Absolutely.  They look like they're very similarly marketed; they both say that they're whole grain guaranteed, fibre, less sugar - even though that's the one which you've just pointed outs got loads more sugar and salt within it.  The marketing is almost identical; they're both bright colours and I would have been fooled.  You're in a rush, you pick up what you know to be a reliable brand, perhaps; that's you brand marketing and also what you think from the packaging it looks like a very healthy product. I've finished my shop, I've filled up my basket.  Let's head for the checkout.

Eric - Sounds good.  Very sad that our shopping trip has come to end, but one thing I noticed is that your shopping basket there is pretty much filled to the top, or even higher.  So it actually turns out that supermarkets who have larger shopping baskets tend to get more filled in them, so people tend to fill their baskets to the top when they see a larger basket.  There's another little psychological technique that supermarkets will use on consumers.

Felicity - The pressure to make a healthy choice, to make the sustainable choice is pretty much down to consumers and we've seen that around the supermarkets, it's a very very consuming environment.  There's lots of marketing, there's lots of different signals being thrown at consumers.  Is this really the way forward in improving food security within the retail environment?

Eric - Well, I think that part of it is on consumers to know what they want.  If they want to eat healthier, want to eat things that are more sustainable, less packaging, so part of it is definitely on the consumer.  On the other hand, there's a lot of talk about legislation, for example, to stop the two for one deals or all these multiple buying thing deals.  So a lot of the times to consumers the deal will look good, but then they'll take home all the stuff and they're not going to eat it, it'll expire, and they're just going to throw it out, and it's going to be bad for the environment.  So I think there are some things that the government might be able to do well to help.

Felicity - My intentions are always good when I go shopping.  I'm intending to buy a healthy set of meals for the week ahead but that's not always how it pans out.

Eric - Well Felicity, it's not just you.  So there is a natural tendency when we have higher level values.  Say when we want to help save the environment, eat healthy.  Those are things that are a little more abstract than things like having something that's right in front of you or a lower price.  So a lot of the times when we see things tempting, in front of us, we'll tend to go with that rather than these values that we have.  So things like lists can definitely help keep you on track in doing what you want to do.  And similar to other behavioural interventions - smoking, drinking, what not - the more that you can kind of think ahead about what you want to do as opposed to just deciding on the moment, you're going to be able to take a step back and it will help you make better choices.

It's all very well eating more adventurously. But what about the food that we waste? Tristram Stuart is the founder of the organisation FeedBack, which looks at how much food goes to waste and what we need to do to tackle the problem. He explained why this is a priority to Felicity Bedford... 

Tristram - We've been told by some of the major international institutions that we need to increase food production by 50, 60, some even 100% to feed the human population expected on the planet by 2050.  The claim is that we can increase this production whilst decreasing environmental impact.  In fact, the main way in which we are increasing global food production is by extending the amount of land that we currently put under cultivation.  That means chopping down forests and draining wetlands.  We know that a third of all the food currently being produced is wasted somewhere between fields and people's plates.  It's wasted on farms and factories, in supermarkets and restaurants and, of course, in our own homes.  That is a very easy place to start if what we need to do is increase food availability and, of course, it can be accomplished without increasing production per se.

Felicity - Surely because of the nature of globalised food production and distribution, we need, to play devil's advocate here a little bit, we need to be producing more food than is needed by the global population?

Tristram - That's absolutely right.  If you want to guarantee food security, you don't just produce exactly what a population needs.  It won't take long for you to come across a bad harvest and then you're in dire straights.  Human civilisations have, since the very beginning of agriculture, aimed quite rightly to produce surplus.  The problem is that that very basic instinct has now got to such an extent that the surpluses we produce are so far in excess of what is actually required to guarantee food security.  To give you an example, in a rich country like the United States, there is available in the shops and restaraunts enough food to feed twice the population of that country.  We have such an enormous buffer between us and real hunger if we used our resources more efficiently.

Felicity - We're going to inevitably have some food waste.  Do you have any proposal for how that should be dealt with better?

Tristram - Yes, absolutely.  One of the real opportunities that we're currently missing out on across the whole of Europe, across Australia and in half of the United States of America is that, currently, legislation prevents what humans have been doing with food waste for thousands of years, and that is to feed it back to our livestock. Instead, we grow grains and soy in South America to feed livestock in Europe and across the western world.  Traditionally, livestock would be fed with our leftovers; that's what pigs and chickens are for within our agro economic system.  But since 2001, after the foot and mouth outbreak was blamed on a miscreant swill feeder, who wasn't treating the food waste according to the law.  The European rules made it impossible to feed any catering waste or any waste that had been handled under the same roof as meat to be fed to livestock.  Now, I can understand and foresee the health concerns but, put in place a good regulatory system, it's absolutely the case that we can have a safe system for recycling food waste.  And, indeed, a very recent Cambridge University study was published showing just how much land we could save if we fed food waste to our livestock instead of importing soy from South America.  A piece of forest the size of Wales each year could be saved.

Felicity - Will it need more scientific evidence or simply more willing policymakers in the first place?

Tristram - It needs both.  Absolutely getting microbiologists to confirm the best possible, most energy efficient and safest way of treating food waste, and ensuring that veterinarians and nutritionists can analyse the value of any particular food waste stream for animal feed.  All of these things will help but the figures are so glaringly, obviously in favour of feeding food waste to pigs.  It really comes down to a question of what faith we can have in a regulatory system that, in the past, went wrong and I would emphasise that we're not advocating for a return to the bad old days, before 2001 but a proper modern system; a little bit analogous to the system that guarantees food safety in the human food supply chain.  We depend on a system that feeds hundreds of millions of people every day to guarantee food security - we need something similar for livestock feed.

Felicity - These bigger issues of global waste; is that something that can only be solved with policies?

Tristram - No.  I've seen in my campaigning life such dramatic changes on these very issues that it gives me hope that, with a bit of energy, we can wake up the giant, the giant that is the global citizenship.  If we want to make food available to people who really need it, we can really help to do that by doing something quite simple which is to enjoy food that we have and not throw it away.  That's really such a simple thing that everyone can practice in the own homes and, indeed, demand that the businesses that they give money to every day, also comply with that really basic ethical criterion, which is not to dispose of food when it's perfectly edible.