Tom Hunt's Letter

To my friends and family,

I’m writing to you whilst imagining myself in the future, cooking you all a big family meal. There’s no freeze-dried space food here, just delicious local-seasonal food grown with respect for the Earth and its oceans.

Because in the future I hope we will have modernised our food systems to work in harmony with nature, not against it, as much conventional agriculture does now.

I hope for the end of hunger by supporting our farmers and heralding them as the heroes they are. In my pantry, I hope for a colourful diversity of fruit and veg grown using agroecology. I hope for rewilded meadows alongside polycultural fields, with thick hedgerows full of insect and bird life.

The way we’ve been growing and distributing food for the last century has fed the wealthy but starved many and made our planet sick. It’s polluted our air and oceans and eroded our topsoil. It’s washed chemicals into our rivers and critically endangered wildlife creating the sixth great mass extinction. It has been estimated that extinctions are occurring at least ten to a hundred times faster than in pre-human times. Without radical change, we may lose the ecosystems we depend upon to survive.

I believe we can feed the world in a way that supports nature. We’ve seen some incredible initiatives already. I want our governments and corporations to listen to them, to the small farmers and women leading the way. I want them to take responsibility and create the conditions for people to thrive with nature as one.

I want to be cooking this meal for you, saying “I can’t believe how things used to be done.” Thank goodness we helped make the change.

I’ll see you at the kitchen table.

Love, Tom