GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Feeding you the Truth, with Suzy Sumner
Ever wondered how your food choices impact not just your health, but the planet too? This episode of GoodGeist features Suzy Sumner, the dynamic head of the Brussels office for Foodwatch International. Suzy is a passionate advocate for safe, healthy, and affordable food across Europe. From being called the "food police" as a child to leading impactful campaigns, Susie’s journey is nothing short of inspiring.
We discuss the hidden realities behind common EU crops like wheat and corn, and the role that pesticides play in the agricultural landscape. How supermarkets are powerful change agents and we also delve into the concept of regenerative agriculture.
This episode reveals how consumers, farmers, and supermarkets can collaborate to build sustainable food systems, challenging the overwhelming influence of big industry. Join us for a compelling conversation on paving the way for a healthier, more sustainable future.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone, you are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, istanbul, and.
Speaker 3:This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Susie Sumner, head of Brussels office for Foodwatch International. Foodwatch is a non-profit campaigning organisation that fights for safe, healthy and affordable food for all people. That's the basics of everything, I think, and it speaks up for transparency in the food sector and defends the right to food that harms neither people nor the environment.
Speaker 3:Brilliant, and so Susie leads on bringing the Food Watch campaign to the heart of the EU Good luck on that one, susie. And really interfaces with the key players around the EU institutions and once upon a time headed up the Brussels office for the Northwest of England which is where she and I first worked together. Susie, thank you so much for taking time to talk to Damla and myself.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much for inviting me.
Speaker 3:So, first of all, it's always great to find out more about our guests' backgrounds, so tell us about your personal journey, if you like, to working at Foodwatch and what interests you about the future of food.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. I think. Maybe my mum would say I found my perfect job because even at age 10, she called me the food police. I was that kid who was in the supermarket looking in everybody's shopping trolleys, fascinated about every label telling her she wasn't allowed to buy Smarties because of Nestle and the baby milk campaigns that were going on at that time in the 1980s and early 90s. So I think, yeah, finding Food Watch has been a journey for me.
Speaker 4:As you said, I'm from the northwest of England originally and I moved over to Brussels actually in 1997. So I came over for a six-month internship and I'm like many people in this city you come for six months and 27 years later I'm still here. It's been a fascinating journey really, around different organizations, working with the EU institutions, but actually it was when I was made redundant from that job in the northwest of England back in 2011, as they closed the regions and the work that I was doing was stopped, that I decided to retrain and I retrained in nutrition. I'd always had a fascination with food all along the way and I spent a few years self-employed as a health coach, but also still carrying on working for a few regions and cities, helping them with their EU work.
Speaker 4:And then it was in 2019 that Foodwatch and I found each other and, in fact, as soon as I started, I had this first campaign I could do, which was we'd noticed that the Romanian presidency of the EU so each EU country can take the leadership of Europe for six months At that moment it was Romania had just stepped in and they had as the major sponsor Coca-Cola. So we're talking, like we see, for the World Cup or the Olympics, you know, a big sponsorship, but this is for an institution that is making decisions on our health, on food labeling, and it was an absolute no way. This cannot be allowed. And that was my first campaign petitions, complaints and managed to get in place some guidelines on who can get involved in sponsoring political presidencies preferably nobody, but certainly we haven't seen any big food or drink doing that since. So, yeah, that was the beginning.
Speaker 3:Amazing, amazing story, susie. And before I hand it back over to Damla, just to make it crystal clear, it was a big thing, wasn't it? The bonfire of the Quangos, when we had a crazy incoming administration that just wanted to destroy regions in the UK. It was a horrible time. We lost loads of work, but it sounds like one sunny side up moment is. It steered you on a course towards nutrition and food, which is you know, you've got to look at the bright side. Anyway, Jamila, back up to you.
Speaker 2:From the beginning, you were the disturber. I see it, and that's great, great. Let's disturb the system, but when we talk about it and when we think about it, food is the main thing. Food is what keeps us going, and planet health plus human health, that equals the food systems. So should we be making more of the intersectionally of sustainability and well-being? What is the?
Speaker 4:big, big conversation here. You've hit it on the head, damla, I think. I mean. To me it's all the same thing. We can't talk about human health without talking about planetary health too. It's so connected. I sometimes go back to this definition of what is a consumer. Ok, so a consumer when we're talking about food, it's the right word. We consume this food. What is being grown out there, we are consuming. We don't actually consume a smartphone or a car. They're more likely to consume us, probably, rather than the other way around.
Speaker 4:But, we actually, you know, when we're talking about food, our health, what we are putting in, depends so much on what is going on out there and how our food is being grown, separated. I mean, on a personal level, it's about choosing where I buy my food from, sourcing it, and actually in Brussels we are so lucky to have a really good sources of good, sustainable food, people who we know, who are growing food, people we can source from. I find myself really really lucky in that situation. However, for Foodwatch, we're working for the majority of these consumers. We're working for the people who you know, who may only have the choice of one supermarket to go and buy their food from. There's a lot of people living in that situation where they don't the healthiest, safest, most affordable food that is possible for them. And you know, the planetary health and the human health really fit together.
Speaker 4:And if you take our daily bread okay, a bread normally has three, maybe four ingredients. It's flour, water, yeast, bit of salt. That is the loaf of bread of which we can all consume without any problems. Um, we can look at, obviously, how the, how the flour is grown and things like that. We can go into that later on, but you know, a basic uh product that is. But why is a bread made of those four ingredients often even more expensive than one that has a long list of ingredients, including flower enhancers, emulsifiers, bleaching agents, and that is available and it's cheaper? And that is the problem. That is the problem that Foodwatch really wants to address is how can we make those simple products healthier products, more sustainable products, better for the simple products, healthier products, more sustainable products, better for the environment products, better for your human health products, the most available and most affordable to people.
Speaker 2:So, Susie, when we talk about, I mean the basic definition of Foodwatch, that it is an advocacy group for consumer rights and labeling and so on. So it just seems like it's about consumer rights, but when we talk about it, we talk about how those pesticides and other things go into our food, how we grow our food. So it is really more than just consumer rights and more than food. Food is not only food. That seems so. So you are a part of the big fight. How do you reconcile two things?
Speaker 4:We believe that consumers have a right to know what it is they are eating, and that is not only by the ingredients that are on their label, but it's also about is this a product that's full of pesticides, what's the effect of those, or is it pesticide free? And maybe, just coming back to the bread there, this is a really good example. We have a campaign in Foodwatch that we actually believe that we can exit pesticides on certain crops, for example, on wheat and corn. They are crops that take 50% of the EU land mass in growing and use more pesticides than, for example, fruit and vegetables, which may take a much less space, and yet they are crops that we are using so much in our products and they are easy much easier than, for example, grapes or apples to reduce pesticides on and even get rid of pesticides on. So we believe that the supermarkets in fact have a really big role in trying to change the sourcing policies for their grain products.
Speaker 4:So, if we go back to the bread, we want to change legislation, of course, so that less pesticides are used, but that at the moment is a bit difficult in the EU.
Speaker 4:So we're putting the pressure on the supermarkets instead and saying can you source your flour pesticide-free and if you change the way that they use their power to buy these products, that changes what the farmers will then provide to them. And the farmers will know they have a market for their pesticide free flour and grains. And so we are putting some pressure on the big supermarkets Lidl, aldi, carrefour, across Europe to ask them and via our members, so via the consumers who are saying look, we can produce these products with less pesticides, so help us drive it Be that source of change that we need in order to ask the farmers to produce with less pesticides. So it's very much part of the big scheme, as you said, damla. It's very much part of consumers taking action in knowing what it is that they're eating not only on ingredients labels, but what's hidden behind all of that as well and for them to be able to ask for change from the places that they are shopping.
Speaker 3:So, susie, I absolutely love all that and I love bringing it back to the focus on the consumer, because I hang around almost for fun in a lot of sustainable sites supply chain forum meeting type places and people bandy around the phrase from field to fork all the time about you know, how do we create a more sustainable food system and stuff.
Speaker 3:And I find it really interesting because I sometimes encounter, particularly in the middle of the supply chain, traders and processors who they're almost hiding from the consumer, and then some of those supermarket brands are much more conversing with what consumers are feeling. But I think the idea of bringing it back to people is really important, and not hiding of what's happening with the food system to consumers so that they can make a smarter choice isn't enhanced if you use lots of jargon or trendy terms, really, and so I wanted your take on a term that's trending a lot, which is regenerative agriculture, because a lot of what you described some people would immediately put into the kind of silo of regenerative agriculture, and so I'd love to know what you think and what food watch thinks about that. A huge force, um, in in food at the moment. Loads of brands talking about it, um, loads of articles being written about it, people struggling with a definition for it. So what's your? What's your thoughts on that movement?
Speaker 4:I think there's amazing projects and examples of regenerative agriculture happening all over the UK, all over the EU as well, and we can see that, actually, people who are working closely with the land, they know the importance of soil health with the land, they know the importance of soil health. There's no, and of the problems that we're facing at the moment with the climate crisis, of extreme temperatures, of flooding, of droughts in one part of Europe and flooding in another. If you work close with nature, you know there's a problem, and when we are getting to the point where we can have contaminated groundwater, the runoffs from these pesticides and fertilizers that are, you know, starting to get into places where they should not be, we know we've got a problem. So I think there are amazing schemes that are going on. I think there's a lot of awareness raising going on.
Speaker 4:Of course, there's always jargon terms that are being used, and I think that sometimes we need to move away from that and just say you know, this is about healthy soil, this is about having the nutrients in your soil that's actually then going to go in your food and and help you be healthier. I mean, that's the the bottom of it, isn't it? And we need to. We need to adapt and to to use methods. Um, often the methods that are being proposed are, like you know where we I don't know if you hear it in the uk as well, but it's precision agriculture and you know using like the technology in order to find solutions. Well, I think the solutions are probably much more simple than that. They're methods that have been used for years and years, and I think we need to get moved from the idea, you know, that farming looks like it does in the children's books.
Speaker 4:It doesn't really look like that for the majority of farmers anymore. It's an industry where farmers are locked into a pesticides trap, a chemical trap, which is very hard to come out of, and a lot of these examples that are going on that are proving that this can be done. This is amazing and we need to keep them going. But at the same time, as I mentioned, we want to be able to get some big scale changes, and that's why we also look to the supermarkets to use their power to actually help those farmers Say we'll pay you in order to make these changes. We need to make sure that consumers and farmers are not being put against each other. That's not the story. That's really a false dichotomy that is being used at the moment by a very big industry playing us off against each other, consumers and farmers. I really believe we're on the same side and we need to work with that and actually put the pressure on this part that's in the middle.
Speaker 2:Well, susie, it's amazing that you said farming isn't how it looks like in the children's book. So this brings me to something that Steve and I were talking a lot about the recent days the post-truth, the era of representation and everything. And of course, steve, you know Baudelaire and simularchs. So we have this notion of farming and food that feels cozy and very much safe and what feels like what we know, and it is kind of home for us that children's books, farm is our home in all over the world, but on the other hand, the reality isn't that. So what do you think will fill that gap between the notion in the people's minds of what's happening with our food and the reality? Is it only information or something else?
Speaker 4:I think we all have to think about the words that we're using. I mean, we always talk about farming. In fact, it's industrial agriculture. Maybe we do need to check sometimes on the words that we use. It's a it's industrial agriculture, maybe it's you know, we do need to check sometimes on the words that we use. It's a chemical lock-in, it's you know. It's not the farmers that are really choosing these methods. So I think it's you know.
Speaker 4:We do need to look at it and we need to look at what this whole food industry is as well. Need to look at it and we need to look at what this whole food industry is as well and realize that a lot of the foods that we find in the supermarket are actually relying on very cheap imports of soy, maize and palm oil. I mean, if you look at many of the products in the supermarket, that's what they contain and they are producing products that can sit on a supermarket shelf for years and years and not go off, and very, very nice for the industry who is creating them. They are cashing in and in there we've got to drive changes, but that has got to come from a policy level. How can we make those healthier foods, those more simple foods, more available and more accessible. And, as Foodwatch and I think that the measures are not as hard as we think they are. You know hard as we think they are. You know countries have put inside a pesticide tax, so you tax on the use of pesticides, tax on the sales tax on the use. That brings in money which can be used to help in regenerative agriculture. You also can put taxes on the end product. So taxes on sweetened food, on sugary food, you know, again, that can help to put the money where it's needed in trying to change the system.
Speaker 4:Other issues as well like the companies have got basically a free reign in how they market the foods to us. I mean, you don't often see a broccoli advertised, do you? Or a packet of lentils. You know the stuff that is being advertised to unhealthy foods, not only to children, primarily to children, because the effect is enormous, but to all of us. And these measures, the taxes, the changes on marketing, that will will hit those people in the middle, that will hit the big agri, that will hit the big industry. That's what they don't want. It won't be damaging the farmers and it won't be damaging the consumers. You need to be taxing those who are actually causing the harm.
Speaker 3:Susie. I mean food marketing and food advertising. We need a whole separate podcast on that. I mean I'm going to have to squeeze in a little vegan plug. But my first six years of my career was campaigning on plant based foods for the future and it was. I found it really good fun, I have to say, doing ad campaigns around vegetarian and vegan food, because there's something about food there's so many comedy angles, so many quirky elements of the human psychology that creating a narrative and a dialogue around food is creatively an incredibly rich space. It's really good fun and separately I'll send you some of my old ads from those days when it was really good fun doing that stuff. But I wanted to turn it back to you in Foodwatch and you are, as Dan said earlier, you're an advocacy group, a campaigning organisation, so I thought, before we wrap up, it'd be good to have a sense of you know. What campaigns are you running currently, what are the tactics that you're using and what does campaigning look like at Foodwatch.
Speaker 4:It's very, very, very varied depending on the issues. It's very, very, very varied depending on the issues. But maybe one campaign which is very much in the news at the moment, particularly in France, but also across Europe, and this is a suspected fraud from a very large multinational company who has been using illegal filtration methods on mineral water. So just to be clear, mineral water shouldn't need those levels of filtration. It's a filtration method that are used for for drinking water, um, but mineral water is supposed to be from a purer source and should not need uh, these, uh, these methods. But what seems to be revealed is a huge uh cover-up, uh from um, from nestle waters and and sources alma on on where we are, so Foodwatch, we're taking them to court. That's what it looks like in our times and in our work and that's sometimes what we do.
Speaker 4:We are from Foodwatch in France. We are taking Nestle Waters and Sources Alma to court on nine accounts of suspected fraud and just bringing this back down to the consumer. This seems to have been going on for many, many years and it's nobody has known. And if you go into the shop and you look at the price of a bottle of Perrier compared to the price that you pay for the equivalent that comes out of your tap and you say it's getting the same treatment. Is that really okay? And to me that is a massive misleading, fraudulent behavior towards a consumer.
Speaker 1:We don't know where these bottles are.
Speaker 4:They've gone off and been sold and the company is very, very nicely making its money from what is going on. So often the issues with Foodwatch can be as precise and, yeah, taking a legal case against some companies and you check out through our website, you'll see various cases that have happened before. But contamination is a big issue for us as well. We've done tests on food. We've tested them to the highest standards. We've gone to the European Commission and said, look, we've tested them to the highest standards. We've gone to the European Commission and said, look, these foods are contaminated. That cannot be. We need regulations in place.
Speaker 4:So we've had campaigns that have gone around like that. Other things are just basically in. You know what's on the label. We have a competition in Germany and in the Netherlands each year for the most misleading product on the shelves and it's actually people who can nominate certain products to us and there's a vote and there's a whole process around that. But you know these are products for example, you know children's snacks which say that they don't contain sugar, but in fact the sugar levels in there are incredibly high through food concentrate or whatever. But the amount of sugar in there actually is incredibly high, but they're being marketed as being healthy to children. So many, many different examples of what we're doing to try to stop consumers being misled, and even to the level of fraud.
Speaker 2:In every answer you give, you open a lot of doors that we have to make another episode on, like greenwashing, transparency, everything that comes into mind. But we don't have such time in this episode actually, but maybe we will have other episodes. So final question our network is ironically called do not smile, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. So what object, place or person always make you smile?
Speaker 4:ah, what object, place or person always makes you smile. This is a. I'm gonna give a typical mom answer. I'll say my kids that's the best answer but yeah, I mean, that's, that's it.
Speaker 4:I actually have, um, you know, kids that I, I, they're, they're amazing in in a in a. It's very personal stories in a way, but I've always tried to give them a lot of healthy food and I love cooking and we've cooked together and we've done many, many different things. And I always remember a little story and we never really went down the sweet side and those kind of things. I always tried to make them different alternatives. And a little story from when I was on the train once with my son.
Speaker 4:He was only about three years old, and somebody offered him a sweet and he said I don't eat sweets, I'm vegetarian. And I thought, wow, that's just the sweetest thing. I don't know why you don't eat sweets, and that's really nice and it's nice that you said no, but it was, uh, you know already I think he's probably, uh, you know, talking about the ingredients on those sweets that were maybe not entirely vegetarian, but that's something that stuck with him so it's so nice when your kids, you know, come back with different things and of course their kids they do that.
Speaker 4:They do their own things and make their own ways as well.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I love that you're raising the next generation of food police, the next generation of food police. We've come full circle to the start. Literally the next generation of food police are growing up right now in Brussels. It's very exciting. Let's hope there's some great food police in the UK as well.
Speaker 4:A great organisation. Bike back young people wanting to take control of their food and what's being marketed to them as well. There's amazing, amazing people and young activists out there who are very inspiring.
Speaker 3:Amazing, Amazing. Well, listen, I'm going to go to a close. That's been a fantastic chat, Susie, about you and Foodwatch nutrition future of the planet. All of that good stuff and, as Danla said, we could have got so into transparency, supply chains, all of it, but that will have to wait for another day, I think. So, Damla, over to you, wrap us up.
Speaker 2:So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies.
Speaker 3:And make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So see you, Damla see you, Susie.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Steve. Brought to you by the DNS Network.
