Organic gardening – the answer to obesity?
The Garden Organic AGM at their magical demonstration organic garden site at Ryton-on-Dunsmore. President, Tim Lang is speaking. His riff is on why public health professionals are getting interested in growing. It’s the rise in the epidemic of non-communicable diseases: obesity, heart disease, cancer.
While 900 million people worldwide are hungry, 1.4 billion are obese. He wants to correct the relationship between people and food to promote health; a cultural issue. And he then goes on to name-check me for the “slightly quirky, crazy approach” I “pioneered at Warwickshire County Council by introducing the master composting and master gardening programmes.” Flattering, but I didn’t really have quite such vaulting ambition. More a case of reducing waste to landfill as part of our waste management programme.
What was really interesting though was the lady who stood up in the audience and told a story about how she was taking blood pressure tablets and suffering from diabetes until her GP told her to get an allotment three seasons ago. Since then she has lost 5 1/2 stone and no longer takes the tablets. And she looked healthy.
