Professorial muddy boots, vegans in the West Midlands & food security

Can you be a vegan and eat enough protein for a healthy life, living off food grown only in the West Midlands? With all the angst about food miles, Rosemary Collier, entomologist and Director of the Warwick Crop Centre at Wellesbourne, has pondered this question. She told me during our thought-provoking conversation that she doubted it could ever be possible, but didn’t actually know.

I’d arrived at the Warwick Crop Centre bearing gifts for her — a papaya, a mango, a very large purple plum, a pear and, yes, one of those 2.5M avocados, part of a large box of fruits given to me by Parveen Mehta, the generous soul who’s Ops Director at Minor Weir and Willis and who I’d met earlier in the day.

Generosity is catching. Rosemary benefitted from its infectiousness, and it all made a neat if surprising introduction for her when we met face-to-face for the first time.

Here at Wellesbourne, Warwick researchers spend their time and efforts researching how to feed the world now, and the challenging task of feeding the estimated 9bn of us on the planet by 2050.

Despite what many think, research is a very practical affair.

Theories don’t say long in scientists’ heads, they’re tested  in the real world, and sometimes overturned. The evidence of such practicalities was on Rosemary’s boots. She’d just come in from the fields.

Like us, Rosemary had realised that the West Midlands, with its unique tightly-bound geography of cities and agriculture, had plenty to offer decision-makers on how we supply a population with food. She’d been thinking about how this could happen, and how to make it as multidisciplinary as it needs to be. So the notion of the New Optimists Forum was music to her ears.

As well as having the input of Warwick’s established scientists and running a ‘normal’ Forum event at Wellesbourne, we discussed the possibility of having a session with postgrads on their new MSc in food security; the first intake is arriving in the next couple of weeks. The students come from all over the world, and from a variety of backgrounds. And it’d be great to have their diverse take on what we’re doing.