The Andrew Carnegie Lecture 2024

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The Andrew Carnegie Lecture 2024
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This is a past event

Celebrating 75 years since John Boyd Orr was awarded the Nobel Prize for his lifelong efforts to improve the world's food situation.

'Eating ourselves to death: How the modern diet is destroying our bodies and our planet'

Henry Dimbleby, the campaigner and author who has proved himself as one of the most effective voices in the ongoing battle for food system reform, following in John Boyd Orr’s footsteps as the father of free school milk by successfully campaigning to improve pupils’ access to decent meals.

Food poverty is not only cruelly damaging to people’s health – it fundamentally undermines society and the prospects of world peace. That was the central belief that fuelled John Boyd Orr’s lifelong mission to improve the diet of populations in the UK and across the globe.

As the founding director of the Rowett Institute, his research here in Aberdeen was the first to draw a clear link between low incomes, malnutrition and ill health.

His drive eventually led him to the global stage, devising a “world food plan” and spearheading the United Nations’ first efforts to coordinate international action.

In 1949, this “lifelong effort to conquer hunger and want, thereby helping to remove a major cause of military conflict and war” won him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Henry's forensic analysis of our malfunctioning food system and how we can fix it – in the independent National Food Strategy and his best-selling book Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet into Shape – are key texts of today’s fight to improve nutrition.

After the lecture an expert panel discussion with panel members including Rowett Director Professor Jules Griffin, Professor Alexandra Johnstone who leads the Institute’s work on food inequality and the Chair of Food Standards Scotland, Heather Kelman.

 Watch the recording- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuo1PmaaV6g

Speaker
Henry Dimbleby
Venue
Arts Lecture Theatre
Contact

events@abdn.ac.uk