Behavioural changes around food can take generations to embed, but action is needed now to mitigate the climate crisis. Canvas8 spoke to Eve Turow-Paul, the founder of the Food for Climate League, about how brands can make healthy and climate-friendly diets more accessible.

FCL received an Honorable Mention in the Climate category on Fast Company’s roundup of World Changing Ideas, 2022.

By now, we’ve all heard the jokes about how millennials can’t afford to buy homes because we spend all our money on avocado toast, and have felt the generational divides around class, race, and gender through these prolonged boomer analogies with food. But when you put the jokes aside, a complicated picture of why younger generations care so much about food starts to arise.

Eve Turow-Paul, founder of the Food for Climate League, said that, although many Americans have expressed an interest in changing the way they eat toward a more plant-forward diet, “so many of us feel like we are being held back and kind of pigeonholed into a corner.

“A lot of that has to do with the framing,” she added. “One of the most basic findings that Food for Climate League had early on in our research is that so often plant-based meals are framed in the negative. … So often we read the menu description and it's all about what's not in the dish, so you don't really know what it is that you're eating.”

Eve Turow-Paul, founder and executive director of Food for Climate League, points out that 75% of the world's food is generated from only 12 plants and five animal species. "There are up to 300,000 edible plants, and we eat less than 200 of them," she says. "There are tons of delicious foods out there that are currently being ignored. Instead, most of us are focusing on a small handful of foods, especially proteins. It's time to expand our horizons and celebrate the outrageous and overlooked diversity of options available for us to enjoy."