Seòmar agus comataidhean

Good morning to the witnesses. I will touch briefly on the sentencing issue that others have mentioned, but most of my questions will be about the scope of the bill.

I welcome the fact that, in your answers so far, you have placed some emphasis on lower-level penalties, such as community payback orders, which might often be appropriate. However, I am concerned about the upper limit of 10 years’ imprisonment that you have suggested. There are people who have been convicted of multiple offences of trafficking class A drugs and who have received shorter sentences than that. You might generally have a view that sentences should be longer—I do not know, but maybe you do. Is that a fair comparison? Is there not some concern that your upper limit is too high?

Thank you.

My question leads on quite well from that. I will talk about food education—a lot of that is about schools, but not exclusively so. At the highest level, is there enough ambition for food education in the plan? That may include cooking skills, but I am thinking about education around our relationship with food in a broader sense, whether that is in the curriculum or through education more widely.

You mentioned training, skills and career opportunities, whether they are in food preparation, cooking, growing at a community level or in our agriculture system. We need to do a lot to make those opportunities and careers attractive, interesting and exciting, but we must also think about the current workforce, particularly within the public sector. Getting a culture change and a change of attitude is not always easy. We do not want people to feel that they are just being berated and told that they are doing it all wrong, but we do need to achieve significant change. How will the Government work with the workforce, particularly in the public sector where there is a far more direct employer responsibility, to create a sense that the existing staff feel part of any change agenda in the food culture and have a sense of ownership?

I will go back a wee bit, as I have a supplementary question on the one health issue that was raised a few minutes ago—broadly speaking, the idea that we can achieve coherence among human health, climate and sustainability, and animal health and wellbeing, and that a less meat-intensive agriculture system, as well as a less meat-intensive diet, is a positive route to achieving all three of those things.

From the last panel, we heard a call for a balanced and nuanced understanding of those issues, and a rejection of the idea that there is some kind of extreme demand for mass culls of animals that would destroy the rural economy, or the idea that there is no such thing as a healthy vegetarian or plant-based diet, because, of course, there is.

How can you convince us that the Government is embracing that balanced and considered approach to uniting those agendas, when it has explicitly rejected the advice of the UK Climate Change Committee on agriculture and land use, basically because the Government does not want to start talking about less meat production?

Okay.

I find this really interesting. Perhaps, in framing my question, I did not quite express the sense that food education is broader than cooking skills—it is not as simple as that. I was thinking back to one of the earliest bills that I had to scrutinise in the Parliament, nearly 20 years ago. We are aware that the attempt to develop the good food nation ethos is 10 years old. Nearly 20 years ago, a piece of draft legislation on public health and nutrition in schools was going through the Parliament—it was the Schools (Health Promotion and Nutrition) (Scotland) Bill. At the time, I took the view that its approach to nutritional standards was reductive, albeit that it might have represented progress at the time in many senses.

Even then, some of the best schools were pursuing that approach and going way beyond it. They were creating a food environment such that, when children were eating, it felt as if a group of human beings were sitting together around a table sharing food, whereas other schools were creating a food environment that looked like a fast-food outlet. That in itself is part of food education. In a lot of schools, food is still consumed in an environment that looks like a fast-food outlet, with disposable packaging on everything and so on. Twenty years ago, some of the best local authorities were doing something completely different—they were thinking about food culture as part of their educational role.

When I talk about food education, I am not just talking about teaching people how to cook. What is our education system really teaching about how we consume and how we eat together?

I will reframe the original question. Is the plan ambitious enough to achieve the transformation in how we educate ourselves and create a culture around food that captures the spirit of what you are talking about? As I have said, that was being done in some places 20 years ago, and it is still being done in some places, but it is far from being the norm. Will the plan deliver that kind of change? Perhaps someone who has not spoken wants to respond.

Are there any other comments on what I asked about?

My last question on food education in the broader sense is about staff—whether they are in schools, hospitals, care settings or other parts of the public sector. Food education is not just about basic skills but about the approach towards the different food culture that we are trying to create among the staff in those organisations. How does the plan engage with an empowering and respectful approach to changing what we expect from people who are working in food and in those environments?