Cape Town - The Labia Theatre was screening the first ever “Diet Change Not Climate Change” film festival starting yesterday, to draw attention to the role individual food choices have on the environment, and how people could reduce their individual greenhouse gas contributions by changing their eating habits.
The festival is taking place at the Labia from July 25 to August 4 and began with a premier screening of “Eating Our Way to Extinction”, a documentary about how the current global food system was pushing the world towards ecological collapse.
Nanine Wymer, programmes manager for ProVeg which is collaborating on the festival, said the environmental film festival formed part of their larger “Diet Change Not Climate Change” campaign wherein they sought to raise awareness of how food choices impacted the environment and to advocate for sustainable food system change among policy and decision-makers.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) Cape Town, a non-violent climate action group, was in attendance for the launch along with other non-governmental environmental organisations.
Jackie Tooke, an XR Cape Town spokesperson, said the topics raised in the documentary put a much-needed spotlight on the link between livestock farming, animal agriculture and climate change that was often hidden from the mainstream media.
“It also resonates with the first call we have as XR, which is to tell the truth. This documentary enlightens us to the way the food system has been structured and how it hurts us as individuals, our biosphere, our biodiversity, our ecosystems and so many other spheres of life,” Tooke said.
ProVeg highlighted that farming and the eating of animals was a leading contributor to the global climate crisis and responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and they believed that switching to a plant-based diet could reduce food-related emissions by up to 50%.
The Labia Theatre managing member Ludi Kraus hoped the festival would be the first of many more in the future.
