Food, The Environment & Richard Flanagan

Lab meat and robot bees: how veganism and tech can solve the climate crisis. Anne McElvoy considers how food impacts on the environment with guests Anthony Warner, Cassandra Coburn, and Alasdair Cochrane. Plus Man Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan on his new novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams – about a dying planet and a dying mother.

Anthony Warner is author of Ending Hunger: The Quest To Feed The World Without Destroying It.

Cassandra Coburn is the author of Enough: How Your Food Choices Will Save The Planet.

New Generation Thinker Alasdair Cochrane, from the University of Sheffield, is the author of Should Animals Have Political Rights?

Novelist Richard Flanagan's latest book, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, recalls the devasting fires in Australia and Tasmania, and against this dying world depicts a dying woman and her three children in a magical realist fable. In 2014 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road To The Deep North, which considered the experiences of a Far East prisoner of war during the construction of the Burma Railway.

You can find more conversations in a playlist on the Free Thinking website called Green Thinking, which includes a discussion of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring - a consideration of the soil, dams, and deserts - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2

Producer: Emma Wallace