Food for Thought!

I went along to the Science on a Plate exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens today.

This beautifully laid out exhibition included photos of people on their allotment gardens taken by Carlo d'Alessandro. Nicely decorated market stalls have displays outlining the importance of plants to our diet and how wild food harvesting can help to preserve biodiversity (presented by the Botanics), crop breeding (presented by the James Hutton Institute), nutrition and health (presented by the Rowett Institute) and sustainable fish (Marine Scotland). The exhibition was hosted by the Botanics' Edible Gardening Project, who also had a stall demonstrating some very crafty ideas on how to recycle plastic household waste (such as margarine tubs and plastic bottles) into garden tools and equipment.

which their volunteers were happy to demonstrate!

They also have a wee quiz where you have to identify the seeds of various garden vegetables, in which I demonstrated I have much to learn!

I then went back into the cold and rain and walked round the outdoor exhibition of Whole Earth Hard Rain, a follow on to the original Hard Rain exhibition which I blogged about here. The new exhibition looks at some of the many environmental issues that face us and some of the solutions too. The centrepiece of the exhibition is the beautiful Tibetan 'People's Pledge' Tent but there were no postcards to write on and the touchscreen pledge facility hadn't yet been set up.

Science on a Plate is part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival. You can see the full programme here. The exhibition runs until 15 April.

You can read my first Science Festival blog post for Clicket here (scroll down for my post)

Hard Rain Whole Earth runs at the Botanics until Sunday 1 July.