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Chicago Botanic Garden Hosts Food Sustainability Discussion For World Environment Day

(CBS) -- "The Food Scorecard, Local and Global" was the theme for World Environment Day at Chicago Botanic Garden, in Glencoe.

Danielle Nierenberg's life work as co-founder and president of the non-profit Food Tank is to alleviate hunger, obesity and poverty, and to do it in a sustainable way. In her keynote address, she said if no changes are made in the way food is grown, processed and used, by 2050 we will need three planet Earths to produce what is needed to feed the world.

Today, she says, that 1 billion people worldwide are undernourished; another 2.1 billion people worldwide are overweight or obese.

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"Things are bad," she said. But Nierenberg said she sees reasons for hope in places a disparate as downstate farms and women's collectives in Africa. She says Chicago is among those at the forefront.

"This is a place where innovation is happening every day, whether it's among young people and students or food businesses, such as Whole Foods, who are really taking the lead and trying to make things better," she said.

Nierenberg says she is encouraged that millennials are increasingly eager to know where food was grown, how it was processed and how healthy it is. She sees change, but says it needs to be done faster.

The keynote address and panel were only one part of the Botanic Garden's celebration. The attending could ask horticulturalists how to create a green roof or a rain garden, could take home butterfly-friendly plants, attend a farmer's market, here a lecture on climate-related issues, see chefs prepare plant-based food and recycle plant containers and electronics.

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