TITLE: Dirty Weekenders Kitchen Table Talk
DATE: 2018-04-07
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================
This is a carbon copy of a blog post that I wrote for
dirties.wordpress.com. It's the write up of a Kitchen Table Talk we
did at Bridgend Farmhouse.
[dirties.wordpress.com]: https://dirties.wordpress.com
Kitchen table talk at Bridgend Farmhouse
Recently, we had the celebration event for the end of the Dirty
Weekenders / RSPB Young Roots project. This was a two year project
which involved the Dirties and the RSPB collaborating to improve
community run green spaces around Edinburgh. The event was held at
Bridgend Farmhouse, one of the project sites where the Dirties have
been working for the past 3 years.
As part of the event, Laura Goble, our person from the RSPB made
the most of us being inside for once, and organised for us to have
a "Kitchen Table Talk". This is an initiative started by Nourish
Scotland to find out what really matters to the people of Scotland
when it comes to food. The Kitchen Table Talks aim to gather
together ideas on this subject in preparation for the Scottish
Government's "Good Food Nation Bill", which will be discussed in
parliament later this year.
[Nourish Scotland]:
http://www.nourishscotland.org/campaigns/good-food-nation-bill/kitch
en-table-talks/
This post mainly describes what we talked about, with the hope that
it will inspire others to think about the food system in Scotland
and how it can be changed for the better. If you want to have your
own Kitchen Table Talk, head to the Nourish Scotland website to
download some guidance materials.
[head to the Nourish Scotland website to download some guidance
materials]:
http://www.nourishscotland.org/campaigns/good-food-nation-bill/kitch
en-table-talks/
You'll see if you look at the actual sheet we filled in, that I've
taken a bit of license in developing our ideas further for this
blog post, but hopefully it still mirrors our collective thoughts
during the discussion.
I think we could split our ideas throughout the discussion into
three basic themes, which cover most of the food system and mirror
the general lifecycle of food: food production, food retail, and
food consumption.
Food Production
Our general thoughts were that currently, big food retailers
dictate the system under which food is produced. Supermarkets
prefer to buy from large industrial farms for many logistical and
economic reasons, and supermarkets sell the majority of food in the
UK, which means that food production is increasingly dominated by
these large industrial farms. Unfortunately this means that often,
the quality of this food is low and it often travels much further
than we would like, or is necessary. Our suggestion was to try to
basically decentralise food production, to give more power back to
small commercial producers, co-operative producers and hobby
producers.
We suggest that there should be more of an effort to convert urban
brownfield sites and areas currently set aside for ornamental
gardens into productive vegetable gardens, with the local community
taking ownership of these areas rather than local councils. We
think that this would encourage people to eat more healthily by
presenting them with food that they have grown, and we think that
the communal ownership of food that comes with sharing growing
space would hopefully lead on to people sharing meals and
encouraging others to eat healthily. Growing your own food is a
great way to understand the origins of food, and to appreciate the
effort that goes into producing it. Hopefully, by setting many
hands to work in small hobby settings, the monetary cost of this
food would also be minimal.
Along with this idea to decentralise food production, we thought it
would be good to try and match the food produced in certain regions
of the country with the climate. This which would hopefully improve
nutritional yield from these foods and reduce the negative
environmental impact that comes from intensive high input farming
methods. It would also mean that local food could be produced at a
more consistent rate throughout the year, by producing more varied
crops with multiple harvests per year minimising the need for
imports. Of course, all of our suggestions above would require more
people actviely participating in food production, rather than just
being consumers, which is something not everybody is interested in
or feels they have the time to do, even though there are obvious
benefits from engaging in food production both for the individual
and for society.
Food retail
Our main problem with food retail was the amount of food waste
generated by supermarkets from unsold produce. We think that part
of the problem of food waste could be solved by sourcing more
produce locally, meaning that supply can be more easily adjusted to
meet demand. This links in nicely to our previous idea about
decentralising food production and getting more people involved in
the food system. A few of us talked about food sharing initiatives
that already exist in Edinburgh such as Food Sharing Edinburgh and
Disco Soup and how great they are. We also talked about dumpster
diving, which some of us do, but I think we acknowledged that
ideally, the slightly shady practice dumpster diving should
eventually be replaced by more structured waste food sharing
initiatives, that make this produce available to more people. I
feel like in Edinburgh at least, most of the people that go
dumpster diving aren't the people who desparately need the food.
Furthermore, even then, we acknowledged that food sharing
initiatives should instead ideally be replaced by a lack of any
food waste, which could come from improving the highly inefficient
food retail system.
[Food Sharing Edinburgh]: http://www.foodsharing.scot
[Disco Soup]: https://edinburghcoop.wordpress.com/disco-soup/
We also had a big issue with plastic packaging, which we think is
currently excessive. Again, by decentralising food production and
moving to more local fresh produce, plastic packaging could be
reduced without increasing the risk of food becoming spoiled. We
had the idea for a tax on food items that use excessive packaging,
but one of the worries with this is that the tax would merely be
passed onto the consumer in the form of increased prices, which
could severely disadvantage some people who already have trouble
paying for food. One of us mentioned a form of protest which I
personally think is brilliant, whereby people in food stores remove
any unnecessary packaging before leaving the shop and leaving it
there, which sends a clear message to the food retailers that we
don't want all the packaging.
Food consumption
We would advocate for a move towards more communal eating, through
supper clubs, work canteens, and community groups, potentially
using ingredients grown in community gardens like the ones we
described above. We think these regular meals would encourage
people to eat healthily by encouraging cooking large batches of
fresh food, and it would inspire people to cook more healthily when
they do happen to eat alone, by exposing them to healthy cooking
techniques and encouraging sharing of skills between households.
Cooking at scale is almost always cheaper than eating alone, and it
tends to reduce food waste on the consumer end.
What is stopping us doing all of these things?
All of the ideas above sound great, despite possibly being a bit
utopic and naive, but they beg the question: "What is stopping us
doing these things already?".
With regards to food waste, we think that the current legislation
surrounding food waste doesn't help the situation. I think the
interpretation of sell by dates as hard rules encourages a culture
of liability avoidance amongst food retailers. We think this could
be relatively easy to solve by enforcing anti-food waste
legislation which encourages food retailers to make provisions for
intercepting food waste before it gets to the bin and supplying it
to food sharing groups. Relaxing sell by date policies in food
stores would also help to stem the flow of perfectly edible food to
the bin.
We think that education surrounding healthy eating isn't adequately
distributed across age groups, and this is preventing adults
providing healthy food. Lots of education about healthy eating
occurs in schools, but beyond school there is very little.
One of the big things that came up was the convenience of buying
low quality, quick, cheap food. Basically, we are lazy about food.
Fixing this problem is difficult as it requires a wholesale shift
in behaviour towards food. We think we should move away from seeing
food as a means to an end, and more towards food being a focal
point around which other things happen. We want people to think
more consciously about the food they eat. Possibly an easy way of
solving this would be coercing food retailers to provide healthy
and environmentally sound food. But then that's a bit unfair to the
food retailer, which might not feel like they should be responsible
for making decisions for their customers. It really depends whether
you think food retailers should be social enterprises or businesses.
Conclusions
At the end of our discussion, we tried to round everything up and
decide which of the issues we described above are the most
important to us, and also came up with tangible actions the
government can take to improve food culture in Scotland. This is
what we came up with.
The top 5 things we are concerned about:
1. Excessive food waste
2. Unnecessary plastic packaging
3. The current lack of transparency in food origins, transport
distance, CO2 output.
4. Farmers do not receive a fair price for their product, as food
retailers seek to maximise profit, discouraging farming as a
profession. Especially farming quality food rather than quantity.
5. Supermarkets have a monopoly and are able to sell low quality,
cheap food. Smaller businesses selling local produce are unable to
compete.
The top 5 things the government can do:
1. Encourage local food producers / retailers.
2. Legislate to reduce plastic waste.
- e.g. introduce a plastic tax for over packaged items,
applied at the retailer level, not the consumer level.
3. Cap profit margins on food items sold by food retailers.
- Again, potentially problematic if this affects the price
that producers receive for their product.
4. Create a "Dig for Health" action campaign to encourage
community food production.
5. Encourage alternative growing systems that are more suitable
for small scale low input food production:
- Permaculture
- Forest gardens
- Mob grazing of small herds of cattle/sheep/goats
Our kitchen table talk featured on the Nourish Scotland map!
[Nourish Scotland map]:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1zNq4BV_qbV9_LxkMCf_8HPg4gl
9jBN0W&usp=sharing
