TITLE: Dirty Weekenders Kitchen Table Talk
DATE: 2018-04-07
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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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/kitchen-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/kitchen-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
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Our kitchen table talk featured on the [Nourish Scotland map]!
[Nourish Scotland map]: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1zNq4BV_qbV9_LxkMCf_8HPg4gl9jBN0W&usp=sharing
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