What does Our Food Future look like?
Transcript from National Food Service presentation, Thursday 27 Aug
Overturning the Food System
Summer Symposium 2020
What does Our Food Future look like?
with Louis Pohl, NFS Founder
Organised by Selina Treheurz and Ina Rawsthorne
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As well as an artist I describe myself as an eco-anxious environmentalist and cook. I have a studio based practice focussed on adapting pre-industrial craft techniques to work with post-consumer materials. In this way I’m trying to provide simple practical solutions to overwhelming feelings of desperation in late stage capitalism. I also run workshops on wildflower identification and fermentation in galleries and charities across the country, skill-sharing and inviting collaborative problem solving to some of the issues in our precious green spaces.
As a Local Contact, I first hooked up with NFS a year ago and did a talk with lovely Elliot at the Food and Farming March organised by Landworkers Alliance at OXO Tower. I have been waving the NFS flag from South London and volunteering some time to help other local groups set up or make changes to the projects, and contribute to the national strategy. I’ve also been a point of contact for enquiries and opportunities around food justice projects in South London.
One of the projects I ran was Brixton Pound Cafe, a pay-what-you-can (PWYC) space that saved surplus food from going to landfill and turned it into delicious, affordable vegetarian and vegan lunches for the community. When I eventually visited Foodhall last year I was shocked how similar the projects were, and it’s so encouraging, emboldening to see how other people are working towards the same goals in their own cities. We ran with a small team of paid staff and I worked with local SEN schools and disability charities to provide volunteer opportunities for young people with learning disabilities and autism. The main aims were to reduce food waste, tackle income inequality and engage isolated folks in the area. Brixton has been aggressively gentrified for almost a decade and providing a free-to-use space with tasty food, coffee and activities like yoga, reiki, life drawing means we had a great range of wonderful and interesting people from different age groups and demographics that used the cafe regularly.
I like to think about the PWYC model as one that not only demonstrates how to provide affordable and nutritious food with few resources, but also as a platform for creating local friendships, building community trust and autonomy and experimenting with alternative currencies. By creating a non-judgmental environment we can eradicate the risk of poverty-shaming that is so prevalent in cross-class interpersonal relationships in a city. The idea of paying what you can afford has a subtext of asking privileged folks to critically consider their status and how best they can contribute to the upkeep of the project, usually in a financial capacity. It also allows those who can offer their time, skills, labour as a unique non-financial stake, facilitating a horizontal support structure that doesn’t leave anyone behind.
Moreover, the traditional power dynamic favours the consumer who, in most hospitality situations, would automatically assume the dominant role because they are spending money. Therefore, it is deemed the customer is always right. This, as anyone who has worked in hospitality, is a very oppressive relationship for service workers. In a PWYC scenario, we are looking at a paradigm shift - the staff, volunteers and patrons become much closer and this traditional hierarchy dissolves to some extent. The emphasis to invite, engage and support all customers regardless of how much they pay, displays an awareness of the needs of those who might feel excluded from commercial spaces.
I believe, when properly organised and centrally funded, the PWYC model adopted by many social eating spaces run by and affiliated with NFS has the potential to create an upheaval of the archaic and toxic relationships that can form unchallenged in neoliberal spaces, and help create very special dynamic inclusive environments that will soon become prevalent on high streets and in estates and institutions across the country.
Many food justice projects rely on surplus food, either through skipping, working with charities or receiving donations directly from suppliers. If there is enough money in the project, food will also be purchased in. These connections are understandably extremely precarious at the best of times, with common issues like no transport, lack of volunteers or food expiration and rotting. This means spending unnecessary funds on buying-in low quality food from supermarkets, one of the institutions that is contributing to food insecurity in the first place because of price and also the privatisation of abundance. This is a huge problem in the city, where businesses restrict access to leftovers, but this might be a whole other subject.
To create a Fairer Food Future, particularly facing Brexit and Covid, we need to consider how important it is to building stronger ties with UK-based food producers. Why are we importing vegetables from across the globe in ever increasing carbon-expensive methods which don’t ensure farmers’ welfare and do exploit workers at all points in the chain? In the UK we have a fine history of landworkers producing highly nutritious and diverse crops, producing around 3.5m tonnes of fruit and veg every year. Food justice charity Feedback found that farmers who tookpart in a survey were saying up to 37,000 tonnes of crops were left in the field to rot last year. This is astounding because the figure hides all the labour and materials lost, and represents a huge financial burden to farmers who are already struggling from lack of government subsidies.
The expertise of our nation of Landworkers has been abused and overlooked for many years.
Bringing the NFS forwards we need to be thinking about how we can support farmers and landworkers, and integrate their skills, knowledge and produce back into the process of feeding communities. This is already being done by Feedback who I mentioned, through their Gleaning Network, which takes volunteers to farms, picks abandoned crops and redistributes them to community kitchens, preservers and small businesses. This is exactly the sort of resourceful thinking that can get food to emerging projects in both rural and urban areas, and create new networks of transporters and more resilient supply chains from the growers.
Having said this, the wellbeing of Organic Farmers and Landworkers should be our top priority. We need to be buying their produce rather than receiving it for free, so we can put money in their pockets and food on the tables in our network of social eating spaces. Their work is unequivocally important in caring for and renaturing our soils, which have been ravaged by aggressive agribusiness extractive capitalist practices for decades. Everything comes from the soil because everything comes from plants.
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The future of the funding strategies of NFS and other national Food Justice programmes must include integrating fair payment to farmers and landworkers and support for increasing opportunities for Black and Brown farmers, who have been excluded from the countryside for so long and will bring a wealth of new energy, expertise and ideas for creating sustainable food futures.
My feelings around the commons are becoming increasing pressing as the threats to reduce the amount of usable countryside and increase the punishment for trespassing. Not only does England have a class issue in the capital, in the cities and towns, but it also does in the countryside. I don’t need to say to much about why it’s reprehensible that landowners are given more and more power, and the public less and less autonomy, but this will also have a catastrophic effect on how we access wild food.
I am a huge advocate of introducing wild foods into our diets. Not only because all food came from the wild but also the incredible depth of nutrition that it can add to our bodies. Harvesting his free, abundant, delicious resource responsibly is key to helping increase biodiversity in areas that are susceptible to being colonised by fervent species. For instance; nettles, dandelions, three cornered leek are all in band 9 of invasive species in london, all absolutely packed with nutrients, oils and flavour. We are doing micro-ecologies a favour by picking and eating the abundance of dominant plants.
We can also see how eating wild food can help decarbonise our diets; cancel the need for any labour or refrigeration costs, reduce the negative environmental impact of transport, and create opportunities to connect with unbridled nature, wild nature and regain some control over the food we put in our bodies. Going blackberry-picking is one of the most fun things to do on a drizzly day in autumn with your friends. There are literally tens of plants that many consider weeds that taste better, keep for longer and contain more iron and vitamin C than any packet of spinach flown over from Portugal ever could.
The need to access this bounty is so important to our cultural history, our local values and the way in which we share a relationship with our natural environment. The National Food Service has already integrated wild foods into many of its kitchens, and by making stronger connections with local experts and enthusiasts, there is an opportunity to reinvigorate our love of scavenging and to regain some degree of sovereignty over our food system for the near future.