Supermarkets and the fabric of society

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At the Welsh Government’s recent Food for the Future conference in Llandudno, the corporate sector was well represented, and rightly so, given the proportion of our food that reaches our plates via the superhighway that is the global food industry. So also was the health sector, there to express concerns about rocketing rates of obesity, diabetes and heart attacks. There was much talk therefore of the relationship between the food industry and the public, and I was struck by a remark made by Tim Rycroft of the Food and Drink Federation, the industry body which represents the UK food and drink sector, with members all the way from Tregroes Waffles to Tate and Lyle.

carrots poster

‘Our values make us different’ – but how different?

Food, he said, is part of the cultural fabric of our society, and this is particularly true in Wales, where people have a particularly soft spot for food produced in the part of the world they call home. That is certainly true. It’s what connects us as families and communities: just think of Sunday lunch, picnics at the beach, allotments, cafes and the workplace canteen. And the opposite of that: TV dinners, children who don’t know where milk comes from, adults who can’t boil an egg, junk food and worst of all, no food at all. Food connects us and expresses who we are as a society, and it links us to the natural world too.

So what is the supermarkets’ response to that? Both Tim Rycroft and Nick Canning of the supermarket chain Iceland had much to say about the quality and freshness of their food, the information that they give their customers about what’s in it, and the steps that the industry is taking to move away from special offers that steer us towards buying more than we need, or making unhealthy choices. They are taking confectionery away from the tills, reducing salt content, producing low-fat ready meals and labelling their products to tell us what’s in them. Many of them are also (though they didn’t say this, because the focusof the conference was on the health of the Welsh population above all) sourcing some of their produce ethically through various certification schemes such as Fairtrade, Freedom Foods and organic.

All this is good, and there is no doubt that corporate food is aware of its social responsibilities and taking some steps in the right direction. Still, I felt there was something missing, and I think the problem lay in the rhetoric of ‘the consumer’, and the uneasy relationship between the profit motive and the aim of feeding a healthy population. When the consumer – and in the mass, a local community – is the source of a supermarket’s profits, how much more lucrative to sell them what they want, rather than what’s good for them. In the strange world of the supermarket, where the lights are bright and the choice is vast, it’s easy to do that. Those flapjacks might be clearly labelled as being 30% sugar and 20% fat, but who cares, when they look so alluring?

I think if the food industry is really to serve the society of which it is part, it needs to engage with its ‘cultural fabric’ in a more genuine way, building it up rather than mining it. We all need to stand up as citizens, not producers and consumers, and see how supermarkets can be more a part of their local communities, rather than outposts of their head offices. There are plenty of examples of good practice already: supermarkets have been sponsoring school gardens, donating surplus food to charity, linking schools with farms, promoting local produce, funding community groups to grow food in their carparks, and hosting farmers markets.

What if instead of doing these things in a piecemeal way, with an eye to PR, supermarkets really committed to the job of rebuilding local food networks, and thereby strengthening local communities, and we held them to it? Let’s stop talking about us and them, and join together to transform our food system into one that really embodies our values of care, fairness and balance with nature, not just for ourselves now, but for future generations.

Filling the streets with food

Outside the library in Machynlleth is a set of raised beds with herbs and salads growing in them, plus hazel arches which in summer bear beans and squashes. In the carpark of the nearby Coop supermarket, there are redcurrant bushes, rhubarb and more herbs. Round the back of the Plas, there are picnic tables with apple trees growing up through holes in the middle and troughs planted up with thyme and rosemary.

woman with herb planter

Katie Hastings of Edible Mach, with the herb bed outside the Coop

This is all thanks to a project called Edible Mach, which engages teams of volunteers to maintain eleven plots around the town, growing food for the public to pick and adding an unexpected twist to public spaces – flowerbeds with a difference. It’s inspired by the original Incredible Edible project in Todmorden, the Yorkshire town celebrated for its dedication to public vegetable growing, where the police station is famous for the sweetcorn in its front yard and the concept of ‘vegetable tourism’ was born.

We were there for a course on how to ‘Fill the streets with food’, which included a guided tour of the Machynlleth project and tips on how to get started. Growing vegetables in public spaces is sometimes known as ‘guerrilla gardening’ but it’s better done with the full consent of the local authorities, who see much to gain from the unlikely vegetable beds: less litter, more neighbourliness, local colour. Councils are often willing to make land available, and local businesses to sponsor materials and plants. Volunteers are of course vital to the enterprise, and in turn gain from the social interaction and sense of contribution, while paid staff are invaluable in holding a project together and looking for new opportunities.

People had come from all over mid Wales to find out more, and there were enthusiastic discussions about what we could do in our home towns: a raised bed here, an apple tree there. The big question though seemed to be: where do the volunteers come from and what keeps them going? Who are these people who are happy to give up their free time to grow food that for the most part they won’t even get to eat? Will the initial enthusiasm last?

This led on to a discussion about selfish and compassionate values, and tied in nicely with research from the Common Cause Foundation which says in essence that people are more altruistic than they are given credit for. Most of us have a strong allegiance to values such as kindness and justice, and really want other people to be happy, even if we are fickle and easily panicked into looking after Number One. However, we tend to think that it’s just us that wants to contribute to a better world, and that everyone else is driven by the profit motive. We always put money into honesty boxes, but we are pretty sure most other people don’t. And so we go along with the general assumption that other people are selfish and have to be bribed and coerced into doing the right thing, and because that is a soul-destroying way to relate to each other, we give up.

edible mach libraryInterestingly that gap between holding compassionate values ourselves, but thinking that other people don’t, is particularly marked in Wales and leads to a general pessimism about our neighbours which holds us back from positive action. If we only realized how much other people care, we might not feel so much embarrassment about asking them to contribute to community projects, and we might create a positive spiral of good actions, building higher and higher levels of trust and cohesion.

Growing vegetables in public spaces is powerful because it makes altruism visible, in exactly the same way that giant advertising hoardings promote the profit motive. Visitors to the library at Machynlleth see that their fellow citizens have gone to the trouble of creating a pleasant experience for them, providing both beauty and food, and that challenges their assumptions about selfishness. It creates trust and shows that people are valued as humans and citizens for once, not for their spending power and their achievements. It reminds us that we are all equal in our need to eat, and that providing food for each other is one of the most basic human obligations. And that is maybe why people want to help keep the vegetable beds attractive and productive.

Food, values and the power to transform

In September, I was invited to speak in a debate about food and land at the Small is Beautiful festival. This annual event, which commemorates the work of economist and visionary thinker Fritz Schumacher, was held at the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth and brought together activists, artists, scientists and others to help shape a new future based on development that serves human needs.

The Food and Land Debate had four speakers on the theme of the commons and the corporate sector, and I spoke last, on the promise of a cheery ending. First was Patrick Mulvany of Practical Action (the new name of the Intermediate Technology Development Group, based directly on the work of Schumacher) who talked about seeds and the trend for excessive corporate control of our genetic resources through breeders’ rights and patenting. Quoting Jose Luis Vivero Pol he said:

“Let’s make ‘food as a commons’ a subversive meme (an element of the counter-hegemonic culture that replicates, mutates and spreads from one civic food action to another) to substantiate the transformational narrative to confront the dominant mainstream discourse of ‘food as a commodity’.

Let’s make commons food common.

Let’s commonify the commodity…”

Next, Humphrey Lloyd of the Land Workers Alliance, himself a small-scale grower, gave a potted history of land ownership in the UK, covering the Enclosures, mechanization and the Common Agricultural Policy, ending with the fascinating suggestion that if everyone in the UK chipped in with £460, we could put the entire land area into public ownership and create the food system we want.

Neils Corfield from the Permaculture Association brought home the perils of corporate neglect of the commons with a beautifully illustrated talk on the impacts of industrial farming on soil, air, water and biodiversity, concluding that ‘food is not a production problem’, and that the big business is engaged in the wrong sort of intensification.

Visual minutes

Visual minutes from the event, courtesy of creativeconnection.co.uk

Then it was me. I had left myself just a few days to work out how our food values work fitted with the distinction between the commons and corporate control, but I was sure there was the germ of a good idea in there. Sure enough, when I thought about the values associated with the two approaches to food, something extra popped out beyond the obvious comment that the commons is about community, benevolence and universalism, while the corporate sector is about power, status and security.

The key to finding the positive message is I think in the observation, well documented in the social psychology literature, that our values shift according to the conversation we are having, or the setting we are in. So if we are gardening with friends at the allotment, or we visit a farmers market and talk to the producers, or we share a meal with a community group, we will engage values of sharing, compassion, generosity and benevolence. If on the other hand – maybe even on the same day – we visit a supermarket, with its array of tempting goods, canned music and fluorescent lights, we are likely to focus on price and appearance, and the main values engaged will be those to do with personal gain, security, status and hedonism.

This works both ways of course, but it does mean that even the most hardened corporate consumer, once placed in a setting where the ethos of the commons prevails, is likely to start seeing things differently. Picking strawberries, say, on a sunny day with a bunch of schoolchildren makes it that little bit harder to worry about money and whether we are have the latest smartphone. Shopping at a farmers market puts us in mind of quality and provenance, and we don’t look so closely at the price label.

So those of us who work in the food commons are actually holding a lot of power: the power to give other people a transformative experience, even a life-changing one. That is important, because it’s easy to despair when we see the size of the corporate food sector. It has shaped the thinking of a generation and seemingly carried all before it. But we need to remember that the corporations only have as much power as the public gives them, and when we demonize them we give away even more of our power, leading to the burnout and despair that can so easily overtake the enthusiastic activist. Maybe we could instead remember that the corporate sector, like the commons, is run by people, and people can always change.

It’s up to us, I think, to align with our deepest values and find our power again. This is the power of authenticity and integrity and it is surely worth trying. As Margaret Mead famously said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Talking to the politicians

This article appeared in the Daily Post on 1 October 2015

Next year, Wales gets the chance to have a new government. What would you like the politicians to campaign for in the run-up to May’s elections?

A group of food researchers are working on a manifesto that will tell them what sort of food system the people of Wales want to see in future, and we would like to hear what you care about.

Food touches every area of our lives. Take food waste, for instance. UK supermarkets run on a system where in order to keep the shelves fully stocked with fresh food, a high proportion of perfectly good food is routinely thrown away.

Action is being taken by the likes of FareShare Cymru to distribute the surplus food, but maybe it’s time for more drastic action.

In France, supermarkets are obliged to give their unsold food to charities or for animal feed, and are banned from throwing it away. Should we try that here?

Most of us waste at least some food at home, too. Maybe we bought too much. The government cannot do much about that, but how about more cookery lessons in schools and in the community to encourage people to prepare healthy meals, and to rediscover the pleasures of eating together?

There is increasing interest in growing our own food, too. But in Wales there are very few skilled horticulturists, and we end up importing most of our fruit and vegetables, even those which could easily be grown here. This is a complex problem, one worth tackling by government.

Welsh agriculture is central to the food system of course, and it’s important to sort out our policy on land use. Do we farm for export markets, or for home consumption, or a bit of both?

What do we want our farmland to do? Grow food, encourage wildlife, prevent flooding, look beautiful and attract tourists? Government policy has a major role to play here, through subsidies and other forms of support.

Government can also affect markets, for instance by requiring local authorities and other public sector organisations to make it easier for Welsh food businesses to supply schools, hospitals, prisons and so on.

More local food in school meals?

It might cost a bit more than imported food, but then it also gives farming a boost. Which do we want to see?

And then there’s the question of food banks. Last year’s All Party Parliamentary Inquiry report, Feeding Britain, found that more and more people are turning to emergency food aid: wages are low, social networks are weak and the food system is no longer resilient enough. What are we going to do about that?

Partly it’s a problem of poverty, and partly it’s about the food system itself, which delivers high quality fresh food to some, while others live in “food deserts” where it is hard to find fresh produce, and shops stock highly processed, fat- and sugar-laden products.

Fundamentally, it is a question of how we value our food, and that comes down to how we see our society and the environment.

In a recent research study led by Aberystwyth University, we shared meals with refugees in Cardiff and pensioners in Gwynedd, as well as schoolchildren, students, organic farmers and many others.

They all discussed how food connects them with family and friends, and how they wanted to see the best quality food available to everyone.

They wanted to see food skills being passed down the generations. They thought it mattered where food comes from – that it shouldn’t be an anonymous commodity, and that the person who grew it got a fair price.

Our food system doesn’t quite work like that at the moment, but it could.

It’s time to ask for change from our government, and it’s time to make changes ourselves. Start growing in your back garden. Join a community garden. Seek out food in the shops that fits with your values – animal welfare, local, organic, as it may be – and be prepared to pay a little more for it.

Find another way altogether of buying it, perhaps through a veg co-op or farmers market. Try out a new recipe and visit a food festival this autumn. Organize a community meal at your church, mosque, school or workplace. Donate some high quality food to your nearest food bank.

And write in to the Food Manifesto. It’s at http://foodmanifesto.wales and http://maniffestobwyd.cymru.

Listening for a change

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When we started the Food Values project it was because after many years of putting on educational events of one sort or another, all designed to increase public understanding of food and farming, it felt like time to stop and question what we were doing. What were we trying to tell people? What did they want to learn? What attitudes do people bring with them to a food festival, a farm visit, a community meal? It seemed like there were some fundamental questions that hadn’t been asked.

Thus at our recent food events, which have included serving soup to the public in inner city Cardiff, sitting schoolchildren and pensioners down to lunch together in north Wales and getting students and staff at Aberystwyth to discuss responsible food sourcing and reducing food waste, we’ve been concentrating on listening to the participants, trying to find out what they really think and care about.

We have gathered plenty of material in the form of sound recordings, video clips, post-it notes, pictures and our own observations. What I hadn’t expected though is how much the task of gathering data would transform my own experience of food education. Accustomed as I am to addressing groups of schoolchildren, engaging visitors at our stands in public events, leading farm visits and so on, I am good at telling people stuff, but less good at listening. After all, if you stop talking, you will lose your audience, won’t you? And what they really want is information, isn’t it?

Once the voice recorder is placed in the middle of a group of children, it’s a sign both to them and to me that what they are going to say matters. I’m after the thoughtful quote, the couple of coherent sentences that will say it all, and for that the recipe seems to be an attentive silence. Given the right sort of listening, children will dig deep inside themselves and try to express what food is about for them: growing up big and strong, enjoying treats with their friends, making sure that banana growers earn a fair wage, caring for animals and wildlife.

Adults too have plenty to say. I’ve met a Sudanese woman talking about breaking the Ramadan fast with soup, a student explaining how she would like to make compost but didn’t know where to start, a retired school cook remembering the joys of catering for the masses in school and then rustling up meals for farmworkers at home, a food bank volunteer describing how she likes to get out of the house and be involved with the local community, a homeless man asking for fruit to take away.

And I’ve been surprised to find how rewarding it is. When we listen to people properly, we enter their worlds and we find out a lot about how they live and what matters to them. Food is a subject which touches many areas of life, so a food conversation can end up being about family, religion, sport, homelessness, holidays, health – just about anything.

How does this help us design transformational food education events? That is something that is still emerging from the project but it does seem that listening to people talk about what they care about makes for a better connection than telling what we want them to know.

Schoolchildren, organic artichokes and soup

March 2015

Our Food Values project has been an opportunity to look in depth at how we get organic food messages across, and to find out what really resonates with people who, unlike us, don’t talk about it all day. What do they really care about? How can organic food meet those needs, and how do we communicate that?

In February we worked with two communities, one in Cardiff’s inner city districts of Adamsdown and Splott, and one in rural Gwynedd, around Penrhyndeudraeth. As you might expect, there were some striking differences in the sort of conversations that come up in those two areas, but there were many common experiences too, and the general theme of food as a means of building or maintaining community came across as a strong concern in both of them, whether we were talking Sudanese soup recipes, lobscows or school meals.

Both events involved the local primary schools. It’s interesting how a primary school draws a community together and becomes the focus of change and of hope for the future. This is where the next generation is being formed – so what do they think?

In Moorland School, Splott, I visited the school’s Eco Committee who were busy making soup to be served to the public the following day. A key ingredient was organic artichokes, sourced from Riverside Market Garden in the Vale of Glamorgan, and they excited a lot of comment, particularly for being hard to peel.

The next day I interviewed a group of 10-year-olds to find out what they thought was important when choosing foods. It was clear that the children had got the message about healthy eating, as most of them put that near the top. As one said, “If you are not really healthy you grow up really weak and tired and doing nothing, you have a really bad life”. But they had other concerns too, especially for fair trade and wildlife.

As another one put it: “We can’t only think about us. We need to think about other people as well or it won’t be fair because we’ve already got all the food and enough money to live,” and she went on to express a concern for wildlife and the need to be kind to animals.

I think it’s fair to say that organic food was not something that they knew much about. It was clear though that they knew that some foods were better for them than others, and that they cared about doing good in the world and had some idea of what difference their food choices would make. It was encouraging to hear how seriously they were discussing their food, and with a hatching project and maybe a farm visit to come, they will be well on the way to being well informed food citizens.

After school, we met again outside St German’s Church in Adamsdown and local volunteers served the soup the children had made, alongside contributions from the church itself and a nearby synagogue. It was a cold day but the children were happy to sit outside, sharing soup with their parents and other visitors and drawing pictures. Among that cosmopolitan group, which included recent and not so recent immigrants from several continents, homeless people, long-term Cardiff residents and professional groups, the primary school and their soup, with its organic artichokes, were very much at home.

Putting the glue back into society

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Published on the Organic Centre Wales website in May 2015

Writing in the introduction to Feeding Britain, the all-party report on food poverty published in 2014, the Bishop of Truro made a plea for a discussion about values. As he put it, “We believe it is time to look again at the state of our country and to review the fundamental values that led to the creation of our welfare state.” He went on to describe how we have lost the glue that holds society together, that is, the informal networks of families, neighbours, community groups and so on that people can turn to in a crisis, and how we need to put it back.
soup event

Food poverty is often framed as the problem of certain unfortunate individuals, an attitude betrayed by suggestions that if only they knew how to cook from basics, they could afford to eat on a tiny budget. The Feeding Britain report suggests however that food poverty is inevitable in an economy where the minimum wage does not allow people to live with dignity and it calls for radical moves to put the situation right.

At a recent conference on food poverty in Cardiff, the lesson that emerged for me is that our entire society suffers a disconnect from food, buying much of it in prepared form, processed with sugar and salt, and never having set foot on a farm or grown so much as mustard and cress. No wonder that obesity, heart disease, tooth decay and all the rest are affecting our quality of life, while our farmers are at the mercy of the commodity markets and public subsidy.

Our Food Values project, which has been running for six months now, has been looking at some of the underlying values that determine people’s attitudes to food. We’ve supported food events with local partners in Cardiff, Newtown, rural Gwynedd and Aberystwyth (twice) and talked to people about food. What does it mean to them? How important is local food? What’s their favourite recipe? Do they grow food themselves? How do they decide what to buy? And what is organic food all about?

As we expected, food is very close to people’s hearts, and everyone has a view on it or a story to tell. It connects us to each other and to the local area, it is associated with cooking and growing skills passed down through the generations, it is precious and should not be wasted, we want the people who produce it to be fairly rewarded. These conversations brought out, through food, some of the fundamental values that we live by: those of meeting our own basic needs for security and health, looking after ourselves, caring for others, creating pleasure, finding our own way in life, caring for nature, and creating a just and peaceful world.

Which brings us back to the Bishop’s plea that we look to our values, and begin a much larger and deeper conversation about how we live together. The organic movement has a vital contribution to make here. Based as it is on principles of health, ecology, fairness and care, it has always been aware of the social context of food, and promoted a vision of a healthy soil supporting a healthy human population. In this view of things, food is not so much a commodity as a human right.

Happily, although the values by which we live have clearly resulted in an unjust society where some people are going hungry, food is also an important part of the solution. At a soup event organized by a church in Cardiff in February, a young man living in a hostel and getting by on a mixture of low pay and benefits came in off the street and accepted a bowl of (organic) soup and bread, which he wolfed down before eyeing up the fruit and vegetable display nearby. It was a sobering reminder that there are people for whom a food event is just that. We talked about why we were doing it, and he said “Yes, food is like music, isn’t it? It brings people together.”

Our project has shown some of the power of food to connect people and to start a conversation about the food system and the society we want. We will present the results at our closing conference on 3 June in Cardiff, where we will explore how a shift in values might improve food security and sustainability for the people of Wales, and also how food itself might be the means of building a more just and sustainable food system in balance with nature. We have also produced a set of publications which are available here.