Monday 20 February 2012

The wider issues of food...

At the weekend I went to a meeting arranged by Bristol 2050, aimed at exploring who feeds Bristol and what the future potential is. It made me think a lot about what the bigger food issues (outside of myself and this project) are, and what the solutions might be.

A lot of interesting points came up. I started a discussion about feeding people in more deprived areas of the city, which is an issue I feel is often lost amongst discussions that often rotate around projects and people in more affluent areas. A lot of talk was around the need for education and engagement with people, as well as the challenge of providing low cost, high quality food. All good points, all hard things to do in action...

But the two things that I took out of the meeting were as follows:


We are very separated from our food and how it grows 

We live currently in a perpetual global summertime, able to buy whatever food we want, whenever we want. It comes shrink wrapped, with the mud scrubbed off and pre chopped/peeled for our convenience. Not only does this separate us from the source of our food and the process of its production, it also means that it often tastes pretty rubbish. I remember the first time I had carrots grown by my Mum, being surprised that carrots tasted like that. And the strawberries I picked in the Pick Your Own fields in summertime were something that the imported strawberries that you can source year round just pale in comparison to.

What's the solution to this? Eating seasonally, as I've mentioned, is not a walk in the park (and I'm not even eating 100% seasonally). A lot of vegetables that grow well in this country (such as beetroot) are not things that people cook with, or even know how to cook. And imported food is not all bad - it's a necessary export for a lot of countries. However, there has to be some kind of balance in this.

One point that stuck with me though is that we have lost our enjoyment in food. If you eat year round strawberries, you get used to the mediocre taste. But if you get to eat wonderful tasting strawberries for a few months a year, then they taste even better. Food that's ripe when picked, rather than been picked unripe and shipped across the world, simply tastes better. And that's something that we seem to have forgotten and lost along the road to convenience.


How do we do this without taking a step back?


A lot of people don't want to change. That's the reality. Even I am struggling with the limits of how far I'm willing to adapt my eating habits, and I'm pretty motivated by all of this. And this is a big issue - will be people be willing to change their on demand, season-less eating habits?

Someone made a valid point at the meeting, that people don't want to take a step back, and I think this is true - most people don't want to do something that feels like they're losing out on something, or giving things up. So maybe we need to focus on finding the positive message? Perhaps we need to help people to rediscover the joys of good, seasonal food, rather than trying to stop them eating the inferior imported options.

How we go about doing that is another question...

No comments:

Post a Comment