Building a Local Food Network
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On 20 January 40 people attended Transition Swindon's first Food Networking Event at Lower Shaw Farm in West Swindon. People with a variety of food-related interests and expertise, in their professional and personal capacities, came along to start a conversation about ensuring the future of local food in Swindon: organic and biodiverse food producers, local food growers, allotments, farmers' markets, Community First, Women's Institutes and Swindon Primary Care Trust were among those represented.
Helen Browning, organic farming champion and the Soil Association's Food and Farming Director, spoke on 'The Future of Food' - including the dual challenges of ensuring a local food supply and getting it to a local market. The talk inspired a wide-ranging and enthusiastic debate from a variety of perspectives, touching on the difficulties of actually getting food to market in an efficient way, the tensions between producing food and encouraging people to grow their own, the need for diversification to survive in a challenging market, working with volunteers, public perceptions of organic/local food - particularly on price - and food poverty. A key action coming out of the debate was the need for collaboration across all of these areas, and the Food Network can play an important role in this. One headline of the discussion was the need to increase people's confidence in buying and preparing fresh food and growing their own food.
It is clear that there are already many people taking steps to tackle these obstacles, but with varying rates of success, and that one of the benefits of a food network would be to create a critical mass in the efforts being made, share what works and what doesn't, and exchange ideas.
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