Produce Local Food

Izzy: Hello and welcome to the Carbon Copy Podcast with me Isabelle Sparrow. We’re back for another episode of our series Do Something Bigger and today I’m joined by guest co-host Kiloran O’Leary, Bridging the Gap Programme Officer at Sustain, the Alliance for Better Food and Farming. 

Kiloran: Hi, thanks for having me. 

Izzy: This podcast series accompanies our campaign, 25 Big Local Actions in 2025, where we’re exploring how to take action together to bring positive change to the place where you live or work. This episode is called Produce Local Food and there is a lot to digest on this topic, but if it’s not to your taste, never fear, you can go back and fill yourself up with inspiration from one of our previous episodes and of course there’s loads more on the menu so do subscribe so you never miss a thing and we will have lots more puns throughout the episode! 

Kiloran, before we get started chatting to our guests, I wanted to get a bit of a background about Sustain and about the Bridging the Gap programme specifically. Can you give us a bit of an overview?  

Kiloran: Yeah, great. So Sustain is an alliance for better food and farming. It’s based in the UK and we have campaigns and programmes that run across the food system looking at the national level and the local level. And then Bridging the Gap is a multi-year programme which is looking to demonstrate how organic / agroecological fruit and veg can be accessible and affordable to people experiencing low income.  

So we’re doing that by running nine pilots which have been running for a year and a half and will be concluding this year and they are demonstrating how we can use government policy and financial mechanisms to most effectively bridge that gap between climate and nature friendly food and communities experiencing low income. So they are broadly looking at local retail environments and then school food which is part of our public food sector and then across that we have the supply chain which backs up these pilots and then horticulture, so how food is produced.  

Izzy: There’s a lot to unpack and a couple of the guests that we spoke to for this episode are people involved with those pilots so we’ll hear more about it, I’m sure, from them. Our first guest, Zosia Wolczak, is Deputy Director at London-based food initiative Growing Communities. She told us how they’re working with public sector organisations, including schools, to help bring more fruit and veg to children.  

Zosia: We’re trying to build a market for more organic fruit and veg in London essentially. Bringing it into schools, hospitals, various public sector catering contexts just means that people can get served that food without having to be able to individually afford it in their homes, and it means organic farmers are being supported, there’s more of a market for organic farming, which is just so important in terms of wildlife, pollution, everything, and also that people are being fed really nutritious food so, you know, that’s why we care so much about school children being able to eat this food. 

It hasn’t travelled as far, it’s very nutritious, they’re eating more unprocessed food, they’re just getting generally more fruit and veg in their meals, but that’s without their families individually having to afford it. Like the two schools we’re working with in Hackney have a higher-than-average proportion of children from low-income households, and so that was really important to us as well, to make sure we’re just basically making this produce as accessible as possible.  

Kiloran: That pilot is based in Hackney where we’ve got two primary schools where the head chef, James Taylor, felt that he could really improve their school meals by making them healthier, but also sourcing from more sustainable sources, so he started working with Growing Communities and their wholesale arm, Better Food Shed to start bringing in organic fruit and veg just on the budget that they actually had from the school, which was kind of amazing. And then we worked with them to develop this pilot into something larger where they would bring in all of their fruit and veg from the Better Food Shed, so it’s all organic fruit and veg coming into school meals every day. And we then have developed a whole load of monitoring and evaluation around that pilot so we can really draw out like what has happened here: what’s been so incredible, what are the learnings, what are some of the successes and the failures, and how can we turn this into a policy recommendation down the line.  

And what working with schools shows us is that, schools are part of our public sector, so we spend five billion pounds a year buying food for the public sector, which includes schools, it also includes hospitals, prisons, care homes, etc. We spend five billion pounds a year on that, that is money that is already committed from the public purse, that is money that could be going to public good and hitting a number of our targets, including ensuring that children have access to a really healthy diet, but also a sustainable diet. And we’re seeing this happening, we already have a commitment from government to increase the amount of local and sustainable food in public sector catering to 50%, and what we’re trying to do, running pilots like this really show how you actually do that, and I think that working with Zosia and Growing Communities shows that you really need to think about the infrastructure, which is where local food kind of comes in as well. How do you actually get that food to schools in ways that is efficient and economically viable? Public sector food and school meals, it’s a really powerful tool for change, it’s one of the key ways that we could really kickstart a transition in our food and farming system. 

Izzy: The idea about making nutritious locally grown food accessible and the process of growing and preparing that food more inclusive was one of the things that Pam Warhurst, founder of Incredible Edible, told us was at the heart of this, well, incredible initiative.  

Pam: It’s predicated on a belief in the power of small actions and that we have huge leadership skills in our communities that aren’t tapped into. So, it was invented 17 years ago, it was a simple concept about using food as a Trojan horse to live in our lives in a climate crisis, and how that displayed itself was through a simple model. And it was a very simple model, but you’ve kind of got to have some shape to offer people to say, ‘what do you think, do you wanna engage in this?’ And the simple model was what I call the “three spinning plates”, which was about activism around three focal points.  

The first was: get up in the morning, get some seeds, plant some food, wherever it is in your neighbourhood, in the place you call home. Don’t worry about what they’re doing down the road, don’t worry whether anybody’s doing anything in London, forget it, just in your neighbourhood, plant food, and make it food for sharing. So that was the first thing, community, edible landscapes to share; grass verges, hospital sites, wherever you can. 

The second plate was the recognition that certainly 17 years ago, and it’s not a right lot better now, people didn’t know what to do with fresh food. Because this is not a movement for folks who have already got it started, can already pay the money to use the technology that will help them live in a climate crisis. This is for everybody, who maybe hasn’t woken up yet to what they can actually do, but who are deeply concerned about their kids. And some of those people obviously are in our most challenged and deprived communities, and this is for everybody. 

So the second plate was, okay, let’s share what we know. Everybody knows a bit of something. Some people know how to grow, some people know how to cook, some people know how to graft a tree. Let’s have a chat with people in our neighbourhood and see what they know, and start to share. That’s just peer-to-peer, it doesn’t require any money, that’s the point about this. Sometimes you do need some money, but quite a few times you’ve got stuff in your bottom drawer, or stuff you can get locally, or whatever it might be. 

So plant seeds, share skills, and then the third plate of Incredible Edible is, if you’re fortunate enough to have a pound in your pocket, spend it locally, spend it on someone that’s produced some food locally, go to your local market without automatically going to a supermarket. You know, ask somebody where the cheese was from, ask somebody are the eggs local, you know, find out where your spuds came from, whatever, just start that local conversation about what I call a “sticky money economy”. Because ultimately, if we all started to rethink how we buy things, and rethink what our landscapes look like, our streets, our public spaces, if we could think about those places reconnecting us to food, then we’re more likely to support our local farmers, we’re more likely to think about not flying stuff all over the planet. And just to say, this is all about what we can do positively, this isn’t about weighing ourselves down with 1001 placards outside the supermarket. Forget it. Supermarkets do what they do, because to date, there’s been a need for it, and they employ people. So I’m not anti-anything, I am pro a more local market economy. That is Incredible Edible. 

And therefore, the story, and it’s all about storytelling, was simply about how by getting up in the morning and doing what we do anyway, we can actually start to become more connected to some local solutions that collectively might help us deal with the challenge ahead on the climate.  

[Music] 

Izzy: Did you know that podcasts are just one of the ways we tell stories of collective local action for climate and nature? Carbon Copy is a charity and we’re all about helping concerned individuals join others to have a real impact. If you’re looking for ways to make a difference, check out the links in the show notes to find out how to join in and make your mark. 

[Cut music] 

So Kiloran, you also put us in touch with the wonderful Beth Bell of Carrick Greengrocers in Northern Ireland. Before we hear from her, can you tell us a bit about how Bridging the Gap has been working with this initiative?  

Kiloran: So Beth Bell and Carrick Greengrocers, this is one of our six local retail focus pilots. And we approached Carrick Greengrocers because I mean, they’re amazing. 

And it is the case that organic agroecological fruit and veg is a higher price. And that there’s a lot of systemic reasons for that. We can talk about like how the big retailers are driving down the cost of fruit and veg at the expense of growers and farmers. 

We wanted to use the funding that we have for Bridging the Gap to plug that gap. So firstly, understand what is the price gap, and actually that the prices fluctuate seasonally. And then create a subsidy for that. So we can take out the risk for Carrick Greengrocers, whilst they run this pilot.  

Izzy: Yeah, so we’ll hear a bit more about the kind of accessible side of what they do in a bit. But this is how they got started. 

Beth: So Carrickfergus, and I should say, I’ll use Carrick and Carrickfergus interchangeably. They’re the same place. It’s just two different names for the same place. 

So Carrickfergus is a town with a pretty neglected and sad town centre, like lots of places, lots and lots of shops closed in the town centre. And people in Carrick really remember a time when there was a thriving town centre, when there was a butcher, a greengrocer, a baker, and you could go and do all your shopping. And the town is now really surrounded by a kind of ring of supermarkets, five, I think, of the big supermarkets. And the last greengrocer in the town closed about 15 years ago.  

And so about four years ago, a group of local citizens working with Sustainable Food Places and a local charity called Positive Carrickfergus held a series of community conversations called Kitchen Table Talks to ask people what they felt about food and the food system in their area. And they followed that up with what they called the “Wildest Dreams for Carrickfergus.” So they distributed loads and loads of postcards for people to send back, for people to tell them what their wildest dream was for Carrick. And for loads of people, it was a greengrocer. And that is both kind of quite a shocking thing in a way that that’s the thing that was people’s really big dream. But it’s actually a really wonderful thing because we’re told all the time that people just want convenience, people want the supermarkets, people kind of demand this convenience. But actually, when we have conversations with people, they actually say, ‘I actually don’t want that. I want to be able to go to a local store in my town centre and do my shopping’. 

So Carrick Greengrocers was really born from that. We raised our startup capital through what’s called a community share offer. So our community share offer raised £34,000 over about eight weeks. And that was our startup capital. So those 434 investors are our members and our co-owners. It’s one person, one vote. That means we have an AGM every year. We can make decisions collectively about what we do with the business. And also it means that each of those members can stand for election to be on the board. 

So it’s a real kind of democratic model, as well as meaning that before you even open your doors, you’ve got 434 people who have believed in you, who are interested in your success, who want to know what the shop is like. So we all know, I guess, or lots of people will know how hard it is to start a new business and kind of open your doors and start building that or galvanising that attention and I guess your customer base. We, through the share offer, through meeting with people in the town hall, in the library, at public meetings, to talk about what a share offer is, because it’s quite an unusual concept and certainly much more so in Northern Ireland. We’re the first community-owned greengrocer in Northern Ireland. You need to kind of give people a chance to come and meet you. It’s not enough to just kind of send them out a flyer or send them out an email. People need to come and see this is real people trying to make real change in our town and I want to be a part of it. 

Izzy: I have to say this conversation with Beth was just so invigorating. This idea that something could have such a huge impact on people’s lives and it’s just a simple thing like a greengrocer. And I loved that that was what the local people were crying out for. And it’s just led to so much joy and positivity and just a real kind of regeneration, I guess, of this town. Not to get too distracted from the topic though, a key question was around the local nature of the food they’re working with. The food that they sell in the greengrocers in Carrickfergus is mostly extremely locally grown. So here she is talking about where they source those fruit and veg from. 

Beth: So we have a real focus on local and seasonal and a real focus on regeneratively grown produce. So that is produce that’s grown without chemicals and often with a no-dig method. So I guess some growers who are working to organic principles, but haven’t got the certification for lots of different reasons. But that kind of regenerative growing or agroecological growing is really important. 

And our primary growers are called Chris’ Market Garden and Jubilee Farm. And they’re both within five or six miles of Carrickfergus. So with Chris in particular, Chris will harvest in the morning and it’s on our shelves two hours later. And the important, there’s lots of important things about that in terms of nutrition density and local food and soil health and all those things. But also, he does deliveries himself. So when our shop is open, that’s when it suits him often to come in. So he’ll be walking up the street with two big crates of beautiful bunches of baby carrots with mud still on them.  

And people are interested because they see it going by and they think, you know, and he comes into the shop. So people have got this like immediate authentic connection and ways to talk to a farmer who’s just a member of the community. So that kind of disconnect between people and the land, which has been done to us. People haven’t deliberately disconnected themselves. It’s been done to us by lots of different things around, you know, big food system. 

So as well as that sort of produce, we also do use a wholesaler. There will be things that we get all year round. So I guess like oranges, lemons, limes, bananas, things that we cannot grow here and we will stock all year round. But strawberries, for example, we will only keep in season. So whenever it’s strawberry season, we’ll have strawberries in and we could get strawberries from the wholesaler in December, but we don’t. So things that we can’t grow here, we’ll have all year round, as I said, oranges and so on. But other things we’re trying to really kind of limit to kind of within within season. And again, that’s a way of having that conversation about seasonality and availability. But without like lecturing anybody or making anybody feel bad, it’s just like this is what we have in our shop. And actually, because it’s in season, it tastes amazing.  

So you’re kind of connecting people positively with seasonality rather than kind of what they’re lacking by not being able to get, it’s like actually shopping like this and eating like this is so much better. But there’s no there’s no finger wagging. There’s no lecturing. It’s just about it’s available here, isn’t it amazing! 

Izzy: So it’s fair to say that there’s a really wide spectrum of what local means in this episode. How local is local, and how do you ensure you have the right products in the right quantities at the right time? Here’s Zosia with her thoughts.  

Zosia: To a certain extent in large urban areas like London, we need to redefine what we mean by local food. So we can’t have farms in London that are big and productive enough, by which I don’t mean mega farms. You know, so many of the growers we work with are sort of small to medium farms, but they wouldn’t be able to grow in London, obviously. So because we don’t have those farms in London and we can’t have them, that have enough of a scale to feed a large number of people in an urban area, we need supply chains like the ones that we have set up, to connect us to those local farmers. And that’s basically what we’re trying to do. 

So yeah, we do have our local small growing sites, and they do produce food. And, you know, on our Hackney market gardens, we grow salad, which is sold to the veg box scheme and also to local restaurants. In Dagenham, we do the same thing. We grow a lot of salad and there is a very tiny, tiny box scheme operating out of our Dagenham farm as well. But really for us, it’s sort of about creating a supply chain that links Londoners to local farmers. 

And by local, you know, yeah, we don’t mean down the road. We mean within 70 to 100 miles of London in Kent, Essex, Cambridgeshire and further afield as well. That’s sort of what local means in an urban context. We’re talking about feeding a lot of people. So we’re talking about feeding hospitals, schools or 10,000 people across all the boroughs that we supply.  

Kiloran: Yeah, I think Zosia kind of gets at something that I would also echo, which is, well, I suppose, yeah, what does local food actually mean? And I think you can think of it as like there’s two concerns. So there’s absolutely one way of looking at local food, which is that it’s food that is produced, processed, sold, eaten all within some region, local area. 

You can also at the same time, look at it as food that is produced via transparent supply chains that focus on small and medium sized businesses. And I think I’d particularly emphasise this thing around shortening the supply chain, which Zosia gets at, and less so on a arbitrary proximity definition, because it is really going to vary depending where you are in the UK. That thing around a farmer-focused supply chain that really prioritises the smaller and medium sized growers and also businesses that are in the middle is really the key for me. 

I would also say, let’s think about what is what we really trying to do? Like, what’s the benefit of local food? What could it deliver for us? So looking at where the UK is right now, how much fruit and veg we actually produce, we grow 55% of the vegetables that we eat, and then we grow 15% of the fruit that we eat. So particularly for fruit, it’s a really low baseline. So there’s absolutely the case to increase the supply of food in our country, particularly fruit and veg, because it’s so good for health and climate as well and nature. 

Over time, we’ve lost a lot of our local infrastructure. So these are like places, like what Growing Communities do, where food is aggregated from all the different farmers who are around London, it all comes into one hub. And then Growing Communities sends that out to veg box schemes and now schools as well. So increasing our efficiency there will do so much for local food and ensuring that it’s also at a viable and efficient scale, so that customers can afford that produce.  

Some of the benefits as well, which I think Pam gets out to is keeping money within regions. So developing a local economy is really important and local food is incredible for that. Actually, people are spending money on food and then that stays within the economy. That is amazing for particularly different regions. And then there’s the community aspect, which again, I think Beth talks about so brilliantly. What does local food do for a community? It’s not just an easier, accessible place to get your fruit and veg, it’s also it’s a place where you can talk directly to the people who are selling you your fruit and veg.  

Izzy: Incredible Edible focusses on the absolute hyperlocal growing and consuming of produce, but the impact is far from hyperlocal. From small beginnings, the story has spread across hundreds of different places in the UK and beyond. 

Pam told us how storytelling has had a huge part to play in getting more people growing. 

Pam: Nobody can believe what we’ve done for 17 years with practically no money, because I’m just a pensioner, but nobody pays me. So in consequence, I can do what I want. And therefore I can tell stories where I want to tell stories. And along the way, that’s what happened.  

So pure happenchance and serendipity. A few mates of mine in Todmorden, we just got together and we started growing. But we’re a bit savvy. So we got a nice piece in our local rag from a woman who completely got it, you know, put us in the right context. Not: ‘These are some loopy women who decided to grow cabbages in grass verges’, but rather telling the story about why we thought this was the way that we might engage more people who weren’t up to that point engaged.  

So as a result of that, it was picked up by a regional newspaper. As a result of that, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall did a piece and came to Todmorden. I mean, we couldn’t have ever afforded that level of publicity, but it was fantastic because if you just kind of like fall off a wall, people catch you. And it went from there.  

And so we did our stuff and then Wakefield did its stuff and then Lambeth did its stuff. 

And, you know, so we are a collective, if you like. We are, if you want to put it that way, we’re a franchise. It’s Incredible Edible. These are the spinning plates. If you want to do it, wake up in the morning, there’s no membership fee. You know, if you eat your in, just get on with it, do it. But tell the story, tell the story, because that’s what really connects us to this belief that we’re also part of that story. 

Izzy: I wanted to go back to something that we discussed right at the beginning around access to healthy food and the challenges of people from lower income families being able to access fresh, nutritious produce. And as we mentioned earlier, you know, organic, sustainably grown food does tend to come with a higher price tag. And I spoke to Beth from Carrick Greengrocers about this. Most of the veg they sell is organic, or at the very least, it’s produced using agroecological farming techniques. So I wondered if this meant that the food was also more expensive and maybe unaffordable for some. 

And, you know, there is still definitely a stereotype attached to eating organic by organic produce, that it’s only really accessible to people kind of upper middle class, Waitrose shoppers. So I wanted to know how Carrick Greengrocers avoided this perception. 

Beth: It’s a real mix in terms of our customers and demographics. And the best way to talk about it, I think, is like our average basket spend is something like £7.40. And that’s people coming in, as I said, and buying a few bits of vegetables a few times a week or a few bits of fruit a few times a week. Sometimes, of course, somebody will come in and shop for a hamper or get their Christmas shopping and they’re going to spend £40. But our average spend over the year is like £7.40. And I think that that says quite a bit, I think, about our demographic. 

Also, then you have, you do have people coming in, literally, like people kind of walking past and buying an apple for 65p. And that feels to me like a really important way of kind of demonstrating that accessibility. 

I think when we talk about price, particularly in relation to supermarkets, there’s an assumption that supermarkets will always be cheaper. And sometimes that’s a myth, actually. Quite often, yes, they are cheaper, but they’ve flown 3000 miles and you’ll get them home and the next day they’ve gone soggy or they’ve gone soft or they’ve gone slimy on your fridge or whatever it is. So it’s a false economy. 

But also, sometimes when we do price checks and price comparisons and we had some baby carrots in that were grown up the road, no dig, chemical free, bunch of baby carrots, and they were actually cheaper than conventionally grown baby carrots in Tesco’s. So there’s something about myth busting as well, but there is something about affordability and we’re really pleased to be working with Sustain. So they provide us with a grant, which means that we’re able to subsidise the cost of all of that good, local, regeneratively grown food, the cost of 50%. We call it our Friendly Food Club. So people join the Friendly Food Club and they’re able to access that really good nutrient-dense local food at a much lower cost and kind of recognition that like organic food is seen correctly as being more expensive. And it’s really important to find ways to kind of break that down. 

Obviously, in a future food system, all food should be grown like that, that should be the norm, and everybody should have access to it. But we need to find some ways now to address those barriers and Bridging the Gap is one that we’re really pleased to be part of. 

Izzy: If you’re feeling inspired to get involved with a local food growing organisation or with helping more people where you live to access locally produced food, then there’s lots of information on Carbon Copy’s website to help you get started. I asked Zosia what her advice would be to people looking to join in.  

Zosia: One thing I would say is if you can find your local community veg box scheme. So I’m a Non-executive Director at Better Food Traders. And Better Food Traders is a network that covers the whole of the UK and advocates for and represents and supports local better food traders. So that’s kind of retailers, veg box schemes, shops that are trying to also change the food system in a practical way. And they’ve got an interactive map where you can find your local shop or community veg box scheme. So I would say to everyone, if you possibly can, sign up to one because it’s just such an excellent way of connecting with your local farmers and growers and actually contributing in a very real way to food system change. And you know, that’s one way.  

If you work or are part of or an employee anywhere where there’s catering offered, again, if you’re in London, definitely talk to us and we can see whether we could supply you, basically. We’d really like to talk to more people working in catering, public sector institutions, things like workplace catering as well, to figure out whether there’s a way to work together. Because improving your food provenance and supporting more organic farmers and ethical supply chains is just such an effective and potentially impactful way to kind of meet your environment and climate targets as well. So yeah, connect with us, basically. We’re very open to kind of talking to anyone about that. 

Likewise, if you’re involved in any primary schools or any schools in London, you would be interested to kind of hear about whether we could supply your school or suggest anyone who might. We’d also be very up for talking with you. 

Izzy: For anyone who might feel like their local area would benefit from a greengrocer or another kind of community-owned food business, Beth had this advice.  

Beth: You need to find some other people who are concerned about the same thing you are in your place. That’s a really important one. There’s something about giving yourself permission to go slow. And I think it’s important to talk about that because everything is very, everything feels very urgent because it is very urgent right now. Think: the world is on fire, all of those things, but things like this will last and they will thrive if you build them carefully with trust, with relationships slowly. I do think that that’s quite an important thing to talk about that, you know, we were meeting for two years as a group before we opened our shop. And that two years included that relationship building. It included us establishing common values. It included working with Cooperative Alternatives who are a cooperative agency here in Northern Ireland to think about our governance, to write our business plan together.  

We didn’t hire a consultant to write the business plan. We wrote it together and it’s available for anyone who’s interested on our website, which is carrickgreengrocers.org. You know, if you’re thinking about doing something like this and you think, ‘oh, I don’t even know where I would start’, go and have a read of the business plan. There’s lots of the steps in there. And like, that’s why we still have it up on our website for people to use and borrow and be inspired by. I think they’re kind of two of the key things. 

And also like do try and find whether if it’s a butcher, maybe a community butcher that you’re interested in or a baker or a micro-brewery or a micro-dairy, whatever it is, find some examples. And there will be some examples somewhere in the UK or in Europe, but don’t get too hung up on kind of needing to research absolutely everything, because for some people you will get stuck. You’ll be like, ‘oh, actually, look, that’s so…’ And even actually, if you look at our socials or you look at our website, you might think, ‘oh my goodness, like we can never do that’. And it’s like, but like three years ago, that’s what we thought when we talked to Dig In Bruntsfield, and when we were inspired by Unicorn Grocery in Manchester. There’s something about like, it’s just, you just take the next step and the next step. And I say a lot like, the next good thing leads to the next good thing, you know. So just go, go slowly, learn what you need to do as you go, bring people in, find different ways to bring for people to be able to participate.  

Not everybody wants to be on a management committee. Actually, for some people that can feel really intimidating because it feels like this, I don’t know, like this rarefied group of people who have all this expertise. That is not us. But you have to find other ways to welcome people in. 

Kiloran: I mean, it’s just incredible. People are just getting on with it. And that is what we need. And I’ve seen that across all of the pilot projects that we’re working with, working with so many different communities where people just get involved and start things up and get it rolling. And that does so much. We’re connecting people back to food and to the land. And there’s been a time where people have got incredibly disconnected. And when you start connecting back in, you realise the power that you do have. For me, that’s like so important. And it and once you start doing that, I think people start realising like we do have the right to demand better food. Like that we have that right to we deserve so much better than that.  

Izzy: Yeah, I think that’s right. Pam told us about the current campaign to make starting a community growing project a little bit easier.  

Pam: One of the big ticket issues that we’re going to do this at scale is we need to have it make it easier to get access to land to grow food on. So that’s what we need to do. 

And therefore we are campaigning and have been doing since ‘22 for a Right To Grow on the public realm that we pay our taxes for. Right to grow food and right to improve the environment. So for too long, people in groups that wanted to kick off and grow food locally and share it locally and so on were finding it difficult. The local authorities said, ‘yay’, the local authorities said, ‘nay’, the local authority changed its mind. It took three years before they took a decision, which, you know, for folks who aren’t used to dealing with the public sector was enough to put you off and like, you know, what was a good idea? You’re not going to take forward. 

So we’re campaigning to repurpose public land. It’s just a no brainer. And we got into the debate in the House of Lords on the levelling up bill with all parties agreeing. The government didn’t accept it. It’s fine. But as a result of that, Hull working just to help a little bit. They’ve done it for themselves. This is about us recreating local government. But Hull adopted a Right To Grow across all parties and for 12 months worked with their community to work out how that was going to work, where they were going to grow, what support they needed. For example, the council covering their insurance, not saying you have to go and get a pay a lot of money for your own insurance. We’ll do it on our public realm and so on. 

After Hull, St Albans, Runnymede, Bury, other places have adopted a Right To Grow, which will mean something slightly different. The principles, the vision will be the same, but the way they do it will be slightly different because it’s for them to hone that for their own communities. And we’re at the moment working on a plan with Sheffield University to create a vision of a coast to coast from Liverpool to Hull of an edible belt. We are hoping that this will lead to not only more communities growing food on their verges or hospital sites or wherever is local to them in their neighbourhoods, but inspire the next generation of urban farmers, or landscape designers, or architects and technicians, who can help us grow food in unusual places. 

You would start to see that there was a framework of doing food in a different way that got people more active, more connected, feeling healthier or whatever. You get food right, you get a lot of things right. 

Izzy: That last point is so important, isn’t it? If you get food right, you get a lot of things right. 

And just thinking about how food has been mentioned in almost every action that we’ve covered in this campaign so far. And how our food is grown and where it’s grown and who grows it and how production impacts nature and wildlife and how the food is transported and packaged. It just connects everything, doesn’t it?  

Kiloran: Yeah, that was what I was thinking when I was listening to Pam. It’s like food is the big connector. It touches kind of every part of our lives and also it is responsible and it touches a lot of different issues like we’ve also discussed. 

And for me, because I work on the kind of policy and campaign side of things, it shows how it’s a challenge actually to get departments in government and in local authorities to act because of the fact that food actually sits across so many different issues. So that’s a challenge, but also an amazing opportunity and there are some really interesting things happening at the moment from the government side of things. They’ve announced a national food strategy which is the first time in a really long time that they’ve done some cross-departmental work to try and come together and understand how we can come at the food system from a number of different perspectives. So that’s actually really exciting. 

If you wanted to find out a little bit more about what I’ve discussed today, we recently released a local Food Growth Plan and that sort of sets out how we see local food as kind of levelling the playing field as we’ve discussed and then also supporting and uplifting how you can actually do that with our local food systems, supporting uplifting farmers as well as customers who want to access that local food. 

And then, later this year we’ll be publishing the findings from the Bridging the Gap pilot. So we have developed a whole load of, a suite of policy recommendations based on this work but we’ve also just got some incredible stories, which Pam also highlights, this is so important, it’s like the people actually doing the stuff on the ground and decision makers are actually just human beings who are really responsive to the story and the human beings doing that work, the human connection behind it all. So that will all be coming out in November.  

Izzy: Fantastic, well we will put links to the report that’s already out in there and in the show notes and we will also share that information once it’s out in November as well. That’ll be very exciting to see. 

I do feel like we could keep going for hours and hours, this is a really Big Local Action and food is important to absolutely everyone. We will be coming back to another food-related topic in a few weeks’ time, when we’ll be speaking with your colleague Vera about food partnerships and Sustainable Food Places, so do keep an eye out for that one. Now let’s sum up what we’ve learned in this episode. 

Kiloran: I suppose it’s about getting people where they are in their lives connected back into food and there’s all these big heady issues. I think actually if we can just bring food to where people are at, we can actually get into those conversations more easily. That’s what it’s kind of made me think about, is like go where people are at, meet them where they are, bring them food that is grown in their area and connect them back into the food system. 

IZZY: Yeah and I think actually most of the users of the initiatives that we’ve spoken to today or spoken about today, they’re probably not thinking about it in any of these big terms or any of these big kind of issue-solving… They’re not thinking about it like that. They’re literally just thinking, ‘oh cool, my town has a greengrocers now, I’m going to buy some carrots’ or ‘oh great, my school is now serving organic food, I’m just going to like really enjoy having that’. I don’t think that you know a lot of the times like we’re thinking about the really big kind of strategic like policy stuff but actually for a lot of people it’s just things are better because of this stuff existing and that’s great and that’s all they need is just for things to be enjoyable and better.  

Kiloran: Yeah, and at the same time I think when you start up a project like this, which you can see from the case studies we’ve already drawn out today and the conversations we’ve had, like definitely people do care about what they’re eating and what goes into school meals, what children are eating. It absolutely is on people’s agenda, but like you say, people live really pressured busy lives and that’s where local initiatives come in, help bring people together, help have these conversations and kind of myth bust as well. We need to do that and challenge some of the assumptions we have about what people care about. 

Izzy: Yeah, I think that’s right and I think a lot of people would be really glad to know that the food they were eating was healthier, that it was produced more locally, but you know without these kinds of initiatives that maybe isn’t going to be possible for them, so it’s really fantastic that people who maybe you know 10 years ago wouldn’t have had the access are now able to have the access and can become advocates for it as well through having had that.  

You’ve been listening to Do Something Bigger from the Carbon Copy Podcast. This episode, Produce Local Food, was written and presented by me, Isabelle Sparrow and co-hosted by Kiloran O’Leary, Bridging the Gap Programme Officer at Sustain. Our Editor and Producer was Alex Orosa. Thank you so much for your time, it’s been really great having you here and thank you as well to Zosia, Pam and Beth for their time and thank you for listening. 

Our next episode is Borrow Don’t Buy where I’ll be joined by Party Kit Network founder Isabel Mack to share stories about sharing. Don’t miss it. Until then, goodbye!