Is Foodshed Thinking Key to Rebuilding?
Written by Board of Directors, Urban Roots London
The opportunity to reflect on food security and COVID-19 is welcome. And a challenge. Food security is one of those terms with many definitions. Many sound official, though they change. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN revised their definition to include the idea that secure access to food is in part socially determined: How your society ‘thinks’ about you shapes how you get food, even what kind you get. When food security came into common use, other terms appeared such as food justice and food sovereignty. These terms shift the focus of food thinking to analyse and remove barriers to access. Food security is an unstable and contested term.
Urban Roots London (URL) faced this definitional challenge as we worked to build a healthy community with access to fresh vegetables, no matter economic or social circumstances. We do this by growing produce on underused urban land. One third is sold at an affordable rate to neighbours, ⅓ is sold to London food enterprises, and ⅓ is given to community partners for their own food programming. Across London URL food is prepared in family kitchens, restaurants, and the kitchen at My Sisters’ Place. People get URL food from the farm gate, retailers, restaurants, and from Crouch Neighbourhood Resource Centre. We know that food security alone does not fully capture what URL does.
In 2017, URL chose to start the process of definition somewhere else, at the level of the foodshed (think ‘watershed’, a geographical region that is supplied and supplies other regions). Where does URL fit in London’s foodshed, connected to food production and distribution processes that span the globe? Where does URL fit in a foodshed that favors retail over production? In a system that produces so much food so inexpensively it would go to waste if perishables overstocked by the biggest retailers were not diverted from landfill by food rescue programs and diverted to consumers through things like food banks.
A foodshed with these complex interconnections always had weaknesses, stress points that were revealed by the pandemic. Consider people with Temporary Foreign Worker status who work in food production outside of London. Their health and livelihoods are profoundly negatively impacted by COVID-19. Consider producers with surpluses because restaurants and retailers shut down, processing facilities operating despite extreme danger to workers, or supply disrupted by border closings.
The foodshed approach helped URL early on define what we do because it draws focus on the relationships among people, food, and place. Connecting to people and place, URL was welcomed into an already complex, flexible, vital, and diverse foodshed made up of London’s local food community, the commitment to neighbourhood food sustainability by our partner Crouch and our small enterprise partners. Already operating at the level of the foodshed, these actors all made room for URL, and offered URL their trust and confidence. London’s foodshed may be dominated by the conventional food system, but it is not defined by it. It is just as easily defined by multiplicity: of scales, consumers, ways to produce and consume, values and purposes. Rebuilding needs to follow the lead of this ‘food multiverse’, and support small, horizontally networked, and most importantly, accessible solutions. For everyone and every idea for change.