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This is an article from the Open University website Platform. I thought some of you might find it interesting...

Some have depicted this year’s festive season as the ‘tight Christmas’, with spending only half that of last year. In difficult times, food is normally the first sacrifice. Will that inevitably mean shifting to an inferior diet, while weakening our ecological consciousness?

With the credit crunch kicking in, many believe consumers will increasingly look for the cheapest deals, with quality, seasonality and sustainable consumption the biggest losers. Sales of organic produce are already declining while the cheapest supermarkets are engaged in prolonged price wars.

If this is the case then perhaps we should not be too surprised. After all, Britain is not a country renowned for inspired foodies in search of fine dining. It has not offered much resistance to the takeover of high streets by global corporations, nor shown much serious intention of reversing the rapid decline in agriculture, or cultivated regional food traditions. The pleasures of food are still widely regarded here as an ‘elitist’ extravagance; Bill Bryson’s observation that the peculiarly British idea of pleasure amounts to a milky tea and a chocolate digestive still holds good.

Implications

However, there is another food story emerging in Britain. Admittedly, like some of the nation’s widely admired artisan cheeses, it has taken time to mature. This story gives a different perspective on the implications of the credit crunch for the nation’s eating habits. From the rise of farmers’ markets, which now number more than 500, to the Guerrilla Gardeners, an anarchist food group which has taken over London wasteland to cultivate vegetables, there are a range of responses on offer.

Moreover, this new mood challenges the assumption that the promotion of good, healthy and seasonal food is an elitist concern. You do not have to go far now to find farmers’ markets, which stretch in London alone from Walthamstow to Hackney and Peckham. The winner of the best local market at this year’s BBC Food and Farming awards was Bury in Lancashire, while best local food retailer was the Unicorn co-operative grocery store in Manchester; hardly the epicentres of privilege. More discerning consumers are making choices over quality, while concern for their wallets does not mean abandoning environmental commitments.

Whatever we think of Jamie Oliver, his TV programmes have made the important argument that good local food at reasonable cost should be available to everyone. His Ministry of Food scheme now has a presence in 11 council boroughs, while Waltham Forest has had the confidence to restrict fast food outlets from the vicinity of local schools. Oliver’s intervention was crucial, but many similar grassroots initiatives already exist. The environmentalist pressure group Sustain; the alliance for better food and farming is involved in many local schemes to encourage greater access to quality food, including the ‘Good Food on the Public Plate’ and the Real Bread Campaigns. The central argument here is that the pleasures of healthy eating need not be sacrificed even at times of economic hardship.

Revived

The Slow Food movement is one organisation which has tried to reconcile the simple pleasures of food with environmental responsibility. Its founder, Carlo Petrini, has described a gastronome who doesn’t consider the environment as stupid and the environmentalist uninterested in gastronomic pleasure as sad. The movement has gone beyond its origins in Italy and found a resonance in the counter-cultural Slow Food Nation event, dubbed “the Woodstock of the food movement”, held in San Francisco this year. In Britain, after suffering from a period of inertia and inflated egos, more symptomatic of a dining club than a movement, Slow Food is at last being revived under a youthful new leadership.

These developments will not prevent the price war between supermarkets, the consumption of £2.99 chickens or claims that eating well with an eye to the environment is a middle class concern. However, they do suggest that there are many alternatives to cheap tasteless food that has travelled many miles.

As the writer Jeanette Winterson, who also owns a grocery shop in Spitalfields, put it on Radio 4’s Food Programme recently: “I get very bored with the argument that we cannot afford to eat real food, when a chicken costs less than a cinema ticket”.

This article is written by Geoff Andrews, the author of The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure, recently published by Pluto Press, and Staff Tutor in Politics at The Open University.

Useful links

www.sustainweb.org
www.guerrillagardening.org
www.slowfood.org.uk

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Positive Change