Our discussion event on food poverty, food access and health – Food & Our Future in the West Midlands – is exactly two weeks away now and getting booked up already, so do book now.
We want this event to highlight some of the basic facts around food poverty, food access and health issues, and explore root causes of these problems and what can be done about them. Perhaps ambitious for a single meeting, as the root causes are complex and encompass global food systems, UK retail and consumption patterns, and the increase in general levels of poverty in the UK. We will only have time to scratch the surface, but it’s a surface more of us need to scratch.
Some thoughts on the issues our speakers might bring and LWM’s take on them.
Chris Mould heads The Trussell Trust, whose food banks fed 913,138 people across the UK last year of whom 330,205 were children. The Trust were recently inundated with donations in response to a rather nasty Mail on Sunday article. Benefit payment cuts and delays were a major cause of the 51% increase in food bank visits over the last year – causing over 500 UK clergy to write in protest to the Government. This cause of food poverty is, quite simply, a general one of financial hardship, with food or heating being the choice people were often forced to make over winter.
Adrian Phillips will also be speaking, as Birmingham’s Director of Public Health. The main food-related public health issues that occur to me, are food access and obesity:
Food access is a very relevant issue in the conurbation. Many people on low incomes live in ‘food deserts’, as mapped and tackled an excellent piece of research in Sandwell some years ago that has gone on to shape Sandwell’s food policy. Food deserts are where fresh or everyday food cannot be found within easy walking distance. They have increased as our diverse and distributed range of local independent shops have been replaced by large drive-to supermarkets. Areas like Sparkhill show how healthy, diverse local competition amongst independent grocers can create an excellent affordable food offer in low income neighbourhoods, but it would take much effort for this culture to be replicated in areas where it’s not the norm. Until then, the supermarkets that cause the systemic damage in the first place often become its most likely solution at local level. A sound business model.
Another massive food access factor locally is Birmingham wholesale markets, which are being moved to the city’s edge to make room for more prestige development. The wholesale markets support a massive amount of food access across and beyond the city, including many independent food outlets catering for the entire breadth of the conurbation’s diversity. The retail markets – closely connected to the wholesale – are the single most crucial place in the conurbation for a great number of people of all income levels and cultures to buy fresh food at affordable prices. These markets deserve far more recognition than they gain, and formed a case study in LWM’s recent MCED research.
Obesity is a problem partly related to poor food access in that often people in low income areas can only access unhealthy food: Birmingham City Council recently introduced restrictions on new fast food outlets in an effort to reduce this. Then of course there are the food-health factors that don’t relate to poverty: the food industry’s emphasis on prepared foods full of sugar, fat and salt, for example; parents having little time to cook properly as they work overtime to pay over-inflated housing costs; or education and understanding.
The third speaker will be Elizabeth Dowler, Professor of Food and Social Policy at the University of Warwick, and a member of the food ethics council, which tells me “rer recent research includes: rights based approaches to food poverty; food security; nutrition and public health; evaluating food/nutrition policy and local initiatives; ‘alternative’ food systems and networks, especially consumers’ perspectives and benefits and exploring ‘reconnection”. All highly relevant. She was recently involved in headline-creating research into food aid and food poverty for Defra.
The event chair will be Kate Cooper, who is chair of the new Birmingham Food Council . Similar city-wide food policy initiatives have happened in Bristol and Manchester. We can look to them to avoid re-inventing wheels.
Both Manchester’s and Bristol’s food initiatives cover the essential connected issues of sustainability, strengthening the local food economy, and food justice – aiming for a healthy, sustainable and resilient food system. They take peak oil and climate change seriously, and consider how we can maximise our sustainable food production capacity to gain resilience. They also both pay keen attention to resolving food poverty.
As a lightning tour of Bristol’s food policy initiative, it started with the Who Feeds Bristol report, which emphasises the hugely important role of their wholesale markets in feeding the city and the threat to it from other parts of the food industry. It recognises the need to build diversity and balanced competition back into our food system in retail, processing and distribution, and to strengthen the market position of farmers. (I learned at the excellent WDM meeting last week that the price share farmers get across the world has gone down from 50% to 10% over the last few decades: problems faced by farmers locally and globally). It then advocates an approach known as ‘Food Systems Planning’ in order to build afood culture for the city that has the health of people and planet at its heart.
There followed a Bristol Food Charter, the food policy council itself and a Food Poverty report, which concluded that
“Lack of access to the necessary finance, coupled with inadequate physical resources (e.g. cooking facilities, local food shops, access to transport) and inadequate skills and social networks are central to creating food poverty”.
I hope that our event helps set the agenda for Birmingham’s Food Council around the same principles of food justice and of food system efficiency within environmental limits that Bristol and Manchester demonstrate.
So – we’ve not even touched on food waste, international food sovereignty and security or the great health and educational value of local growing schemes, but at too long already for a blog post you can see there’s plenty of food for thought there for us to get our teeth into over a couple of hours, and I hope this has whetted your appetite. But seriously – and very seriously – there are some striking issues of injustice and system fail here that I hope will fuel the sort of anger that leads to action and change.
I hope we’ll see lots of you at the event (click here to book). There will be light refreshments and drinks provided at the event, and any donations we receive for this above the costs of providing it will fund food bank activity – so please contribute (and count yourself lucky) if you can afford it.
Karen Leach
PS – The event is a partnership between the Lunar Society, Localise West Midlands, Birmingham Leadership Foundation, Midland Heart and Nishkam Centre. We’re very grateful to Midland Heart and Nishkam for providing refreshments and venue respectively.