End of the food chain?

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A conference in Bristol aims to help Tony Benjamin find out where his next meal is coming from.

It’s all around us, food, and we take it rather for granted. It may have travelled halfway round the world and been processed on the way but almost everything we eat was grown or nurtured by a farmer somewhere. As part of the Green Capital initiative in 2010, Bristol City Council and the local NHS funded some research looking into where our food comes from. The resulting report – ‘Who Feeds Bristol? – will be launched by its author Joy Carey at this year’s Bristol Food Conference on 16 March. You can also download it from the council’s website. It’s a fascinating read that provides a uniquely broad overview of the world of food from the farm to the plate, and raises many issues for the future food security of the city.

Despite some 20 years’ experience of food policy, including 12 years working with the Soil Association, Joy Carey seriously underestimated the scale of her task. “I thought I could do a snappy 30-pager but soon realised it was going to be much bigger. I was running out of time – it felt like I was doing 15 PhDs at once!” In the end it took 140 fact-filled pages to summarise her research, but the report’s combination of case studies, statistics and other information makes for a surprisingly accessible read. “I wanted to provide a full picture. Food is so complicated, people only see their part in it, but if we’re thinking about sustainability, then we need to look at the whole and think what we can do as individuals. Bristol is such a brilliant city, full of creative people and we’re all too busy to get the whole story.”

Sustainability is what it’s all about, of course. As fuel prices rise, any major city in the UK (which imports two-fifths of its food needs) must start thinking about change for the future. ‘Who feeds Bristol?’ looks at the way we get our staple foods (i.e. milk and veg, not chocs and booze). It shows that, while we are surrounded by highly productive farmland (including some 10% of the country’s organic production), the big ‘multiple’ supermarkets – who centralise their own distribution systems – are providing more and more of what we eat: nearly 80% and rising. Joy found that this has some interesting side-effects: “I hadn’t realised how little veg we produce in the region. We have the land and the farmers but the major supermarkets want large production contracts and the South East has more open land suited to that. We surveyed farmers through the NFU and many of them are interested in supplying directly – via markets or local shops, perhaps – and losing that dependence on multiples. We need to build up those sort of relationships.” Another surprise was the amount of food production that could be achieved within the city itself. “I had to work out the possible growing land – it was an enormous amount of work! But if we got really serious about urban agriculture, we could produce around four or five percent of the food we need right here in Bristol!” Given the famously high demand for allotments that may not be as fanciful as it sounds.

What emerges from the report overall, however, is that despite its crucial importance to us all, there’s no real political place for food as it stands. “It falls through the net,” Joy observes. “It’s nobody’s remit. It’s left out of strategic planning and usually left to market forces…” Happily, this is being addressed by the Bristol Food Conference itself, by the formation of a Food Policy Council of representatives from all aspects of the local food world. Their aim will be to use the content of the report for future planning and strategy to build up local resilience as times change. It’s a big task, but ultimately the answer to the question ‘Who feeds Bristol?’ could even turn out to be the city itself.

Food, glorious food: but how can we ensure it stays on our tables? Joy Carey has some answers