To help us better navigate today’s oftentimes disorienting food landscape, Bee Wilson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall shared their Food Wisdom in a packed-out tent at the Charleston Festival last month. With Leyla Kazim as chair, the result was a generous and empathetic conversation about the daily dilemmas we face around food. By unpacking the anxieties of our modern food system, they were able to share practical tips and insights to cultivate more nourishing relationships to food.
LDFP coordinator Nancy was lucky enough to attend. Read on to find out her key take-homes.
1. Most
of the choices about the food you buy have already been made before you get to
the shelves – so give yourself a break
Based
on the array of brands and products on the shelves of our supermarkets, you
might think we’re spoilt for choice – and with great choice comes great
responsibility, right? But Bee Wilson reminds us that most of the choices about
our food – from the origin of the raw materials to the wages of the workers
that pick them to even the product’s final resting place at eye-level on the
supermarket shelf – have already been made.
If
we’re trying to make choices based on ethical, environmental or other criteria,
our food environment stacked against us, and there’s nothing like a portion of
guilt to kill the appetite. Bee’s advice is to take choice out of the equation
when things get overwhelming, by building up a handful of dishes using easily
accessible and affordable ingredients that align with your values and most importantly
align with what you want to cook and eat.
2. Change
comes as citizens not consumers
Accepting
the limits of individual choices in reforming the food system means
concentrating on the industrial and political forces shaping the food system.
Why is it that fresh fruit and veg are so much more expensive than
ultra-processed, high-fat high-sugar products? And why are these products so
aggressively marketed to us?
Rather
than beating ourselves up about our own choices with respect to food, we would
do better to interrogate the choices being made at a political level, that load
the dice in favour of big corporations and to the detriment of small-scale
producers and suppliers of food. And with the general election coming up, we at
LDFP will be working to ensure that access to good food is pushed up the
political agenda – get in touch at info@lewesdistrictfoodpartnership.org for
more info.
This
being said there are choices worth making, as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
rightly said. If it is accessible and affordable to buy local – through, for
example, the brilliant Lewes Friday market and Saturday farmers market – you
can support vital actors for tomorrow’s food system, making sure that they’re
still going when that tomorrow comes.
3. Our
sensory connection with food has been delegated to the food industry – it’s
time to wrestle it back
As
Bee Wilson said, our thumbs evolved to test the ripeness of figs – sensory
connection to food is literally built in to our bodies. This can feel like an
alien concept in an era of plastic-filmed, best-before-dated food, where we’re
taught to trust more in labels than in our own senses.
However,
initiatives like TastEd (of which Bee Wilson is a founding member) are giving
young people opportunities to rediscover food through the five senses,
reminding us of our innate sensory abilities. In Lewes District, Grow Cook Eat
network projects are also remaking these connections on the land and in the
kitchen.
4. Junk
food advertising is hijacking our evolutionary hunger for food stories
Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall took us back to the fireside where hunter-gatherers
would congregate to share the food they had managed to bring back, along with
the stories of how they came by it (after all, most of the excitement from a
hunter-gatherer lifestyle would have been food-focused).
Hugh’s
hypothesis is that we have an in-built hunger for food stories as a legacy of
our food-obsessed ancestors. The food industry seems to understand this very
well, with more money than ever being poured into advertising by fast food,
soft drinks, confectionary and other snack brands. Compared with the often
bleak food narratives around environmental or public health concerns, the
feel-good stories junk food companies feed us
As anyone involved in local community food
movements in Lewes District and beyond will tell you, there are plenty of
joyful food initiatives that nourish community and planetary health happening
every day. We need to amplify good food stories – why should the junk food
companies have all the fun?
Keep your eyes tuned on this blog for more
local Good Food stories.
