Feeding the Community
How do we make food access a right, not a privilege?
When we started Sourced, we kept coming back to this core idea: Food and drink are cultural and biological rights. But what does this really mean?
Food is most often written about as entertainment or pleasure – something we touch on in the ‘Gift Guide’ we published on the website this week. We want to amplify food writing that goes beyond this and considers the cultural history of our food to be as important as its nutritional value. We also believe that a basic function of government should ensure its people have access to food and can feed their families.
In the UK, the government recently decided to discontinue funding for a school meal program that provided for children in England and Northern Ireland when schools closed for holidays. For the low-income families that qualify, school children are given meal vouchers that can be redeemed at participating partners and ensure they have access to food while classes are in session. Offering this food access during school holidays while canteens are closed is crucial to maintaining the health and wellbeing of these students. In June 2020 footballer Marcus Rashford explained the importance of this food access to the UK government through a retelling of his own experience of food insecurity.
Rashford’s appeal to the Tory government’s (lack of) ‘humanity’ on the issue – and extremely successful fundraising campaign with food charity FareShare – saw Boris Johnson make an abrupt about face on the issue. Funding for vouchers was reinstated for the summer holiday but over the recent half-term this was not the case. Instead, activists like Rashford along with restaurants across England have worked with new and established charities to fill the gap.
While these efforts were nothing short of heroic, it is also an unfair burden to place on an industry already on its knees. Alongside already overburdened charities, chefs and suppliers scrambled to navigate the logistics of organising, cooking and distributing food to families subject to limited food access they did so against a backdrop of anxiety about their livelihoods as a second lockdown loomed in the distance.
We have been heartened to see our friends in the hospitality industry rally to fill this gap in such an uncertain time but we’re also frustrated that food aid is largely relegated to the charity sector. The normalisation of charitable food aid has the effect of negating government responsibility when it comes to creating equitable food access.
The meal voucher system in place today is a product of 19th century social activism that forced the government to take responsibility for the nutritional welfare of its school children with Manchester as the first city to introduce school meals for vulnerable children in 1879. The program was later adopted by social and educational activists working with charitable organisations to provide school meals. These groups aimed to prevent widespread malnutrition, a malady blamed for the poor health of many volunteers for the Boer War by a parliamentary committee held in 1904.
In 1906 the Education (Provision of Meals) Act required that low-income students had access to free school meals and by 1947 the cost of meals for all students was covered in full by the UK government. School meals were considered a crucial part of early education, contributing not only to students’ ability to learn but also to their overall wellbeing. This remained the case until social care cuts in the 1980’s cast school meal funding as a misallocation of government resources. Over the course of the next 40 years, the fight for equitable food access for school children has been steadily eroded back to its 19th century roots.
Charities and activists are again in a position where they have to convince the government that equitable food access is a right, not a privilege. The issue of charitable solutions to equitable food access goes far beyond the UK and the specific issue of school meals. Globally, hunger and health issues related to malnutrition are mainly served by charitable organisations that have stepped in where governments have not. We want to hold our governments accountable for creating liveable conditions for their citizens and that means taking a critical look at their role in the culinary systems that feed us.
We view SOURCED as a community where we can engage this kind of critical thinking to harness positive change. We’re still in the questioning phase of this conversation but we hope to develop solutions to these issues over time. In the meantime here are a few groups/people in the UK whose work we admire when it comes to creating awareness and action for food equity and justice:
Trussell Trust supports a nationwide network of food banks to provide emergency food and support and work to help break the cycle of poverty.
Dee Woods is a chef, food educator and co-editor of The People’s Food Policy which is a grassroots initiative that develops strategies for food sovereignty in food policy.
Clara Widdison is the head of Social inclusion & Kitchen Social lead at the Mayor’s Fund For London and has been working to raise awareness and practical solutions for food insecurity in the capital.
Angela Malikis a chef, entrepreneur and board member of the Mayor of London Food Board. Her startup project, Project Nourish combines her interest in food and tech to tackle diet-related illness in the BAME community.
Ann Storr(@storrcupboard on instagram) is a food waste activist, among other things, she provides her Storr Cupboard community with ways to reduce domestic food waste and works on larger projects to bring awareness to how systemic issues can contribute to limited food access.
City Harvest Londoncollects surplus food from restaurants, wholesalers, hotels and more across the industry and reallocates this food so that it isn’t wasted. Their work is proof that food insecurity isn’t due to a lack of food, but a lack of formal infrastructure to get this food on to people’s tables.
Here are some highlights from last month and what to look forward to in November:
The Politics of Flavour in Coffee
Thomas Haigh, specialty arabica Q Grader, coffee sourcer and founder of coffee consulting company Toko, connects the global north with the global south through the concepts of trends, tastes and questions these ideas in relationship to power.
We have two new interviews as part of our The Ten Series. Met Tatjana Sendzimir, Bar Manager at London’s FAM bar, and Dylan Jones, chef/owner of Bo.Lan and Err restaurants in Bangkok.
Last week we published a new tutorial to our IGTV. We discussed what we mean by origin stories when it comes to food, the concept of sourcing and how we think about traditions.
The highstreet has holiday lights, so we got in the spirit and are sending you a gift guide! Kinda.
As freelance journalists we have been ‘gifted’ things and experiences and have recently been sent products we felt have value to SOURCED. This has spurred us to think about how we feel about gifting. Is it possible to uphold our values of transparency and inquiry into ethical sourcing when getting something for free? This piece is our untangling of the system of gifting in food and drink media.
This was originally a subscriber newsletter but we felt that it was an important discussion to have, and to be transparent about, therefore we have published it on the website.
Newsletters subscriptions pay for us to commission writers, researchers and experts - such as Thomas - so if you’re able to, here is the link to upgrade or subscribe! This month we have a piece by Israel Melendez Ayala looking at the rum and it’s colonial history, and next month we will be looking to New Zealand / Aotearoa and indigenous farming systems.
We hope this month you find ways to be fed by and feed your community and we’ll see you next time with more exciting SOURCED news.
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