Oh these mad Devon-to-London-and-back-in-a-day trips, I really must learn not to do them. I’m writing this on the train home after the train was stuck for half an hour at Pewsey due to a failed signal, which the driver waited for and then, it would appear, noted that it wasn’t working and just thought “sod it”, and carried on through it. Not sure if that’s standard procedure, anyway, at least we’re moving again. So, this is a write up of the ‘Future of Food’ event organised by the Soil Association, its International Conference, which was the cause of my early rising and late return home.
LOCAL FOOD: How To Make It Happen In Your Community. Tamzin Pinkerton & Rob Hopkins. Green Books, 2009. 220 x 220mm, 216pp. £12.95
As the twin issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change become more widely discussed, more people become interested in prom-oting local food as one of the steps towards self-reliance. But how do you go about it, and what do you do if there is no local food to promote? The decades of industrialised agriculture have seen local food links wither and orchards grubbed up. Local Food, the latest book in the Transition series, aims to help local communities rediscover their food culture and in doing so rediscover community itself.
While Vandana Shiva was in Berlin recently promoting her book ‘Soil Not Oil’, Andreas Teuchert and Thomas Finger of Transition Berlin, who were filming the event, spontaneously asked her for her thoughts on what the Transition Towns movement could do that is of real use for people in the southern hemisphere. Here is her answer.
Our thanks to Andreas for allowing me to post this here.
I travelled up last Friday to Slaithwaite in Yorkshire for first Transition North conference, which was supported by the Co-operative and attended by people from the Transition and Co-operative movements across the North of England. It was a wonderful day. Dynamic, positive, creative and very well attended. Hosted at the Civic Hall in the town, it was supplied with wonderful local food, and was very well organised by the Transition Marsden and Slaithwaite group.
The first of the forthcoming Transition Books series, ‘Local Food: how to make it happen in your community’ was launched in a wonderful event on Tuesday night at the Hub in King’s Cross in London. The evening was more than just a celebration of the book, it was a celebration of local food in general. Tamzin had been laid low with flu in the days running up to the event, so even though she had recovered somewhat, I was drafted in as a last minute compere.
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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Oh these mad Devon-to-London-and-back-in-a-day trips, I really must learn not to do them. I’m writing this on the train home after the train was stuck for half an hour at Pewsey due to a failed signal, which the driver waited for and then, it would appear, noted that it wasn’t working and just thought “sod it”, and carried on through it. Not sure if that’s standard procedure, anyway, at least we’re moving again. So, this is a write up of the ‘Future of Food’ event organised by the Soil Association, its International Conference, which was the cause of my early rising and late return home.
