An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent
Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
We are delighted, after many months of work, to finally announce the release of a major piece of groundbreaking research developed by Transition Town Totnes, Transition Network and Geofutures, with support from Land Share CIC, entitled ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself: exploring the practicalities of food relocalisation’. You can download the paper here. The report is a key part of the Totnes EDAP, taking Simon Fairlie’s Can Britain Feed Itself paper and applying it to Totnes and District.
In the ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself’ paper due to be launched here in a few hours (get ready…), one of the recommendations is a relaxation of the laws surrounding the collection of local food waste and feeding it to pigs. This will need to be a key element of more localised food systems. There are a variety of reasons why some might oppose this, but I’m sure that none of them will have considered the potential rather alarming risks that are revealed in this news clip below.
Clearly the markets weren’t the only source of food. The High Street contained a far higher proportion of shops selling food than today. The way the shops were run was very different to today. ML describes a trip to the shops in the early 1950s;
“I used to go to the grocers and I could sit down, lovely. They’d go through your list and say, “yes, yes, we’ve some new whatever it is, would you like to taste some?” You’d have a little snippet of cheese or something, “great, yes, we’ll have that”. “Now we’ve got a tin of broken biscuits, but they’re not too bad (half price you see), would you like them?” As soon as you put a biscuit in your mouth it’s broken isn’t it! Then they’d say “now Mrs. L, you’re going to the butchers, yes, yes, and going to get some fish? Yes, yes, and paraffin? Yes, yes… and they used to say to me now bring any parcels in, we’ll put it in the box with your groceries and bring the lot up for you. And they did. They’d come and deliver and you’d go through it and say that’s fine and would you like a cup of tea….”
September 17th 2009 sees the publication of the keenly awaited ‘Local Food: how to make it happen in your community’, the first in a series of Transition Guides exploring different aspects of Transition at a community level. You can download the blad here(blad stands for ‘book layout and design’ and is a small document that gives booksellers a taste of the book). As the book nears completion, I asked the lead author, Tamzin Pinkerton, a few questions by way of introducing the book…
The farmers who surrounded Totnes were much more directly engaged with the town than they are now, as the town provided the key markets for their produce. DM farmed 250 acres (which had grown to 300 by the time of his retirement in 1989). When he started work on the farm, it was still run by working horses. The farm had around 30 cows, 40 acres of cereals and about 50 breeding ewes, but by the time he had retired, it had been turned into a purely dairy farm, with nearly 80 cows.
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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We are delighted, after many months of work, to finally announce the release of a major piece of groundbreaking research developed by Transition Town Totnes, Transition Network and Geofutures, with support from Land Share CIC, entitled ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself: exploring the practicalities of food relocalisation’. You can download the paper here. The report is a key part of the Totnes EDAP, taking Simon Fairlie’s Can Britain Feed Itself paper and applying it to Totnes and District. 
