22 Nov 2013
Sarah Wollaston, Conservative Member of Parliament for Totnes, is not your everyday Tory MP. She was the first MP to be chosen as a candidate through a US-style open primary. She was recently one of 15 joint winners of The Spectator’s Parliamentarians of the Year Award for going “through the ‘no’ lobby to prove that our ancient tradition of press freedom is not abolished without a fight”. She spoke more sense about the proposed intervention in Syria than anyone else on both sides of the debate. She writes regularly for the Guardian. She’s also a great supporter of Transition. I caught up with her recently and heard her 7 thoughts on austerity, why it’s happening and how we might respond to it.
1. We have no choice but austerity
She told me:
“If you look at the figures on debt and it’s 85% of our GNP, what does that mean? Does it mean that you can just keep on pretending that you can carry on increasing government spending above what a government’s earning? Inevitably that leads you to the situation where Greece is. Do I feel that something had to be done about that? I’m afraid I do. I think it was inevitable that that had to happen.
You can therefore either increase taxation, you can shrink what government spends, or you can try and get a balance between the two. I think, unfortunately, we do need to shrink our spend. I’m afraid I do think those decisions had to be made. Undoubtedly it’s impacting people’s lives, it’s very painful”.
2. It’s not helpful to blame or stigmatise those on the receiving end of it
She has been outspoken against what she has called the “divisive rhetoric” of ‘strivers and skivers’ which has emerged from some within her party and elsewhere:
“Just because words rhyme with each other doesn’t mean you should use them! I absolutely do not think we should be using any language of that sort, and most people who are not in work absolutely want to be in work. The issue is how do you make it that you are paid more for being in work than being on benefits? How do you make sure that you give people encouragement into work?”.
3. People need support and help to get back into work, not punishment
For Wollaston, it is not acceptable to scapegoat those looking for work. In another recent Guardian article about helping those with mental health issues back into work she wrote “Sometimes people need a push to get back into work, but that should not feel like a coercive or punitive shove”. She told me:
When you’ve had a period of depression (she herself has been very public about an episode of post natal depression that she suffered from herself) it can impact catastrophically on your self-confidence, and it can lead you to a position where you feel you really can’t go back to work. What you need is the encouragement, because for very many people it’s actually getting back into the workplace that helps restore confidence and make people feel better. It’s about the social contact that comes with work and employment. I don’t think it does anybody any favours to have to have a narrative around this that says that a government is being wicked if they are trying to encourage people back into the workplace. It’s a question of whether or not that encouragement feels like a big stick, or whether it feels like it’s genuinely supportive and helpful”.
4. Outsourcing public services is no bad thing
One of what many people see as the most alarming manifestations of austerity has been the outsourcing by many local authorities of work that was in the public sector and into the private sector. Barnet Council’s programme of “mass outsourcing” has been hugely controversial, but what are her thoughts on that approach?
“To say that it’s wrong for councils to outsource, I don’t agree with that argument. If other people can provide a better service with better value for money, I just see that as being inevitable. If that money could be spent better by bringing in other people I don’t have a reflex that it must automatically be wrong.
Clearly it’s incredibly painful for those individuals losing their jobs, but the evidence is over this period of austerity that although there’s been a great loss of employment in the state sector, there’s been a much greater corresponding increase in the private and independent sector.
But is the principle that you can shift people from being employed by the state, or the Council, to being employed in other organisations that can sometimes provide a better service and do things like increase the rate of recycling really so bad? Actually I think that’s a very reasonable way to approach austerity.
Having said that, she made clear that for her, it is also a question of making sure that this does not lead to abuse of low-paid workers. She raised the example of Healthcare Assistants, employed on zero hours contracts on a minimum wage, who are not paid for time spent travelling from one person to the next which, in effect, drives them below the minimum wage. She has been part of lobbying for the forthcoming Care Bill to outlaw this practice.
5. Austerity means it is more important that we vote, not less.
In the light of both Russell Brand and Jeremy Paxman announcing that they never vote, I wondered whether being in parliament had strengthened or weakened her belief in the vote? She took a sharp intake of breath, clearly looking forward to getting something off her chest:
“Where do I start? I can see why people are cynical about politics and politicians. There are so many problems with the way politics works today. What I would say is if you take an attitude of “I’m just going to boycott the whole thing, I’m not going to bother”, how is it ever going to change? I would say what you need to be doing is not sitting at home taking a negative view. If you’re unhappy with it, you need to apply. That’s what I did. I’m there.
There are lots of things that deeply frustrate me about the way politics works, about the way patronage operates, about the lack of genuine representation. We haven’t got enough women, we haven’t got enough people in parliament from a diverse range of backgrounds, we are under-representing people from ethnic minorities, and I think that’s desperately important. But you don’t solve those issues by not voting. You solve those issues by getting involved politically yourself and campaigning for change. I think it was a deeply worrying thing for Russell Brand to have said, particularly as he’s such an influential individual. I’d like to see Russell Brand applying to become an MP”.
6. Approaches like Transition have a vital role to play in times of austerity
She has been an enthusiastic supporter of the work of Transition Town Totnes. What, I wondered, were her thoughts on Transition, and its role in times of austerity?
I think it’s hugely important, because the thing about austerity is that it’s less about what the state is providing for a community, and as that pot of money shrinks, inevitably communities have to fall back on their own resources and look at what they can contribute. What Transition shows is just how important that can be. I look at what’s here in Totnes and I compare that to what’s available in some other communities, and I just wish that every community had that kind of community resource.
Inevitably people have a downer on what government is doing and to focus on the negative things, but there are some positive opportunities that we should look at and say “what are the opportunities for Transition Town Totnes?” because that’s what you’re very good at, saying “how could we use that within Transition?”.
For Wollaston, the refocusing of austerity creates new spaces for communities to innovate and take back some degree of power. She is very animated about how personal care budgets could be reallocated and used to support a variety of new and existing social enterprises in at the community level. Some of the powers given through the Localism Act have similar potential, such as Community Right to Build Orders. These, and other powers offer the potential of “restoring real power to individuals, that’s going to be a real gamechanger”, as she put it.
7. We have to tread carefully to maintain public support for renewables in times of austerity
Our conversation then turned to energy. Dr Wollaston discussed the number of people who come to her surgeries raising the issue of “green levies” on energy bills and how unfair they consider them to be. “People who are fuel poor feel like they are subsidising people who are not fuel poor” she told me. “That is a voice we have to listen to”. She spoke of how, for her, renewable energy needs to be rolled out with the support of local communities, rather than in the face of opposition:
“Frankly, I am horrified, when you look at the impact on a community like Dipford (a village near Totnes), which suddenly finds itself surrounded by very large scale solar panels, and, if companies get their way, very tightly spaced. It’s a question of how we make this work so people accept it and it’s done in a sensitive manner, and it doesn’t act as an extra levy, a disproportionate levy in fuel poverty. I am not saying that we should scrap environmental levies, I am absolutely not saying that. What I am saying is that the balance at the moment is risking us seeing a collapse in public support for green energy, and I think that’s a danger…”
I pointed out that given that the world currently subsidises the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $500bn a year, six times more than is spent to subsidise the renewable energy sector. Much of the hysteria being whipped up around “green taxes” should be seen in the light of how in Germany, the push for renewables is making the big energy companies’ business model unravel, and has seen their profit halve. I suggested that lobbying instead for the end of subsidies for fossil fuels might be a better place to start, and that it would be a move towards a genuinely ‘level playing field’. We also discussed a different approach to how energy is charged for which will be put forward on this website in January, as part of our theme of ‘Scaling Up’.
Some closing thoughts
Time spent with Dr Wollaston is fascinating, especially in the light of our discussions this month on the theme of austerity. She represents very much the “glass is half full” side of the debates around austerity. David Cameron said in his speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet recently:
“We are sticking to the task. But that doesn’t just mean making difficult decisions on public spending. It also means something more profound. It means building a leaner, more efficient state. We need to do more with less. Not just now, but permanently.”
With the Labour Party stating that if they won the next election they will uphold most of the Coalition’s spending cuts, it appears that austerity is here to stay, indeed that it has only just begun. And its impacts have only just begun too. For example, the recently released State of Children’s Rights in England report accuses the government of using “economic pressures” to:
“justify not only a serious erosion of children’s economic and social rights, such as health, food and the right to play, but also fundamental changes to our justice system.”
As people on the ground doing Transition, trying to build resilience in the face of such rapid and deep change, that’s our context. Whether its cause is peak oil, or austerity, necessary or unnecessary, as Dr Wollaston says, “inevitably communities have to fall back on their own resources and look at what they can contribute”. While there is still much to be gained from trying, where possible, to oppose cuts to public services, Wollaston’s message that there is also an opportunity here, an opportunity being seized by companies like Circo but not so much by community-owned social enterprises, is one that resonates with Transition. This also, of course, opens a whole ethical minefield for initiatives, as to whether they are colluding with further cuts or providing a vital safety net for local communities.
From a Transition perspective though, of course, that needs to be done built on foundations of social justice and fairness, with an underpinning narrative about the urgent need to tackle climate change and build resilience to the end of cheap energy, and in a way that builds community resilience, rather than undermining it. None of those appear to be priorities for the current administration, typified in David Cameron’s alleged recent “get rid of all the green crap” comments. But certainly talking to Dr Wollaston, you get a sense that there’s more support for them than you might previously imagine, in some quarters at least. .
Read more»
22 Nov 2013
Naresh Giangrande of Transition Training reports on a Transition Thrive training he recently co-facilitated in Scotland:
The University of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland is certainly posh, and old (it is famously Scotland’s oldest university). So what is a Transition Initiative doing in the middle of all that? And what is a Transition University anyway?
I was met off the train by David who is part of Transition St Andrews and the first thing he showed as he drove me from the station was an old paper mill, the Guardbridge industrial estate that recently shut down and was bought by the university. They are turning it into a bio mass plant to heat all of the universities buildings. Was it combined heat and power I asked?
“No”, he said, “we have just got planning permission for a medium sized wind farm and we will get our electricity from that”. “All?” I said? “Yes”, he said. “The whole university will be carbon neutral in a couple of years time”, he casually dropped. I sat in his mini, green with envy having just been part of the thwarted attempt to erect a small wind farm in Totnes.
“How did you get that through?” I asked. He told me that the estates department has seen their energy costs skyrocket from £1.2million to £5.4 million in just eight years and he projected they would be around £20 million by 2020. It makes absolute economic sense to move to biomass and renewable energy. We lock in a much lower cost supply a decouple from the spiralling out of control world fossil fuel markets.
“So where are you going from there?” I asked. He told me of their rolling fund to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings (with a minimum requirement to meet BREAM excellent or outstanding) and upgrade infrastructure. And their Transition Initiative is part funded by the university and part funded by the Climate Challenge Fund, so they had an office and five paid workers, and embedded sustainable teaching in many of their degree courses. I turned green a second time, as Scottish Transition groups have had access to pots of money from the Scottish government that English, Welsh and Northern Irish groups can only dream of.
Mandy Dean and I facilitated a Transition Thrive training with them, as part group building and part ‘let’s explore where we can go from here what’s next’ workshop. Unsurprisingly their practical project and group dynamics were their strengths, so we didn’t spend much time exploring these parts of Transition. We took this mixed group of project workers, university staff and students on a journey around the Transition model and practice, based on the Transition animal. We deepened, and planned, talked and explored. We planned a new social enterprise or two, and envisioned how they could create more engagement with the town.
What’s unique about a Transition University? Well, one of their challenges was that they have students coming and going all the time in their Transition Initiative. We helped them redesign their TI to enable them to maintain their initiative while at the same time find a way for students to take as much away with them into whatever they did next- seeding new projects new ideas and new enterprises.
I left with a feeling of hope that something established over 600 years ago is taking on board some of the 21th century’s knottiest problems , and a deep appreciation for the work they have done in preparing students for the risks and opportunities of 21st century living.
As I walked past the oldest golf course in the world, St Andrews, on my last morning, next to one of the most beautiful unspoilt towns in the British isles, I couldn’t help but be seduced by the grandeur and serenity of something that old and magnificent. I could, also feel the cold winds of change that are certainly sweeping, unbidden and unseen by most, through that old landscape.
Read more»
20 Nov 2013
Felicity Lawrence is a food writer and Guardian investigative journalist. When it comes to understanding the dark side of how the food industry works, she is the place to turn (unfortunately, the Skype connection was too bad to allow a usable podcast). What I wanted to explore was how austerity measures are affecting what ends up on our plate. It was a conversation that inevitably started with the recent horsemeat scandal:
Felicity, you’re just about to publish an updated version of your book ‘Not On the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate‘. One of the things that it has that differentiates it from the previous one is a new special chapter all about the horsemeat scandal. What does the horsemeat scandal tell us about the state of our food industry today, do you think?
I think it’s a kind of warning of systems failure really, because what you’ve got is a system that’s set up with these very, very long and complex supply chains where everybody’s trying to add a bit of profit as the stuff moves around. But it was a system built on cheap oil in a period when energy was cheap and it made some sort of sense, economically at least, to do that, if not environmentally. Of course, that’s no longer true.
Many environmentalists were predicting, as the price of energy went up, that inevitably there would be fantastic strain in that system, and I think that’s what you’re seeing here. You’re seeing a period where wages are stagnating, consumers are feeling real pressure because the cost of their fuel bills is going up so much, the cost of food is going up so much. Costs for the industry have gone up enormously, so whether you’re a meat processor, your energy costs have gone through the roof, the cost of beef has gone up enormously as its demand globally has increased and as climate change takes its toll.
If you’re a supermarket, your energy costs have gone up enormously, you’re transporting food round and round in these great big loops, and you’ve got enormous refrigeration costs because you’ve got these extenuated supply chains. But you can’t put your prices up to reflect that overall, because people on the lowest incomes simply can’t afford to pay any more for their food, so if you put the prices up, they just buy less. The supermarkets are locked into this model where everything must be continuous growth. Even in a deep recession, the shareholders demand continuous growth, and their executives are rewarded on the basis of continuous growth, but they can’t achieve it. So the system is broken.
What you’ve ended up with is contracts for cheap processed meats such as burgers being re-negotiated every 12 weeks, and prices being proffered by supermarkets that were just too low, so the processer wasn’t able to make a proper margin on them. Then they’re putting a great squeeze on the people supplying them. Then some point down the line, someone was committing fraud.
The whole issue of austerity that’s being imposed, which you described in one thing I read recently as being used to “dismantle the state”, how has it impacted on the food sector?
You’ve seen this relentless drive to deregulate, which preceded austerity and the recession. It’s been the neoliberal trend here for decades. It certainly happened under the last government, not just this one, but it’s accelerated with the recession and austerity. You’ve seen enormous cuts in public services that might have kept alive our capacity to regulate industry. There’s a trend for industry only to be inspected on what’s a so-called ‘risk basis’, because any inspection was regarded as a burden and so there are less inspections in factories. You’ve got certain types of cutting plants that no longer have a daily inspection service.
You’ve see a dramatic fall in inspectors and a huge slashing of trading standards budgets, and the main regulating standards agency has been eviscerated: that was one of the first things that the coalition government did when it came to power as part of its ‘Bonfire of Quangos’, these pesky agencies that were regarded as a nuisance, added to industry costs, got in the way. So it had a lot of its powers taken away, and you can see in relation to this huge, huge fraud, one of the biggest food frauds for centuries, that they simply don’t have the powers or the capacity to actually work out who’s done what and hold anyone to account.
Is that something which is just an unfortunate by-product of the need to save money, or is that an intentional gutting of those institutions, do you think?
I think there’s been an ideological drive which precedes this government but has accelerated under it, the sense that the state should be removed and that business and industry can regulate itself. Here we’ve got a spectacular failure. Industry cannot regulate itself. Its interests are going to be very different to the interests of the public, that’s precisely why there is a role for the state.
One of the other things that has been deregulated along with the other things has been stuff around, although there’s been less ability to police, has been the issue about gang masters and slavery and food and everything.
The re-emergence of slavery in the last couple of decades is one of the most shocking aspects, for me, of the current food system. It’s become an enormous problem. It’s happened because methods of production have changed, and that’s changed the relationship between labour and capital.
What you get with these ‘just in time’ ordering systems, that are very sophisticated but for the supermarkets, it enables them to eliminate all risk and waste from their end of the chain, so they only ever order once you’ve already bought something, and the barcode on your product has been scanned. That then triggers an order that cascades down to a supplier down the line who might find out in the evening that he needs to double his delivery to the supermarket the next morning.
The only way that those suppliers can then meet that demand is by having a pool of surplus labour. They obviously can’t afford to employ those people directly, so they end up with this outsourcing system where they have the agencies. The only kind of people who are prepared to work those sorts of random shifts as they happen, 12 hours work one minute, no work the next, are generally migrants who’ve got no choice and who are desperate enough to take it. That’s really why this whole system has built up.
Once you’re relying on that kind of casual labour it’s not surprising that abuses creep in, because the gang masters have control over the labour, they have control over people’s lives. They have to be transported around from one factory to another in different parts of the country. They don’t have any accommodation except through the gang master.
You get into this system of control, and there are just repeated abuses which are very shocking. In some cases that I’ve looked at recently, there was one just last year, real proper slavery where people have no freedom of movement, they aren’t aware of where they’re being taken, they’re subject to physical threats and intimidation, have their documents taken away from them, and live in fear. That’s going on in modern Britain. It’s very shocking.
Is that something which is just an unfortunate by-product of the need to save money, or is that an intentional gutting of those institutions, do you think?
I’m not suggesting that everybody who works in it is a willing participant in it. Lots of hard-working farmers increasingly really struggle to survive unless they’re working on an enormous industrial scale, and I think scale matters. When you get to that huge scale, you lose the humanity in it, and that is reflected in what goes wrong.
There are an awful lot of people in the supermarkets who work hard or think they’re doing their best, but I think they’re trapped in a system that actually doesn’t work. It doesn’t work particularly for those on the lowest incomes. What we’re seeing is wages being held down or driven down, what used to be reasonable jobs in the sector being undercut by the system of casual labour, so that people don’t have enough money to buy the sort of food that keeps them healthy and well, and now we’ve got austerity on top of that, you’re seeing people having to make choices between food and fuel.
The argument in favour of the supermarkets is always that they’re much cheaper than all these independent shops and people like them and if they didn’t like them they wouldn’t go there. One of the things I’ve done in the new edition of Not on the Label is actually unpick some of that.
Their profits are very healthy. It’s very hard to say what’s going on with prices, but there has been very substantial food inflation, running considerably ahead of overall inflation, and that’s partly cost and a lot of it is energy cost, which, if we had a different system, that wouldn’t be such an issue. But also when they give you something on special offer with one hand, they can take it back somewhere else. By upping the price of things that we’re less able to compare on, or we’re not certain what they are. We’re seeing an awful lot of this yo-yoing of prices at the moment, which competition experts have described as anti-competitive.
There was an article I read that you wrote recently, I think the one about David Cameron and not knowing the price of a loaf of bread, where you said that ‘deep discounting has driven a race to the bottom’. What does that race to the bottom look like?
As I say, supermarkets remaining profitable despite a deep recession, consumers struggling to pay their bills, prices going up and down in a way that makes it very hard for anyone to know where best value is. The things that are being promoted to encourage us into the stores so that they get all your business and there are not many alternatives left – if you want to go and find a nice greengrocer it’s getting harder and harder – the things that they’re promoting are by and large the things we know we should be eating less of. It’s heavily processed foods, foods higher in fat, salt and sugar, and there are academics who’ve done the work on that and show that’s true.
It’s become increasingly difficult for people on low incomes to actually eat the sort of food they need to be healthy. The corollary of that is that we see these extraordinary inequalities that are widening in terms of health, so that if you’re on a lower income, in a lower socio-economic group, you’re much more likely to suffer a higher rate of diseases that relate to poor diet. You’re much more likely to suffer obesity. You’re much more likely to have low birth weight. All these complex issues. So there’s a real social justice problem there.
Part of that is that tension between people being on lower and lower incomes, so therefore needing to buy cheaper and cheaper food, therefore the argument is that we need supermarkets because they’re the only people that can feed people on those kind of incomes. Is there a way out of that cycle?
I think you have to frame the questions a bit differently. If people can’t eat, can’t afford to eat well enough to be healthy, then they’re not earning enough. We’ve seen this driving down of wages as I said, and we’ve seen the flight of capital with companies paying less tax. It’s not really good enough for them to say “they can’t afford more, let them eat junk, they can’t afford decent beef so let them eat horse”. That’s where we’ve ended up.
Of course, the people who ended up eating the burgers adulterated with horse were those on the lowest incomes. I think that’s one of the reasons it hasn’t had political traction. It’s not affluent people – they don’t eat those kinds of things, the cheapest burgers and processed meats. The people who are buying those are the people who can’t afford anything else.
Ed Miliband recently was talking about the idea of freezing the price of energy to make energy more available to people. Is there a case for the government intervening in the pricing of food as well, or basic healthy foods, do you think?
I think it’s very hard to see how governments can intervene in price controls. I think again that’s framing the question the wrong way round. There’s often an assumption that we’ve moved beyond government intervention in supermarkets. The real question is that we’ve got markets that have been captured by a handful of players in the sector, and that’s one of the real problems. There isn’t the alternative for people to be able to go out to a local store or local street market and buy cheap fruit and veg that’s not perfect but half price because it’s not cosmetically perfect. But they could afford it, and eat very well on it. Those alternatives have been swept away, because you’ve got these oligopolies that have emerged.
So rather than saying, do we want socialist, Marxist price control, the question’s upside down. Why have we not got free markets? Because Adam Smith wrote, all those centuries ago, that business tends to monopoly and you have to counter it. But we are in an era when governments either don’t have the political will to ensure that there is better competition, or define competition so narrowly that they don’t really take into account the public interest.
But also these are globalised businesses, and we’ve moved to an era of globalised food industry but without a corresponding globalisation of the institutions that might actually be able to regulate and hold them to account.
What can we learn from previous periods of austerity that is useful now, from the 1930s and so on? Are there any lessons that, as we enter a new period of austerity that we can learn from those times?
I think what we’ve learnt from previous periods of austerity is that you see this huge gap between the top and the bottom, but actually what’s generally associated with that is unrest, whether it’s political unrest or worse than that, war. We ignore that at our peril.
Can it be argued that there is an opportunity inherent in austerity? Is there a silver lining to it? Does it create a space to do things that weren’t possible before?
I think if there’s one thing that does come out of it, it’s that people are reassessing. It’s a time to reassess. The system is creaking. Supermarket directors privately will say, we actually know some of this is unsustainable, but we need help. We do need regulation to say “that sort of thing isn’t going to be possible in the long term”. They talk about this phrase that’s being introduced: ‘choice editing’. We may not be able to have food from all round the world whenever we want at a price we can afford. Actually, some of it may be too unsustainable because there’s not enough water or it requires too much energy for transporting it or growing it in the wrong season. Those things, we may have to stop assuming we can have. We never used to have them, it’s only a recent phenomenon that we are able to have those things.
I think the other thing is the attitude to waste is changing. We’ve had, just in the last couple of weeks, a major supermarket, Tesco, actually being very open about just how much of its bagged salad goes to waste, which was quite ironic for me as I wrote a whole chapter about bagged salad and how dependent on exploitative labour most of it has been. And now we’ve got people saying that a great deal of it is thrown away, and maybe we need to rethink.
So I think austerity, very painfully for those in the bottom half, is opening up these questions at all levels.
In the Portas review it said that 97% of all groceries are sold through just 8,000 supermarkets. We’ve arrived in that situation, and the government is less and less willing to regulate or intervene. What can communities do? What can they do to start to shift that?
I think communities are probably one of the few ways we can actually start to change this. This industry is so powerful. People are running frightened of facing it and changing it. Rebellion always starts with small changes, and it will have to be from the ground up. Interestingly enough, for me when I look at what’s been successful in terms of taking on these huge power bases, it is actually the sort of asymmetric power of people on the ground or small NGOs, who use the same technology that the food industry has used to globalise itself and create this very concentrated system. They’re being disrupted.
I’m thinking, for example, of the Greenpeace campaign against soya being sourced from deforested parts of the Amazon, where Greenpeace activists were able to globalise in the way that the industry has and pop up all over the place attacking, or protesting outside, key companies, factories and offices and embarrass them in a way that nobody else had done before.
I think creating food companies who are dealing directly with producers, all that can happen on a small scale. Something bigger will grow from it, but it will take a long time. That again may be possibly another silver lining of austerity, that people are more receptive to that sort of stuff. They’re having to work harder to think how they can find stuff they can afford. There is this great burgeoning of interest in the producer groups and food co-ops and street markets.
It is, to me, the most appalling indictment of our current political system that we’ve got half a million people in the UK, which is one of the most affluent countries in the world, using Food Banks because they simply can’t afford to eat. At the same time, if you go to developing countries that are some of the biggest food producers, you can find food there is being produced on wages so low that even people in work can’t afford to feed their families. That, to me, says the current system has to be rebuilt.
Read more»
19 Nov 2013
Pam Warhurst is a community leader, activist and environment worker who is one of the founders of Incredible Edible Todmorden, West Yorkshire. In the 2005 New Year Honours she became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), for services to the environment. She is a passionate advocate for the potential of urban agriculture, and once gave a great TED talk about her work. I spoke to her by Skype about her thoughts on urban food production, austerity and food banks. You can either listen to/download this podcast or read the transcript below.
What does austerity look like in Todmorden?
The most obvious face of austerity is the fact that we’ve got a food bank, food collection point, whatever you want to call it, where about 70 different people, once a month, have to go through the doors to collect food in order to meet some need at their end. That’s the obvious face of austerity.
But there’s a lot of austerity that you don’t always catch. There’s the people who’ve been challenged for a heck of a long time, not just in this recent recession, with making ends meet. The people from some of our communities where thinking about paying their bills and giving their kids decent food and all the rest of it may not necessarily be possible, at least in their minds.
Then of course there’s the austerity that we’re probably only just starting to understand, of the single and the elderly, which in a community of 16,000 people, given time, talking to people and reconnecting, we may be able to have an impact on. But just at the moment, I suspect they’re out there and we don’t know them.
How do you see Incredible Edible as a response to that?
We take the last bit first and work forward. Incredible Edible is trying to do a number of things. It’s trying to reconnect communities using food as the medium. It’s trying to reskill communities using local food, and it’s trying to stimulate economic opportunities, no matter how modest, again with a focus on local food.
We work through all that, and it has a huge potential impact at a community level on what it means to not be able to make ends meet. You’d just be at your wits end. On a community scale, it’s about growing in very public places, it’s about getting people having conversations with complete strangers. It’s about people thinking about food in a more hands-on way … “ I could do that in my front or back garden, I could start to share what I’m making. Maybe I can get the apples from that tree down the street which everybody lets drop on the floor and make something of it”. That type of very low level but really important thinking around local food that I think has become a disconnection in recent times.
The second thing we can do in Incredible Edible is, because we’re interested in lost arts, it’s about taking that to the next stage and saying “we used to be able to make bread. We used to be able to make pickles and jams and know what to bottle when. So why don’t we find the folks who can teach the neighbours? Why don’t we roll out a Come Dine With Me programme, where people are invited in on the estates and we make something really simple?” That’s the informal bit.
But the other bit is, how do we put local food at the heart of the curriculum? How do we help schools with their aspiration to be at the heart of the community where it’s a problem, because they’ve got their agenda and the community hasn’t got much of an agenda, therefore they don’t necessarily speak the same language. How do we work in schools, building on everything that’s good, Food For Life, School Food Plan, all the stuff they’re already thinking about – or the really good schools are thinking about – and how do we add that community dimension to that, to reconnect everybody’s family, extended or otherwise? So we’re working on that.
And the third bit, I suppose the way we impact on austerity is trying to say local economies really matter. Sticky money really matters. People love to spend money on food, if they’ve got it. Visitors to a town love to seek out what’s local and special. There’s a lot of opportunity in a market town like Todmorden, and there’s lots of towns like Todmorden where we could get more market stalls selling local pies and pickles. We can get, perhaps, more butchers, bakers and candlestick makers taking on people, maybe taking on apprentices. Just feeling confident about making money in their local economy around food. That, over time, can have an impact.
So you square all that up, about looking after your neighbour, learning new skills, having a bit more economic confidence, feeding your family better, growing stuff in order to be more active as well as getting good stuff on the table, and that’s kind of where we play in.
I met Mary a little while ago from Todmorden, and we were talking about food banks. She was saying food banks are terrible because they breed dependency and despondency and that actually Incredible Edible Todmorden had taken a different approach to that in its relationship with the food bank. What is the relationship of Incredible Edible with the local food bank?
I think the general thinking is we absolutely get the need for a safety net. We absolutely do understand that it is a gift that some people can bring to the table, to say I want to support people who simply haven’t got the means to put food on the table. I understand why people do that through food banks. There’s a structure, it’s a necessity, as an immediate response.
But my line would be, it’s the first response, not the final response. It cannot be the only way you want to do these things. Increasingly I think many people are seeing their work complementing that of the food bank. What we would want to do, and our relationship with the food bank, and we haven’t got a very proactive one at the moment, but we’re working one up, is to do what a lot of communities are doing, which is to say, this is the box of food. What we want to do is come in and help people make that go further or allow them over time to substitute what they’re doing themselves for the things they have to ask other people for, and make themselves more self-sufficient and more proud of what they’re able to achieve.
But we’re not simpletons. If you are going to change that sort of skills bank and self-esteem and opportunity, you do not do it on a sunny afternoon in a year or even in two years. It takes time to build that up so that it’s not something you’re chucking money at but something that actually is how a community would want to function. It would want to make sure that everybody had every opportunity they could to feed their own family well.
So, food bank, immediate response: we understand why it’s there, but it’s the beginning, not the end. We would want to work alongside them, and are hoping to introduce things like working alongside Rachel Gilkes with Chutney for Change, which is the northern equivalent to Rubies in the Rubble, to maybe setting up small enterprises so that maybe some of those mums, dads or whatever that are going to the food bank could work alongside Rachel in a Todmorden Chutney for Change so that people are using the waste products that are not beyond consumption but not suitable for sale or for the supermarket counter in order to make the jams and chutneys that people can consume themselves, but also might create a Co-op to sell on the market.
It takes time to set all that up. That’s our relationship. We want to work with those 70 people. We want to help those kind people who have set up the food bank see that we are part of the offer. It doesn’t start and end with the food bank.
You mentioned there about trying to see the next step in the evolution of Incredible Edible being about helping people start new businesses, start new enterprises. What’s your sense of where that could go? What’s the potential? You started growing food on the high street, outside the police station and so on, but where could it go as a new economic regeneration story, do you think?
I preface everything I say to these questions with – we are part of something bigger. I think it’s important to say that because I want everybody to understand, we understand we are a piece of a jigsaw, that’s what we are. But increasingly, we’re pieces of jigsaws in many people’s communities. We’re a piece of a jigsaw that perhaps a lot of people can understand their own role in, that they’re the solution not the problem. Because we have such a low entry level. If you’re in, you’re in, it’s as simple as that. That was always our goal, it was about creating a sense that I can do this, and I am part of something that is a better world, and from that other things follow.
So, to answer your question directly, it’s my opinion, and we have not established this in any grand sense, that the future will need a lot more resilient local economies. I can only speak for this country because it’s the only country I’m familiar with in terms of its structures and policies.
We need more people understanding that the system as it operates now, the globalisation, the large-scale detached financial model, there’s something wrong with that somewhere. It’s blindingly obvious. But how would the man on the street know where to start? Our assistance around reskilling, letting the scales drop, which local food grown in public places can do, see spaces differently. Understand your own role, understand you’ve got something to offer, understand the pound in your pocket can influence what happens locally. That dropping of the scales is the first port of call. Then that reskilling is the second port of call. The third one is, what the heck am I going to do with this? We all have to eat.
We have been taken for a ride by the media for a long, long time, the advertising media and so on, that we have to have the McDonald’s, we have to have the Nikes, we have to have beans flown from Africa, because we do. Well, once you start to unravel that – and I’m not doing an anti-anything, I’m doing a pro-alternative – you start to say “why?”. Why on Earth do we have to have this?
And actually, if I’ve got 10 bob in my pocket, does it not make a lot more sense, provided I know how to cook perhaps a broader range of things in season, or cheaper cuts of meat, why don’t I spend that in my local butchers, my local veg shop, my local whatever, instead of just brainlessly walking to the supermarket and back. It seems to me that what we are doing is trying, in a drip, drip, drip way, because again, you can’t rush this, to help people start to think of their own solutions to how they see the future. I absolutely am certain that that’s about more local economies. One of the main reasons I’m certain about that, other than the multiplier effect, when you spend money on local food it’s got a much greater impact on the local community than a pound spent in the supermarket which will go somewhere else, although that does create jobs, I get that.
For me, what’s really important if we are to reconnect people long term to the environment, to a more sustainable approach to living without having used those words, which is the long term goal, local economies allow you to make financial decisions locally that take on board social and environmental impacts. They just do! It’s a no-brainer. You don’t want to poison your kids, you don’t want to live surrounded by polluted land. All these things will come, as people start to understand that they have the means of change in their own hands. So for me, that whole idea of institutional detachment impacting on our lives, you break that down with local economies.
So the long answer, because it’s a long-term project, it’s a forever project, Incredible Edible. I do think it helps us put in place the things that in 10 or 20 years’ time, we will say, thank God we started to do that 20 years ago.
What does your focus on making this as inclusive as possible, and as relevant to as many people from as many different backgrounds in the town look like in practice? How have you managed that in terms of the language you use, the approach you take?
Just simple things, like we don’t talk about sustainability, we don’t talk about climate change. We don’t talk about peak oil, we don’t do any of that stuff. Because we have generations of people, not just people from the poorest backgrounds but across the piece, who don’t really get that. If they did get that, they’ve no idea where they’re going to start to be different. Therefore, we use very simple language.
We don’t talk about organic but we do that in our own practice in terms of permaculture etc. But we don’t make a big play about it, because what we want is to stimulate people’s interest and self-belief. Because we do have lots of little phrases that we use along the way, like “believe in the power of small actions” and what have you, our evidence over the past six years is give people half a chance and they will want to do the right thing by them and theirs.
What’s the evidence of that? Well, we’re working out on the estates, working with volunteers helping to build some raised beds or whatever it is they actually want. We worked on our estates. Again, if you want to use that as a proxy for meeting some of the challenges of those that haven’t got a right lot of money nor the means to get themselves out of their predicament, we’re working on them with our Come Dine with Me, with our how to bake bread, with our this is how you graft a tree. We put a thousand residents in Todmorden through a really informal teach-each-other programme which was anything from taking them up to a farm to how to make a sausage to how you make pickles, jams and preserves.
One of our spin-off social enterprises, which is the Incredible Aqua Garden, which we’re launching on the 11th November, which will eventually be a learning centre for aquaponics, hydroponics and horticulture/permaculture. We’ve got apprentices in that and we’re hoping, fingers crossed, we’re very close to it, to work with the Housing Association on reskilling some of their tenants to be apprentices, who will then be the champions on their own estates. That’s the beginning of a programme that we’re very keen to roll out with many more social landlords for people to help themselves.
We do work across a number of communities. We’ve got quite a significant Polish community here, and we’re also trying – but remember we’re only volunteers, we’ve no paid staff at the centre of this so we’re a bit organic in how we do stuff – we’re trying to think into the University of the Third Age, so all the skills that that organisation possesses can be shared. We’ve worked with Age Concern to tell the stories of the past, and those older people who remember a different way of thinking about local food. In as far as we’re a bunch of volunteers in this forever project, we are trying to reach out. I know people would criticise and say you’re a bunch of middle-class elderly women – well we’re not. But us middle-class elderly women need to kick something off because we’re perceived a need to kick something off. If it stays and ends with us then we’ve bitterly failed. But of course, it’s not. Increasingly now we’re working through the high school, we’ve got some real champions in the sixth form there, who are really starting to get what we’re doing – “you’re not just growing cabbages, great!” – those conversations are starting up.
Could you argue that there is an upside to austerity? Is there potential within it as well as the downside of it?
I don’t think anybody, if they were sat in a room where they couldn’t afford to put the fire on and didn’t know what they were going to put on the table, I think it would be a bit of an insult for me to say there’s an upside to austerity.
What I would say is, human beings are amazing in their ability to rise to a challenge. The upside of austerity if there is one, is absolutely not for those experiencing it, but for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, get off your backsides and do something about it. Incredible Edible is one way that people can do that.
Read more»
18 Nov 2013
Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall is a writer and garden designer, a career that has won her two gold medals at Chelsea Flower Show. She has written many books, mostly on gardening, as well as writing articles for a range of publications. And yes, she is Hugh’s mother. In 2010 she wrote a great book called The Ministry of Food – Thrifty wartime ways to feed your family today (now out of print), which combined a history of the period of wartime-imposed austerity between 1939 and 1945 with recipes and tips. With our exploration this month of the theme of austerity, I was interested to hear Jane’s thoughts on the matter, and so we did the following interview via email.
You wrote in Ministry of Food: “if our mothers and grandmothers could provide good food on a tight budget and with the most basic equipment, it should be much easier for us”. Yet here we are, in a period of government-imposed austerity, with half a million families depending on food banks, a rise in health problems caused by poor diets and so on. Why is it not so easy for families today? What have we lost? What is different about today?
I think it’s partly the knowledge and skills that are lacking today. It was the same at the beginning of World War 2 when rationing was first imposed on the nation. A family could have an adequate and healthy diet on a week’s rations of meat, bacon, butter and margarine, cheese, milk, eggs, sugar and tea. But only if they knew how to eke out the meagre rations by using pulses, veg and fruit which were all available relatively cheap ‘off the ration.’ (Also, in the countryside, ‘wild’ meat: rabbits, pigeons, etc.)
At the outset of the war, many women had no idea how to achieve this. However, the government set up mobile units, which went round the country giving cookery demonstrations and handing out recipe leaflets. The much-loved, best-selling cookery writer Marguerite Patten started her career in this way.
Later, in the ‘never had it so good’ days of the 1960s, we all took enthusiastically to convenience foods – frozen food, ready meals, anything ‘on offer’ in the supermarkets. My children grew up on fish fingers, burgers, spaghetti hoops, oven chips, Angel Delight, etc etc. We more or less forgot how to cook, and how to budget. That’s how things have stayed until the present. Now it’s not so different as it was in the days of rationing – we know what we should be doing, but not how to. But the info is there if we look for it.
We have also lost the pleasure of cooking together. Yes, we are all too busy during the week, in most families both parents are out at work, but we can still enjoy preparing and eating meals together at weekends. It enhances family life. We’ve also lost the pleasure of seasonal food, looking forward to new potatoes, say, and purple sprouting broccoli, or the first apples, or ripe blackberries in the hedgerows. From a practical point of view, seasonal food costs less.
In today’s period of austerity, we are told that “we’re all in this together”, although many people don’t feel this. History tells us that that was the strong sense during the war, but was it?
During the war there was certainly a feeling of shared hardship and people did feel they should pull together and make light of their troubles. But rationing went on till 1954 (the war ended in 1945), and by then everyone was sick of it. There was no longer the threat (and for many the reality) of being bombed out of your home, and the fear of losing loved ones serving in the forces. The reasons for ‘pulling together’ and not complaining were gone.
What role did advertising and propaganda play in creating that common sense of purpose, Dig For Victory and everything?
Hugely influential. Churchill and Lord Woolton (Minister of Food) both realised the importance of communication, in those days by radio and in cinema newsreels and in the press. Although Woolton was usually putting out unpopular messages about shortages of this or that, he was personally very popular, known as ‘Uncle Fred.’ Partly because of his engaging personality, but also because he believed in telling people the truth about what was happening.
One of the challenges today in terms of healthy diets and food justice is how our food is controlled by fewer and fewer larger and larger companies, who opposed much in the way of regulation and so on. During WW2, how was the food industry made to play its part?
Total government control. The food and farming industries were told what they could sell/grow and the government fixed the prices. Such strict regulation would never be acceptable in peace time.
What skills did the ordinary person have then that we have lost?
It was taken for granted children would help in the kitchen. We learned to peel spuds; prepare other veg; boil, poach and scramble eggs; and make other simple dishes, for example cakes, scones. Adults were skillful shoppers, buying ingredients for good value, knowing how they were going to use them. Usually made a shopping list and stuck to it, but could also buy opportunistically, eg if a sudden supply of raisins or oranges had come in from North Africa. People learned to shop and to plan meals so nothing was wasted.
What were, if you like, the key ingredients, that made a basic, cheap diet such a healthy one? How does that differ from what we eat today, and what can we learn from that diet?
Because meat and fish were in short supply, we relied on it far less than we do today. Lots of fruit and veg, specially potatoes, but the diet could be very monotonous. The wartime diet would not be healthy for today’s way of life. It was high in carbohydrates, designed for a population who walked or cycled to school or work, lived in much colder houses and flats. They needed fuel to keep going.
In Britain in 2013, austerity is leading to a widening of the gap between rich and poor. By 1945, when the war ended, that gap had actually closed significantly. Why was that?
Rationing was a great leveler. Except for the black market which was surprisingly limited, being richer did not buy you a better diet. However, both rich and poor living in the country were better fed than those who lived in big towns and cities. Home grown fruit and veg, backyard chickens, goats, pigs.
If the housewives of 1943 were able to sit down with families today struggling to put healthy food on the table on very tight budgets, what advice do you think they would give them?
Waste nothing. Keep a stock pot going for soups and stews. Use up leftovers. Cook without meat several times a week, using eggs, cheese, lentils, pearl barley, rice. Use seasonal ingredients. Use cheaper cuts of meat, cooked long and slowly. Have fun foraging for wild food: mushrooms, blackberries, nettles; if you live near the sea, mussels etc. Share and barter: if you keep hens, swap eggs for your veg-growing neighbour’s glut of courgettes.
Jane’s latest book is ‘The Pocket Book of Good Grannies‘ published by Short Books.
Read more»
