Some of Manchester's leading sustainable food projects visited Newcastle Upon Tyne recently to see how the country's most sustainable city was improving access to sustainable food.
On Monday 1st November, the Manchester groups visited The Food Chain (NorthEast) - an inspiring food delivery social enterprise – particularly useful for HERBIE and its plans for diversification and expansion. We also visited, a leading food and conservation project at Scotswood Community Garden. Towards the end of the day we met up with East End Health and heard about their work to increase organic milk and fresh fruit in schools, their programme of cooking courses and their future plan to further engage the local authority caterers.
On the Tuesday, the Manchester groups presented our work at the Grow, Cook, Eat conference at Ouseburn Farm, where the new Kindling video on sustainable food was shown and each group gave a ten minute summary of their work and how we are working in partnership together.
The future plan is for some of Newcastle's local food projects to visit Manchester as part of a FeedingManchester event in the Spring of 2011.
This exchange is being made possible with a small grant from the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens.