At the end of last month, Kindling organised Making Food Fair, a one day conference exploring food poverty and fairness in the food system overall. Kindling volunteer Becky Mallows gives her views on the day.
“The ‘Making Food Fair’ conference, hosted by the Kindling Trust, took place on Saturday 22nd November, bringing together a fantastic range of speakers with over 70 participants, to explore the iniquities of the current food system. The event provided an opportunity to explore how we can make our food system fairer and more sustainable across the whole food supply chain. This broader perspective opened up the discussion to consider how our food system is perpetuating poverty for UK farmers as they struggle to make a living, whilst at the opposite end of the food chain, many families are unable to afford healthy food.
The event brought together passionate speakers who all care deeply about justice in the food system, but from widely varying backgrounds and with very different outlooks. It’s perhaps not often that representatives from farming, Unions, the faith community and academia share a platform, but each speaker played a vital role in exploring the issues of unfairness and inequality that exist right through the food system, from production and processing to retail and consumption.
The broad range of perspectives covered by the speakers, alongside the diversity of those attending the event, made for an exciting and inspiring exchange of ideas in the afternoon group discussions. With our food system continuing to fail so many, it is essential that we continue to discuss ways in which we can work towards a more equitable system. Making Food Fair provided a brilliant platform on which to do just that.”
Becky Mallows, Kindling volunteer.
Whilst we certainly don’t feel we came up with all the answers at Making Food Fair, we do think it contributed to a really important debate. From those working with people in food poverty to farmers struggling to make a living, unions calling for a living wage for food workers to academics charting the economic and social impact of malnutrition, it's crucial we learn from each other in our mission to make the food system work better for everyone. We hope our event will help us here in Manchester to do just that.
Thanks to our fab speakers Rebecca O'Connell (Senior Research Officer, University of London), Pete Ritchie (Executive Director, Nourish Scotland), Niall Cooper (Director, Church Action on Poverty), Lynn Collins (Regional Secretary, North West TUC) and Ben Reynolds (Acting Co-ordinator, Sustain). Also to our wonderful caterers Real Junk Food Project who made an amazing stew from waste veg, and The Kitchen in Bolton who made a whole range of tasty delights with veg sourced from our partner co-operative Manchester Veg People.
The day was filmed and will be posted online soon. In the meantime, to get a snapshot of the day check out #makingfoodfair on twitter, or to find out more about how Kindling are working to make food fairer in Manchester, check out our projects at www.kindling.org.uk/projects
We'll leave you though with some food for thought from Pete Ritchie (Nourish Scotland)
"Hunger is political. A government that isn't feeding its people is failing its people".
Well said Pete.