The way we grow, distribute and eat food needs to be radically
transformed. The million different brands in your local
supermarket might give you a dazzling choice, but is deciding
which of the 10 brands of granola you’d like to eat, alone and in
a rush, really the choice you want? For most of us there are
fewer real options, with many of the brands on the shelves out of
our price range.
The prolonged period of austerity plunged thousands of people
into poverty. With poverty comes food insecurity, increased
foodbank use and massively reduced choice. The market-driven
distribution of food is failing to provide tasty, nutritious
meals for all. Food ought to be decommodified.
The National Food Service campaign proposes community dining as a
solution that Labour needs to get behind. Cooking and eating
together is more cost-effective, sustainable, and enjoyable than
eating alone. Studies have shown that regularly eating alone is
one of the biggest factors in mental ill-health. But eating
together is a vital part of human existence that seems to have
been forgotten in modern Britain.
We live in a time where public dining is conspicuously absent
from our towns and cities. It was not always this way. Spaces for
sharing food have a long history. From the earliest moments of
civilisation, communities organised their settlements around the
campfire, where they not only cooked food but socialised and
played. In ancient Greece, there were grand public buildings
devoted to sharing meals, where political issues were
discussed and young people were inducted into full membership of
their towns and cities. The suffragettes ran neighbourhood food
purchasing co-ops, and cooked food together to share the burden
of women’s domestic work. In both world wars, when people were
hungry, or had lost their kitchens in air raids, the government
organised the ‘national kitchens’ – public dining halls which
served food for today’s equivalent of £1 a head. In 1943, there
were 2,160 of these, and they served 600,000 meals every day.
People come together around the dinner table. In Rojava, the
threatened Kurdish region in Syria, restorative justice is
currently being practiced. Rather than a punishment and
prison-based system, justice in Rojava can mean two families eat
together to make peace. In a country divided on Brexit, we need
opportunities to step outside our immediate circles. But our
public spaces, centred around spending, do not foster
interactions with new people. Sitting and eating with others
could break down these barriers. In public dining rooms there are
hundreds of anecdotes of people building relationships with each
other across the usual boundaries.
This is why activists from the Foodhall project in Sheffield have
been working to develop the National Food Service campaign.
Foodhall is a prototype National Food Service venue, where people
from all walks of life can cook and eat food together on a
‘contribute what you can’ basis. Unlike a foodbank, Foodhall sees
the community meal not just as emergency food provision, but as
the stepping stone to a plethora of social goods. Community
architecture designed around food sharing can become the backbone
of flourishing, caring neighbourhoods and cities.
The word ‘resilient’ has become diluted by people using it to
make light of government cuts. ‘Resilience’ cannot undo the
violence of austerity – state support is needed to achieve food
equality. However, in the event of climate collapse, which may
well be within our lifetime, we’ll need communities that know how
to look after each other. Community run dining spaces are
practice for this.
There are many organisations up and down the country practicing
communal dining. These include networks like FoodCycle and The
Real Junk food project, Eid meals held in mosques, coffee
mornings held in churches and school holiday lunch clubs. Many of
these organisations redistribute food to reduce waste. The
reduction of food waste, whilst vital in a society where an
increasing number of people are becoming reliant
on foodbanks, is not our primary goal. Once no more food is
wasted and when no one lives in poverty, communal meals will
still be valuable. Cooking and eating together is not just a
solution to the problems we’re facing now, it’s how our eating
culture ought to be organised forever. We need to invest in these
ideas, and transform them from local activism to a new cohesive
public service. It’s our hope that councils will benefit from
increased budgets, allowing them to invest in community projects,
giving them permanent spaces with affordable rents and protecting
community space by supporting community land trusts and
cooperatives.
We were thrilled when the previous shadow environment secretary
announced a role for
‘community kitchens’ in Labour’s policies on food. With the
party’s renewed commitment to nationalised industry, we hope food
remains high on the agenda.
