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VALUE CREATED BY SOCIAL FOOD PROJECTS
Social food projects re-make relationships – between people, food and place – damaged by the commodity-based industrial agriculture system.

Social food projects focus on care, not just consumption.

Social food projects reconnect urban and rural in a spirit of mutual respect, and a practice of shared responsibility.

In the language of public policy – which determines how governments spend our taxes – social food projects create ‘public goods’. These public goods include: social cohesion, public health, territorial development, food sovereignty, farmer livelihoods, learning, innovation, and biodiversity.

Social food projects are a medium of hospitality, and therefore create solidarity and mutual understanding, among citizens of diverse cultures.

The direct participation of citizens in farm-based activities can diversify income for farmers, and reduce their social isolation. Socially-connected farmers add resilience to a region’s food system.

Social food projects are central to the emergence of new rural economies. They are pivotal in many ‘smart village’ and ‘smart neighbourhood’ projects in which relationships among social networks are enhanced by digital telecommunications.

So-called craft bread, and beer, are fast-growing alternatives to resource-intensive industrial products based on commodities.

Social food projects such as care farms increase the health and well-being of socially-isolated people, elders, or people with dementia.

Social food projects are a gateway for citizen participation in environmental restoration to increase biodiversity.

Seed saving and seed sharing networks are a staple form of sharing and mutual support in diverse local economies based on sharing and care.

Connecting the cultural meanings of food and agriculture, to stories of person, and place, adds value to sustainable tourism, too. Sites of alternative food production are visitor attractions in their own right; they also attract tourists away from over-visited city centres.

Social food projects revive cultural and natural heritage, and remake the social fabric and character of Europe’s landscapes.

Gardens and kitchens in schools and colleges are sites of social learning.

HOW TO DO MORE OF THIS WORK

All this is great, but social food projects do not organise themselves. They happen thanks to the work of social food producers and curators.

These individuals identify neglected assets in a community – such as projects, places, or individuals – and design ways to connect them in events, services and enterprises.

Social food producers create social infrastructure by enabling a wide variety of stakeholders to work together. As collaboration experts – people who connect people – their most valuable skills are hosting, convening, facilitating, animating, and co-ordinating.

However, because such work is not yet appreciated by public authorities, many social food producers work project-to-project, rather than long-term. As a result, they are often economically precarious.

The Social Food Forum identified a number of practical ways to address these challenges.

The online Social Food Atlas launched in Matera makes visible – and findable – a wide variety of social food projects that, right now, have been little known – even to each other.

The Atlas is a valuable resource for policymakers as a repository of stories and case studies that can be used to marshal support for alternative practices that are wished for by policy, but are already emerging on the ground.

Ways to measure the value created in social foods projects can also be important for policymakers. The Social Food Green Paper draws their attention to metrics and measurement systems that already exist. (Among these: True Value: Community Farms and Gardens published by the The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens in the UK; and Kilowatt Social Impact Analysis (Bilancio di Impatto).

Working with city and municipal authorities is a particular priority for most social food projects. Recycling organic solid waste into compost for urban agriculture, for example, can re-position food projects as critical urban infrastructure – not just as a recreational resource.

The integration of food projects into urban planning is in its infancy. Multi-agency co-operation platforms – such as those that enable bicycle use in cities – could be emulated for social food projects, too.

To achieve the continuity, and longer time-scales, that trust-based projects need, the Forum resolved to work with locally-embedded institutions. These range from pubs, local museums and libraries to community colleges and Folk High Schools.

Most museums have learning teams and budgets, for example. And although budgets for learning gardens are small to non-existent, budgets for schools and classrooms persist in most governmental budgets.

A lot of useful knowledge is being created by university research networks and scholars. Technical language, and introverted institutional cultures, means this knowledge can hard to access – but the effort needs to be made.

The Forum will seek to collaborate with European networks that link agricultural and rural stakeholders and whose work intersects with the social food agenda.

These include SIMRA (Social Innovation In Marginalised Rural Areas); HNV Link (High Nature Value Farming); and AESOP. @ARC2020eu and @ENRD_CP

The Forum is committed to share knowledge online.

We were inspired by the the way that the knitting platform Ravelry supports a community of six million members. We will also learn from the ways that millions of people in the software world have found ways to share complex information.

Forum members will learn most from each other by interacting with real-world projects.

In Matera, for example, members met with the team behind the AgorAgri – a community garden project to transform one of the city’s underused green spaces.

An important lesson emerged: a community garden is as much about growing a community as it is about growing plants – and that takes time.

The project’s first two years, we concluded, were probably a small proportion of the time that would be needed, long-term.

(A conversation is needed about ‘accelerationism’ in mainstream design. The celebration of ever-faster launch-and-learn approaches is at odds with the time needed to foster trust in a community).

Among other practical suggestions to the AgorAgri team: find out if any schools in Matera might use the garden as a living classroom. The European Federation of City Farms is a good source of advice.

The Forum resolved to share knowledge about promising event formats as they are discovered. The success of the Mammamiaaa dinner instructions was an encouraging benchmark.

Among other formats discussed in Matera: the contadinners organised by VaZapp in Italy; Ireland’s Learning Landscape Symposium; Disco Soupe in France; the Art of Invitation in England; Doors of Perception xskools; and Holis summer schools.

Trans-local and Place2Place meeting formats will take priority over the intensive air travel associated with global conferences.

Formats being considered include learning journeys, pilgrimages, and modern interpretations of the transhumance.

In European Union networks, so-called cross visits are in favour; someone suggested that we need an Erasmus exchange programme for food and agriculture

Our group included: VaZapp; Rete Semi Rurali; Il Querceto; Alce Nero; Wonder Grottole; Avanzi Popolo; Liminaria; Panecotto Ethical Bistro; Casa Netural and Agrinetural – allfrom Italy; plus Simra from Scotland; Germinando and Grupo Cooperativo Tangente from Spain; Sustainable Food Lab from Sweden; Doors of Perception from France; Holis from Hungary; Atelier Luma (France) with Cohabitation Strategies, and Urbania Hoeve Social Design Lab, from the Netherlands.

Note: For decades, the production of cheap food has taken place at the expense of people health and soil health The global system of commodity agriculture, in particular, has gravely damaged our relationships – with each other, with the land, and with nature. Commodities have no identity, no story, no place. Their dominance in global trade has therefore caused a loss of identity and community, especially in rural areas.

Further information:
Mammamiaaa https://www.mammamiaaa.it/en/archive/ Social Food Atlas https://www.mammamiaaa.it/en/atlas/
Social Food Green Paper https://www.mammamiaaa.it/en/green-paper/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mammamiaaa.it/

Contact:

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John, why do you think so much attention is being paid to the ideas around the notion of ’the commons’ right now?

The commons is an idea, and a practice, that generates meaning and hope. Millions of people are busy in projects to meet practical needs in these precarious times – but a lot of this work feels fragmented. We’ve been lacking an umbrella concept, a coordinating idea, to make sense o the work we do as individuals in the swarm. The Commons is that umbrella idea. Commoning gives shared meaning to the emerging ‘leave things better’ politics that otherwise lacks a name. It’s the opposite of the drive to turn everything into money,


Do you have your own favourite definition of ‘common wealth’?

I’m nervous of definitions; they cause endless disputes and also tend to freeze an idea in time. But I like the way Silke Helfrich talks about the commons as “all the things that we inherit from past generations that enable our livelihoods’.  Seen through that lens, the commons can include land, watersheds, biodiversity, common knowledge, software, skills, or public buildings and spaces.

The important thing is that the commons are a form of wealth that a community looks after, through the generations. The idea embodies a commitment to ‘leave things better’ rather than extract value from them as quickly as possible. They are the opposite of the impulse to monetise everything. And because the commons, as an idea, affirms our codependency with living systems and the biosphere, it also represents the new politics we’ve all been looking for to replace the industrial growth economy we have now.

None of this is new, by the way. The commons goes back an awfully long way. It describes the way communities managed shared land in Medieval Europe. Even earlier history, too, is filled with examples of communities managing common resources sustainably. Examples of water being shared as a commons date back 8,000 years.

When you spoke in Scotland last year (2013) you said that you believed that the arts had a transformative role, especially now, given the enormous challenges we face around climate change, resource scarcity and social injustice – can you expand a bit on that belief?


Twenty years ago, Susan Sontag posed a tricky question: “Why is it that, even when we are  exposed to  shocking stories and images, nothing seems to change?” Sontag was writing about war photography, but her words apply equally to environmental communications. We’ve been exposed, for 40 years, to a stream of shocking maps, images, and visualizations – ‘doomer porn’, as some call it. But passively watching this gloomy news has produced more guilt and denial than transformational change.

What we need are positive triggers that reawaken a joyful sense of being at home in the natural world. This is where art and storytelling come in. They can tweak our interest, redirect our attention, and start conversations in ways that hectoring communications never do.

As you’ve reminded us, Clare, Marcel Poust memorably said “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes”.

Do rural communities have a special role in helping all of us respond to these challenges?


Rural communities have an important role to play as hosts of new kinds of ‘active travel’ – from Wwoofing to Fibershedding – that involve an exchange of value, not just the purchase of a package. Making new connections between cities and their surrounding rural areas, and bringing in new internet platforms and Peer-To-Peer business models, combines tourism development with creative place making. New forms of guided tour and learning journeys are emerging that take people to novel destinations that are only now being described: watersheds, bioregions, ecomuseums, food routes, industrial heritage sites.

I’m not just talking about recuperative weekend trips to nature, here: People are looking for  activities that contribute in a tangible way. This trend is enabled by new business models such as Peer-2-Peer travel and the sharing economy. Think AirBNB: it didn’t exist a few years ago but is now the world’s largest hotel.

Our Cateran’s Common Wealth project is just beginning. When you visited with us in July (2014) what struck you most about what you saw and experienced in relation to what we want to try and achieve?

Many of the ingredients are already present: Buildings, biodiversity, landscapes – and above all, passionate, knowledgeable and committed people. It’s a lot of fun here! The next phase is to explore ways to connect and leverage these individual assets in ways that help them do better. In this, we’re pushing on an open door: there’s a growing demand for forest awareness, ecological camping, biodiversity trails and suchlike. I’m super-confident the project can act as a catalyst that inspires residents and visitors alike to revalue our ‘common wealth’.

Are other communities around the world trying to do something similar to us?

I have collected dozens of examples! In Slovenia, I met some bee fanatics who’ve adapted their ancient tradition of Pilgrim Tours to create hiking routes that take people to centres of Slovene apiculture: mead breweries, gingerbread workshops, apitherapy clinics.

On the Andaman Islands, in Thailand, guests spend time replanting mangrove forests. http://www.andamandiscoveries.com

In Rajasthan, the Arna-Jharna Museum, founded by one of India’s leading folklorists and oral historians, celebrates the open spaces of the desert, including its flora and fauna, as part of a larger holistic exploration of the museum as a place of learning.

We’re planning to deepen our work with you in the near future, can you explain what you are going to try and help us do?

My main contribution is threefold. First, I’ll be a kind of talent-scout who turns up in town and celebrates the unique but neglected assets that are easy for local people to take for granted. To this end, I’ll be chivvying you to make short films and paper artefacts that enable others to learn about the potential of the area.

My second input will be to help you turn “would-be-nice” ideas into service prototypes that can be the basis of sustainable livelihoods in the longer term.

My third contribution will be to connect you with innovators in other places who will be keen to share knowledge and experiences.

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