FoodFutures is supporting North Lancashire to work towards a Gold Sustainable Food Places Award. Anna Clayton shares what this will involve and invites you to join this golden food journey.
Across the UK, local movements are bringing together growers, distributors, cooks, eaters, teachers, and composters to make healthy, sustainable, local food a feature of where they live.
If a place can demonstrate a joined-up, holistic approach that has had a significant impact on improving its local food system, it can put itself up for a prestigious Sustainable Food Places (SFP) Award.
In 2023, North Lancs received a Silver SFP award – acknowledging progress made across six different areas of the food system, including action on food waste and food poverty, up-scaling sustainable local food production, and the introduction of procurement policies that support healthy, fair, and local food.
But it doesn’t end there; in Spring 2024, the FoodFutures partnership agreed to support North Lancashire in going for the Gold Award by 2026. It’s not going to be easy. It will involve supporting more businesses, organisations and individuals to get involved in creating a more healthy, resilient and fair local food system. It will mean attracting more political and institutional buy-in to our region’s food strategy, for example by helping institutions purchase more local and sustainable food. We’ll need to support activities across the area that promote a thriving food system, including supporting the activities highlighted in the Silver Award to grow and develop.
The SFP Network also agreed that North Lancs should focus on developing two key areas:
FOCUS 1: Building a more sustainable and just food economy from the ground up. This will include developing new partnerships around solidarity economy ideas and a new community farm; developing a business network aligned with the Good Food Manifesto.; training new growers via the FarmStart scheme at The Plot’s organic market garden; growing and developing Gather, a new food hub, which allows sustainable local food producers to sell and deliver their produce via an online platform.
FOCUS 2: The food ladder approach: supporting people in moving from a crisis where they are reliant on food aid, to a position of food sovereignty.
By tackling these two focus areas together, FoodFutures aims to challenge a two-tier system where the wealthy are supported to grow, cook and eat healthy organic food, while those at risk of food insecurity are expected to exist through donations of surplus food. It’s only by tackling social and environmental justice TOGETHER that a community can truly thrive.
To find out more about the two focus areas above and how you can help North Lancashire in working towards a Gold Sustainable Food Places Award visit: foodfutures.org.uk/north-lancs-is-golden/
