Ayrshire inquiry on fairer food

 

Something doesn’t quite match up. Ayrshire – which encompasses large swathes of countryside south of Glasgow and the bountiful Isle of Arran – is a food-producing region. It has fisheries, farmland and a large dairy sector. Potatoes are one of its claims to fame: the Ayrshire earlies. Still, potatoes on offer in one local supermarket are imported from India. Plus, Ayrshire has a rising number of people experiencing household food insecurity or suffering from diet-related diseases – or often both. The so-called ‘Scottish paradox’ seems even more absurd at the regional level. The food system is failing to feed people in Ayrshire well and it’s failing those on lower incomes most of all.

 

So what would be a better place to start asking questions about food and fairness in Scotland? At Nourish, we think that change often starts with bringing an unusual mix of people in one room together to dig deeper into the issues at stake. Questions before answers. That’s why in autumn 2015 we decided to host a collective inquiry asking how food can become fairer in Ayrshire, exploring the complex links between food, inequalities and social justice.

 

We invited producers, local food entrepreneurs, health professionals, community developers, local authorities and community planning partnerships from across Ayrshire to take part in three inquiry sessions in October and November. The Ayrshire Community Trust kindly offered to host us in their premises in Ardrossan. In between the sessions, participants used research methodologies from Theory U and the online U.Lab course that the Local Government and Communities Directorate of the Scottish Government encouraged local groups to embark on this autumn. The participants shadowed each other in their different work places and went on a ‘learning journey’ to Overland Farm, the dairy farm of one of the participants, Wallace Hendrie.

 

Fairness & control

One of the main questions we asked during the inquiry was: Whom does the food system need to be fair to? Not surprisingly in Ayrshire, milk turned out to be our way in. In the first session, we reflected on who/what is potentially impacted by the small container of milk that came with our coffees. Indeed, not only our own health is at stake as we pour milk into our cups. Whether we want it or not, we’re linked up with the fate of the cows, ‘the planet’, the dairy farmers, the processors, the people in the Global South affected by the production of the soy many of our cows are fed on, etc… The container of milk brought it home to us (again) that the food system is complex. Because we’re looking at the system as a whole, we have to take into consideration all of the actors involved before we can decide whether a product, project, policy or state of affairs is truly fair.

 

When considering public health outcomes, household food insecurity, the current plight of farmers and the huge amount of food waste, we found that fairness is tied to questions of control: Who actually decide what we eat and drink, who shape the food system? Wallace Hendrie, who currently sells his milk to one of the big milk conglomerates that in turn is supplying the supermarkets, shared how he has no control whatsoever over the price paid for his product at the farm gate or what happens to it after it leaves the farm. And to what extent do we as consumers of milk have influence over, for example, the welfare of cows on Scottish farms?

 

Fairness & care

Fairness is also tied to care. Those who visited Hendrie’s farm during the ‘learning journey’ witnessed how much care he gives to his cows. The whole farm, from the quality of the grass to the alleyways leading to the milking parlour, is designed with one single aim in mind: to keep the cows as healthy as possible, to help them thrive. To Wallace it’s obvious: Caring for the (natural and built) farm environment means healthy cows means healthy milk.

 

In the inquiry we wondered: What if we gave the same amount of care and attention to our citizens, and especially to our children? What would our cities and towns, our schools, our health and social care services look like if we took a more proactive approach to public health? Food and nutrition would be centre-stage, we agreed. At the moment, to speak with the American farmer and critic Wendel Berry, it seems like “we have a health system that doesn’t care about nutrition and a food system that doesn’t care about health.”

 

One example of a project we heard about that takes a more integrative approach, is The More Project. Participant Iain Wallace and a dozen other farmers from Ayrshire and Bute are trying to encourage public procurement of locally produced dairy products with high nutritional value for schools and care homes.

 

At the end of the third session, something had become clear: A fairer society, and a fairer food system as part and parcel of this, is about every one of us, from farmers to citizens, being able to take more control of our lives, so that we can take better care of ourselves, of others and of the world we live in. For this to be realised, we have to be bold and challenge the norm.

 

Public event: food and fairness in a historical perspective

The inquiry culminated in an event on the 11th of November that Nourish organised together with the North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partership. Around 40 local people from different backgrounds came together to explore how we got to where we are now, drawing from the food-related memories and experiences of local residents, and how the regional food system can become fairer. In the morning, we asked: How did families in Ayrshire get by from 1940 to now? We heard about how local shops created a sense of community and also about the important service they offered to buy food on tab until wages came in, and the differences between growing up in a Glasgow tenement and rural Ayrshire. In Ayrshire, no matter how poor you were, people rarely went without food. They grew vegetables in their back gardens, shared produce, fished and sometimes, in more dire times, they got together to poach for geese, as one resident shared.

 

In the afternoon of the event, we did a collective visioning of what we would want the food system to look like ten years from now, in 2025, building on what worked and what didn’t work well in the past. Then we spent time in small groups discussing how we would get there and what would be our priorities of action – the first being to create a space to continue this conversation.

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Jo Gibson from the North Ayrshire Health & Social Care Partnership frames the day.

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We were served a 1950s and a 2015 school lunch – both very tasty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The North Ayrshire Health & Social Care Partnership are currently writing up the report of the day, which we’ll make available here on our website. We’ll also keep building on this work with partners in Ayrshire. One outcome of the inquiry is the consideration of a potential bid to the new Ayrshire LEADER programme to look at the development of shorter supply chains and better local food networks.

 

At Nourish, we’re also feeding the outcomes of inquiry and public event into the Fairer Scotland consultation – as part of which the Scottish Government is asking for input into a vision to create a fairer Scotland by 2030. At the same time, it seems important that this agenda is widely shared across local Community Planning Partnerships and Health and Social Care Partnerships.