About us
Nourish Scotland is a charity focusing on food policy and practice. We work for a fair, healthy and sustainable food system that truly values nature and people.
We take a systems approach to food. This means we work across a wide range of issues and levels: from production to consumption, from practice to policy, from grassroots to national. We champion integrated approach to solving the big challenges of the current food system: hunger and malnutrition, diet-related disease, exploitation, loss of biodiversity, and climate change.
We work towards 4 high-level aims in Scotland:
- Everyone has reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food
- Our food is grown, produced and distributed with care for the soil, climate and all the living world
- Food growers, producers, distributors and consumers share control over the food system
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A Scotland where we grow more of what we eat and eat more of what we grow
Our approach
We undertake evidence-based advocacy, informed by lived experiences of those at the sharp edge of current food problems. We help people to do things better and learn from others. We encourage and promote new ideas, and the people making them work.
We are intensely collaborative by nature. We work on the basis that ‘we go faster alone, but further together’. We believe, and try to practice, ‘with, not to’. We work through a number of NGO coalitions and with other actors including the food and drink industry, farmers, scientists and government at national and city level, building common cause.
We are positive. We have no doubt of the magnitude or urgency of the challenge: but we have a can-do orientation, recognise progress (in whichever sector) when we see it, and try to avoid ‘us and them’ thinking. We support good, and imagine better. We recognise that the future is already here, if not yet widely distributed.
Recent highlights
Our recent high profile work includes:
- initiating and co-convening the Farming for 1.5°C inquiry on how Scottish agriculture can best contribute to the climate targets
- hosting meetings with Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food
- initiating and draftinging – alongside other NGOs, UN agencies and subnational governments – the Glasgow Food and Climate Declaration ahead of COP26