Home grown

Here’s a sign of our difficult times. The food charity Fareshare now operates through 17 main distribution centres nationwide. It works with more than 700 charities and other organisations to tackle food poverty, redistributing ‘surplus fit-for-purpose products from the food and drinks industry’ to more than 35,000 people every day, many of which are social tenants.

Not only does it put healthy food in the mouths of the poor, it also brings disadvantaged people, who would not otherwise seek help, into contact with services that can offer them other support. Certainly, as a result of the scheme, community workers at the well-used Fareshare outlet in my ward and at the Brighton Women’s Centre have made first contact with many families in desperate need and sometimes facing weekends with bare cupboards.

Waste not, want not

Fareshare is also kind to the environment. It reduces the obscene food waste in the UK, where about 18 million tonnes of expensive, fit to be eaten food ends up in equally expensive landfill every year, and it helped cut carbon emissions by 1,800 tonnes in 2010/11. At a time of rising food prices, it also cuts disposal costs that the food industry, inevitably, passes on to customers.

Many social landlords are involved in the growing number of local food partnerships that take another and important approach to tackling food poverty, and a host of other social and community problems. Taking advantage of the explosion of interest in food growing, many partnerships are involving residents in community projects on council and housing estates.

In Greater London, for example, fruit and vegetables are grown through the capital growth initiative on more than 600 plots in 12 boroughs, including Camden, Hackney, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets and Islington. The initiative supports more than 100 food growing projects on council estates, in schools and public parks through the edible Islington project. London & Quadrant, Metropolitan Housing Trust, Peabody and Tower Hamlets Homes are among the 10 social landlords providing plots for the scheme, which aims to create more than 2,000 plots by the end of next year.

Elsewhere, Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing in Huddersfield is developing grow your own schemes and community gardens on its estates and is providing growing areas on raised beds at sheltered schemes. A ‘back to roots’ allotment project in Nottingham was set up to help reduce diabetes among members of the Asian community by promoting physical exercise and healthy eating.

Harvest Brighton & Hove supports more than food growing: it has 100 projects across the city, among them delivering food to council estates and to an Aids/HIV hospice where much of the produce goes into the kitchen to provide meals for service users.

Super saver

Cash-strapped Sussex University students grow their own vegetables, Brighton’s YMCA runs a community allotment project for vulnerable housing tenants, and women and children tend a vegetable garden at the Rise women’s refuge. Another initiative, ‘grow your neighbours’ own’, pairs up frustrated gardeners who have nowhere to grow their own food with older or disabled people who can no longer manage their gardens or allotments.

The value of putting affordable and healthy food on people’s tables at a time of economic hardship should not be underestimated. In extreme circumstances in the past, community food growing has saved lives. Once the debris was cleared in Berlin, for example, at the end of World War II, Berliners used every available space for growing crops to supplement their meagre rations. Indeed, for a long period the ruined Reichstag parliament building stood in the middle of a vast and impromptu allotment.

Closer to home and in a different, but challenging age, food growing projects offer many benefits to social landlords, their tenants and the wider community. Tenants work together to help promote community cohesion. Locally grown produce saves distribution miles, helps cut carbon emissions and eases traffic congestion. The projects, many of which are supported by primary care trusts, are a vehicle for general health education and are used to promoting healthy eating. The mental and physical health gains of gardening and food growing are numerous. Some projects are used successfully to steer young people away from anti-social behaviour. Critically, this work encourages biodiversity at a time when the United Nations estimates three species an hour are lost worldwide to urbanisation, deforestation, overfishing, climate change and invasive species.

Food for thought

It is time all local authorities and housing associations explored the possibilities of setting up food projects on their estates and other land they own. It is difficult to believe we will ever be able to return to the profligate way we have lived in the past, nor, indeed, should we. We must look at new ways of living in a more self-sufficient way.

While we are not in the position of Berliners in 1945, we are in serious difficulties with a rapidly growing world population producing many millions more mouths to feed and pushing up food prices. It makes a huge amount of sense to produce as much home-grown food as possible, and we all have a small but important part to play.

Social landlords have a key role in all this. Many have already grasped the nettle and are supporting this important work. I urge those who have not to dig in and start growing.

Bill Randall is a Green Party councillor, leader of Brighton & Hove Council, and a housing journalist