Lobby for change

The aim of Eat the Change is to make government, and other decision-makers, sit up and take action! The impact of your belly rumbling week will be dramatically increased if you sign the pledge at www.pledgebank.com/eatthechange and write to your MP.

Communities are increasingly eating and demanding more local organic food with less packaging.  Meanwhile the UK Government is turning a blind-eye and instead pursuing bio-technical fixes to the current food related health and environmental crises we are facing. Rather than investing in re-localisation and de-industrialisation, the UK Government wants to tweak our current supermarket-dominated global system, to make it more resilient to the health, environmental and economic crises we are facing.

Take action!
Write to your MP to tell them about Eat the Change and ask them to ensure that the Government:

- Puts a halt to its current pursuit of bio-techincal fixes to solve our increasing food crises

- Invests instead in exploring real solutions by working with NGOs and community groups who represent the needs of communities and the environment, rather than responding to the interests of big business and the economy.

Visit www.theyworkforyou.com to find out who your MP is and to send an email to them.

Your MP is just a normal person, so don’t feel intimidated writing to them. Simply write from your heart about why you feel the Government needs to take action to increase the availability of local, organic food that is free from packagaing.

Please forward your MPs reply to bristolfoodhub@googlemail.com so we can help you respond to them and get a sense of which MPs are being lobbied.

You might want to mention:

- What That Eat the Change is (give them the website address), that lots of people are taking part (we will keep a record of numbers on the website) and that this time is more of a pilot project that we hope will be run on a much bigger scale next year.

- That Eat the Change is a response to our frustration with Government’s emphasis on ‘consumer choice’, in the absence of real sustainable food choices.

- That our current food system is responsible for a third of human’s contribution to climate change and 18% of greenhouse gas emissions and that supporting local organic food production would go along way towards addressing climate change and peak oil and increasing sustainability.

- How concerned you are about the devastating effects of our current globalised food system on our health - such that the NHS now spends some £6 billion each year on diet related ill-health.

- That the current global food system has not developed ‘naturally’ at the will of the market’s invisible hand. It has rather developed thanks in large part to rich country intervention in the form of support to multinational food and farming companies and the shaping of international trade rules that have devastated small farmers across the world.  

- That you can see for yourself in Bristol that land for growing is being lost to housing and other developments, rather than being increased to respond to the needs and demands of Bristol’s communities.

- You want central government to reform land and planning policies such that Local Authorities are able to ring-fence land for food production.

- You also want your Local Authority / Council to ensure that whatever public land is currently available for food production is ring fenced for this purpose and that they fully consult communities over the use/ selling of land for developments such as housing, at the expense of land for community food production.

- That you want to live in a neighbourhood that is abundant with food growing, not only because this means your food is fresher, more nutritious and more affordable - or free, but also because being surrounded by beautiful fruit and nut trees and vegetables and herbs is vital for your quality of life.

- Introducing more sustainable food production into communities is a great way to reconnect people with where their food comes from and to get them involved in growing thier own food - which is also great exercise!

- That you are concerned about the irreversible effect non-organic farming is having on our soils and what this means for the future of food and farming in the UK and our health.

- That we really need to support local food producers and retailers in the face of increasing supermarket sprawl, as they are key to strengthening our local economies.

- That you welcome the Competition Commission’s recommendation that the Government should introduce an independent ombudsman to oversee supermarkets and strengthen the supermarkets’ Code of Conduct. However the Government’s investigation into, and regulation of supermakets urgently needs to go beyond just competition issues, to address the impacts supermarkets are having on the health and wellbeing of communities and the environment. See www.tescopoly.org for more information and actions.

(The Competition Commission Inquiry into the grocery market had a very narrow remit to only investigate supermarket dominance with respect to its effect ‘consumer choice’. It was therefore not able to consider the myriad other problems that supermarkets are responsible for.)

- You are concerned that supermarkets are not only promoting an extremely unhealthy and unsustainable food culture, but they are also destroying the lifeblood of communities by bringing about the demise of our hight street and draining money from the lcoal economy, and siphoning it instead to the pockets of shareholders and CEOs.

For more information on the problems of our global food system - and to become bven more inspired and motivated to Eat the Change read:

Eat your heart out: why the food business is bad for the planet and your health - by Felicity Lawrence

Stuffed and Starved - by Raj Patel (great global food analysis)

For more information on the Government’s curent approach to food and farming check out:

Food Matters: towards a strategy for the 21st century (Cabinet Office report open for consultation)

Ensuring the UK’s food security in a changing world (DEFRA discussion paper - open for consultation)

Cabinet Office’s food section (compreehesive food analysis)