Embodied Values fifediet

THE FIFE DIET - A LOCAL FOOD EXPERIMENTEmbodied Values,

Bringing the Senses Back to the Environment University of Edinburgh - November 2010

• Who am I?• A brief overview of the Fife

Diet• Taste & Locality• Changing the Metric

Who Am I?

Mike Small BA, MA, FRSAInstitute for Social Ecology 1994-1996

Programming the Big Tent Festival 2006-2010Lecture UNESCO Chair of Sustainable Development,Turin University 2007 -Director, Fife Diet, Scottish Government Climate Challenge Fund 2007 - ?

A brief overview of the Fife Diet• Started from a sense that there was

something fundamentally wrong with the food system

• Ate food only from Fife for a year with pilot group (Oct 2007 - 2008)

• Developed from an informal network to a movement for change around food (2007-2010)

• Publishing carbon foodprint reports on 100 research volunteers and now all members (1500+)

• ‘The biggest local food project in Europe’ The Independent

• Aims to deliver stronger communities through enhanced local economy, healthier unprocessed fresh food and food with lower carbon impact

Our 5 Pledges for Low Carbon Sustainable Food

• Eat local (defined bio-regionally)

• Eat less meat

• Eat more organic

• Reduce food waste

• Compost More

What has worked in our project

• Eating together

• Being honest about the realities of change requiredMotivating through pledges

• Strategic Use of Social Media

• Not engaging in ‘general awareness rising’

• Looking after children

• Not being patronising

• Combining global picture with local realities and practicalities

Use of Social Media

Our members have a carbon foodprint between 40-50% below the UK average on food, rising to 80%.

Source: Fife Diet Carbon Report, June 2010

10 Rules for Communicating on Climate Change

• Big Picture• Technically correct• Be cool• Only stories work• Optimism• Glory button• Change is for all• We need more

heroes• Personal circle

Source: futerra

Additional criteria: engage the senses and act collectively or collaboratively.

Obstacles to Change that is Sustained, Credible and Immediate:

Surround sound, Hegemony of Increment and Techno-Babble

The Daily Mail bag campaign- “a British family on their weekly shop - but their bags could be killing our wildlife”

Surround Sound

Hegemony of Increment

• Adopt little steps• Adopt marketing

strategies• Focus on green

consumerism• Create offers which

are easy, painless• Use non-

environmental motivations (-£)

• Use celebrity endorsements (‘Nicole Ritchie loves the planet’)Source: Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity, Tom Crompton WWF

Taste & Locality

• Dislocated places don’t taste of anything in particular

• Industrialised food doesn’t taste of anything in particular

• It doesn’t matter what the food you eat in front of the telly tastes of

• It doesn’t matter what ‘convenient food’ tastes of

• In post-industrial Scotland taste and locality is a non-starter

Taste Revelations

• Embedded sugar and salt

• Myth of choice and what this means for taste

• Herbs matter

• Food tastes of something

Food as restorative practice

• Few other systems touch people's daily lives in such an intimate way and thereby provide such a strong motivation and opportunity for citizenship … Food, like no other commodity, allows for a political awakening … draws on and helps nurture authentic relationship …[and] suggests both belonging and participating, at all levels of relationship (Welsh and MacRae, 1998: 240-41).

The sixth sense?

• Taste and seasonality are both about savouring a moment in time

• Appreciation of quality versus uniformity and quantity

• Nuance over ‘consistency’ as virtues

• Things pass and decay and have their moment ...and that is allowed

• Allowing the variant gene…difference is good

Changing the Metric

What is going to help create local seasonal food is a shift in our metric…

from desperate craving to taste and pleasurefrom weekly shopping to daily shoppingfrom convenience to savouring the experiencefrom high-tech to spade and dungfrom global to localfrom local to neighbourhoodfrom highly processed to fresh, raw and simply cookedfrom infinite choice to seasonalityfrom fast food to slow foodfrom food experts to democratic foodfrom community gardens to community agriculture

and a shift in our planning and infrastructure to allow…

tight restrictions on supermarketslarge-scale restructuring of urban space (from parks and gardens to allotments)but more crucially urban agriculture

“Until recently, anyone who suggested nationalising the banks would have been derided as a ‘quack’ and a ‘crank’, as lacking the most basic understanding of the functioning of a ‘complex, globalised world’. The grip of ‘orthodoxy’ disqualified the idea, and many more, without the need even to offer a counter-argument.”

Place, proximity, intimacy, immediacy & scale…

Place needs to be reclaimed and re-understood - by mapping our foodsheds and by understanding what our city-regional can appropriately produce


Proximity needs to be reconceptualised - food miles are not just about carbon, they are about developing a sustainable local economy and the externality of costs


Intimacy needs to be reclaimed - not as a moralistic nagging but as a new relationship - the opposite of detached and invisible. ‘Nabacht’ versus ‘bowling alone’


• Immediacy maybe we need to rethink this not as next day delivery but as having some control over your food system, and some control over what you eat.


Our sense of Scale needs to be re-understood - currently there is no cereal mill between this and a 10,000 ton mill in Kelso. Our food systems are currently structured for mass and uniform production, export growth and next day distribution.

It’s the ecology [email protected]://fifediet.co.uk/