Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations of that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And as we head down towards the end of the year, it is stirringly obvious that we are at an inflection point in the history of humanity. Our experiment with a notional democracy that was only ever really a kleptocracy is failing, and either we find something now that actually works or we sink into autocracy, I would say. And given that the current global flavour of autocracy is in deep denial about the climate and ecological catastrophe that is happening around us, then that's a pretty fast road to extinction. You cannot deny your way out of biophysical reality. So given that, what can we do? We who care deeply about passing an inhabitable, even a thriving world to the generations who are not yet born. There are all kinds of answers to that, but I would say at heart, we all need clean water, clean air, safe shelter, and good, nutritious food.
Manda: And we are rapidly heading for a space where just accessing these will become more of a priority, will take up more of our time and our attention and our creativity than our recent experiment with unleashing ancient sunlight has led us to believe. But more than this, the community that grows around these, particularly the growing and sharing of food, is a good part of the glue that holds us together. We are a pro-social species. We are astonishingly creative when we put our minds to it. So what happens when we put our minds to creative ways of growing and sharing food that are founded in solid values of cohesion and connection? And one of the answers to this is the Open Food Network, which is a global community of farmers, growers, community food enterprises and software geeks; all of whom have a common belief that the world food systems are broken and that better, more connected, open, resilient systems can be built in their place. So they're doing just this around the world. And this week, our guest is Nick Weir, who helped to set up the Open Food Network in the UK. As you'll hear, Nick has a background in IT account management, but he's also a long term grower who founded the Stroud Co Food Hub and Stroud Community Agriculture.
Manda: And he's deeply passionate about the role of innovative food systems in creating a kinder, more connected society and the ways in which the Open Food Network can model a new way of working, which empowers people to bring more of themselves, their real selves, their authentic selves, to everything that they do. So if you're feeling crushed by the global political chaos, I hope this conversation cheers you as it did me, with living examples of change happening on the ground and the ripple effects it can have; and the Open Food Network is open, if there isn't a hub where you live, you can create one. There are lots of links in the show notes, and Nick will talk through all of the values that lie behind this. It's genuinely an exciting experiment in all that could happen if we all got together. And definitely now is the time and we can be the people. So here we go, people of the podcast, please do welcome Nick Weir of the Open Food Network.
Manda: Nick, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this rather misty December afternoon.
Nick: Thank you. Where am I is easy; I'm in Stroud, in Gloucestershire. The how am I is complex. I'm well in myself and in my bubble. I'm well. But I find it hard to be content when the world is in the state it's in. So as well as can be expected. Thank you.
Manda: Yes, I think you probably just spoke for everybody listening to the podcast, except for those who are not well at the moment. But yeah, I think each of us is finding it harder increasingly to watch the world. My sense is that we needed total systemic change and it wasn't happening any other way. And I was speaking to somebody yesterday who is very much better connected in echelons of people who can pull levers and who said a lot of people are working very hard behind the scenes to ensure that it doesn't go the way it seems like it's going. So that gave me better sleep last night.
Nick: Good.Yes.
Manda: And you are part of the Open Food Network, which sounds like an astonishingly generous and generative and open and beautiful space that is part of the new world that we need to build. So from the top, tell us about the Open Food Network and particularly tell us how you came to be involved with it. Over to you.
Nick: Thank you. So maybe I can do those in reverse order, tell you how I came to be involved first. I'm a part time grower on a very small but long standing community supported agriculture project here in Stroud. So I've been working with other people to grow my own food for a long time, and I'm very keen that we eat food that's grown and produced, and it has to be processed as close as possible to where we are, where the people who are eating it.
Manda: So just before we go on, give us a sense of how small is small. How many of you are there and do you sell some of the produce locally as well?
Nick: Okay. There are eight families and we have between us taken on five allotments on a regular town allotment site. We took on the first one 25 years ago, and we've now built it up to five allotments. We don't want to get any bigger. A lot of people want to join us, but we reckon that eight households is about as big as we want to get. We do have surpluses and we have various ways of processing them. We have an amazing organisation in Stroud that is working to feed everybody who needs to be fed on a basis that you pay if you can, what you can, and they take our surplus produce. When I come on to the Open Food Network, we can talk a little bit about how surpluses from allotments are being fed in small quantities. But a lot of small quantities being fed into this distribution system that I'll talk about in a moment.
Manda: And for people outside of the UK for whom allotment is a phrase that probably doesn't mean very much. Can you just explain what an allotment is, please?
Nick: Of course. So every town in the UK has a legal responsibility, the local council, the local authority has a legal responsibility to provide food growing space for every household that needs and wants to have food growing space. There is a regulation amount of land. It's quite a small piece of land. It's probably about a quarter of an acre, but each household has a right to a small piece of land to grow food for themselves and their family, and to distribute surplus as they see fit.
Manda: And we are, I realise, already down a rabbit hole. But let's stay with this, because I haven't spoken to anyone on the podcast who's an allotmenteer before. It seems to me, looking at the allotments around where I live that some of them are almost militarily regimented. The huts are all the same size. They're all painted the same colour. Everything's very neat and it looks as if, frankly, it's sprayed to hell in between all the bits. You know, there's going to be glyphosate everywhere. And I look at it and it makes every part of my body cringe. And then others look like they're completely alive. And then others have obviously been abandoned. Your five allotments, are there lots of others with them? Are there allotment regulations that you have to fit with?
Nick: There are allotment regulations. We are very established there now, so several of the people in our little project are represented on the committee. So they do have a voice.
Manda: That's handy, eh?
Nick: Which is always very useful. We're also lucky that we are tucked up in the corner of the allotment site, so we have relatively few borders with with other allotmenteers. But one of the things that I'm really interested in is social cohesion. That if we are going to change the world, we need to take everybody with us. And what I love about the allotment site is that there are some old school dyed in the wool flat cap allotmenteers, who were very suspicious of what we were doing up in the corner there. And why were we doing a four year rotation around five plots? And they were clearly not individual plots, and we all worked together and all that seemed a bit odd to these older, generally men, who had traditionally kept their allotment to themselves. And in some cases, yes, sprayed it to death with all sorts of horrible things. But over time, what people have realised is that because we are working collectively and because we cover for each other, so if I do go away for a week in May, I don't come back to weeds that are knee high. And because we have a watering rotor and we take it in turns in the summer to make sure everything's watered. And we do grow entirely agro ecologically. And people are really noticing that the level of fertility and the level of the fertility of the site is just generally incredibly alive. So I think over time, people have come around to our way of thinking. Yeah.
Manda: Right. So in terms of social cohesion, which clearly is one of the things we have to evolve if we're going to get to the places that we need to get to. Are you able to bring some of the more modern social technologies like Sociocracy or Holacracy or anything like that into the allotment, or is it still run along standard democratic lines?
Nick: Yeah, I would love to talk about Sociocracy, and if it's all right with you to talk about it in the context of the Open Food Network.
Manda: So first tell us what the Open Food Network is then. Let's go down that slightly bigger rabbit hole than we went before.
Nick: Yes. Good. Okay. So the Open Food Network is a global community of farmers, growers, food producers of every kind, and software geeks, with a common belief across the whole community that the food systems of the world are broken and that we are in the process of rebuilding them from the bottom up. So 15 years ago, two women in Australia, who had been working for the Australian government, chose to leave working for the Australian government in the food systems area, because they wanted to build something that met that need. A fairer, more transparent, more resilient, healthier food system. And they saw this opportunity to build it from the bottom up. So the Open Food Network is a piece of software. Going back a step, we believe that the reason global food systems are broken are largely due to issues of ownership and control, and that if we're going to build a new system from the bottom up, it needs to be in open ownership and joint control. So the platform is and always has been open source. And that's the word open in the Open Food Network. And we are incredibly passionate about the importance of the technology that we're developing being in common ownership.
Manda: Can I just ask a question because I diverted you before you told us how you got involved? Are you a software geek as well as a grower?
Nick: No, no.
Manda: Okay. I won't ask you any geeky questions.
Nick: I end up using quite a lot of geeky language because I'm starting to understand it. But if you ask me any detailed questions, I would be out of my depth.
Manda: Well, we wouldn't anyway, because the listeners wouldn't be interested. But okay, so we've got the existing system is broken. I think that's a really interesting base point to start with. And it needs to be open, fair and equitable, and and ownership needs to be spread and not concentrated in a few. So two people from Australia 15 years ago, pick up where you left off.
Nick: So they started to build the beginnings of the Open Food Network, which is so much more than the software platform and I don't want to get stuck on this, but the software platform is incredible. It enables anybody producing food to profile themselves for free. There's no cost whatsoever. We want as many people to profile themselves. And when I say food producer, it can be anybody from field scale agricultural process through to somebody who has an apple tree in their back garden and they want to sell a few apples, and in the autumn. So every scale of food producer. They can talk about themselves. We encourage them to talk about their food growing practices, about their ethics and their approach to food. And they are encouraged to give as many contact details as they like, and then to list their products and to give as much detail about the products, individual products as possible. And then they can do 1 or 2 things. They can just sit there and wait for someone to notice them and to say, can I come and buy some produce from you? And as well as doing that, they can choose to set up their own shop; so they can set up payment methods and shipping methods and create quite quickly an online shop. And if they can see that somebody else has already created an online shop close by, they can start to network with them. They can say, would you like to add my apples from my back garden onto your shop? So we get this beautiful mycelial like network of people growing foods, people starting to distribute food, people connecting with each other and building what we call food hubs. So a hub, a bit like a bicycle wheel, has many spokes, bringing multiple producers together onto a single online shop front. And then the shoppers and the buyers can browse and buy from a whole range of producers.
Manda: And you can upload pictures, presumably, of what you've got. And here's my happy cows and here's the cheese that we make.
Nick: Exactly. Absolutely. And people can click, from the shop front, to find out about, the cheese and how that's made, and they can click on the person who produced it. So we're very much into transparency. We want the people who are buying the food to be able to see and contact the people who made that food.
Manda: Right. So we're rebuilding the connections between people and their food and the land that supports them. brilliant.
Nick: Yeah, we do talk a lot about that mycelium-like interdependence of people sharing nutrients, sharing information, sharing knowledge and building, again, bottom up, a better food system.
Manda: And presumably you have some core programmers. This is open source, but you're not just relying on someone who's got 20 minutes in Zimbabwe to come and do a tiny bit of coding for you. How much is it iterative? How much are you recoding all the time?
Nick: We're releasing an update to the software every week on a Tuesday. There's a new update coming out. Yes there's an incredible, beautiful team of people who are coding all over the world. The core team at the moment are in Australia. That has moved around a bit. The core team were in Spain for a while and we do have some amazing people, not just in Zimbabwe. Quite often, incredibly skilled developers who probably work for a merchant bank or a management consultancy and want to do something meaningful with their spare time. And so they will give us for free their incredible knowledge. Obviously, our core dev team then need to check any contributions that are made and decide what can be merged and what can't be merged. But yeah. And so yes, there's a beautiful big team there. But it is expensive. You know the code base now is, as I say, 15 years old and incredibly versatile. But it does mean every time we make a change, there's a huge amount of testing that needs to go on. It can be very expensive.
Manda: And you must have very big servers. Or how are you managing to distribute the ledger of the knowledge?
Nick: So each country deploys separately at the moment. That's largely due to the complexity of having multi currency trading platforms, which we haven't yet got our heads around.
Manda: And different legal jurisdictions.
Nick: Yeah, that's less of an issue.
Manda: Okay.
Nick: So there's a very well thought through sysadmin super admin setup process, that enables people to say which country they're in, what the tax system is in that country. In the states it has different tax laws for different states and that all can be set up. But the problem is, if you're trading across borders then it can be quite complex having multi currencies. So each country has its own individual server.
Manda: Okay. But even that is not going to be cheap. So how does Open Food Network Fund itself?
Nick: So I said earlier that to list your products on the Open Food Network and to have a presence to enable people to find you, we want that to be free and always will be free. If you start to trade and you start to sell products through using the Open Food Network technology, we then ask you for 2.4% of anything that you trade through the platform.
Manda: That's tiny. Compared to current interest levels, that's nothing.
Nick: And also, if you compare it to a lot of the proprietary platforms that are doing something similar to the Open Food Network, then quite a lot of them will have a setup fee initially, and then they will have quite a high trading percentage.
Speaker3: Right.
Nick: And our trading percentage goes down as your turnover goes up. So if your turnover is more than 6000 UK pounds in a month, it goes down to 0.9% plus £90.
Manda: So this is absolutely the opposite of the big supermarkets. Why is everybody not trading through you?
Nick: It's partly because the supermarkets have a bigger budget than we do. So our software is open source. And as many of you will know, using open source software can be a bit clunky. It's not the most beautiful software. The user interface isn't as tight as it could be, because we don't have the budget. Any budget we have goes into building functionality. We're just in the process of deploying in Senegal, and they have specific needs that they need integrated into the code base. And therefore we've got to change the whole code base. And as it grows, that's where all of our funding goes, into making the software better.
Manda: How many countries are you serving at the moment then?
Nick: Senegal makes 21.
Manda: Wow. Okay. Right. And you've got to work on PC, Apple, Linux and on desktop, laptop, tablets and mobiles. The fact that you're able to update once a week it leaves me gobsmacked, frankly.
Nick: A huge proportion of our funding goes into the dev platform. We're spending €35,000 a month on dev.
Manda: So I really want to go into more of the people involved and what's happening on the ground with the growing. Just before we leave the tech, are you using AI as part of this now? Is it integrated and if so, which one do you happen to know? It will be there in the coding. Anyone who codes now is using AI to code as far as I can tell. But I'm wondering whether any of the functionality of the existing AI's is useful in helping to build the networks, and particularly helping to move the money around.
Nick: So this is a question I'd really like to talk to my dev team about, because I know that we are interested in that. I know that because our decision making process is incredibly flat, that a lot of people get very nervous about AI. And we have to consider all of our stakeholder base when we make decisions like that. But my personal take on it is if we can be entirely safe, and I'm not sure you can ever be entirely safe, but if you can be entirely sure of where this AI is from and where it's leading to.
Manda: And what it's sucking out of your System.
Nick: Yeah, exactly.
Manda: If you're open source, your open source. I mean, Moscow and Starling. Nothing is safe anymore. So safety is all relative. And if it's open source what have you got to lose? Okay, this is going to be boring everyone who's listening except for me. So let's move back to the exciting stuff of growing things and creating food that people really want and need and sharing it and networking. Take me in any direction that is alive for you at the moment.
Nick: Okay, there's two directions I'd like to go with this. One is within the Open Food Network to talk about what happens when you build a system, not a software system, but a people system that uses software. But you bring together a team of people who are deeply passionate about something, in this case food systems, and you give them an opportunity to bring as much of themselves to work as possible. So that's one of the lines, one of the ways I want to go. The other way I want to go is outwards from the Open Food Network in terms of how it's being used and some of the amazing applications of this technology and how it transforms society. And I'm not sure which to do first.
Manda: I think probably in the order you just said them. Let's look at transforming society second, and let's look more deeply at at how it functions first.
Nick: OK so the Open Food Network, the global Open Food Network community, has nine core values, one of which is subsidiarity, which my understanding of that is that decisions should be made at the most local level possible. So if I talk about the UK application, we make the technology available. We have these nine core values that we uphold. When somebody sets up on the Open Food Network, they tick that they agree to our terms and conditions, which includes those nine core values. And we then trust that whoever's using the software will be using it in the way we want them to use it. If there are issues,those issues are brought to the national team, which is a group of nine part time people in the UK, myself included, who will try and resolve the situation if somebody we feel is not using the platform appropriately and so on. And then each country, so the nine of us in the UK will then be represented at global level. So being a sociocracy, we have circles of influence. So in the UK team we have a support circle who'll be looking after users. We have a finance circle. We have a people circle. We have a coordination circle that brings us all together. And those circles are replicated at a global level. So somebody from our support team will be on a global support circle, sharing ideas, sharing what tech they're using to do the support. And there's a global comms circle which brings together ideas and testimonials and marketing ideas from all of the countries.
Nick: So that's sort of the governance structure. But what really excites me is that because in Sociocracy there are no bosses, there is nobody who's telling anyone what to do. If you're in a circle and you have the most experience about what this circle is about to deal with, then you will take on a leadership role and you will advise how things should go, people will ask you for ideas. And then you might then also be sitting in a different circle where even though you might be the most senior person there, you're not really sure what's going on in this particular project, so you're then in service to somebody else. And there's this beautiful mixing of responsibility and sharing of leadership. Alongside that is a process that has evolved over the 15 years of the Open Food Network, that we encourage people to bring as much of themselves to their work as they are comfortable bringing. Which means that my colleagues will often talk about their menstrual cycles or their mental health state or bereavements and all of that is welcome. And there are often tears and there's often a lot of emotion. I mean, most of the emotion is incredibly joyful and we have a lot of fun, but we work with the whole human being as much as people are comfortable bringing.
Manda: This is how you build community.
Nick: Absolutely, yeah. Which means that that person brings more of themselves to their work, so the Open Food Network benefits because we have more energy from them. But they also benefit because they don't have to hide away any of themselves and pretend to be something that they're not.
Speaker3: You can be fully seen. That's so good.
Nick: And if we can have fully seen, fully engaged, fully vulnerable human beings in the world.
Manda: And let them know that there is a safe space where it's okay to be there and that we can build these safe spaces with people, I'm guessing by the global ones, you've never necessarily met in person.
Nick: When it does happen, it's incredibly powerful. It doesn't happen very often at all. In my time, I've been around 12 years in the Open Food Network we've had three global gatherings, all of them for a week long. So we'll rent a farmhouse in the middle of rural France and live together for a week and cook together and eat together and have incredible conversations and then find it very hard to leave each other.
Manda: Yes, do you not get to the point where you think, can we not just buy some land and create a community?
Nick: We often do think that, and then we all want to go back to our country to get on with...
Manda: Yeah, we've got to buy land where I live. Right. Okay.
Nick: But yes, some very deep and long lasting and powerful relationships, which again connect us. When we do end up on zoom calls together, we have a bond.
Manda: And to what extent, we are maybe going to get on to this, but it seems to me that change happens from the bottom up. Change happens because people experience change and understand that it does actually work. And then it radiates out in their local communities and I don't know, then the bowling club becomes a sociocracy or then the local newspaper starts creating more generative articles. Are you seeing that happening anywhere in the world?
Nick: I'm seeing it happen in many of the food hubs that are using the Open Food Network. They are running on similar lines. They are often really quite small organisations, so in terms of the governance structure, they don't have the benefit of forming circles because there's only three of them. So, you know.
Manda: It's more of a triangle.
Nick: One triangle, yes. But the ethos, the way of being, the way of living, yes that definitely ripples out and is attractive to people. You know, people see us being quite lit up as an organisation. We have quite a few networks in the UK, so we're very linked up with the Landworkers Alliance and Sustain and Social Farms and Gardens, people like that. And yes, they notice that there is something good about being in the Open Food Network team.
Manda: That's really cool. In in my projected world, places like the Landworkers Alliance and Sustain are already fully sociocratic and completely embedded and enjoying the ripples of that. So it's kind of nice to know that that you are able to feed into that and that it's seen and respected and enjoyed. So thank you. So as far as I can tell from my notes, which are probably wholly deficient, we only got down two of the nine values. We got subsidiarity and trust. And it seems to me I've been talking to Audrey Tang a lot. You only get trust when you give trust. So before we go on to the others, I'm quite interested in national groups seeming to curate the people who join, who then sign up to these nine values. And again, in my projected world, anyone who's got to the Open Food Network would seem to me to already be buying into these values. They've signed up to the values. Is it a question of helping them to understand how they can express those in the wider world? Or do you get people who come in and are basically trying to extract profit at a large rate and don't want to play the game, so to speak?
Nick: So this goes back to my point about allotment I made earlier, that I think we need to be as inclusive as possible, and we need to engage with everybody. And another organisation I'm very involved with is Forest School Camps, and one of their principles is that we assume goodwill, that we start off from a point of expecting that everybody is going to buy into these values.
Manda: We're all in good faith and we assume good faith.
Nick: Exactly. Yeah. And then, of course, because the world is the world, there will be situations where that doesn't happen and we then need to address individual situations. And what we try to do there is to go into those conversations again assuming goodwill, assuming that we've misunderstood, or that maybe we haven't quite understood the whole picture, and we need to understand a bit more. And there've only been, I think, in the time the Open Food Network UK has been trading, which is 12 years, there's only been two occasions when those conversations have ended up with us saying, I'm really sorry, but we're going to have to ask you not to use the platform.
Speaker3: That's pretty good.
Nick: Yeah, because we want we want this to work. And the more we exclude people, the more..
Manda: Yeah it's not the point, is it? The point is to bring everybody with us.
Nick: Absolutely.
Manda: Interesting. And so, just without going into specifics ever, I am again trying to imagine, partly because I'm imagining writing a book where some of this comes in. But there are people who, because of their enculturation, just don't get it and just haven't quite understood, and that once it's explained they're completely on board. Is that common or is this just my fluffy projection?
Nick: Yes it is. They will be surprised at the fact that we are working to these values, which are open to abuse and they could take advantage of us.
Manda: Because predatory capital is predatory.
Nick: Yeah. And if that's what they've grown up with, which is what all of us have grown up with, then it's not surprising that they think that way. And when we explain how we're working and how we're making this thing work, and that we are building this thing to include everybody, they will almost always find a way to change their trading practices enough to fit in with our values. And at the same time, go away slightly changed by that experience.
Manda: Which is the point, isn't it? I mean, honestly, yes the point is feeding people, yes the point is building hubs, but if we don't evolve to be not predatory capitalists, to be something bigger and better and more connected, then we're screwed, basically. We all know that with Covid there was an R number of three: one person infects three people who infect three more: pandemic. If everybody with a hub can reach three people, exponential growth is a thing. Oh, that makes me so happy.
Nick: Me too.
Manda: So we're still on a list. If I promise not to interrupt again, can we actually go through the list? Because otherwise we're going to get to the end of an hour and never get there. Unless there was something about ripples, because you were looking quite happy about too.
Nick: Yes there's a real energy to that. So yes, I do want to talk about the values, but the ripples are really important. And particularly you mentioned around the pandemic. So what is happening is people are taking this platform which has these core values, and they are using the technology to build local food systems. So there's these incredibly diverse hubs all over the UK. I described them earlier as bicycle wheels, and that's the sort of symbolism behind them. But each one is incredibly different. Again, going back to the principle of subsidiarity, people will build a system to suit the local producer base. Whether or not there's a market in town, whether there's already some local food shops, they want to bring in, what the food poverty situation is, how are people on zero or low income being fed? All of that needs to be integrated into the system. And so they will build something using our tools that meets their local needs. And the people who do this in some cases are food producers themselves, who start by selling only their own produce and then a hub builds around them. But in many cases, they're good people who want to change their local food system, and they will just start from scratch and they'll go out and find the producers and they will build this system. But however it builds, these people are incredibly connected to their communities. So what happened during the pandemic was that within days, the supermarket shelves were starting to empty and suddenly everybody thought, oh my word, we need short food supply chains. Why do we not thought about this before? And so because the Open Food Network was there and it was well established in the UK, turnover through the Open Food Network platform went up by 850% in the first seven weeks of lockdown. Because the supermarkets weren't coping, because producers had polytunnels full of salads that were due to go into the hospitality trade and all the cafes and restaurants were closed.
Nick: So we had to find really quick ways to to build these supply chains and get that produce to the people who needed it. I mean, there's some lovely stories. There's a hub down on the outskirts of Plymouth called Tamar Valley Food Hubs, and they were approached by their local basketball team, who were not allowed to practice because of Covid. And they'd heard the basketball team had said, can we come and help? And the the people who were running the food hub knew that Mrs. Jones around the corner wouldn't be coming out for her shopping because she was vulnerable and needed help. And they knew that so-and-so was an NHS worker and was a bit bit too busy. And so these lovely basketball team were cycling around Plymouth with baskets of produce, delivering them all around.
Manda: And did it last after the end of the pandemic? Because that seems the big thing.
Nick: Well that's interesting. So turnover through the Open Food Network platform in the UK now is about five times what it was before the pandemic.
Manda: That's 500%.
Nick: But it dropped off 350% because the supermarkets recovered or appeared to recover. And they also put a huge amount of marketing. Their marketing budget is, you know, we are here to to serve our community and every little helps and blah, blah, blah. And the other thing that happened, of course, is the cost of living crisis. And people were suddenly really struggling to feed themselves and Agroecological grown food is more expensive. And how do we compete with supermarkets?
Manda: It isn't slave labour in another country and we don't pay anything to bring it in.
Nick: Exactly.
Manda: I read a really heart rending blog the other day and I can't remember where it is, but it was somebody who'd gone into their local communities agriculture to get food during the pandemic and then had gone back to Aldi. For people abroad Aldi is just the cheapest of the cheap supermarkets, because it was cheaper. And now the CSA has folded and it was sending out emails going we were here for you in the pandemic, people just come and buy something from us. And it's so sad.
Nick: It's tragic.
Manda: That ultra processed food is stupidly cheap. And how do we get around that? I don't suppose you have an answer to that, but if you do, please let me know.
Nick: I certainly don't have a quick answer. Again, a lot of the work Sustain are doing is really interesting in terms of lobbying for top down legislation that will help with, again, the bottom up work that we're doing. But I don't think there is a quick answer, no.
Manda: No. Okay. All right. So let's go back to our list of values, because I still think they sound like a really core set of values that every business could live by.
Nick: Okay. So there are nine of them. Maybe I'll just read them out. So the first one is around Global Commons. So we've talked about the software being in common ownership, but we're thinking more than just the digital commons, we're talking about the land, the air, the water, the soil that we believe should be in common ownership.
Manda: Even that. We are never going to get through all nine! Because they're in common ownership when we dump into them, you know, there are PFA's, forever chemicals in every bit of water. I read something the other day that they were trying to get back to blood samples that didn't have PFA's in them. And they had to go back, obviously in America, to blood samples taken during the Korean War, before they could find ones that were free of PFA's. And they're carcinogenic. They're endocrine disruptors. We don't actually know what they do to people because nobody's done the trials, because big, big companies will sue you if you try and find out.
Nick: Absolutely. Yeah.
Manda: And so the global commons of the water is that the earth is full of microplastics such that now if you melted your brain down, there's a credit card's worth of plastic in there. We don't know what that does. It's probably also an endocrine disruptor. And basically everything that we throw away ends up in the Land, the soil or the air. So we have a global commons, but there's no accountability to it, and there's no commonality to working with the land instead of just annihilating it with your latest fun set of chemicals that you think are going to solve problems or make you rich or both.
Nick: Yes. And a lot of that does need some top down change in order to make it happen.
Manda: And are you seeing that in any of the countries where the Open Food Network is working? I'm thinking Senegal is taking this up. Is that because they want more commonality of the land?
Nick: Yeah. I'm not very familiar with what's happening there. The Senegal deployment is happening because a Belgian NGO based in Senegal is funding it and is supporting them to do that, and they're going to be focussed mainly on rice production.
Manda: Oh, interesting. In an agroecological way? So kind of fish in the rice paddies and ducks feeding off the fish and all that sort of thing.
Nick: I hope so. Again, I'm not fully familiar with it, but yes, that's my hope. But yes, we need top down. And until that happens, and here's me being eternally optimistic, until that happens we will continue to build this agroecological network of farmers and growers who are supporting each other and who will cooperate together. So one of the big things we've just brought in, which encourages bottom up, which is possibly influenced by top down, is public procurement. So getting Agro ecological produce into schools and hospitals and prisons and local authorities. And because the Open Food Network is the network and it has these hubs, a school previously would have really struggled to source 100 kilos of carrots every week from a small scale agroecological grower, because they can't cope with that kind of volume.
Manda: Nobody produces that.
Nick: No, but when you network them and you have a hub that's drawing from a wide network of local growers, that 100 kilos of carrots comes from ten different growers. And that contract then gives the growers a baseline. They know that they've got this contract with a hospital through the hub, that's going to mean they can produce, they can sow an additional acre of carrots this year and they can commit to that. And once their production volumes go up, their marginal costs come down and they can be more profitable. So there are ways of building it bottom up before we get any top down.
Manda: Beautiful. Brilliant. Super. Let's carry on down the list and I'll endeavour not to interrupt.
Nick: Okay. Number two is relationships. And we've talked a lot about that. So it's about putting great value on the interconnections between people and between people and all other beings. So relationships number two.
Manda: Thank you.
Nick: Ecosystems. We support the farmers and the growers. We talked a lot about agroecological, but yes, about biodiversity and about future generations. That this is not just about building a resilient food system for now. It's about the decisions that we make now, how is that going to affect seven generations hence?
Manda: Brilliant.
Nick: Transparency. I talked earlier about everyone who buys on an Open Food Network shopfront can see not only how that product is grown, but who grew it, and they can contact them. And then that goes right through down to the price, so that if a hub is selling product from a producer, they will almost certainly make a mark-up because the hub has running costs. They've got to have some kind of premises, they've got to pay for the people to do the work. So somebody shopping on an open Food Network hub will see how much the price of these carrots is going to the producer and how much it's going to somebody else.
Manda: And it's still going to be less than the supermarkets are taking.
Nick: Unfortunately the selling price will be will likely be higher.
Manda: Yes, but the percentage going to the growers and the people who are actually making this happen, it's not paying for someone's superyacht.
Nick: Exactly. If you were to go into Lidl or Tesco or Sainsbury's, they wouldn't be as transparent with you about how much of that money is going into the supermarket shareholders pockets.
Manda: Yeah, yeah. And you wouldn't be able to talk to the growers about have they been feeding weird anti methane drugs to their cows or not. Whereas with this you can contact the producers directly and see what's happening and ask them questions. Still not interrupting, I promise. Go on.
Nick: Next one: empowerment. So not only empowering people, which is what we've been talking about internally within the Open Food Network, but empowering people who take the software to do with it what they will. And mostly that's good stuff, but building a food economy that is suitable for them, that will make sure that the farmers and the growers are paid a proper wage for the work they're doing, making sure that the food system serves all the people in the community, not just those who can afford to pay for their food.
Manda: Breaking my promise already. But I'm thinking that farmers also produce fibre and fuel food. Fibre, fuel are the three F's of farming. Are they also able to be sold on the hubs or is it food only?
Nick: No, it is very broad. So mostly food. But when you set up a product on the Open Food Network, you can call it a non-food product. And in the last 12 months, there's now something called the Open Flower Network. So there is a whole network of growers in the UK producing flowers to provide locally sourced flowers to florists so they don't have to import trucks from Holland. And they have white labelled the Open Food Network platform. They've decided not to fork the code. They've stuck with the same code base, but they can white label it and make it the open flower network.
Manda: What does white labelling mean? Sorry.
Nick: It means that when you set up an Open Food Network shopfront, the main branding that you see will be your local branding. You will make your own brand and you will decide what it's called. In the background you can probably see that my local hub is called Stroud Co because that's Tesco for Stroud. But up in the top left hand corner of the screen it will say powered by the Open Food Network. If you set up a flower hub using our platform, that logo you'll see in the top left hand corner is actually they're now calling it the Flower Growers Collective. So it just means that the Open Food Network branding is taken away.
Manda: Right. That makes a lot of sense. But I've just gone onto their website and it's got Open Food Network on the main Open Flower Network website. So they've got a little bit there.
Nick: Yes, so they're crediting us for the software. So for them it was confusing for their florists.
Manda: But I'm thinking equally, if people wanted to be selling wool, if people wanted to get more into somehow carding, producing their own wool, the open wool network would be a thing.
Nick: I was just yesterday on a call with a textile group, Fibreshed Scotland they're called.
Manda: Right. I was thinking Fibreshed.
Nick: They wanted to use the platform for exactly that. And again, there was an international call with people in the States looking at growing cotton here, looking at growing hemp. And how do we get the growers linked to the processors and the weavers linked to the buyers and yeah.
Manda: And then you want the people who are producing earth based dyes and everything. This is so exciting, Nick. Okay. I'm sure I interrupted the list, so let's keep on let's go back.
Nick: Well, the next one we can go over quite quickly because that's subsidiarity, which we've talked about a lot.
Nick: Number seven is kindness. So it reads on our website we are building a people system, care and empathy for each other lie at its heart, celebrating respect, solidarity, diversity and inclusivity. Which yeah, makes me quite tearful just reading it. But there is a huge amount of kindness and care and love. The word love doesn't appear on here, but it's a word I use a lot around the Open Food Network and that is a very powerful motivator for us.
Manda: Beautiful. Thank you.
Nick: Number eight is constant emergence. So we live in a perpetually evolving world which requires constant agility, organic growth, and letting go. Which brings me back to the reason we've been talking to each other, is because of how moved I was by reading your book Any Human Power. And that letting go which I feel like we need to constantly move towards what we think is the next best step and trust that that we're moving in the right direction. And then when we are disappointed, when things go wrong, when things don't work out. To let go and to not give up, but to take the next step in the right direction. So yes, it has been a long and rocky road, but it feels like we're on a constant evolution towards a better world. Yeah.
Manda: I realise we've got one more cell to go, but I'm really curious if there are any instances of things that you could tell us about, that are suitable for an open mic, that went wrong and that you learned from? Because it seems to me that the fail and then fail again better is actually really integral. And it is a cliche, but it's how we know where we're going.
Nick: Okay. So there was an instance during lockdown where a large multinational software company was approached by one of the large agricultural universities in the states and was asked if they could develop a software platform that would allow the farmers and the growers to cope with the consequences of the pandemic. This large software company went looking, so rather than developing a software platform, they went looking and they found this open source software platform called the Open Food Network. And they thought, well, that ticks most of the boxes. Let's have a look at how protected that is.
Manda: And it's not because it's open source.
Nick: No it's not. And at the time, it wasn't trademark protected. We've since found a pro bono lawyer, bless them, who has helped with our trademarking. But it made it very easy for the software company to take the platform and to make a few tweaks to it. Take the user guide, which is again incredibly powerful and updated and monitored by teams of volunteers. And they gave it to this university who forked the code at that point, which means that they're no longer having access to all of the weekly updates that we're giving.
Manda: They have to do their own, then.
Nick: Well, they would have done if they had intended it to be long term, but what they ended up doing is getting all the local farmers to use it. It had the Open Food Network branding all over it, so it looked like it was the Open Food Network platform, but it wasn't being supported and it wasn't being updated. And these farmers and growers were then left high and dry because there was no funding for maintaining or supporting this platform. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about what to do about this. We then had conversations with the large software company, and they made it very clear that they were legally safe. And we took their word for it and didn't have the budget to check that out. But we did have conversations with them, and they made all sorts of offers about ways they could support the code and how we could work with them. None of those conversations came to anything, but they were human connections.
Manda: With people who were acting in very much bad faith.
Nick: Well, yes, but they were acting under instruction from somebody above them. So my point is that they will have gone away with a sense of this organisation that we've just taken advantage of, is different from us. That they are doing something that is quite similar to what we're doing, they're building software systems like we are, but they're doing it in a very different way. They're doing it with open heartedness and assuming goodwill and love. They're not doing it purely for profit. And so my hope is that is another ripple. That those people will go away questioning, do I really want to work for an organisation like this? Do I really want to be like this?
Manda: Could I change the organisation from the inside? I mean, one could always try. It would be hard, but one could try. And what about the university that had commissioned this, which was then presumably knowingly forking a code that had been basically ripped off?
Nick: It was hard to tell how much they knew.
Manda: Well, they only had to look at your website.
Speaker3: Yes.
Manda: It wasn't complicated, was it?
Nick: No, no. And they were they were also involved in those conversations, particularly when it became clear that they had this quite significant user base that they were not going to support. And we said to them, well, why not port them over? We can help you move the data across onto our database so that they can continue to use the software. They will then have access to support systems. And they said no, this is our proprietary data. These people signed up to our platform.
Manda: We're not going to support them.
Nick: Not going to support them. No. But then again this was the mentality. And again, it was an interesting meeting of cultures that we were offering to do what we thought was the right thing, but there's a whole sort of intellectual property and an ownership, that again goes back to this concept of ownership. That they felt they'd be giving up something if we took responsibility for these farmers.
Manda: Wow, predatory capitalism in a nutshell. And the mindset that drives it.
Nick: And me talking now, I'm sounding quite relaxed about it. At the time I was deeply angry and very, very distressed by what was happening. And we had quite a few calls with the Open Food Network USA team, about how we were going to handle this. And we did vent an awful lot of anger, and we were then able to go into these conversations having vented the anger and try to be as constructive as possible. But yeah, yeah, it was deeply distressing. It felt like a step back before we could take a step forward.
Manda: But again, if we're going to change the world, we change it by being the people we need to be. And exactly if that means that we have to process the anger first before we can step into a healing and generative space, then we need to do that.
Nick: Yeah. And the anger has power in it. Again, from your book, that sense of where do we go with this rage, with this grief, with this anger? And if we can divert it in a way that doesn't challenge the system too much. We'd have been wasting our time taking a legal battle but we could have done a social media campaign or whatever against them. But but it would have not served us.
Manda: No. And the energy behind it would have been the energy of the old paradigm.
Nick: Yes, absolutely.
Manda: And it's not useful. Even if you'd won, you wouldn't have won with the right energy behind it. And in the end, consciousness creates matters. So I'm so proud of you. Thank you. That feels a really important step to have taken because it will have had a ripple effect somehow. We don't know what it is, but that's the nature of emergence; you don't see the butterfly wing that turns the tempest.
Nick: And just building on your point of the energy of that. If we had gone down that route, it would have taken a huge amount of focus and time and energy and resources, and it would have distracted us from walking away after we'd done whatever we could, and turning back to the 99% of people who are using the platform in a positive, engaged way that engages with all our values. There's a real upward spiral to that. There's a real sense of feeding off each other that if we'd taken the negative route, we would have spiralled down.
Manda: Spiralled down into despair and rage and the sense of scarcity and separation and powerlessness that is the root of predatory capitalism. I'm wondering then, if the American teams have found since then, because the pandemic was 4 or 5 years ago. Now they've had a forked system, a group of farmers who had a forked system which presumably now is completely not functional. Do they know that what they got was ripped off, and that there was an actual vibrant open food network that they could access and reconnect with?
Nick: If they know then it will be because of the social media that we put out at the time. This was only deployed in one state so we put out national social media at the time saying the National Open Food Network platform is here at this web link, and this is the support that we're offering, and it is open to everybody. We weren't allowed to contact the people who were using the fork. We couldn't because we didn't have access to the database, so we didn't know who they were. But we made it very clear that we were open. And I know that there were one or two farmers who found that and made that contact and did switch over.
Manda: Because it only takes one. The value of the mycelial network is if one of those goes, Hey guys, you know that broken stuff it was actually stolen. Here's the real thing and it works! Then that ripples too.
Nick: It does, except for the fact of the reputational damage. That as far as they were concerned, all those farmers had been using a system that worked great at the beginning, but then got worse and worse and worse and then didn't work for them. And so they were left with 'the Open Food Network doesn't do what we need it to do'. And maybe not having the technical understanding of that was a fault code and therefore blah blah blah.
Manda: Your a farmer, it's not your business to understand that.
Nick: No no no.
Manda: Okay. I believe we still have one of the values left to go.
Nick: Number ten is probably your favourite. It's about systemic change. So it reads: We believe in a global transition that addresses the root causes of current ills, not its symptoms. Part of this is our commitment to decolonialization and prefiguring systems that we want to be brought into being.
Manda: Brilliant! Yay! Thank you. You're right I love it. I love all of these, actually. I'm thinking imagine if that was integral to our Parliament. That everything that was done in Parliament just adhered to those set of values, the world would be a different place.
Nick: It would, it would. So mote it be.
Manda: Well, quite. Because you're in Stroud and Stroud is near Frome, and it seems to me you've got a very diverse political system there that's actually functioning very well.
Nick: Yes. Which leads on to something else I was hoping to talk to you about, which is common ownership. In Frome, there is a real commoning movement.
Manda: Just briefly for people who are not in the UK and actually probably some people in the UK. We were going to talk to Peter McFadzean but we haven't got there yet. So give us a very brief edited highlights of what Frome is.
Nick: Frome is a town in Somerset, southwest UK that is quite alternative. It's one of many, many towns across the UK that has quite a high proportion of people who are building alternative systems, whether that's food systems or education systems, energy systems, whatever.
Manda: And a political system that's different.
Nick: Yes, yes. And I don't know a huge amount about the political system in Frome. But yeah, I was going to divert a little bit into the Commoning movement that's kicking off in Stroud, which has links with Frome and Bristol and other towns that are that are very focussed on bringing resources into common ownership. Whether that's land or energy or housing or whatever.
Manda: Right. Interesting. And so very briefly, one of the things I know about Frome. So for people who are not in the UK, we did do a podcast with a lady in Buckfastleigh and they had followed the Frome model. They call it Flatpack democracy. And basically people stand as independents and they agree a set of values rather than a set of procedures, and they agree to work together. And part of the agreement is how we will problem solve, rather than we will sit in the council chamber screaming at the people who don't wear the same coloured tie. And one of the things that they did in Frome was that the list for people who had signed up for an allotment was stupidly long. And it seems in Britain, you know, you have a right to an allotment, but there isn't a time scale within which they have to provide it. So they put your name on a list and then park the list in the bottom of a filing cabinet. Three stories down with a jaguar - that's Hitchhiker's Guide. And the new people coming into Frome went, okay if 30 people want allotments we're just going to buy a ten acre field. And you all have allotments. And the list has gone overnight and we now have a resource that the council, you know, you pay a little bit of rent and we have an income and why was that not happening before? So I am wondering, given this, I read an interesting paper that scrolled down through Blue Sky oddly the other day, where they'd given a group of people in a state in the US a universal basic income. But it had come from an NGO, not from the government, and they were looking at whether there was any political change in the people who'd had, I think, 2 or 3 years of $1,000 a month, which is not insubstantial. And no, there was no change because they knew it didn't come from the government and they already hated the government. But I think that that was an interesting example of the fact that predatory capital will be predatory and simply handing people money doesn't necessarily change how they function. But if you have what you're doing, which is bottom up creation of community, then it seems to me that there is going to be some kind of political shift and that that's going to be very important, given that various individuals with far too much money and very little sense in the US are going to endeavour to buy the next UK election. And we have the best democracy money can buy. So they might succeed. Unless the ground up connections are building resilient people who are not susceptible to all of that. Are you seeing that on the ground?
Nick: Yes. We recently had a public meeting held in Stroud that was addressing the worrying, to me, phenomenon of a significant fascist presence in Stroud, which is very public and very visible. And a lot of people are very concerned about the way that's going. And the fact that because a lot of people feel disenfranchised and they feel they have no control and no power in the system, they want a strong message. And there isn't a significantly strong message coming from the leftist political system in the UK. So what I want to sort of come back to is this idea that if we can build on the powerful stories, I told you about the basketball team in Plymouth earlier, that one of the things that happened in Stroud during the pandemic is that some of the produce that had been grown for the hospitality trade, which had no outlet, was taken by a group of people who called themselves Freezers of Love. So they were taking this produce and they were cooking ready meals. They were freezing them and they were putting them in freezers around Stroud. And next to the freezer would be a microwave. And then these locations were publicised and people could go along and they could take a meal out of the freezer, and they could either take it home or if they didn't have a home. If they didn't have a kitchen they stick it in the microwave and they have a hot meal. And these were freezers of love. And that for me is a much more powerful and heartful story than a political message saying, we have the answer to this. It's much more visible that here is an answer that it's a hot meal for a person without a home.
Manda: Yes, here is a sense of community. Because the problem, it seems to me with what we might call the progressive side, I think right and left are no longer particularly valid. But we have those who lean towards life and flourishing and seven generations down the line, and those who basically are so scared that they'll destroy everything to try and make themselves feel safe. And we have currently in political power in this country at least, and as a binary in most of the other Western democracies, the people who were the slightly soft side of predatory capitalism. And that's not actually an option anymore. If you're so scared that you want someone to give you certainty, you're on to the fascists. And everybody else knows that the slightly fluffier, predatory capitalism with a pride flag on top isn't going to work anymore.
Manda: And therefore it can't provide a narrative. And then the door is open to okay, what can we do? What can a narrative can we create that is a narrative of cohesion and courage and curiosity. And yes, we are facing total cultural collapse. We just are. And if we can be honest about that, and what can arise from the ashes? That every single thing that we do know is arising something from those ashes, and it's either taking us off the edge into extinction, because you can't deny your way out of a hole biophysical collapse. I have a friend who was on GB news, I think, this morning and they were denying the Met Office reports that there's been a 10% increase in rainfall in the UK. And you can deny it all you like, it doesn't stop the rain from falling.
Manda: So, you know, one of the things that makes me slightly more able to sleep at night is Bannon cannot get his 10,000 year Reich because biophysical reality is what it is. It doesn't mean he won't destroy everybody to try and make it happen, but you can't deny the rainfall. So what narrative can we produce that is nothing to do with predatory capitalism with a pride flag on top, but is a genuine change? And I don't think we've seen that in any political discourse yet.
Nick: No. And maybe this leads on to the power of Food, which I think I've talked to you about. Because the Power of Food is a project that aims to bring people together. So what you've just been describing is a frightening level of polarisation, of people needing to make sense of this crazy world and finding different ways to do that and that resulting in 'us and them'. And this is the right way to think about the world and this is the wrong way to think about the world. And so what we came to with the Power of Food, so this is a project that came out of what people are doing with the Open Food Network. We realised there were people all over the country, it's a UK project, so all over the UK there were people who were using this platform to build food systems that were bringing people together. And it's happened, particularly since the cost of living crisis, that we've noticed that rather than having a food hub that serves the rich people who can afford to pay for agro ecological food, and a food bank that sorts out all the poor people, let's have one system. One food hub where people can buy exactly the same food but at different prices. And the way that's done is that people who can afford to pay for a veg box are invited to pay it forward, and to pay for another veg box for a neighbour they haven't met yet. Or just to make a donation at checkout, and that money goes into a bursary fund and that in some cases is supplemented by council funding that then enables that food hub to tag the customers, so that people can log in.
Nick: They can choose to self-declare as I need some help with my food, without any means testing at all. The system will then tag them so that they see exactly the same products as everybody else, either at a reduced price or at zero price. But when they come to pick up their food or they get it delivered to their home, nobody knows who has paid and who has not paid full price for that food. So in terms of food dignity, it addresses those. And other things that are happening with the platform are around Brexit. The food hub in Preston ran a process called feast for peace, when there was a lot of racial tension. They brought people together and they cooked multicultural food on the basis that if we can eat together, we can live together. And so we brought together all of these projects, and we have developed this process called Power of Food, which links with an organisation called Living Justice, who are amazing team of people who build social cohesion through arts based facilitation. And what we are planning to do is to roll out a program where we look at if we can get people to eat together, ideally. If we can get people, even better, to grow food together and harvest food together and process food together and cook food together and eat food together, then we will have a huge common starting point.
Nick: All of us need food. And if we can use food as the starting point of people telling their stories, because you don't have to go very far back in anyone's history to know somebody who grew food, or baked bread or brewed beer or whatever. We all have a story around food. Maybe a grandmother who made jam or whatever. And if we can get people to start telling these stories, the stories will be different, but they will have a common connection to food. And the word this is all hung on is the word companion, which comes from breaking bread together. And if we can break bread together, we can then live together. So yes, there's a whole process, we believe, of bringing people together from the different polarities that they end up in, to find that actually there is common ground. And again, if they can eat together, they can live together. So we are in the process of looking for funding to roll this thing out.
Manda: Gosh, I hope you get it. Because that sounds like one of the best ideas I've heard yet. It feels really aligned to the work of the food, Farming and Countryside Commission and the videos that they were making. Of people from all walks of life and what they thought about farming and food and how they could come together. And they might have some funding, is a thought, because this sounds like the kind of thing that we desperately need. We're on the edge of biophysical and cultural collapse, and we need to be building the bridges and bringing people together, while we can still grow food frankly.
Nick: And I think the extent that we can bring people together before that collapse, we have a better chance of surviving the collapse. We can do it together, but we can't do it if we're pulling in opposite directions.
Speaker5: Wow.
Manda: Nick, that's. This has been amazing. I'm so glad that we. We made contact and that you were able to come on to the podcast. Is there anything else that you wanted to say before we call it a day?
Nick: Just what a real honour it's been to talk to you and to have this connection with you. As I say, many of my colleagues and friends are very appreciative of you making this space for us to talk about the Open Food Network and the Power of Food.
Manda: Thank you. I'm really grateful. It filled a slot that I was very keen to fill. So thank you. And I have a feeling that we'll talk again sometime, because it feels like these are all projects that are growing and evolving, and it would be really interesting to follow how they evolve.
Nick: Well, it'd be my pleasure. Thank you. Manda.
Manda: Thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Nick: Very pleased to be here.
Manda: Well, there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Nick for all that he's doing to help to create cohesion and community and connection, and to do it in a way that models what it is to be adult in the world. As ever, as soon as we stopped recording, we carried on with the conversation. But broadly, we were talking about trauma culture and initiation culture and how we can move forward into being an initiation culture again in this world, which you will have heard before if you've listened to any of the previous podcasts over the last six months. And exploring the ways that what the Open Food Network is doing is offering adulting. If we can let go of our rage and our despair and all of the things that are likely to be triggering us, and do that in a constructive way, so that then we bring the best of ourselves to any given table, to any meeting, to anything that we're doing. This feels to me that it is the way of becoming adult. And actually, given where we are in the world, we now have a number of very, very obvious priorities. Whatever has been your priority up until now, creating social cohesion in your area I would say has got to rise to the top of the list. We are a creative, prosocial species and we all need to eat.
Manda: And food can be the glue that knits us together. Genuinely. Like I said at the top, if there isn't an Open Food Network hub in your area, then please do consider setting one up. You don't have to be a grower, you can be the hub. You can make it happen. You can connect with people. You can help them to see that there are ways of sharing what they produce. If you have garden space, then grow things. We are moving towards a point where the six continent, just in time supply chain, cannot keep standing for much longer and we all need to eat. So experiments in growing while we've still got a bit of energy left to get it right and get it wrong and start again, do something different. Now would be a good time. And then you can share the food in any way that you want. And there are so many pro-social ways. Nick was talking about the ideas of people who can afford it, buying other boxes and getting them sent out to people. Nobody knows who's paid and who hasn't. We can begin to remove the stigma of not having enough money, which is a ridiculous idea in the first place, and help people to eat food that's worth eating.
Manda: I remember back when I was at Schumacher and we went to visit Tamar Grow Local, the people who had the basketball team come and help them. And they were offering food boxes that the local general practitioners, the medics, the doctors, would put on prescription for people. So you got a prescription for a food box, but part of it was that you had to go along and learn how to cook it, so you're developing community. And Simon, who was in charge at the time when we went to visit, told me that the local council reckoned they were getting a 17 to 1 return, which is to say, for every pound they put in, they were getting £17 of value back. And he didn't necessarily trust the statistics and the careful massaging of figures that got to that. He said what gets me up in the morning is the emails I get from somebody last week, a woman on her own with three kids who said that when the box comes, the kids run downstairs like it's Christmas to see what's in there. And that's worth doing. Real food. Because part of what is poisoning our culture is the eating of the ultra processed rubbish that makes huge profits for the megalith of whatever we're calling the predatory capital unit at the moment. Nate Hagens calls it the superorganism. There was a film that was on Nate Hagens' recently that I think turned it into a character called Groth, which sounds lovely.
Manda: Whatever it is, it's voracious, and it doesn't care how many people die in pursuit of growth and profits. And we don't have to be like that. So please go and check out the links in the show notes, see if there is a local hub, and if there is see what help they need. And if there isn't, see if you can start one. That's your homework for this week. And as ever, we will be back next week with another conversation.
Manda: In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot this week. Thanks to Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Anne Thomas for the transcript. To Lou Mayor for doing the YouTube just before going on holiday, and honestly, I think it would have waited. But there we go, that's dedication for you. Thanks to Faith for managing the tech and the website and all of the very strange chaos behind the scenes and for the conversations that keep us moving forwards. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. And if you know of anybody else who needs help to feel that the world really is a good place, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.