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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods; to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for 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 this week we're talking to somebody that I've known for nearly a decade, and we're back in the field of food and farming and the systems that arise from them and intertwine through them and everything else that we do. Because as we say often in the podcast you're about to hear; we all need to eat. Food is central to our survival and to our cultures. Sharing food has been a gift and a duty and an honour and a right for pretty much as long as humanity has existed. And it's only very recently that it's become a source of profit for the very few at the top who are determined to keep the rest of us addicted to food with the minimum of nutritional value, which then leads to the maximum disruption of our health. And yet, we all know that plants grown in living, thriving, life filled soil give us living, thriving, life filled food. The question is, how do we get to that? Or how do we get back to that? Because it's not been that long gone, in the face of a multinational industry devoted to toxic, nutritionally empty, addictive, and yet highly profitable, ultra processed food like substances that they want to feed us. And so this week's guest, Daphne Du Cros, spends her entire life deep in the mycelial networks of food and farming systems, endeavouring to bring both into genuinely regenerative balance.
Manda: Daphne is a food policy researcher, educator and farmer. She holds a PhD in food policy, a master's in environmental science and management, and she's director and coordinator at the Shropshire Good Food Partnership. She's a director at Lightfoot Enterprises, lead at Food Forward BC, where BC stands for Bishop's Castle, not British Columbia or any of the other potential options. And she's co-owner of the Littlewood Batch CIC, a farm just outside the aforementioned BC. Daphne and I are relatively near neighbours. I live in Shropshire, a little bit further east and south of her. We swap seeds, her more than me, she's better at seed saving than I am. I'm getting there. And we share ideas about systems thinking and how we might evolve our world to something that really works. She is far more deeply involved than I am at every level, from the actual growing, providing food boxes to actual people in the actual neighbourhood, up to governmental level meetings, trying to get those in power to find some wisdom when it comes to food resilience, to food security, to all the other things that we say. To try to get them to move away from the corruption innate in our system and lead it towards something that actually works in service to life. So here we go with a lively, friendly and I hope inspiring conversation, about food and farming and all of the impact that it has on each of us. Please welcome Daphne Du Cros of the Shropshire Good Food Partnership and so much more.
Daphne Du Cros, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. I kind of know how you are and where you are because you don't live very far from me. But how are you and where are you on this somewhat drizzly November morning?
Daphne: I'm in Bishop's Castle, so just down the road in Shropshire.
Manda: And it's gorgeous. And those of us on YouTube can see the somewhat drizzly day out the back. But you do live in a particularly beautiful part of what, as an incoming Scot, I still think is a particularly beautiful part of England. So thank you and welcome. And you and I talk fairly often. Not as often as we should, probably. But we have conversations that invariably take us into places that I haven't thought of. And you have... I was going to say many fingers in many pies, and that feels like too much of a food oriented thing. But you have interests in many different areas and at many different scales of being. So of all of those, what is most alive for you at the moment?
Daphne: Yeah, I think, as you say, food is the way that I look at the world. It's how I've been trained in systems thinking. And so when it comes to what's really alive for me, I think it's how to use food as a lever for systems change, because it's something that absolutely everyone can relate to. Everyone is connected to food, and food is connected to our landscape, our daily economy, our health, our bodies, and how we connect and relate to other people. So I think that would be what's buzzing for me.
Manda: Okay. Thank you. So let's take a step back because I got to know you before the pandemic. And one of the things that struck me most in the pandemic is that you went from a not very large number of boxes to a very large number of boxes, it seemed to me, in quite a short space of time. And that this was core to our understanding, or at least my understanding of the extent to which we can feed ourselves if we really try. But until we have to, we don't really try. And that, given what's coming down the line, we're going to have to really try. So I'm curious to know what stimulated that. And also we talked to Abel Pearson during the pandemic and then again at the five year anniversary of our original conversation earlier this summer. And one of the things that struck me most about when we first talked to him, was that he'd had an influx of volunteers, of people who had been furloughed, could not go into work, and had realised that their work was fundamentally meaningless and that they got a lot more sense of meaning coming to volunteer for him, actually getting their hands in the soil, actually growing real food that they could see had a higher nutritional benefit. We can talk about nutritional density and things later on. Was that your experience also? Or did you just simply go all out and decide that you were going to provide food for a lot more people?
Daphne: I came to market gardening by a sort of unlikely road. I came to the UK from Canada to do a PhD in food policy. And my research was focussed on how we develop local level food strategies to tick sustainability boxes, essentially. How can local food production help us be more focussed on our community, build our local food economy, connect and steward the land more effectively? And so I saw how profoundly broken the food system was throughout the course of my research. And living in London, that made me feel quite insecure. I'm sorry for anyone who's listening from London.
Manda: Or any other big city in the Western world.
Daphne: Absolutely. And what really struck me is that if the proverbial hits the fan, there is three days worth of food in an urban space.
Manda: And one day's worth of toilet rolls, as we discovered.
Daphne: Crisis!
Manda: Yes.
Daphne: And so I also, in the duration of my food policy research, was in a lot of rooms where we were talking about what we need to do as farmers to change the system. But this was a lot of people who are working in academia and policy spheres, but there weren't any farmers in that space. So I really felt that gap very acutely. And so came into market gardening thinking, well, what is this in practice? Because we found this beautiful place in Bishop's Castle with this incredibly welcoming community. One person said, we've waited ten years for you to come and do this, because there was such an appetite for local food. And what an incredible welcome. And so we started from from nothing, not knowing what the heck we were doing in terms of food production. Starting out very small. And as I told you, in 2019 we were doing something like 12 veg boxes, just getting a feel for it. And what is this growing business anyway and what are the cycles of nature and how does this work? And then the pandemic came about in early 2020. And I remember sitting in our big polytunnel with my head in my hands, thinking, what is my responsibility in this moment?
Daphne: Because through my research, I know what supply chain disruption looks like and I know what it does. So having that sort of line of sight I thought this is going to get complicated. So how do we respond and what is my role in this? And my response was to go massive overkill on food production. And so we ended up on point nine of an acre being able to produce 55 veg boxes a week for our community.
Manda: Astonishing.
Daphne: And that was for two years, which was an incredible privilege, incredibly eye opening. And then as the pandemic wound down, people started to move back to their regular habits and their regular lives. And the lessons of connecting with our local food producers sort of started to dwindle as the convenience of click a button food retail came back into their lives, and as they were able to go on holidays again. And no, I'm not going to have my veg box this week, thanks, I'm going to take the caravan out. And so we had a return to that normal and lost an incredible opportunity to maintain these really strong local connections and to continue building that appreciation for local food production.
Manda: Curses. Okay, that's incredibly sad. So now I'm feeling very depressed. However, it is what it is. And so it seems to me that this is part of the core of the problem. If I come back into balance, you've lived through the horror of that, and I hadn't really taken that on board. So we are existing at a crunch point, I would say, that has been going on for a little while and is only going to intensify. Between we can move in towards a more regenerative, resilient way of living, or we can default back to where we were. And where we were was owned by multinational companies, who put a lot of time and effort into making sure that people are dependent on their nutritionally valueless food. It keeps you alive. It doesn't keep you well at any level. And so presumably they geared up; they wanted to grab back their market share and they made sure that they did it. If we are to balance that, how do we go about it? Is it going to require government intervention to just ban the multinationals and ultra processed foods? Is it going to require something more ground up or both or neither?
Daphne: I think in my experience, it will take us coming at every single level with everything we've got to try to initiate changes. I think recognising that we are in a vulnerable position. I didn't mean to make you depressed.
Manda: I'm resilient. It's okay.
Daphne: I think it's a a lesson. I think we had a trial run, and we knew what we could do. And it was for a time incredibly productive and validating for small farms. And I think that essential infrastructure, just highlighting that, as small farms and grassroots connection and relationships in communities. The human relationships and the relationships built on trust that we had. So I think there's something beautiful and hopeful about that, if I can turn that on its head. But we can harness that. And I think we need to figure out how to reconnect with that without having an acute crisis as a lever. Because we do have the sort of Poly crisis context ticking around in the background now, don't we? And so that gives us a hook to hang these bigger conversations on, about urgency, about vulnerability, and about now being the time for change. And we can connect with our communities in those dialogues. We can connect with different governmental departments and identify how it relates to them, and then explain to them, because it's not about a silo, it's about a system and how these things all link together. And actually, we have to be working together to use food as a tool, as a lever, for something that we can more broadly develop into systemic change. Am I confident that the government will be in a position to tell multinational companies that they have to reform and have to feed people well? I think that is going to be more challenging. We had the FFCC report, the food, farming and Countryside Commission Conversations, where they did an incredible piece of work around the UK, saying, what do citizens actually want? And asked citizens what they wanted. And citizens really clearly relayed to the government through this piece of work; stop worrying about the nanny state narrative; we want you to take control for our health because these are essentially addictive substances, and we are in an economic position where our choice is gone. So we need you to take action for the benefit of the population. And so that has been fed back to the government.
Manda: Yeah. The question of whether they take any notice or not is entirely separate.
Daphne: Absolutely. And this came out at the same time where Henry Dimbleby and Dolly van Tulleken said, we know that former PM's have been heavily, heavily lobbied by these companies, so that they would dismiss action on healthy food and continue to prioritise the economic interests of multinationals. And that is a massive obstacle, particularly when most people don't have the privilege of choice.
Manda: Yes. That obstacle. That and the short termism of governments. Tony Blair, ages ago, I think Tony Blair was a monster, but he was a very smart monster. And he was asked why he did nothing about climate change. And he said, because the impact of action will be immediate, and the impact of doing nothing will be way, way beyond any electoral cycle that we're interested in. I paraphrase, but basically there's no political advantage in acting, and I'm sure that there's a huge amount of what we nicely call lobbying and actually mean corruption, where the multinationals are influencing the actions of government and they're never in favour of the general population. If any government is making a choice between the interests of capital and the interests of people, they always go on to the interests of capital. Every single time. Which is why we need a different political system. But given that we have the system that we do, is the nature of the current poly crisis sufficiently severe that the current government is likely to actually do anything, do you think?
Daphne: I think they are starting to see it from trusting lenses. I think one of them is essentially food security is national security. We are in a vulnerable place in terms of our domestic production. Climate change is impacting our ability to continue importing food, particularly horticultural produce. So I think we are looking at an event horizon of not too many years, that within perhaps the next decade, the countries that we get the most of our horticultural produce from Spain, the Mediterranean and African nations, that will be diminished because they are going to be struggling with the impacts of climate change themselves and won't be able to provide the surplus needed to subsidise our production. We produce 56% of our own food, but that is overall. In terms of horticultural produce, that's far less. In terms of fruit specifically, far, far less. And in terms of seed, not very much at all. And everything comes from seed.
Manda: Okay. I want to talk about seed in a moment. Those numbers are horrifying. And I mean, even in the Second World War, when we were all producing a lot more and there were fewer of us, we were not wholly food secure. We ended up with enormous numbers of transport ships from the US bringing spam and corned beef and whatever. Can you see a point where the UK or any of the nations of people who might be listening, is food security anywhere a thing?
Daphne: I don't have the global lens.
Manda: Okay. In the UK then; is it possible that we could become? I mean, we will never be making our own chocolate and coffee, I guess. There'll be things that we will continue to want to import. But broadly, food security in the UK, has that been a thing for centuries?
Daphne: It has been reliant on the idea of empire feeding us.
Manda: Exactly.
Daphne: So the colonies were very useful to the empire and that mentality persists. That's one of the arguments of Tim Lang, who wrote the report on civil food resilience. We are vulnerable because we have historically had this view that everybody else would feed us, and it's a position of privilege. We are no longer facing that position of privilege, and it has become an area of complacency. Where we have incredible lands, we have incredible soil in so many areas. We have the capacity to produce so much more of our own food, of our own seed, but primarily in our agricultural universities, for example, our 13 agricultural universities, while there are some exceptions that do teach horticulture, it is primarily intensive livestock production and arable production, from a more agritech focussed lens. And so we have been losing the key skills around horticulture for a long time. There are very few formal structures where somebody could get the incredibly diverse and skilled education that you would need to be a horticultural producer. And so these people are gold dust and they're so essential and so valuable. So that is something; we need to rebuild the horticultural sector across the UK. We need to rebuild the infrastructure for small scale direct sales, which has been systematically gutted because of these large Centralised retail industry. And connection. Human connection to sell. There are so many components that we need to rethink because we have allowed things to get so big, but really we need to relocalize and become more small scale resilient. Get rid of this idea that we have to get bigger to feed the world. No. Small is beautiful and we can feed our communities and we can connect with our communities, and we can do it with greater care for the land, greater care for our local context and biodiversity, and ways to connect with the people who are our neighbours. Change the way that perhaps the system of capital exchange works.
Manda: Oh yes, we're going to have to do that too. Let's not get into that rabbit hole. Because I'm really interested in on point nine of an acre, you were able to feed 55 people, at least with the veg box. I'm guessing they would be buying their cereals and potentially livestock products elsewhere. But you had veg. Did you have a lot more help? How many people were working on that point nine of an acre in order to feed 55 families? Was it 55 other people coming in to help?
Daphne: No. So it was a unique time, as we all know. But what it required was pivoting our business model to our social context at that point. So the plan was to take on a CSA model, a community supported agriculture model, which is better known in Canada and the states where a customer pays upfront for the year in solidarity with the farmer, recognising that it's a challenging time, where you have to get most of your expenditure upfront for the season; seed, staffing, etc. So you pay upfront and you share in the abundance or the risk of the year. It's a lovely concept. Harder to pitch in the UK because it's a lot of education and outreach around that. But I'll park that. That's another conversation for the CSA network UK. What we ended up doing is recognising the need of our community and that many were furloughed, that many lost their jobs. We said we can have people either pay as normal for their veg box, if you're in a position to do so, or you can work as a volunteer or sort of in exchange, two hours a week for your weekly veg box. And so there was myself and another full time staff member, some people who came as volunteers, but some people who came as that work exchange model. And it made for a really interesting social experience throughout that, because we felt purpose and we felt connection. And we had a place to come, and food brought our community together in so many ways. And so it meant being creative about our financial model and our business model. I remember somebody brought me a wool sweater at one point for one of my kids because it opened up that exchange process. And what a gift!
Manda: Yeah, yeah, this is what community is about. But then at the end of the pandemic, everybody went back to buying stuff from the local supermarket and eating empty calories.
Daphne: So we saw just how impactful and just how much abundance, broad definition of abundance, could come off a small piece of land. And that is an extremely hopeful thing.
Manda: Yes, yes.
Daphne: Just by opening up our land, our gates, our approach and our willingness to engage with our community in a creative way, we were able to, in a very short period of time, create something totally different with broad reaching ripples, which was wonderful.
Manda: It is wonderful. How much of that has stayed? Are you still as deeply connected in the community? I'm guessing you're not selling 55 boxes a week, because you haven't got volunteers who've got the time to come and give you time, I guess. Because what really upset me amongst the many things about the pandemic was there was that sense of hope. There was a sense of capitalism actually dissolving in real time and then end of the pandemic slam it back into place. It seemed to me a lot of effort at all scales, government scaled down to ensure that capitalism absolutely was back on the road full speed ahead, because they could see it crumbling and they did not want it to crumble. So are you seeing? I don't know, echoes or watermarks or faint ripples of what you were doing. Is it still there?
Daphne: We stopped trading commercially at the end of the pandemic. Part of that was family life. Part of it was, I think, burnout. But ripples, yes. And it has taken a few years of sitting with that experience and thinking about what the next iteration of the farm is going to be. And that is going to be something that starts, it has gently begun ramping up, but in the next growing season I will be opening up the farm as a CIC to deepen that community connection once again. Recognising that part of our vulnerability is a lack of skills, a lack of connection to not just the food system, but our land, one another. I think we are very, very isolated at this point in history.
Manda: Do you mean each of us individually, or us as a culture, or us as an island or the whole of the world?
Daphne: All. All of these things. But the components that I can link with are individuals can come and connect with Land, food and skills on the farm, but that also ripples to the community can connect with the community orchard or seed saving, or the benefit of the seed bank, or these things that we can learn together, or have a space to come together and have conversations about creating a new version of ourselves, our community, the system in which we exist. And how we might want to see that change and what we can do about it. So I see my own farm, as maybe a little bit of a crucible where change can happen. Aat the end of our sort of market garden project, I started to work with the Shropshire Good Food Partnership, and this brought it out to another scale. So from just the farm and my local community, my policy background and my food systems background got woven into the county level. And so with the food partnership, the way I explained it is we try to connect the dots across all aspects of the food system across the county. And so that encompasses farm level initiatives and town and parish councils and businesses and schools; academic institutions of all types and different industries that link with food, landscape initiatives. So we have a really broad web that we can link with and connect other people with. And so it's kind of a weaving project where we're trying to build resilience at the county level as well.
Manda: Mm. Wow. There's so much in all of that. I need to say for people who are outside the UK, that CIC is a community interest company, and it's a specific form of legal rune that actually is quite good that it exists within capitalism, because it allows you to explicitly make the aim of the company not necessarily the generation of profit, but the well-being of your local community, which is great. Okay, so much on that. Two things; I want to get back to seed banking. Remind me at some point we need to talk about seeds. However, we're building education at all levels: community level, you're going into schools. I would like you also to tell us, I know you went to the local agricultural college, and as far as I understand it, you blew all of the students fuses because you were talking to them about things they had not heard. I think that sounded really interesting. But I am also aware that in the other spaces that I work in, there are a lot of people feeling deep frustration because they talk about, say, paradigm shift or systems change, or any of the language that we think of as normal, and they watch the lights go out in people's eyes because they genuinely don't know what they're talking about.
Manda: And it tends to be older, straight, white men, but generally speaking just older people, whose executive function evolved in the 50s or the 60s. Their understanding of the world was cast in stone then, and they're not fit for purpose in the modern world as far as I'm concerned. And they don't understand systems change. They don't understand the nature of paradigm shift or why it might happen. They think capitalism is perfectly good and has done amazing and useful things for the world. And frankly, they'd be happier if there were still an empire. And they're probably going to vote Reform at the next election. And I'm guessing Reform does not understand that there will be no food coming in from places that are already getting really hot, because Reform is deep in denial of the fact that climate change is happening. How can you, at a really practical, granular level, how do you help an ossified system to become resilient? And you may tell me that it's not actually as ossified as it seems to me to be, and I'd be very happy if you said that.
Daphne: Oof. It is ossified. Oh, goodness. We need to shake the tree, that's for sure. We connect as the food partnership, but myself, the people who work in the food movement, we, by the very nature of the medium being food, think in systems. And we do take it for granted that we think in systems and that other people think in systems. And we forget that it has been systematically the objective of the neoliberal structure to sever those links, and the capacity to think in systems. So we have to gently bring people back in to connection. The fact that our food system is linked to our soil system is linked to our water system, is linked to air, is linked to our wellbeing, economics, public health, planning and all of these different things, that everybody thinks has a unique little box that it sits in and that they don't overlap or connect in any way.
Manda: And they mustn't. We must continue to consider them to be separate, because this is the old divide and rule. The more we can split our brains and say that, I don't know, children's health and the food that they eat are completely separate things, and we don't merge them. It makes systems thinking very hard. Okay.
Daphne: And so how do we bring people in to the notion of this connected web? Food is so useful, because we can use it as something to illustrate those connections that people can relate to. We can put in front of them in a meal, in a community setting.
Manda: Okay, you can ask them to eat it. Yes!
Daphne: Invite them to connect with the food itself. One of the areas that we work in are schools. So as the Shropshire Good Food Partnership, we were funded to do a project where we would go into 20 primary schools, three secondary schools, to decarbonise the school using food as a lever. And that allowed us to connect with students, staff, the administration, the chefs in those schools and to use food to communicate how so many of these different pieces link together. Our health, through nutritional density of food that has been grown, through brix refractometer testing, composting, getting kids out on farms.
Manda: Are you going to tell us about Brix refractometer testing? Carry on with your link, but we need to go back to that because most people won't have a clue. Go on.
Daphne: So we developed a system of educational delivery that connects these kids to food. And it is so enriching for them, because it goes beyond sitting in a classroom and just being taught at. It's tactile, it's sensory, it gets them to farms. We had one student from an urban area, from Telford, who said this is the first time I have seen a horizon. Because we took that student from an urban centre to a farm, and that child was able to look out across a field and to the horizon for the first time.
Manda: And they'd never been out beyond the high rise or the... How can that be a thing? Oh.
Daphne: And that is transformational for that child, in a way that you cannot attach a monetary figure to. How do you quantify a transformational experience for a kid like that? But we have so many experiences that our young people have had. And just by realising that food and farming is central to life, it's not an add on. And it's an avenue through which you can connect with your curriculum, if you're a teacher. And that gives it superpower status in teaching. And when we present that to government; I'm working with an initiative of incredible educators and activists through an initiative called Soil Ed UK, and that is to embed food, farming and sustainability into the national curriculum. Because it's been a huge gap. And so connecting kids with food system skills, that's something that has a benefit from today, from the very moment where they can connect with that, and better understand food and farming and how all of a sudden all the puzzle pieces start to fit together, but also has a knock on effect in the decades to come. So it's as much of a silver bullet as you can possibly get as a policy maker, is to change the curriculum for young people in this changing context that we have.
Manda: And I am assuming that the multinationals who like ultra processed food and would like to continue selling it to us, are not happy at the idea that there might be that silver bullet within the system. Because if every child were able to internalise what you just said, it has to impact their capacity to make profits. So are you seeing, I may be wrong in this, but I think the current government is wholly owned by the multinationals. Are you seeing pushback or are you getting actual traction?
Daphne: So there are massive challenges to overcoming this. First, that the national level of government, oh my goodness, it takes proving beyond a reasonable doubt that something is a logical idea. And then it has to go through an extensive process, when I don't really see how anybody could argue against healthier, stronger, more engaged students because they have had proper nutrition and who have a better sense of skills that they'll need to manage and navigate the world that they're inheriting, and the food system that they need to reinvent in the context of crisis and better health, and less impact on the public health care system.
Manda: It's ticking a lot of boxes, isn't it? And I bet they're still sitting there and their eyes are glazing over and it's not fitting their current paradigm.
Daphne: We still have 65% ultra processed food in the school meals offered.
Manda: Is that countrywide or is that just in our county?
Daphne: I believe it's the UK, if I'm mistaken and it's just England, forgive me. Wales is doing so much incredible work to get healthy food on the menu, through their Welsh Veg in Schools programme. And this links in with another piece where procurement contracts, who obviously want to increase their profitability, so they have the lowest common denominator cheapest food offer. Enter ultra processed food. But Castell Howell, for example, in Wales, were brave enough to take on the challenge and with support from Welsh Government to have that change subsidised. So all of a sudden there is a lot more locally produced food. And it might just be a handful of items on the menu, but it improves the quality.
Manda: Every single bit makes a difference. Yeah.
Daphne: And the regional reach, that sort of local level procurement. So the procurement piece is such an interesting one, potentially transformative. But again, it comes to we have had this scale of infrastructure removed from the local level and even the medium level, where everything has become centralised with large retailers. So the capacity for small scale producers to come together and to sell and bid for larger contracts is very, very difficult. So we don't have the processing, we don't have the aggregation function, we don't have the direct sales function. So there are things that are fundamentally missing, despite the fact that the government has come out with this idea of procurement for good, where they want these smaller producers to be able to achieve that.
Manda: Right. But they're not putting in the infrastructure to actually allow it to happen.
Daphne: There's a brilliant book by Kevin Morgan that talks about how public procurement is an opportunity to unlock transformational food system change. And that links into horticulture and domestic production; working with sustainable food places networks like ours at the Shropshire Food Partnership. How that local level knowledge, the engagement with the county level structure, is such an opportunity for schools or hospitals, for prisons, for care homes. For the people who need to be caught and cared for and who are most vulnerable. So there's a tremendous opportunity, but there are flaws. So that may have gone off piste from your question.
Manda: No, no, no, it's good. And I've just found the book; it's called Serving the Public; The Good Food Revolution in schools, hospitals and Prisons. So I will find a link and put it in the show notes, because that looks really interesting. I have so many books to read, Daphne, I didn't need you to add one to the list. Can we go back? Because you mentioned brics and I want to unpick that. And then I definitely want to talk about seed saving. And then I want to get on to national policy. That's my plan. Tell us, edited highlights, what brics is. Tell us about that.
Daphne: The Brics refractometer testing is a way of essentially squishing a fruit or a vegetable, to measure its dissolved sugars. And that gives you a proxy for its nutrient content. And so what we have done in schools is a series of tests on say, a Tesco carrot that has been picked and shipped and grown conventionally, and compared it to a locally produced picked just this morning, organic carrot, and a couple of other options so that you have a bit of a range. And we get our students to be citizen scientists. And it has been the first of its kind as an initiative and a program in the UK to do that. Where we've had our kids, our students in primary school, squish their veggies and taste the veggies and get an understanding of the link between flavour profile and nutrient density. And in a world where standardisation and uniformity from the grocery store has become the norm, this is mind blowing for kids. And what we have found with this initiative, putting our Shropshire context to the side, when we have compared it with this sort of initiative that has taken place in France or Japan, where kids have a much more defined palette because they have experienced a wider range of foods and healthier foods, particularly through rigorous school meal programs that are state mandated for health and seasonal variation, what we find is that British kids prefer the taste of the boring standard carrot.
Manda: No!
Daphne: Because it's what they've been conditioned to understand.
Manda: Yeah. Of course. Yes.
Daphne: The richness and the complexity of the nutrient dense, local, organic carrot that was picked fresh this morning can be overwhelming to some kids.
Manda: This is not good.
Daphne: We have a heck of a lot of work to do to claw back the diversity in our foods and what's on the plates of our children, to challenge their palates, to broaden their life experience and their enjoyment and the social experience of these. That started so many amazing conversations in those classrooms.
Manda: Okay. This could be a very deep conversation on schools. But I think perhaps let's have that at another time. Because I want to focus more on the bigger picture, probably the less important picture because schools are really important. But the whole procurement system is likely, I think, to be as corrupt as everything else at the moment. And it's not their fault, it's the way the system is being set up, which is to maximise the impact of the multinationals and to minimise anything that threatens them. And, per the previous conversation, it seems to me that the current government in the UK and elsewhere is wholly owned by the people who own the multinationals, and so I struggle to see them having any long term strategies of any sort, frankly, which is going to cascade down. That means that the local councils cannot have long term strategies, and therefore whoever is procuring for the schools also can't have long term strategies. But within food and farming, are they at all getting their heads around Tim Lang's report? Or anything else that suggests that we need a food and farming systems approach that is different to simply giving the multinationals the empty calories that they need to feed back to the people.
Daphne: I think Tim Lang's report really shook things up. I think it was really important to show just how vulnerable we are. And he was very vocal about that in the lead up to the publication and post-publication. And I will give my personal gratitude to the work that Tim has done, because he also highlighted the important role of local level food partnerships like the Shropshire Food Partnership. And we are part of a broader network called the Sustainable Food Places Network, and that has 123 different food partnerships across the UK that make up that network. So it's a massive opportunity, just having been highlighted as place based and embedded; knowing our local networks, our communities, our farmers and sort of our context, what our role can be in the delivery of food programs that benefit the broader food resilience narrative. So I see us as sort of occupying the middle of a triangle, where we have connection to the grassroots and the public at the broadest base of the triangle. And there are councils and the national government at the top. But we have the opportunity to be nimble and responsive in an acute crisis, and we have the opportunity to build resilience in the present, in the right now, before an acute crisis hits.
Manda: As the poly crisis is becoming. Because this is a chronic crisis, assuming that everybody understands that acute is short term and chronic is long term.
Daphne: Absolutely.
Manda: We are heading for increasing levels of catastrophe or decreasing levels of resilience.
Daphne: Our baseline is climate change that's ticking along; geopolitical instability, the threat of war and more wars going on currently than there have been in, I don't know how long.
Manda: And warming and food being used as a weapon of war, starvation being deliberately inflicted on people.
Daphne: Absolutely. And our cost of living crisis in the UK, the cost of energy. There are so many things that are ticking along in the background that are impacting people day to day. We talk about a food ladder's approach in the food system and in sustainable food places, where there are rungs of food security. And there's an opportunity that we need to take right now to make sure that we are catching those who are most vulnerable and supporting them, so that when an acute crisis hits, they don't fall further behind like they did in the pandemic. And we have to continue building infrastructure, and that means not just physical infrastructure and not just food banks, but community infrastructure, infrastructure of mutual care, awareness of food systems, mutuality and local level food resilience planning. We can no longer be complacent about the fact that food is going to come from elsewhere to feed us. We need to be more prepared in a community context. And that means not just our leadership, but our community stewards, our custodians, our community food champions, knitted in together, recognising we're all in the same boat and we need to be building action in right now, because we don't know when the next crisis is going to happen. But we can upskill, we can make sure that we are aware of who needs care and what our assets are and what our gaps are. And do we have a plan? And how will we communicate if we don't have mobile service? And where are our seeds? Because during the pandemic there was a run on seeds? So there are skills that we need.
Manda: And are these happening, Daphne? Because we need to do these is self-evident. Is it actually happening? We're back to ossified councils. And this is a worldwide podcast and so this is things that communities will need across the world. And perhaps there are areas of the world where the ossification is less. But is this happening in the UK and in other places that you know of? Are we able to do this?
Daphne: The wonderful news is yes! There is so much heartening, wonderful stuff going on. And for the most part it is not council or government led, although there are exceptions, which is really encouraging. For the most part it is people who are feeling, you know, the hook behind their belly button that's pulling them forward. That deep pull, that drive, that values driven energy that gathers other people up in their steam. We have incredible national level initiatives. I've said the Sustainable Food Places Network, the Gaia Foundation and the Seed Sovereignty program. Initiatives teaching regenerative agriculture. I'm part of an initiative that is Routes to Regeneration. There's the Apricot Centre that's teaching regenerative farming. So many great initiatives that are bringing together people, regardless of where they are in the food system. It might be farmers. It might be people working in policy, it might be community gardeners and seed savers. And each of these initiatives, they might seem small or they might start small, but they eventually really loop people in. We're very excited about skilling up, about resilience, about how just to connect with other people and to be excited about creating a better option for the world.
Manda: Okay, so these things are happening and they're happening around the country. Good. Okay. So seeds. Tell us a bit about the value of, the need for and how it works. Because again, we're up against the multinationals who don't want people to save seeds. And yet Land race seeds seem to me again, another really important; naturally pollinated, grows on this land. I will pick the best and I will keep them going. And 2 or 3 generations down the line, I will have something that is actually oriented to here, even though here is changing as a result of the climate impact. I've been to your seed bank. I have acquired seeds from you. Tell us about the practical challenges and resilience of seeds.
Daphne: I think one of the most significant challenges is that people forget about seeds. People see food. People can relate to food. Food is a substantial physical thing. They eat it and that's great. They forget that everything we eat...
Manda: Everything starts as a seed.
Daphne: Everything starts from a seed. And even that lump of cow you might be eating has been fed by things that grow from seeds. So part of it is we have lost incredible seed diversity in the last 80 years. We have fewer people who save seed. We have fewer people who are independent small companies that produce seed. Essentially, it's sort of taken on like borderline occult status.
Manda: Because it's not that easy saving seed, actually, unless it's beans or, I don't know, peppers or marrows.
Daphne: I will challenge you on that and say easier than you think. It's like making your own bread. I think we've been convinced very conveniently that it's harder than you think it is, so don't don't try. When really, it's a spectrum of complexity and a spectrum of challenge. And it just depends on how hard you want to geek out on learning how to save seed. And it's a wonderful gardening rabbit hole if you want to geeky.
Manda: Okay. I will take you up on that. Possibly not next year, but the year after I'm going seed geek.
Daphne: It will be absolutely essential stuff. So saving seed back in World War two, every 10th field was put aside for seed production. And that was part of the domestic food security planning.
Manda: Because everybody then understood it. I would struggle to imagine a single minister in the existing government that actually understands that that would be a useful thing.
Daphne: Because once again, we just expect things to come from somewhere, but we don't see it in that systems way of how does it begin and how do we move through that growth to full circle? Saving seed is fascinating. It is absolutely essential to our long term survival. It is a legacy. It is our ancestral heritage in physical form. For 10,000 years, our varieties have been handed down and handed down. And they're like languages; if they die out, they're gone forever.
Manda: And they're adapted to the land on which they grew and they've been adapted for a very long time.
Daphne: Absolutely. And so there is this weight of responsibility, but privilege that comes with saving seed and being given seed and the stories that go with that seed. And from the enslaved people going from Africa being taken to the States, weaving seeds into their hair so that they would have seed from the things that they know. So that's why there's okra and collard greens on soul food menus. These things are so deeply part of people's cultural stories. And once again, we've lost our cultural stories, we've lost our cultural connection to food. But seed and those stories can give people so much meaning, and not just in terms of their connection backwards, but what we hold on to and steward now.
Manda: What we can pass on down the lines.
Daphne: For future generations. And we get to hold that for them and carry that forward, season on season. And to give that gift forward is an amazing thing in diversity, embedded within the landscape and taking the stories and the complexity of that landscape and good seasons and bad seasons and the strongest crops and leaving the weakest. It's such a poetic and beautiful thing to be able to do. And we have the Gaia Foundation Seed Sovereignty network that is teaching people across the UK through regional seed coordinators and clusters that gather that talk about seed, that share stories, that share skills, equipment and try to take that out to more people more widely. So I think when I talk about food and food systems, I also mean seed and seed systems. And we have the UK Grain Labs as a small scale grain network that is working to bring back heritage varieties of grain as well, because we forget about our grains heritage, as those have been supplanted by commercial varieties, and we have to unpick and unpick and claim the heritage of landscape.
Manda: And then the cooking that goes with them. Because you cook, say black oats very differently than you cook the ones that you just buy off the shelf.
Daphne: Absolutely. So we get to, as seed savers, work with chefs and bakers who can mill and test and connect with their communities and tell these stories as well. So it's a storytelling process at every step that illustrates how all of it fits together.
Manda: Right. And not just in the UK. These exist all around the world. I think that's really important to say is, everything that we're talking about here at county level or national level is international. That food is common to everybody. We all need to eat, and it would be good if we were eating food that was actually good for us and had high nutrient density, did well on the Brics tests. Rather than the empty calories that the multinationals would like us to remain addicted to. We are at the end of our hour. We both have to go. Is there anything that you would like to say in wrapping up to give people a sense of potential, of ways that they could take the next best step, anything of that?
Daphne: We're coming up to the holidays and people will be feasting. And I would say that as people think about their food and they think about the feasts that they want to gather people for, make the effort to connect with your local farmers and to buy local food to celebrate the landscape, the season, the harvest, and eat real food prepared with time and care. Give the gift of food. Of sourdough starter, of kombucha mothers.
Manda: Yes, water kefir is my latest find. It's amazing.
Daphne: And seeds. And give people the gift of abundance that won't keep feeding a system that doesn't love you. But give love and abundance to those you care about. Because we need to reinvent a system and it needs to be focussed on those around our table and inviting more people around that table and thinking of our farmer neighbours and inviting them to share in that table through the abundance that is on it. And we can do this locally, more and more than you think. And so it can start with voting for a local Christmas meal or celebratory meal. But food is something that we can make a choice every single day to be a bit more mindful of. And it is transformational and community action. And even if it's just having conversations about your food memories from when you were younger or teaching skills like bottling and preserving, we all have a role to play in unpicking the loss of knowledge and skills, and to being more connected to one another. And food is the greatest tool for being able to do that.
Manda: Perfect. Thank you. And we don't all live a dozen miles from Daphne, but there will be a person close to you who thinks like this and who is doing this. So we'll put in the show notes some of the ways to connect, at least in the UK and possibly internationally, because everybody needs to eat. And the better we can eat, the better we can be part of the solution. Thank you so much, Daphne. I look forward to further conversations as we all move forward. But in the meantime, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Daphne: Thank you so much.
Manda: And there we go. That's it for another week. Huge thanks to Daphne for all that you are and do. It is such a pleasure to talk to you and to understand how many people are working so hard and with such good effect at all of the levels that matter. When our world seems to be cascading so fast into chaos and collapse, this is what gives me hope. The fact that you can take children who have never seen a horizon and introduce them to a farm, and create life changing understanding of where food comes from and how we grow and how we thrive, and how we offer ourselves in service to life. This was a very local conversation, we both live in the same county. But there will be people near you, wherever you are in the world, who are working towards resilient food systems. Even at the level of the idiocy and corruption of government, there will be people trying to gain food security, however unlikely that is, however relatively impossible in a world where we need to work together and they are creating deeper and deeper silos. They still want, wherever you live, to be able to produce local food for local people. And provided we don't do that with the inputs of industrial agriculture, actually we are aiming in the same direction. So find whoever there is, whatever they're doing near to you, and do whatever you can to support them.
Manda: If there's a local farm growing local food and you have the means, then buy that food. It's going to be better than whatever you can get at the supermarket. If it's at all possible to stop using supermarkets, then please do that. They're not useful. They're not our friends. They're not on our side. Go find the local producers and support them in whatever way you can.
There we go. That's it for this week. We'll be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for lightning fast production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website, making the gatherings happen, and all of the conversations that keep us moving forward and learning and growing. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who eats food, then please do send them this link. And if you have time to give us a review, five stars to subscribe to us on whatever channel you use, please do so. It definitely makes a difference to the algorithms. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.