Food & Health Alliance

Workshop 2. Local food and health

Enjoying and getting involved in producing and eating local food is more effective in the long-term than telling people what’s good for them, Fergus Younger, Development Manager for Argyll and Bute Agricultural Forum, told the workshop on local food and health.

He described several projects in Argyll he had been involved in, all of which related to food production and consumption but none of which talked explicitly about the health benefits.

‘If you create an interest in people and engage them in an activity around local food, that’s a stronger motivator than telling people about how much salt or fat you should have,’ he maintained.

He had been closely involved in helping to set up Food from Argyll, a type of farmers’ market selling local produce from Loch Fyne oysters to salads and burgers that began life in 2007 when they were invited to set up a marquee at the Connect rock festival.

Since then the group had gone from strength to strength and in 2009 was represented at 12 events and festivals, including T in the Park and Rockness. An estimated 250,000 people sampled their food in 2008, helping to spread the word about the range of good local food produced in Argyll. The producers have now set up as a farmers’ co-operative group and have won a number of awards.

In fact it had become so popular it now had its own fans who followed them from one event to another. ‘It’s a bit like being a rock band,’ said Fergus, ‘it’s quite bizarre.

‘We don’t say anything about health,’ he added. ‘We just try to enthuse people about food.’ Some of the products they sold, such as sticky toffee pudding, were not obviously healthy but their overall healthy eating message underlined the importance of a balanced diet.

He also described local horticultural projects he had helped facilitate in Islay, Bute and Kintyre which were involving schools, creating employment and producing fresh, seasonal fruit and vegetables for the local communities.

Importantly, these schemes had been supported by a very active local housing association which had been crucial to their survival. ‘These sorts of projects do need that kind of drive and facilitation.’

The key to sustaining the long-term future of schemes like the horticultural projects was introducing apprenticeships as well as securing the funding to make it happen in the first place. That funding had, for instance, made it possible to employ a full-time gardener.

The schemes were not yet completely self-sustaining but he felt they had the potential to be. ‘The excitement of growing your own is quite palpable.’ And no-one should under-estimate the social benefits provided by communal activity and engaging with where food comes from.

In the question and answer session afterwards one participant felt it was important to consider the wider benefits of schemes like the horticulture project. ‘This is the sort of thing that gives people a sense of purpose and can have a big impact on their mental health and well-being and as well as helping to build communities which are in many cases quite precarious.’

These projects also created jobs and reduced reliance on exported food that might be cheaper but would have the effect of ‘externalising’ costs and taking jobs away from the local community.

Fergus admitted that calculating the overall benefit of these projects was difficult, especially if they appeared to be at odds with healthy eating messages. For instance, it could be argued frozen vegetables were better for you nutritionally but this ignored all the other benefits associated with local food production.

He also felt it was vital that these projects came from the grassroots and were not imposed from above if they were to be sustainable in the long-term. He questioned, for instance, whether the national Take Life On campaign would have the long-term effect on health that a local project would.

Another participant wondered whether the term ‘local’ hadn’t become too ‘cuddly and fuzzy’. For instance, some of Scotland’s most celebrated exports such as meat, cheese and whisky did not necessarily form part of a healthy diet. She was also concerned that some local produce was too expensive for people on low incomes. Unless it was affordable there was a danger of this becoming ‘just a select people’s agenda,’ she said.

But Fergus insisted initiatives like Food from Argyll were not elitist and appealed to every section of society. The food they sold was competitive with other food sold at festivals though some was not competitive with supermarket prices. ‘But I would argue that we are in for a rise in prices in supermarkets that have been sustained up to now by cheap oil. In the future they won’t be able to source cheap food so prices will start to balance out.’

What was local, one participant wanted to know? Fergus admitted that because Argyll was so spread out getting to a farmers’ market could involve a 200-mile round trip. But this could still be termed local compared to the food miles involved in supermarket distribution. It wasn’t just about locality. There were other principles involved in local food production, including how many local workers were involved, all the miles in every part of the production process and how the food was grown.

He felt national food policy needed to look at the current procurement laws that stated all tenders had to be European-wide. But, he suggested, there were sometimes ways around this by, for instance, specifying delivery times all the way from production to delivery and ensuring ‘best value’ was not simply the cheapest but factored in the health benefits to the community. ‘There are wider benefits of local food procurement,’ he added. ‘The question is how to make it fit with the rules.’