Food for the Community
This section aims to get your community to think about your ability to feed yourselves. Here in Wales we are lucky to have a wonderfully rich and varied food heritage, which includes plenty of meat, fish, cheese, preserves, fruit and vegetables. A huge range of fresh, local produce is available from season to season throughout the land, making growing and buying locally-produced food possible to all.
Local food is important for many reasons:
- Local food is fresher than shipped-in food and so it tastes better and is more nutritious;
- Local food has fewer food miles and is better for the environment;
- Local food helps support the local economy;
- Local food is more easily traced back to its origins
However, in recent years the rise of supermarkets and desire for convenience has found us filling up our supermarket trolleys with pre-packaged food that’s been flown in from across the globe. As a result, consumers and producers have become disconnected from each other, leading society to lose its understanding of the land and where food comes from.
A fifth of the UK's total greenhouse gas emissions come from food - the climate impact of eating fruit and vegetables rivals that of petroleum refining! This makes food a key area to tackle in the bid to create more sustainable communities. Strong local communities with experience of working together to meet their basic needs will be much better placed to thrive in an oil-poor world than societies that rely on globalised production and distribution systems. Communities with well-developed local food systems will be economically better off too. Research has shown that money spent locally on local goods circulates around the local economy for longer than money spent at big chain stores whose profits are paid to distant share-holders.
This is why the Cadarn scheme is keen to get communities working to support local food schemes.