Food rethink

Currently, government planning on climate change takes little notice of food security as a related issue, but awareness is growing. Some councils are working to encourage community gardens, home gardens and composting. All have benefits, particularly in smaller cities and towns, where many homes have a bit of yard. Programs for redistribution of unwanted but edible food are also more common in the United States, where their equity gap is larger than in Australia (although ours is growing).

Benefits of more localised food production and distribution include social interaction, quality assurance, and re-learning simple pleasures. Many older people remember the allotments and gardens of the Depression era or World War II years, often with great fondness.

There is scope for the large industrial supermarkets to soften their approach to locally grown and processed food, and become more niche oriented. Why not stock Suzie’s jam or Nellie’s Nuts? Responsiveness to local offerings could well be part of the “traffic calming” that our whole society needs. Such approaches could also provide a larger employment pool than currently work in the food processing factories we have come to accept.

A return to more individualised production and distribution is in keeping with a search for quality over quantity. The balance may be tweaked in ways that benefit us all. These moves to slower food might not feed the third world, but it could help Australian to move a bit in the direction of becoming the changes we want to see in the world.