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By Andrew Stark, Scottish Food Coalition
The Scottish Food Coalition is a wide-ranging coalition of 38 organisations, who since 2015 have been tirelessly campaigning for food policy change in Scotland. After years of campaigning, we successfully got the Scottish Government to commit in their 2019-20 Programme for Government to bring forward a Good Food Nation Bill, the legislation required for us to transform Scotland’s broken food system.
Due to Covid-19, this Bill was not brought forward, with the Government focusing on emergency legislation only. Despite this, the longstanding need for a food bill did not subside, and Covid-19 brought into even sharper focus the need for holistic food policy change. It also highlighted the urgency for one of the SFC’s key asks for a Good Food Nation Bill, the Right to Food, to be brought into Scottish law. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused disruption on a scale not seen in generations to our food system. It has exacerbated existing inequalities around access to food, whilst underlining how important green spaces and community food spaces are for our mental and physical wellbeing. Introducing the Right to Food would be a vital step in protecting those most vulnerable from the harmful consequences of our distorted food system. The SFC responded to the Right to Food consultation on a bill and organised a series of workshops to help people respond to the consultation.
To capture how the people of Scotland were experiencing the food system during the current pandemic in their own unique way, the SFC set out to collect people’s ‘Food Stories’. We did this through two ways. Firstly, we gathered stories as part of our ‘Covid Chronicles’ series, where our Ambassadors (volunteers) and the wider public were asked to submit their own unique story about their relationship with the food system during Covid-19. Below is an example:
The second way of collecting people’s stories was through our Food Stories Workshops series. These four workshops focussed on introducing people to the Right to Food and helping them respond to the Right to Food consultation. The second looked at how the SFC could campaign more sustainably and avoid campaign pitfalls such as burnout, whilst the last two were structured around participants sharing their food stories where we connected with the Highland Good Food Partnership.
For example, one story shared during the workshops highlighted how Covid-19 has laid bare existing inequalities around access to food and exacerbated the struggles people already struggling to afford food have. Another story described how the pandemic made them rethink about their relationship with urban spaces and the opportunities that lay in reclaiming disused public spaces for producing food in these spaces. One story told about the comfort that lay in food and its value in providing mental health benefits, particularly during the height of lockdown when our access to others and the outside world was so restricted.
Collecting people’s Food Stories has been a vitally important activity for the SFC. We have ensured that people have had their individual experience with the food system connected with others around Scotland. It has also linked these experiences with the need for the policy change to transform Scotland’s food system to one that is more resilient to future shocks, kinder to our environment and people and able to support the changes needed to change our food system; from strengthening workers’ rights, enabling healthy diets and protecting nature. These have given us more evidence of the need for such policy changes and we will continue to campaign for a Good Food Nation Bill to bring about a transformation of Scotland’s food system.
October 2020