Local Food
Why WEN campaigns in this area
Everyone needs food; sharing and celebrating it has the potential to heal social divides and bring people together. At the same time the way it’s produced, transported and processed can have significant impact on the environment and our health. We believe everyone should have access to fresh healthy food grown without chemical pesticides and fertilizers, but we know that organic food from the supermarket is not always affordable, especially for the 14 million people living on incomes below the national average. Figures show that some low income families eat as little as 95g of fresh green vegetables each week, barely one Brussels sprout per person per day. Growing some of your own food makes healthy fresh food affordable, as well as cutting down on pesticides, food miles and packaging.
The food project seeks to influence national food policy by highlighting experiences from women’s growing groups in Tower Hamlets and lessons from network groups across the country. Our grassroots connections inform our policy and media work and enable us to advocate on behalf of those groups, and community growers everywhere.
WEN makes the connection between local and international food issues; 70 per cent of the world’s farmers are women, yet less than one per cent hold title to land. Many of them are presently being moved off their land to make room for biofuels. WEN has joined up with ActionAid to make connections between food growers here and their compatriots overseas.
What we do:
The Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) Local Food programme has four strands:
- It offers training and support to groups of women growing food in urban areas particularly London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
- It hosts an online national directory of food growing groups called the Taste of Better Future Network, which focuses especially on ethnic minority women’s groups
- It influences national food policy through publishing research and reports, and responding to government consultations and national policy.
- It coordinates the expanding Tower Hamlets Food Growing Network (mixed gender groups rather than women only) in partnership with Capital Growth, Tower Hamlets Homes, NHS East London and the City
Who we work with:
We’ve worked with ActionAid to spread awareness of how biofuel production impacts women farmers overseas, arranging talks from representatives from Sub-Saharan countries to speak at our local food growing network events.
Some of the community groups we work with in Tower Hamlets include:
Asumjwe
Zacchaeus Project
John Scurr Community Centre
Coriander Club
Ocean Somali Community Association
Wapping Women’s Centre.
To see a Youtube video featuring Wapping Women’s Centre garden and WEN visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYxiYdvdjT8