Rumpus Room .
Isssue 2 . Spring 2021
Adapt & Act
Becoming
a Food Citizen
Contributions and Thanks This publication was created in 2020 with Rumpus Room young activists group in collaboration with Camilla Crosta and Jess Routley. Thanks to Beth Cloughton, Ellie Begley, Thalia Groucott, Asta Marie Tutavae Iversen, Eleanor Moselle and Parul Nayar from the group for sharing contributions to the magazine. Thanks to Annika Hansteen-Izora, Joss Allen and Sean Roy Parker for additional contributions. Thanks to Morven Mulgrew for hosting the bread baking & kiln making at Rumpus and to Swap Market for hosting the Becoming a Food Citizen exhibition. Thanks to Jess Routley for designing the publication and to everyone who took part in making and shaping it.
Cover: Rumpus Room Yard Harvest 2020
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About this Zine
About the Collaborators
This is the second issue of Adapt & Act, a zine created through discussions with young people about issues that affect them now and going into the future. This issue was created through a series of online workshops titled ‘Becoming a Food Citizen’ hosted in the later half of 2020 by Camilla Crosta in collaboration with young people from Govanhill and across the world.
Camilla Crosta is a freelance curator and producer based in Glasgow, Scotland. Camilla’s practice is particularly focused on both public space and location-sensitive curating, and the politics of food. She is also researching participatory models of governance in cities and the role of artists and art organisations in the urban policy decision- making processes.
Becoming a Food Citizen is part of Around The Table, a Food For Life Get Togethers project supported by The National Lottery and The Soil Association.
Küche is a social business creating food led events, community projects and multicultural catering in collaboration with people navigating the UK immigration system.
If you are a young person living in Glasgow aged 16 -25yrs and interested getting involved in the project get in touch at
Jess Routley is an artist who’s practice focusses on the visibility and invisibility of difference through portraiture. Jess is also a co-founder of daikon* zine.
rumpusroomteam@gmail.com
daikon* is a collective of South East and East Asian women and non-binary and trans people who produce daikon* zine as a platform to build community, provide space for underrepresented voices and narratives. daikon* critically examine and respond to structural inequality; building radical and educational resources by and for South East and East Asian people of marginalised genders in the diaspora.
About Rumpus Room Rumpus Room (RR) is an artist-led initiative dedicated to collaborative arts practice rooted in mutual exchange with children and young people in order to challenge how we play, learn and make art. RR considers alternative ways of learning; facilitating shared spaces for art and social action between artists, children, families and young people. In 2019, we started the open-studio in Govanhill, Glasgow. The studio is run by artists and playworkers and hosts a programme of youth-led activity for children, young people and their families living in Govanhill and the wider community. The studio is a shared experimental creative space, existing on and offline, where children & young people can work independently and in collaboration with artists, activists, youth, play and community workers on ideas they have instigated.
Publication design and additional illustrations by Jess Routley from daikon* zine.
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Contents 2
About This Zine
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Key Terms
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Introduction - Fixing our broken food system
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A Food Manifesto - Demands and Dreams for the Future
11 Part 1 - Food and the Personal 13 Supermarkets 14 Diwali 16 Dear Strawberry 18 Foods that Remind Me Of My Childhood 21 Part 2 - Writing a Collective (Food) Stor y 23 Baking Bread togehter 26 Collective Menu 28 Group Menus 33 Part 3 - What (Food) Future can we Imagine? 34 Actions for Fare and Care Idea Board 36 What does Our Food Future look like? 39 Simple Food Waste Dye 40 Communal Dreaming 43 Food Production as a Means to Create Sustainable Communities 46 Creating Ecosystems In Your Home 48 Some Words about Growing Food 50 Glossar y 52 Resources
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Fixing our broken food system - demands & dreams for the future Intro written with the Rumpus Room food working group
Our food system is broken. It is vital we re-think that system and the civic role of food. The growing debates on food inequality and inaccessibility, as well as on the right of communities to control the way food is produced, traded and consumed, show how food is political. Food can be an act of solidarity. It can be used to explore social relationships and the places where we live. The table becomes a way of telling stories. Performative meals can be used as tools for addressing social concerns and political dilemmas. This is the second issue of Adapt & Act, a magazine created through discussions with young people about issues that affect them now and going into the future. This issue was created through a series of online workshops titled ‘Becoming a Food Citizen’ hosted in the later half of 2020 by Camilla Crosta in collaboration with young people from Govanhill and across the world. As we moved our sessions online, our project which is firmly rooted locally to the Rumpus studio in Govanhill, was suddenly able to connect with young people around the world from Portugal to Norway to India. For ‘Becoming a Food Citizen’ workshops, young people came together to ask how we could use food as a way to care for our communities we are a part of and to imagine alternative food systems based on equality, fairness and justice. The sessions were split into four themes Food as an act of solidarity, Food, community & identity, Food & cultural sharing and Food utopias & the environment. The magazine follows these themes with introductions from the workshops and contributions from young people involved.
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To support the workshops Camilla worked with Jess Routley (daikon*) to produce a Becoming a Food Citizen workbook that is available as a free resource to be used at home or in other local working groups settings. Scan the QR code here to access it! As an outcome of the ‘Becoming a Food Citizen’ workshops and publication a young persons food working group has formed at Rumpus Room for young people who live locally to the studio in Govanhill in Glasgow. The group hosts monthly meetings to continue to explore food as a civic tool and plan ways they can activate some of the ideas in this publication in the places we live in. The magazine includes contributions from Beth Cloughton, Ellie Begley, Thalia Groucott, Asta Marie Tutavae Iversen, Eleanor Moselle and Parul Nayar from the group alongside contributions from 3 artists & designers working in food and environmental practices that inspire us; Annika Hasteen-Izora, Joss Allen and Sean Roy Parker. Some of young people from the Rumpus food group have shared in their own words why the project and being part of a self organised solidarity group is important to them; Beth Cloughton is a member of the group: “One of the reasons I think a food group like this is important is because it has core principles of community-ownership, possibility and transformation. Conversations and actions are cyclical and need to be led by local groups, not corporations, especially not conglomerates greenwashing themselves. It is also because it is a group of compassionate listeners and where you can challenge and question together. It is about collaboration not individualism. “The issues of our food system are a way to access and challenge the global issues we face more broadly. Food underpins everything we do, it is literally fuel. But, it is also a way to learn about different problems through its lens. Inequality; sustainability and environmentalism; fair labour; exploitation; supply chains; colonialism; and more. Food is one way to access almost all the socio-political and economic problems we face.” Thalia Groucott describes how she joined the group as a way of learning more about problems and solutions in our food systems: “I think that the problems in our food systems today are the result of many combined factors, including the supermarket hegemony in food access and the isolated manner in which we view food and eating, but I think that there are lots of creative ways in which we, as communities, can begin to tackle these.” During the Becoming a Food Citizen workshops, the group drafted a manifesto on food solidarity, sharing demands and dreams for the future:
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A Food Manifesto Demands & Dreams for the Future No food poverty - sanctions on the governments that allow it No food banks/pantries because we don’t need them Free food for all No industrial agriculture No pesticides/herbicides Community gardens for everyone Public space is used for food growing More food education
Everyone has access to their own plot of land A cyclical food system Housing built with sustainable food systems Food growing integrated as a bathroom/kitchen Waste re-thought
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Better access to fresh food Less water used Community fridges and freezers Food corporations 1) don’t exist, 2) if they exist, there is no food monopoly and their profits are put into the local community Illegal for food to be thrown away by supermarkets Right to growing space Cooking food for yourself everyday is difficult and lonely, can we cook for each other? Everyone will be fed and healthy and happy Public space is important for food, public space is yours, reclaim this space that is yours
People should be being a part of this process Free school meals Dignity around food Food support for new families
Mutual food-giving and sharing Community is extended family
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1. Food and the personal: Notes on a reimagined self through food and people A brief journey from the personal and the intimate sphere of our families and traditions to the communal dimension of the world around us. Poetic and visual explorations of intergenerational relations (us and our families), interhuman relations (us and food) and “contaminated” relations (relations as matters of survival and adaptation).
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by Beth Cloughton
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Supermarkets Shivering by the fridge aisle, she lost her sense of direction. Next to a punnet of eggs stamped with the code 1UK23023, By a carton of lactofree milk, In front of a tiny paddling pool of cream, She stood there staring at a cold slice of pink salmon, as thin as the knot under her left rib bone. A child was screaming by the baby bells, she decided to take a left. Past a box of curiously cinnamon whole grain squares, By some puffed white choc coco pops And a broken pot of marmite that could have been there since last year. She picked up some apples from an almost empty crate, hexagonal, like a beehive, Finally in the queue by the checkout, She caught the attention of a cat hanging out in a young man’s backpack And wondered why the neighbour’s dog had left a flip flop on her doorstep this morning.
words by Eleanor Begley art by Asta Iversen
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by Parul Nayar
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Dear Strawberry
Dear Strawberry,
Your tip is a bit mouldy but I don’t mind, it’s mid-september after all, and I know this isn’t the best time for you. I found you in the discount section of tesco. It says on the back of the box that you were grown somewhere in the UK. That’s lovely, I’m glad you didn’t have to travel too far. I really like you dear strawberry, I was having a bit of a tough day you see, as I had an argument with a friend this morning - I won’t go into it here - but it left me feeling not very hungry. But when I found you, you really did make my day a little better. You were so fresh and sweet, even if Mr. Tesco said you were past your best before date. I’d hate to have a best before date stamped on me, as if my impending death and self-worth was already decided by someone else, in this case the UK Food Standards Agency. Now I wouldn’t want to make anyone sick either, if I really was past my best before date maybe I should accept that it’s time to start a new life among the worms. But we all know that the UK Food Standards Agency does get it wrong sometimes and to them I’m just a number with an estimated life span and a predictable number of calories. Well who has ever wanted to be predictable? Anyway I do wonder dear strawberry where you did actually grow. I’ve always really loved strawberries ever since a girl in school told me you weren’t actually a berry because your seeds are on the outside. I recently discovered that while you are not a berry, grapes and bananas - as a matter of fact - are. It’s all very confusing and honestly I think it’s a bit mean, you should be whatever you want to be. But anyway, I always liked strawberries - I hope I’m not generalising too much here - but I always liked them because you were one of the fruits, if I can call you that, that grew well I guess in the land where I came from? which wasn’t where I grew up. So, whenever we visited relatives in the summer you would always be there and would be delicious. We used to have you with fresh cream and airy meringues. I never liked whole meringues but crushed up I thought they were delicious with you...if that’s ok with you? But I don’t want any of them right now, I just want you because you’re a little sweet but mostly refreshing which is what I really need.
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Anyway even if this combination is tasty, it’s named after a school that is very famous and very powerful, much more so that you or I could imagine. You see I have to be the bearer of this horrible news, that sometime in your life you will most likely be associated with this dish, the one I was describing, which unfortunately for you is called Eton mess. The school it is named after has quite a reputation. And I hate to break the news to you, but recently Eton mess has also been used to describe the current political climate. I know, I’m sorry dear strawberry, I realise you didn’t want any of this. But yeah, Eton mess has recently been used to refer to the post -referendum chaos brought about by Boris’ government. I just thought I should tell you so that you are prepared for what you might come up against. If it was up to me, you would live and grow up however you wanted, without these people telling you who you are before you know it yourself. So here we go: a petition has gone around to rename the dish you are most associated with, the dish currently named Eton Mess....a petition has gone round to rename it: Brexit. The petition reads: “We, the undersigned, believe that a few grown-up boys have whipped up a tide of xenophobia in this country like cream, before crumbling its meringue-like international unions to make a pudding that no one wants anyway.” Now how mean is that dear strawberry! I mean they don’t mention you directly, they are more talking about the stuff around you I guess. I can’t believe they were the ones that slammed you together with these two ingredients and now they’re blaming you for it. It does seem a bit self-righteous I must say. They’re not very good listeners are they? I mean I guess a cream of hate has been whipped up by Boris’ government and that’s true but now you’ll forever be associated with that cream and never for what you are - sweet and fresh, how I see you now, if you want to hear it. Take it on as you wish. Anyway, dear strawberry, I’m not sure who you’d like to be eaten with, or if you’d like to be eaten at all. I wish there was some way to know a little more about you. I wonder who planted and watered you? And if they felt at home here too. I wonder if you made them feel more at home or if they hated you because all they saw was strawberries all day long and you made their back hurt and woke them up at 4am and I don’t know how much of the £1.18 I paid in tesco for a box of you they got in the end. The ironic thing is that most likely this Eton Mess that these petition people have been talking about, the current political climate, will decide the fate of your future grandchildren. Who will pick you, how much they will be paid, how far they must travel to get to you and birth you into this world, how much they will miss their own families. It must have come as a bit of a shock to all those cream-whipping racists that when coronavirus hit they had to call back flight-loads of eastern Europeans to pick the fruit for their non-existent Wimbledon matches. Apparently a whole load of you went to rot when all the sporting matches got cancelled. Who knows what’s in store for next spring. Who knows if the Brits will get it together to pick their own fruit or if they will grow to be a little more understanding of newcomers. Who knows how long the essential workers label will stick, if this will reflect how much people get paid, or if the low-skilled judgement will come creeping back in. Who knows if the virus will still be lurking or what the weather will be like and how it will affect your growth. All I can say, which is not much, is thanks for growing and thanks to everyone who helped you grow and brought you to me. I am very lucky to have tasted you and had the time to write you this letter, however superfluous it may be.
words by Eleanor Begley art by Jess Routley
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by Eleanor Moselle
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2. Writing a collective (food) stor y Shared food, Collective food, Care, Mutual support, Cooperation, Exchanges, Solidarity, Celebrating the other in our food collaborations. Some visual attempts in merging food experiences and stories to write a new collective one.
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by Asta Iversen
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Baking Bread Together
On the weekend of Saturday 12th September 2020 we celebrated one year at the Rumpus studio in Govanhill, Glasgow with a small harvest party in the yard outside for local families and neighbours. We’d been working at the studio with artist and potter Morven Mulgrew over the year making a collection of ceramic tableware using vegetables and wooden cutlery to print, roll and shape clay. We made a mighty collection of spoons, platters and a huge big pot with 8 handles that was made by a group of kids during a cosy family workshop pre-covid. Before the eraser was invented people used to use soft bread crumbs to erase pencil marks.
The studio moved outdoors into the fresh air in the summertime and Morven worked with small groups of children to make terracotta bread tins using bags of flour as moulds to shape around. We glazed the ceramics together using shiny white, russet and transparent blue glazes, dipping and sloshing objects into old buckets in that kind of carefree ‘I don’t know what this will look like until it’s done’ kind of way. We mixed flour and water to make our own sourdough starter and fed it until we were ready to bake loaves in our tins. The yeast used to make bread is an organism floating around in the air we breathe. by Nadia in conversation with Morven
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For the weekend of the harvest we served a delicious homemade Pakistani lunch cooked by chef and neighbour Saubia, harvested all the veg and herbs in the yard beds, made mint tea, fed the worms, and built a DIY kiln with Morven using borrowed bricks, a bucket of sand and an old oven tray. We fired our terracotta bread tins and tried baking our loaves together. On kiln day, temperatures in the kiln ranged from 600 at the mouth of the fire to 20 (!!!) at the back of the kiln chamber. We reached about 400 in the middle but we needed about 600 to transform the clay through quartz inversion! That’s the point you can’t go back and transformation occurs 573 degrees celsius. On bread day however, the mouth of the fire was reading 1100 at some points and the area the bread was cooking in was consistently about 220, we took turns to waft the flames to keep the temperature between 190-250 degrees celsius, wafting heated it up then it slowly cooled down then we wafted again. The first loaf came out as hard as a rock. After a few attempts we got there and spread homemade bramble jam on thick hot slices. This was the first time many of us had been together in real life for months. The word companion comes from Latin com - ‘with’ and panis ‘bread’.
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We talked about bread, what kind of bread we liked to eat, what kind of bread we’ve tried to make, how it tastes ‘sweet or savory, crust or no crust, flat, wrap or roll?’ We stacked the fire in the kiln and took turns to waft it with the lid of a box. We talked about family recipes, things to cook using leftover bread and other ways people have cooked bread together in outdoor shared ovens. In Egyptain Arabic, the word for bread, ‘aish’, simply means ‘life’.
Building our own DIY kiln and baking bread together ignited something in many of us who helped to build it; a kind of power in self organising - working together to do something simple and practical like baking our own bread reminded us of how much more we can do for ourselves and for others.
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Collective Menu Starter Cucumber, Tahini, Feta
Main Aubergine, Kidney beans, Cinnamon, Cumin + Basmati
Dessert
Oats + Rose petals
Associations Oats and Basmati - plain, filling, delicious Aubergine - nostalgic / memories, lots of different ways of cooking, grilled, fried, roasted… nutty and tasty Rose petals - in India have them in hot water before a meal to clean the palate menu created in the group workshop art by Jess Routley
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by Asta Iversen
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Group Menus
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by the workshop group
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by Eleanor Moselle
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3. What (food) future can we imagine? Exercises of imagination for a real utopic future We need a new language to speak about food, We need to dream together to envision the unthinkable, We need a new National Food System, We need actions based on imagination.
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by the workshop group
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What Does Our Food Future Look Like? Transcript from National Food Service presentation, Thursday 27 Aug from Sean Roy Parker’s Fermental Health blog.
As well as an artist I describe myself as an eco-anxious environmentalist and cook. I first hooked up with the National Food Service (NFS) as a local contact a year ago and did a talk with lovely Elliot at the Food and Farming March organised by Landworkers Alliance at OXO Tower. I have been waving the NFS flag from South London and volunteering some time to help other local groups set up or make changes to the projects, and contribute to the national strategy. I’ve also been a point of contact for enquiries and opportunities around food justice projects in South London. One of the projects I ran was Brixton Pound Cafe, a pay-what-you-can (PWYC) space that saved surplus food from going to landfill and turned it into delicious, affordable vegetarian and vegan lunches for the community. The main aims were to reduce food waste, tackle income inequality and engage isolated folks in the area. Brixton has been aggressively gentrified for almost a decade and providing a free-to-use space with tasty food, coffee and activities like yoga, reiki, life drawing means we had a great range of wonderful and interesting people from different age groups and demographics that used the cafe regularly. I like to think about the PWYC model as one that not only demonstrates how to provide affordable and nutritious food with few resources, but also as a platform for creating local friendships, building community trust and autonomy and experimenting with alternative currencies. By creating a nonjudgmental environment we can eradicate the risk of poverty-shaming that is so prevalent in cross-class interpersonal relationships in a city. The idea of paying what you can afford has a subtext of asking privileged folks to critically consider their status and how best they can contribute to the upkeep of the project, usually in a financial capacity. It also allows those who can offer their time, skills, labour as a unique non-financial stake, facilitating a horizontal support structure that doesn’t leave anyone behind. Many food justice projects rely on surplus food, either through skipping, working with charities or receiving donations directly from suppliers. If there is enough money in the project, food will also be purchased in. These connections are understandably extremely precarious at the best of times, with common issues like no transport, lack of volunteers or food expiration and rotting. This means spending unnecessary funds on buying-in low quality food from supermarkets, one of the institutions that is contributing to food insecurity in the first place because of price and also the privatisation of abundance. This is a huge problem in the city, where businesses restrict access to leftovers, but this might be a whole other subject.
words by Sean Roy Parker art by Jess Routley
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To create a Fairer Food Future, particularly facing Brexit and Covid, we need to consider how important it is to building stronger ties with UK-based food producers. Why are we importing vegetables from across the globe in ever increasing carbon-expensive methods which don’t ensure farmers’ welfare and do exploit workers at all points in the chain? In the UK we have a fine history of landworkers producing highly nutritious and diverse crops, producing around 3.5m tonnes of fruit and veg every year. Food justice charity Feedback found that farmers who took part in a survey were saying up to 37,000 tonnes of crops were left in the field to rot last year. This is astounding because the figure hides all the labour and materials lost, and represents a huge financial burden to farmers who are already struggling from lack of government subsidies. The expertise of our nation of Landworkers has been abused and overlooked for many years. Bringing the NFS forwards we need to be thinking about how we can support farmers and landworkers, and integrate their skills, knowledge and produce back into the process of feeding communities. This is already being done by Feedback who I mentioned, through their Gleaning Network, which takes volunteers to farms, picks abandoned crops and redistributes them to community kitchens, preservers and small businesses. This is exactly the sort of resourceful thinking that can get food to emerging projects in both rural and urban areas, and create new networks of transporters and more resilient supply chains from the growers. Having said this, the wellbeing of Organic Farmers and Landworkers should be our top priority. We need to be buying their produce rather than receiving it for free, so we can put money in their pockets and food on the tables in our network of social eating spaces. Their work is unequivocally important in caring for and renaturing our soils, which have been ravaged by aggressive agribusiness extractive capitalist practices for decades. Everything comes from the soil because everything comes from plants.
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The future of the funding strategies of NFS and other national Food Justice programmes must include integrating fair payment to farmers and landworkers and support for increasing opportunities for Black and Brown farmers, who have been excluded from the countryside for so long and will bring a wealth of new energy, expertise and ideas for creating sustainable food futures. My feelings around the commons are becoming increasing pressing as the threats to reduce the amount of usable countryside and increase the punishment for trespassing. Not only does the UK have a class issue in its capitals, in the cities and towns, but it also does in the countryside. I don’t need to say too much about why it’s reprehensible that landowners are given more and more power, and the public less and less autonomy, but this will also have a catastrophic effect on how we access wild food. I am a huge advocate of introducing wild foods into our diets. Not only because all food came from the wild but also the incredible depth of nutrition that it can add to our bodies. Harvesting his free, abundant, delicious resource responsibly is key to helping increase biodiversity in areas that are susceptible to being colonised by fervent species. For instance; nettles, dandelions, three cornered leek are all in band 9 of invasive species in London, all absolutely packed with nutrients, oils and flavour. We are doing micro-ecologies a favour by picking and eating the abundance of dominant plants. We can also see how eating wild food can help decarbonise our diets; cancel the need for any labour or refrigeration costs, reduce the negative environmental impact of transport, and create opportunities to connect with unbridled nature, wild nature and regain some control over the food we put in our bodies. Going blackberrypicking is one of the most fun things to do on a drizzly day in autumn with your friends. There are literally tens of plants that many consider weeds that taste better, keep for longer and contain more iron and vitamin C than any packet of spinach flown over from Portugal ever could. The need to access this bounty is so important to our cultural history, our local values and the way in which we share a relationship with our natural environment. The National Food Service has already integrated wild foods into many of its kitchens, and by making stronger connections with local experts and enthusiasts, there is an
opportunity to reinvigorate our love of scavenging and to regain some degree of sovereignty over our food system for the near future.
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by Asta Iversen
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Communal Dreaming Been quieter lately, off socials, reading more, questioning a lot, drinking water, being tired, thinking about what it actually means to show up with love for myself & my loved ones, about the power of communal dreaming. In these past months, I’ve been tired - not inspired to create. Dreaming has come in as a way to tether, to consider self and communal possibility. I want to think about how dreaming can sway away from toxic positivity, escapism or reductionism. When I think about dreaming I think about how it can be used as a strategy, as a way to critique, as a balm. As a method of envisioning beyond the status quo - which is informed by those in power. Thinking about what it looks like to give each other space to dream together - off the screen. Right now, giving myself room to dream is an act of care, opening myself to communal dreaming is giving me room to build trust with others. It’s a way I can move against my habit of isolation when I’m depressed. It’s a method of reaching out. It’s a reminder of my capacity to change, adapt, transform. Question to take with you off the screen: What are you dreaming about? What would it mean to dream communally with others? Book I’m reading right now in the study of dreaming: 1. Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson, Alex Lubin Sending love your way, gentle reminder to drink some water
by Annika Izora
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Food Production as a Means to Create Sustainable Communities
These are some drawings from a project I did as part of my undergraduate degree in architecture. I was designing a housing scheme that used food production as a means to create environmentally and socially sustainable communities. I became interested in the idea that architecture could be used as a tool to integrate food growing and horticulture into the daily lifestyles of the residents through having it be inherent to the structural and spatial design of the building, through strategies such as green walls, aquaponics systems and stacked allotments that are attached to the flats. Growing food seemed to be simultaneously beneficial in itself as it could provide the residents with fresh, seasonal and cheap produce, as well as being a helpful tool and an answer to many contemporary and long-standing issues in housing and general society; lack of outdoor space, air pollution, mental health, loneliness, climate change and food insecurity. This project explored the idea of a self-sufficient, mutually reliant community where growing food and living together exists in a symbiotic relationship.
words and art by Eleanor Moselle
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Ideas for growing food in your home
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Seaweed Laundry - Harvesting seaweed under the washing machine Use the roof Make a growing cross-building canopy across rooftops to connect with your neighbour
Moss carpets in the bottom of your shower Tomatoes above your shower using the steam to make them ripe The alternative medicine cabinet - repurposing things that you’ve bought The bathroom as the garden The car greenhouse Make a wall out of used bottles and store herbs and small plants in them, make tea with all different herbs and spices on the wall . Grow peas up your windows Sharing spider plants Asparagus fern is really good in bathrooms! Bathroom food growing eco system - a hot humid room - tomatoes growing above the shower, moss to clean the water - algae wall. Spider plant chain, pot for every new plant.
Grow mushrooms in buckets under the stairs or in a dark cupboard. words by the workshop group art by Jess Routley
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Some words about food and food growing I’ve been playing with words and their meanings, sketching out a different kind of glossary on food practices and politics. These are not definitive but provisional, towards thinking and doing otherwise. Here are a few recent ones. What do you think? Do you have your own? I'd love to hear from you: joss.hamilton.allen@gmail.com
Culture, v.
1.
The act of becoming earthly.
2.
To care for and honour the soil.
Domestication, n.
1. The principle of incorporation, human control and captivity. 2.
The principle of interdependence, dialogue and trust.
Sow, v.
1.
To practice the discipline of hope. by Joss Allen
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Glossar y Anti-capitalist can be used to describe someone, ideas or actions which oppose Carbon emissions is the carbon dioxide that capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system which planes, cars, factories, etc produce, which is mostly benefits private individuals or corporations harmful for the environment. and can cause social inequality. Biocides can be a pesticide or an antimicrobial containing or generating an active substance(s) that is used to prevent or control various types of harmful or unwanted organisms. Such products include disinfectants, preservatives, insect repellents, rodenticides and insecticides. (Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine, Kildare, Ireland.)
Diaspora/Diasporic refers to a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. Historically, the word diaspora was used to refer to the mass dispersion of a population from its indigenous territories.
Ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives. Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as Biodiversity is the shortened form of biological moral philosophy. and diversity. It refers to the variety of life forms that can be found within ecosystems, species, Food Bank is a charitable organisation which plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms. A high collects food and living essentials to then distribute level of biodiversity is considered important and to those in financial difficulty. Recently, there has beneficial. been an influx of food banks. (Introduction to biodiversity, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) Food Heritage is a set of traditions and common practiced ways of producing, processing, Community Fridge is an accessible place where selling and eating food. Food heritages can tell the surplus food can be donated and collected. The history of groups of people and communities, and food is provided by both local businesses and they are important for understanding who we members of the public. The system is based on were, are and want to be. trust and is a successful way to reduce food waste. Food relations are connections, the relationships (Community Fridge, Brighton & Hove Food with people, groups and places created through Partnership) and with food. Food can be a way to rethink relationships with people, a way to find old and Conviviality is the quality of being friendly and new homes. Food relations are important because lively. It can be used to describe a person, an event they create exchange, learning and contamination or atmosphere. It has positive connotations and of ideas, which are matters of survival and refers to enjoying the surrounding company. adaptation. Citizen/Citizenship is the status of a person recognized under the custom or law of a sovereign state or local jurisdiction. In many sovereign states, citizenship is equal to nationality not ethnicity, which is in international law the membership to a sovereign state. Community refers to groups of people living in one particular area or people who are considered as a unit because of their common interests or social group etc. A community can be physical or ideological.
Food security is a measure of the availability of food and individuals’ ability to access it. It does not distinguish where food comes from, or the condition under which it was produced and distributed. (Bamidele Raheem, Is food sovereignty part of the future of skrei? Arctic University.)
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Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. Attention is paid to facilitate local food systems, promoting community control over resources, biodiversity, local knowledge, the rights of peasants, women, indigenous peoples and workers; social protection and climate justice. (Bamidele Raheem, Is food sovereignty part of the future of skrei? Arctic University.)
Gastronomic from the word ‘gastronomy’ which is the study of the relationship between food and culture. Gastronomy is the art or science of ‘good eating’. Intensive agriculture is a type of agriculture, both of crop plants and of animals, with high levels of input and output. Industrial agriculture uses huge amounts of water, energy and industrial chemicals, increasing pollution in the arable land, usable water, and atmosphere. Pollinators are small and little bigger living beings, (usually insects and some animals) which carry the pollen of trees and flowers to another tree and flower. This is vital for the reproduction and the survival of the land ecosystem. Mutual Aid is just another way of talking about helping each other and it is based on both giving and receiving help.
Revolution is a sudden, complete or marked change in something, its a radical and pervasive change in society and its social structure. Solidarity is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a sense of unity of groups or classes. It refers to the ties in society that bind people together as one. Utopia is an imagined place, community or society based on justice, equality and fairness, allowing its citizens to live a flourishing life. They invite people to participate in a process of imagining a better world, and this helps to critique and challenge the current socio-political and economic dominant system.
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Becoming A Food Citizen Group Resources
The Funambulist - Politics of Food (PDF) https://drive.google.com/file/ d/1xo2nrcI6r0fG13ChPajWPLAOhdfESjVY/view? ts=5f623a3e
Food Citizenship How a small shift in thinking – from Consumer to Citizen – can make a big difference in our food system https:// foodcitizenship.info/be-inspired/
Land In Our Names aims to disrupt oppressive land dynamics relating to BPOC communities in Britain. https://landinournames.community/ https:// landinournames.community/podcasts
Bakudapan is a study group that discuss ideas about food https://bakudapan.com/en/
Landworkers Alliance are a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers with a MOLD is an online and print magazine about mission to improve the livelihoods of our members designing the future of food. https://thisismold.com/ and create a better food and land-use system for event/education/cooperative-economics-101-and-the everyone. https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/ -revolutionary-potential-of-redistributing-ofresources#.XzutVJMzb3A A People’s Food Policy https://drive.google.com/file/ FIG (Food Issues Group) is a grassroots collective of d/0B00GeyvZdIaJY1VnNlptTFlzOFE/view food and hospitality workers in New York & beyond http://foodissuesgroup.squarespace.com/ Calais Food Collective is a grassroots organisation supporting displaced people in northern France with food packs of cooking ingredients and Eden Projects Guide to Community Food equipment. Projects https://calaisfood.wixsite.com/calaisfood https://www.edenprojectcommunities.com/sites/ default/files/community_food_projects_e-book_0.pdf
Open Kitchens is a national food solution that brings together restaurants & their communities to fund, produce & deliver free meals to those in need. https://openkitchens.co.uk/
Global Justice Now - What is Food Sovereignty? https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/what-foodsovereignty
Bread and Roses http://breadprintandroses.org/about-us/
The National Food Service is a new public service, built by and for the communities that it AROUND THE TABLE Zine by Rumpus serves. NFS aim is to eliminate food insecurity and Room & Kuche tackle the interconnected issues of social isolation https://drive.google.com/file/ and food waste. https://www.nationalfoodservice.uk/ d/1sJjAcJmRARWKggaBClbLkhQWE2zqAl4t/view? usp=sharing
Foodtank are 28 Organisations Promoting Indigenous Food Sovereignty https://foodtank.com/news/2020/08/28-organizations -promoting-indigenous-food-sovereignty/
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Artists included in this publication: Annika Hansteen-Izora https://www.annikaizora.com/blog
Joss Allen / Gardening Otherwise https://www.instagram.com/gardening_otherwise/
Sean Roy Parker / Fermental Health https://fermentalhealth.substack.com/
Glasgow based Food Projects
Propagate are a collective based in Glasgow and working across Scotland. We nurture and support the emergence of ideas, solutions and practical projects around the themes of food, communities and resilience. https://www.propagate.org.uk/ Urban Roots host community led environmental projects in the Southside of Glasgow. https:// www.urbanroots.org.uk/
Free Food Map of Glasgow https://www.urbanroots.org.uk/freefood/ Food For Good Glasgow are a group of organisations that decided to take action to tackle the impact of coronavirus on food security. Glasgow's communities are faced with an unprecedented need for good, nutritious food. https://www.facebook.com/FFGGlasgow
Glasgow Local Food Network https://www.facebook.com/ groups/328239010562316/? multi_permalinks=2998560503530140&notif_id=1583 Glasgow Seed Library - a seed library is a 946667670291&notif_t=group_highlights depository of seeds held in trust for the public. Anyone may come to the library and borrow seeds to grow. The idea is to let a number of plants ‘go to Glasgow Community Food Network seed’ at the end of the growing season. https://glasgowfood.net/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/765862137181704 MILK is a social enterprise set up to empower and support refugee and migrant women living in Glasgow http://www.milkcafeglasgow.com/
South Seeds is a community org based in the South Central area of Glasgow. http://southseeds.org/
Plant Grow Share https:// www.plantgrowshare.co.uk/
Glasgow Mutual Aid http://glasgowmutualaid.co.uk/ http://instagram.com/ glasgow_mutual_aid/
Soul Food Sisters is a collective of immigrant women based in Glasgow with a shared passion for good & authentic food. Catering, cafe and cooking workshops in East Glasgow. http://www.soulfoodsisters.org/
Peoples Pantry https://www.facebook.com/GovanhillPeoplesPantry/
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Back Cover: Rumpus Room Yard Harvest 2020
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