Next year’s Sustainable Food Cities campaign unveiled

Veg Cities will follow three successful campaigns run with cities through the network. Each of these campaigns still continue: 

• Sustainable Fish Cities is working with 16 cities and to date has had commitments from caterers serving over 600 million meals to only use sustainable fish, and where it is possible now to say that in two of these places, Durham and Bournemouth & Poole, the majority of meals eaten out use fish from sustainable sources. 
• Sugar Smart has supported 13 local campaigns launching, another 10 scheduled and another 25 interested, with almost 400 organisations registered to go Sugar Smart, and reducing the prominence of sugar in their communities.
• Beyond the Food Bank has now evolved into Food Power – which will work to support over 30 alliances across the UK identifying, supporting and sharing those initiatives that alleviate food poverty.

These campaigns have shown that by galvanising the movement of SFC local members across the UK to focus on a specific issue we can see what a difference we can, and are, all making. And this is what we hope to do on Veg Cities. 

We will be working closely with the Food Foundation and other partners, including Nourish, Food Cardiff and Brighton and Hove Food Partnership on the Peas Please project to learn from the work already piloted, where they have already made great strides in building a campaign, identifying a set of measurable actions for community groups, public and private sector and have encouraged them to take action  collectively that amounts to much more than a hill of beans – or peas (sorry!)

Ahead of this becoming a Sustainable Food Cities campaign, a number of places are getting ahead of the game, with Aberdeen, Brighton, Birmingham, Redbridge and Cardiff all making pledges to run local Veg Cities campaigns and taking actions covering increased uptake of healthy start, more veg in street food, more veg in school food, more veg in public procurement to name a few areas.
 
Katie Palmer, who heads up Food Cardiff and is a member of the Peas Please project board says:
“When Food Cardiff became involved with Peas Please it quickly became evident that if cities, could pick up the gauntlet of developing local level veg actions that reflected and built on the National pledges, there would be a real chance that we could reach a tipping point in the number of stakeholders making a pledge for more veg. Veg Cities is a perfect fit with the Sustainable Food Cities framework and it’s fantastic that food partnerships across the UK will have the support of the Sustainable Food Cities Network to help develop their own local level Veg solutions to a National challenge”

Over the coming months we will be working with these partners to build the resources to help others get on board with this campaign throughout the 50 strong network of Sustainable Food Cities. We’ll be keeping cities updated ahead of the launch through the Sustainable Food Cities newsletter, so if you’re not already signed up – get online and do it

Sustainable Food Cities is a partnership led by Food Matters, Soil Association and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. It is funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation.