This is a call to arms to all who agree that it’s time to rebuild our food system from the ground up as the dawn breaks on this exciting new era of connected and conscious consumerism.
Have we inadvertently discarded a profound means of connection over the last 30 years?
Among my fondest childhood memories were the times sat at my grandmother’s table as she served up Sunday lunch announcing “the tomatoes, lettuce, peas and potatoes are all OOTG (out of the garden). This labelling had a strong effect on me. Just knowing that those particular ingredients were lovingly grown by Grandpa gave them an almost divine status. I felt somehow more connected with my family as I savoured each mouthful and my sense of belonging was being nourished along with my body. Psychological or not, the effect on me was real.
Little did I know then that bonding with the people and places around me by literally putting meaningful morsels inside my body would become far less common over the next 30 years. The spirit of OOTG has been insidiously strangled and discarded as we charged headlong into the brave new world of Food Inc.
We are what we eat, and the story behind our food connects us with the people, places and processes that have contributed to our meals. How meaningful these connections are comes down to what we’re connecting to. It’s hard to feel a meaningful connection to a carrot that has been industrially grown and processed in some distant location that you can’t relate to. By contrast, the story behind the life journey of a carrot grown in a nearby farm by a farmer you might bump into in the street, has a certain romance that triggers a feeling of kinship.
Today our society is suffering from a deplorable lack of connection and I can’t help but wonder how much our sterile, homogenised and detached food system has contributed to this.
The question is ‘what are we to do about it?’ Do we stand by as our food continues down the road of hyper commoditisation or do we stand up and take decisive action to rebuild the systems that bring meaning and connection back to our daily bread?
Food has a greater direct and fundamental effect on people and planet than any other industry and it holds the greatest potential for social and ecological healing in the shortest period of time. If just a handful of the right strategic players can act together around a set of unifying supply chain principles then I believe with absolute certainty that the next decade will deliver a turning point to put us on a restorative trajectory.
The good news is that there is already a global resurgence for a renewed food system, which is building momentum largely due to the prolific sharing on social media of opinions and research findings in favour of food we can relate to and trust. Pair this rise in demand with unprecedented adoption of online shopping and we have the makings of an industry disruption to dwarf that of music and print media.
Ooooby.org (Out of our own back yards) has been developing a prototype operation, which demonstrates that there is a viable model for achieving a balance between the soft philosophical ethics of a social organisation and the hard practical execution of a commercial operation. We are walking an uncommon path on what feels like the ridgeline that divides the left from the right and in doing so we hope to draw from the strengths of both approaches, with our ownership and governance being held in a commons manner and our business operations being carried out with commercial adroitness. Our aim is to build rebuild connections between society and their growers so that small-scale growers and artisan producers can reclaim market share.
This shift to online shopping presents an enormous and convenient opportunity for society to adopt a better way to consume food. If we can build new systems around a commonly held platform that gives consumers access to the food they want at the tap of a button, then we can bring socially and ecologically responsible food back into the mainstream marketplace.
So this is a call to arms to all who agree that it’s time to rebuild our food system from the ground up as the dawn breaks on this exciting new era of connected and conscious consumerism. I invite leaders and innovators, individuals and organisations, to join us in designing and executing a collective entrepreneurial endeavour for the posterity of us all.
