Sustain: Food for the Planet

Overview

A programme of new grants has been launched by Sustain as part of the Food for the Planet project. The grants aim to support communities to campaign and advocate to make food in their area better for people and the planet. Applicants are encouraged to propose their own ideas for great local action, but should focus on areas that have a big impact locally, for example:

• Improving your council's score in the Every Mouthful Counts report and/or developing a food strategy
• Supporting groups and communities that are marginalised to campaign for food climate justice and tackling racial injustice in the food system
• Encouraging climate-friendly food in public institutions and council settings
• Supporting sustainable farming systems through planning policy
• Tackling unfair and unhelpful pricing and advertising of the most climate-damaging foods

Level fo Funding

Grants of up to £5,000 are open to any local food partnership, local authority or community group in the UK.

In applications, they would love to see:

1. How you can spread the message further than your local area so your actions can influence others. For example:
   • Sharing your experiences through wider networks
   • Looking for events opportunities to speak and share your work
   • Producing shareable content for social media (photos, videos etc)
2. A briefing, short report, toolkit or other resource that could help other places learn from your experience.

They can help with both the above.

They’d like you to come up with your own ideas for a local campaign so the following suggestions are not intended to be prescriptive, but to spark ideas. It’s also worth looking at the ‘Every Mouthful Counts’ toolkit for local authorities to see if there are any actions that would suit your local area particularly well.

The climate crisis is fuelling inequality and is inherently racist. People of colour are experiencing the worst consequences thanks to profound structural inequality globally and within the UK.

Suggestions for campaigns and activity

• Empowering groups and communities that are marginalised to campaign for food climate justice, and to tackle racial injustice in the food system.

Exploitation by European colonial powers has stripped communities in the global south of resources, power and wealth and the global north is still disproportionately responsible for excess emissions.

Solutions must therefore help tackle inequality locally and globally, from simple considerations like using Fairtrade and equitably produced foods in procurement, to campaigning to ensure good food is accessible to all, to empowering people from more marginalised communities to speak out about climate and food inequality and injustice.

Please consider how you can inequality and racism in all projects, and/or think about a project that will directly tackle injustice.

• Serving more climate-friendly food in the public sector

They want as many schools, hospitals, universities, public buildings and other public sector settings to serve climate-friendly meals – high in vegetables, fruit and pulses, fresh locally-sourced food and with low waste. Where meat and dairy is served, this should be much smaller amounts from ‘better’ sources. Climate scientists suggest that we should be aiming for 50% less meat (and we add: and 100% better).

You could campaign for your council to adopt more climate-friendly school meals, or focus on local universities and colleges, or iconic restaurants, or perhaps tourist attractions or sports teams.

They have developed the Planet Pledge – a simple and flexible, but meaningful commitment for any businesses that serve food. You could aim to get as many places as possible to sign the pledge? Or to adopt the Food For Life Served Here standards?

• Increasing sustainable farming

Growing more sustainable food locally is a very helpful way to reduce emissions from the food system, as well as delivering nutritious, fresh produce and supporting farmer-friendly retail enterprises. They want to advocate for more land, as well as other support, to grow food sustainably in:

• Community gardens and allotments

• Smallholdings and locally run farms

• Peri-urban land

• Organic farms

You could campaign for your council to adopt a food growing strategy, or identify other landowners and aim to persuade them to release space for food growing – which could include golf courses, grassland or car parks.

There are a lot of ways that councils can support sustainable farming in urban fringes – check out the Fringe Farming report for a list of recommendations

• Tackling the causes of food waste

A number of food waste campaigns have focused on public awareness raising and surplus food redistribution.

They would like to see actions that focus on prevention, and have co-benefits for procurement and land use as well.

For example, you could campaign for:

• More action around transparency, for example convincing large food businesses to conduct food waste audits and publishing annual food waste data.

• Food waste recycling solutions that have benefits to the local community, for example community/communal composting sites in spaces such as parks and community gardens.

• Promotions and advertising for climate-damaging food

An encouraging number of councils are implementing restrictions on advertising foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar. Could you campaign to introduce rules on advertising the most climate-damaging foods, for example industrially farmed meat and dairy? This work would be pioneering, and could include garnering support for advertising restrictions locally, and tabling a motion at a council meeting, for example.

Consulting stakeholders and building a local case for advertising restrictions - this would be incredibly valuable for other councils wanting to follow suit.

You could do this if your council already has a healthy food advertising policy, as a ‘bolt on’ – or it could be a first step in improving advertising policies in your area.

• Fairer food pricing policies

All too often, the most climate damaging foods like industrially farmed meat and highly processed foods high in sugar and palm oil are the cheapest and most readily available options.

However, if more sustainable meals and snacks (like meat free choices, or those with more veg and pulses, or healthier food) were priced more fairly when side by side to these climate-damaging foods, we could encourage well-intentioned consumers to make good choices.

Good candidates for a trial campaign could be a council staff restaurant, or university canteen, or a chain of local businesses, and you could set policies such as ‘all vegetarian meals must be at least £1 cheaper than meat options’

If we can demonstrate that even moderate price differences make a difference to consumer behaviour, we may be able to persuade more businesses to change their pricing policies in future. Key to this campaign would be collecting data to show how the pricing policy affected sales. Overall, the aim would be to prove that pricing policies can work, perhaps to show public support, and make a set of recommendations to businesses about how they should be pricing foods to benefit the planet.

• Divestment from intensive agriculture

UK local authority pension funds hold £238 million of investments in industrial livestock companies, according to research by Feedback, working with World Animal Protection.

A new campaign is calling on responsible companies and institutions to divest from industrial livestock production. The fossil fuel divestment movement has been successful in removing investment from climate-damaging industries: 1,485 institutions globally representing over $39.2 trillion in assets have already committed to divest from fossil fuels, helping delegitimise these companies and pave the way for regulation.

Find out more about setting up a local divestment group here

Resources

Check out the new Campaigners Guide which sets out how local campaigners and groups can work with councils to make school meals more climate-friendly

Food for the Planet: Food for the Planet is helping local authorities, businesses and organisations take simple actions to tackle the climate and nature emergency through food.