Sustainable Bristol

Food

A food culture which values local, sustainably produced and artisan foods, celebrates the diversity of regional foods and benefits the local community, environment and economy.

Shining a light on Bristol’s independent shops

by Helen Burley

24 October 2011

As far as I’m concerned, Bristol’s independent shops play a huge part in contributing to the quality of life in the city – it was one of the things I raved about when I moved here five years ago, and visitors I take shopping are often envious.

Bristol is particularly well provided for in terms of local high streets. The Gloucester Road has been celebrated as one of the best independent shopping streets in Bristol, but other parts of the city also do well – and a Bristol Independents campaign has been launched to keep them alive.

Now Bristol Council has launched an enquiry to examine best practice in supporting local high streets and in making them vibrant and diverse places to visit. They want to hear from people about their local high streets and have launched an online questionnaire. There’s a separate set of questions for businesses to complete.

The enquiry will take place on 11 November and wants to hear people’s views about what they like, what they don’t like – and what can be done to improve them.

The Bristol Independents website also has some tasty recipes.

Bristol's independents' campaign

Will Business embrace Lunchtime Allotments?

by Paul Rainger

12 September 2011

Growing your own is all the rage. With long waiting lists for allotment space, we’ve seen veg beds spring up in parks, guerrilla growers taking over derelict land and even veg growing on supermarket roofs.

The beneficial effects of reconnecting which nature through growing are well studied, from healthy eating itself, through to general improvements in health, happiness and even productivity at work.

So, could leading business embrace Lunchtime Allotments as the next must have staff perk? Will tomorrow’s young generation of more values led employees see an hour lunchtime break to tend their veg as another key differentiator between good and bad employers, just as secure bicycle parking and showers are for many today?

One company in Bristol, Arup, are already leading the way in the city. Staff in their city centre Bristol office haven’t let lack of space get in their way. They have simply taken over the nearby wide grass verge by the main bus lane.

What if every business played its part in greening our city?

Not the bland corporate shrubbery we see today, but the real veg growing of Lunchtime Allotments like this. Businesses would benefit from the improved productivity, health and wellbeing of their staff. And in these times of recession in the public sector, it may now be the best way of achieving the truly edible city.

Time to Bee Inspired

by Paul Rainger

29 August 2011

When I was little, honey was simple. It came in jars, bees made it and certain bears got stuck in their homes if they eat too much.

Today, in less innocent times, the sudden collapse of bee populations, and with it our whole food system’s reliance on their pollination services, have catapulted these amazing creatures into the environmental frontline.

Fortunately the bees’ suffering at the hands of our environmental degradation has struck a chord with the public. Beekeeping in Bristol, and other urban areas, has rocketed over the last five years.

Now HoneyFest, an event taking place at the University of Bristol Botanical Gardens on 3–4 September will allow visitors to see inside a demonstration hive, with live bees behind glass.

The Bristol Beekeepers’ annual honey show will also provide a wide range of information on keeping bees, and on honey and beeswax products, with experts to explain the ins and outs of beekeeping for the curious, or potential beekeepers.

Dave Maslen President of Bristol Beekeepers’ Association, says: “Urban beekeeping has really taken off in the last five years, which is great news both for the bees and for all the species of plants that benefit from pollination. Beekeepers come from all walks of life but share a passion for learning and passing on our knowledge about one of nature’s most fascinating creatures. Public interest is reflected in the fact that our membership has doubled in the last five years but we always welcome and support new members and our annual Honey Show is a fantastic opportunity to find out whether beekeeping is for you.”

Inspiring people to Get Growing

by Jenna Willcox

20 July 2011

What with the British weather being as it is, the glorious sunshine for Bristol’s first ever ‘arts trail for growing veg’ on June 11^th was surely a sign that the gods approved.

Forum for the Future helped to organise the Get Growing Trail, which aimed to celebrate local food growing projects, and to inspire more people to get involved with them. 23 community gardens opened on the day, offering visitors the chance to have a look around the site, meet garden members, get advice on growing and take part in lots of fun family activities.  A smallholding even slaughtered one of their prize pigs for a barbecue!  Another garden offered homemade elderflower champagne to visitors, and veg dug up on demand.  There were also cookery demos, plant sales, and seed planting courtesy of Garden Organic’s ‘One Pot Pledge’ campaign.

Overall, around 1000 people visited the gardens across Bristol, which was a great result for the first year of the trail.  The friendliness and enthusiasm of the garden members (plus the sunshine!) resulted in some fantastic feedback: over half of visitors said that they’d been inspired to start growing their own food by visiting a garden, and just under half said they were inspired to join a community gardening group.  The garden groups that took part were really positive about the day, saying that they really valued being part of a city wide event, and attracted lots of new members and volunteers.

Forum for the Future have produced a short report about the event which you can read here.

Inspiring children to get growing at Bramble Farm in south Bristol, one of the community gardens open on the Get Growing Trail 2011

Getting children started growing their own food

by Paul Rainger

09 June 2011

Community gardens across Bristol are giving out free seeds and biodegradable pots to visiting families this weekend, as part of Bristol’s first ever ‘Get Growing Trail’ on Saturday June 11th.

Bristol Food Network has teamed up with Garden Organic’s One Pot Pledge campaign to give everyone the chance to start growing their own veg.

Children visiting any of the 24 gardens open for the Get Growing Trail will be able to take away a chard, rocket or basil seed and a pot to get their seed started, along with advice on how to take care of their new plant.

The Bristol Get Growing Trail will see a variety of community gardens all over the city-region open their gates for a day of advice, tours and family fun.  There’ll be lots of activities for everyone to get involved in including chilli tasting, BBQs, plant and produce sales, ‘meet the animals’, grow your own workshops and farm tours.

The Get Growing Trail is part of Bristol’s Good Living Week taking place from 10^th-19^th June 2011 to celebrate sustainable city living.

Get Growing Garden Trail – Saturday 11th June

by Paul Rainger

25 May 2011

Bristol’s secret vegetable growers are opening their garden gates and community plots for a special open day of tours, advice and family fun. Visit more than 20 community gardens, allotments and orchards around the city to find out more about growing your own fruit and veg.

The Get Growing Garden Trail is open on Saturday 11th June from  10am to 5pm, organised by the Bristol Food Network, Bristol Permaculture Association and Forum for the Future. Full event details are now available on an interactive map, or on a download leaflet from the Bristol Local Food website. And you can follow on Twitter: @DigBristol.

Find out how to start growing your own veg, how to get involved with your local group, or just get on your bike and see how many you can visit. Activities across the city include chilli tasting, farm tours, grow your own workshops, ‘meet the animals’ and seed-planting for the children.

So join us for Bristol’s biggest celebration of urban growing.

The Get Growing Garden Trail is just one part of Bristol’s Good Living Week (10th – 19th June), a new festival that aims to inspire people to live and work more sustainably.

You can see full details of all the week’s events on the Good Living Week website  including the chance to visit houses with solar and other renewable energy installed; a major exhibition of sustainable living, making its first appearance outside London; the Festival of Nature, a public celebration of biodiversity; and Bristol’s Biggest Bike Ride, a mass cycling event.

Seeds of inspiration – its Bristol’s veg trail!

by Paul Rainger

15 April 2011

Bristol's first 'Get Growing Open Garden Day' will be held on Saturday, June 11 as part of a campaign led by the Bristol Food Network.

Bristol is already well-known for its community art trails and now the gardening equivalent is set to be launched in the city this June. Suzanne Savill finds out more in this story that originally appeared in the Bristol Evening Post.

As food prices continue to rise, more people are becoming interested in growing their own food. With that in mind, a new event is being launched in Bristol aimed at getting people to start cultivating their own fruit and vegetables.

The Get Growing Open Garden Day is being organised by the Bristol Food Network, the Permaculture Association, and the UK sustainable development charity Forum for the Future, and will feature urban food growing projects in the Bristol area – as well as a detailed map featuring inspiring plots.

These will include an organic community orchard in Horfield, a not-for-profit organic gardening club called Buried Treasure in Knowle, a community allotment in St Paul’s, a local gardening project created from derelict land in Easton, a community health and food initiative in Hartcliffe, and a chilli club in Clifton.

Paul Rainger, head of the Sustainable Bristol City Region Project for Forum for the Future, said: “It will be a grand ‘open day’ of about 40 city wide food-growing projects, encouraging more people to get involved with urban veg production – a sort of ‘arts trail’ for vegetable growing!”

Laurence Copleston of Forum for the Future adds: “This will bring together Bristol’s growing groups for the first time, putting their details on to one easy-to-use map, and making it simple for people to find peaceful city sanctuaries and social garden spaces right on their doorstep.”

The Get Growing Open Garden Day map – which will be available online and in print – will show the diverse range of growing projects across Bristol, with different icons for city farms, community orchards and gardens and community supported agriculture projects.

It will be accompanied by a guide called Bite into Bristol, to help people volunteer their time and get involved for themselves.

Laurence explains: “With more and more people interested in growing their own fruit and veg, we wanted to create an event that would help to promote Bristol’s urban growing projects.

“We want it to become an annual celebration, inspiring people to get involved with growing and having a go for themselves.

“By running the Open Garden trail, we hope to raise awareness of Bristol’s vast food-growing potential.

“We hope that this will help kick-start our vision of transforming the Bristol city and region into the UK’s sustainable food capital.”

In addition to being an opportunity to view growing projects around Bristol, the Open Garden trail will also feature free activities ranging from music and art to guided tours and wildlife hunts for children.

The Get Growing Open Garden Day will be held on Saturday, June 11, and is part of a campaign led by the Bristol Food Network to encourage more people to get involved with urban vegetable production and to promote alternatives to traditional allotment growing.

Full details of all the venues open for the trail will be available from early May, when the promotional guide and map will be released online and in pr int. Or for further information on Get Growing Open Garden Day, visit the Bristol Local Food website.

The Get Growing Trail is part of Bristol’s Good Living Week (10th – 19th June), a new festival that aims to inspire people to live and work more sustainably. The week includes the chance to visit houses with solar and other renewable energy installed and a major exhibition of sustainable living, making its first appearance outside London. Popular established events like the Festival of Nature, a public celebration of biodiversity and Bristol’s Biggest Bike Ride, a mass cycling event add to the action-packed Week.

Who Feeds Bristol?

by Paul Rainger

15 March 2011

This week sees the launch of the “Who Feeds Bristol?” report, the first comprehensive city food system study like it in the UK, looking at the city’s whole urban food system both in a global and local context.

The report is being launched on Wednesday at the City Council’s second Bristol Food Conference. As well as discussing this report, the conference will set up the city authorities’ new high powered Food Policy Council for Bristol. The Food Policy Council will be chaired by Professor Kevin Morgan from Cardiff University, and includes the City Council leader, Barbara Janke. The Who Feeds Bristol research will inform the Food Policy Council’s work towards a resilient food plan for the city.

This report builds on the earlier Bristol Peak Oil report - another UK first – and the work of the Bristol Food Network and Forum for the Future who drew up the Sustainable Food Plan for the city. The research was commissioned and funded by NHS Bristol and undertaken by Joy Carey, an independent food researcher.

Who Feeds Bristol is primarily a descriptive analysis of the food system serving Bristol together with an analysis of its resilience. It looks at the ‘positive planning powers’ cities may have on their food system and it makes suggestions for action. It is specifically aimed at city decision-makers and food system stakeholders but should be of interest to anyone who is interested in how food makes it onto their plates.

You can download a copy of the Who Feeds Bristol from the City Council’s website here.

There is a short summary, a full report, appendices with much of the background research detail and full versions of case studies.

Dig Bristol Get Growing Campaign

by Paul Rainger

03 February 2011

The Dig Bristol ‘Get Growing’ Map promotes alternatives to traditional garden or allotment growing, as part of the city-regions’ campaign to get more people involved in urban veg production.

Beef needn’t be bad for the environment

by Paul Rainger

26 August 2010

I often read that meat-eaters and dairy drinkers are responsible for several million tonnes of CO2 produced by raising livestock, and we all need to become vegetarians to save the planet – writes worried beef lover, Jonathan Green, of Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Bristol team.

Looking at the figures it’s easy to see why:

The damage to the environment of our food production systems has been well documented. Agriculture is heavily reliant on fossil fuels (eg. fertilizers, pesticides, fuel for machinery and distribution) and often causes damage, some of it irreparable, to the environment in the form of fertilizer run-off, loss of bio-diversity, water shortages, deforestation and the release of greenhouse gasses (GHGs). One of the biggest culprits is livestock which accounts for more GHGs (18% in CO2 equivalent), than transport.

As our cities grow and developing countries start to eat more meat and dairy, these pressures on the environment will grow, unless we change something about the way we produce food. For example, in the UK beef consumption totals about 1.04 million tonnes each year. Estimates suggest that producing 1 kg of beef releases 22.1 kg of carbon dioxide. Doing the maths shows that the UK beef (just beef) consumption alone releases as much as 22,984,000 tonnes of CO2 every year.

However, this may all be a moo(t) point if believers of the grass-fed revolution are correct. One believer in Grass Fed is Graham Harvey. He makes a very convincing case about the benefits of raising livestock on pasture in his book “The Carbon Fields”.

The Carbon Fields explains how we can get back on the road to health and prosperity.

Believers in grass fed advocate revolutionising the livestock industry in favour of a return to a less intensive pasture fed methodology to raise livestock.  The benefits are numerous ranging from improved animal health, better tasting beef, improved health of beef consumers and environmental benefits too. Here are a few of Graham’s arguments:

Animal health is improved as diverse pastures provide “free-range” conditions that allow the cows to become more healthy and resistant to diseases and ailments such as lameness.

I can personally say that a grass-fed steak is significantly tastier than a conventional steak. In addition scientific tests have also shown it to contain more conjugated linoleic acids (CLA) which can help prevent cancer – so it’s good for me too.

From a sustainability point of view what’s most interesting about Graham’s book is the ability of well maintained pastures to store carbon in the soil and simultaneously reduce agriculture’s reliance on fossils fuels and minimise environmental impacts.

By raising livestock on pastures (as opposed to corn) Graham argues that there is less need for fossil fuel derived products such as petroleum and fertiliser. He claims that the overall carbon footprint per litre of milk is as much as 40% lower on grassland compared to intensive farms.

In addition to reducing the dependence on fossil fuels pasture fed techniques can also help store carbon in the soil by creating more organic matter. This is because annual plants such as corn are entirely removed after harvesting the edible part. The soil is then ploughed, ready to start again, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Perennial plants such as grass are rarely removed and ploughed. This saves a lot of energy and nutrients in the soil as the “whole plant” need not be grown every year to produce the small edible part. Allowing the plants to stay in the soil allows organic matter to build up. It is this network of roots, fungi and compounds such as humic acid and glomalin that help to store carbon in the soil. Glomalin is a compound made from protein and carbohydrate sub-units. It is believed that these sub-units are comprised of as much as 30-40% carbon. Carbon Farmers of America estimate that that if organic matter in the world’s farmed soils were raised by as little as 1.6% then this would be enough to solve global warming.

An added benefit of all this organic matter is that the risk of soil erosion is also dramatically reduced….so on carbon grounds at least, there’s no need for me to become a vegetarian yet!

See Grass Roots for more information.

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