FOOD POWER!

After four days intensive campaigning with Oxfam at Latitude Festival, I'm now home, thoroughly cleansed, refreshed from a night in a proper bed and ready to share my experience with you! As always, volunteering with Oxfam is inspiring and motivational (I'm feeling motivated to revive my blog a little...) and this years campaign focus was very close to my heart. Oxfam's big campaign at the moment is called GROW, which is campaigning for a fairer food system. There are 7 billion of us on the planet (and increasing rapidly) and 1 billion of those people go to bed hungry every night. Oxfam believe that there is enough food to feed everyone, it's the system that doesn't work - favouring big conglomerates over small scale farmers, with markets speculating on food causing massive price spikes and developed countries (like us) getting into bad food habits, becoming so disconnected from our food that we don't really respect where it comes from, how it got to us and how much it costs to produce. Oxfam is working on campaigning against climate change, for equity for small-scale farmers and against unethical activities such as land grabs - but if GROW is really going to work, the movement needs to start from the ground up.
At Latitude (as at all the festivals Oxfam is campaigning at this year) we were asking festival goers to tell us about their food power. Food power is the power that all of us have to make the world a better place simply through the choices we make about the food we eat. Our aim was to inspire and celebrate what people already do, rather than to make them feel guilty for not doing enough. People shared their stories and ideas by writing their "food power" on a board and holding it up for us to photograph. The pictures will be used to make an inspirational e-book to show just how many people out there care about fair food and as a way to share ideas. We met lots of vegans and vegetarians as well as carnivores who thought that we could make a big difference by eating a little less meat, people who hate waste, windowsill gardeners and allotmenteers, fair trade and local lovers. It was certainly inspirational for me. Here were some of the favourite conversations, quotes and tips from my campaigning:

• "Your local market is super"
• Chatting to the lady who has a mobile farm that she takes around schools to teach them about where food comes from
• "You don't have to be vegetarian to enjoy vegetarian food"

At the end of our campaigning, we all did our own board and mine read:

• "I believe teaching people to cook healthy hearty food (on a budget) with fresh ingredients is the most powerful thing we can do"

If you're going to a festival this year, look out for Oxfam campaigners in their pink Food Power tee shirts, but if you're not going to a festival then feel free to share your food power, how are you eating your way to a better world?