GREAT Food Gloucestershire is a Good Food Movement to engage and connect people, communities and organisations across Gloucestershire, championing and supporting the county on a journey towards a more sustainable food system.
What is Sustainable Food?
Food production is currently threatening both human health and environmental sustainability, and how to provide a growing world population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems is an immense challenge, but by re-thinking food and farming we can shift towards a future where food is providing for both human and planetary health.
We often think of food going from ‘farm to fork’, but this linear way of thinking is too simple and misses out important parts of our food system – waste and biodiversity! Nature works in cycles and is incredibly complex, so by considering ‘soil to soil’, and valuing farmland ecosystems, we begin to re-think the whole food system.
- Farming agro-ecologically – reducing greenhouse gas emissions, artificial fertilizers, conserving soil and water, using natural forms of pest management, and creating thriving farmland habitats.
- Shortening supply chains, increasing access to healthy food for all groups in our communities, and changing how we eat to think about our carbon footprint and family’s health.
- Re-distributing and reducing food surplus and packaging at all parts of the cycle – on the farm, in transport and processing, retail and restaurants, as well as on our plates and in the bin.
