A small town in the north of England has turned to food as the “language” it can use to bring the community together, improve resilience, draw tourism, and build up the local economy.
“We tried to answer this simple question: Can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture, that will help people themselves find a new way of living, see spaces around them differently, think about the resources they use differently, and interact differently?” Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible told a TED Salon audience more than a decade ago.
“The answer would appear to be yes, and the language would appear to be food.”
Warhurst recorded those words in 2012, 3½ years after the project launched. Fast forward another dozen years, and the Incredible Edible website now lists more than 175 local groups across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
The group’s two taglines: “Believe in the power of small actions.” And: “If you eat, you’re in.”
‘Sprouting Cemeteries’
“Propaganda gardens”, as Incredible Edible calls them, got their start in Todmorton, a community of 15,000 between Leeds and Manchester that Warhurst described as a “fairly normal market town”. Her TED Salon talk included before-and-after photography of previously barren, sterile locations that ended up filled with fruit, vegetables, and herbs—a corner row along a railway, a patch next to a health centre, a clearing in front of the local police station.
“We’ve got edible canal towpaths, and we’ve got sprouting cemeteries,” Warhurst said, showing images of a small school group tending beds in a graveyard. “The soil is extremely good.”
The group planted corn outside the local constabulary and got permission from doctors at a newly-built, £6-million clinic to replace inexplicably prickly landscaping with fruit trees, bushes, herbs, and vegetables, “as long as we got everything approved in Latin and in triplicate,” Warhurst snarked. Local seniors’ homes now have healthy fruit and veg that residents can pick and grow. Local artists piled in with “fabulous designs” for raised beds, along with signage that helped passersby figure out what they could pick and eat. Other locals stepped up to cook and distribute food in town.
‘We’re All Part of the Jigsaw’
The point of the effort was to make a real connection “wherever people are living their lives,” Warhurst said. “We are all part of the food jigsaw, and we are all part of the solution.”
Along the way, the local group in Todmorton invented a new form of tourism. “Believe it or not, people come from all over the world to poke around in our raised beds, even when there’s not much growing. But it starts a conversation,” Warhurst said.
Along the Incredible Edible Green Route, visitors tour edible towpaths, and bee-friendly sites feature the story of pollinators. The route helps sustain the local economy by bringing traffic through the whole town, past cafés and small shops and local markets.
By “changing people’s footfall around our town,” she told her audience, “we’re also changing their behaviour.”
A Kitchen Table Conversation
Warhurst said the idea for Incredible Edible started around a kitchen table. “We came up with a really simple game plan that we put to a public meeting,” Warhurst recalled. “We did not consult. We did not write a report. Enough of all that.” At the meeting, the group talked about the three “plates” around which local life is organized, and on which Incredible Edible still focuses: community, learning, and business.
If even one of those plates starts to spin around food, “that’s really great, that really starts to empower people,” she said. When they all spin at once, and in tandem, “we’ve got a real show there. We’ve got some action theatre. We’re starting to build resilience, starting to reinvent community ourselves, and we’ve done it all without a flipping strategy document.”
“We’ve not asked anybody’s permission to do this. We’re just doing it. And we are certainly not waiting for that cheque to drop through the letterbox,” Warhurst said. “Most importantly of all, we are not daunted by the sophisticated arguments that say these small actions are meaningless in the face of tomorrow’s problems. Because I have seen the power of small actions, and it is awesome.”
At that initial public meeting, after two seconds of silence, “the room exploded,” something Warhurst said she’d never experienced in her life. She now knows that “it’s the same in every room, in every town. People are ready and respond to the story of food. They want positive actions they can engage in. In their bones, they know it’s time to take personal responsibility and invest more in kindness to each other and to the environment.”
As for Incredible Edible organizers, “you know we’re not doing it because we’re bored,” she declared. “We’re doing it because we want to start a revolution.”
A version of this post was originally prepared for Quebec Farmers’ Advocate.
