Sitopia: How Food can save the World
Channel: British Library
Date: 2020-11-23

Food shapes everything: our bodies, habits, homes, landscapes, cities, politics and economics. It is seldom out of the news, whether it’s industrial production destroying the planet or modern diets causing a crisis in public health. But what is the potential for transforming the food system, and thereby to creating a healthy world with a healthy population?

With urban visionary Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City and Sitopia, and food campaigner and CEO of Sustain, Kath Dalmeny.

Carolyn Steel is a leading thinker on food and cities. Her award-winning 2008 book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives is an international best-seller and her concept of sitopia (food-place) has gained broad recognition across a wide range of fields in academia, industry and the arts. A London-based architect, lecturer and writer, Carolyn studied at Cambridge University and has since been a visiting lecturer at Cambridge, London Metropolitan and Wageningen Universities and at the London School of Economics, where she was the inaugural Studio Director of the Cities Programme. Her lecture course Food and the City, given from 2002-2012 at the Cambridge University School of Architecture, was the first of its kind. A non-executive director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects, Carolyn has completed several major buildings, including the Embassy Theatre for the Central School of Speech and Drama. A Rome scholar in 1995-6, Carolyn is in international demand as a speaker and her 2009 TED talk has received more than one million views. Her second book, Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World, was published by Chatto & Windus in March 2020.

Kath Dalmeny is chief executive of the charity Sustain and a long-serving member of the London Food Board. She is a campaigner and organiser, helping people and organisations to speak up for better food, farming and fishing. Working with what she describes as “my wonderful campaign colleagues”, Kath has been instrumental in persuading three successive Mayors of London to support thousands of community food gardens; caterers that serve one billion meals per year to serve verifiably sustainable fish; Westminster government to introduce mandatory standards for meals served in schools and hospitals; and HM Treasury to introduce a sugary drinks tax, with £0.5 billion ring-fenced to fund children’s health promotion. She is currently preoccupied with finding ways to help government, local authorities and communities to halt the rise in need for charitable food banks and fix the upstream causes of household food security, securing everyone’s Right to Food.

Meet some of those who's food projects aim to build cohesion and hope amidst isolation and desperation. The panel includes Kemi Akinola of Brixton People’s Kitchen and Be Enriched, Barny Haughton of Bristol's Square Food Foundation, Mary Brennan of Community Unity in Leeds and Jess Thompson, founder of Migrateful. Chaired by journalist Stephen Armstrong, author of The New Poverty. 

Kemi Akinola is a dedicated food justice activist. She is Managing director Brixton People’s Kitchen and CEO of Be Enriched a South London-based charity that uses food to bring joy and connection to the socially excluded, develop skills in young people, build communities and grow future generations. Over the past 9 years she has grown a small community meal in Tooting into a range of community focused food projects covering South London. Kemi has mentored and advised on food start-ups and innovation projects in London, Scotland, West Virginia, USA and is a trustee of the Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN), the Food Partnerships of Lambeth and Wandsworth.

Mary Brennan set up Community Unity, a neighbourhood group that runs a lunch club in the Cross Green area of Leeds and created a garden on a disused railway bridge where the community can pick their own food.

Jess Thompson spent two and a half years working on the front line to support migrants and refugees in Ceuta, Morocco, at Dunkirk refugee camp in France, and in London, when discussions with refugee women at a Time Bank project in Tower Hamlets led her to set Migrateful. Migrateful helps refugees and asylum seekers on their journey to employment and independence and promotes integration. It runs cookery classes led by migrant chefs struggling to integrate and access employment due to legal and linguistic barriers. Migrateful currently runs 15 cookery classes per week taught by over 25 refugee chefs in London, Kent and Bristol.

Barny Haughton is the Founder, Director and Head Teacher at Bristol's Square Food Foundation, the not-for-profit food education school he started in 1998. Square Food is committed to teaching people from all walks of life to cook good food from scratch. Barny regularly gives talks and demonstrations at food conferences, festivals and schools and is a judge for the Soil Association's Organic Food Awards.

Food Season supported by KitchenAid

https://www.kitchenaid.co.uk/