Food and people

Food and people

There is only one planet Earth and we all live on it.  As it is our only home, we all have a responsibility to help look after it.

A sense of place is 'a unique collection of visual, cultural, social, economic and environmental qualities that provide connection to a location'1. By having a sense of place we are more likely to care about our surroundings and what to help look after them.

In Scotland, since we started settling down and making homes, food has been key in shaping our societies.  We have:

• Built societies on food – for example fishing communities on the North East coast of Scotland

• Fought and moved people over land access – for example the Highland clearances where people were evicted to make way for sheep

• Experienced starvation – for example the potato famine which killed more than a million people in Scotland.

Today a major issue is food poverty which is a significant threat to health and wellbeing.  Food poverty is ‘The inability to acquire or consume an adequate or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty that one will be able to do so.2

Food poverty is a complex issue and is linked to income, local food availability, access to retailers selling affordable, nutritious food, access to transport to buy and get the food home, access to cooking, storage and preparation facilities.

One indicator of food poverty is the use of food banks, but only a proportion of those in food poverty use food banks.