G’day, everyone, and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations, I’m Benjamin Law. Today is number 49 of 100 conversations that happened here every Friday at the Powerhouse museum in Sydney and online, which presents 100 visionary Australians taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. Of course, you can’t divorce the past from the present, so it’s worth noting that we’re recording this in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum, which used to be the Ultimo Power station. That was built in 1899 and it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right up until the 1960s. So, it’s in this context that we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

Today, of course, we’re having this conversation on the unceded lands of the Gadigal. First Nations people on this continent have been sharing knowledge here for tens of thousands of years. Together, they constitute the oldest continuing civilisation on this planet. They’re the world’s first scientists, engineers, architects, agriculturalists, mathematicians. And they mastered how to live sustainably on this ecologically fragile continent, which is a task that we’re still struggling with now. So, we’re grateful to Elders, past and present that we can continue sharing knowledge here on what is and what will always be Aboriginal land.

Now today’s guest is a professor of media at the University of Tasmania and board member of Food Lab Sydney, a food business incubator. Her research and activism with the international food sovereignty movement has connected her with a global community of farmers, activists and eaters, focused on creating more sustainable foodways. Her latest book is called Food in a Changing Climate, and it’s been described as a must read for those seeking the facts and language to speak truth to power in our food systems. Can you please join me in welcoming Alana Mann. I want to travel right back into the past and into your personal history with food before we get into the bigger discussions about the politics and the ethics of food. Tell me about your upbringing and your early experiences with food. What was the typical diet for you? Where did food come from?

Well, I’m a proud Queenslander.

Aye, represent.

I grew up in a beautiful town called Hervey Bay in the shelter of K’gari, Fraser Island, and my parents owned a fishing business.

So, not only was food on the plate, but food was your family’s income.

Exactly. My earliest memories were my father tapping the barometer every morning to see how the weather was. It’s a beautiful, protected waterway, the sandy straits. But a northerly wind will really rock your world because Fraser Island doesn’t protect you from that particular direction. So, he would often leave before dawn and return shortly after lunch. We always grew up knowing about the tides because they were very important. He always wanted to be out actually on the water, lines in by daybreak when the fish were biting. And my mother was meanwhile running the business effectively and also, we had so many boats at various periods. The first one was eight passenger all the way up to 120 passengers at one stage taking people over to the island, fishing on the way. And sometimes my mother would make 100 chicken salad lunches. At home in the morning.

Wow.

And it was all hands-on deck, literally, because every school holiday I was tying hooks on, undoing tangles, helping seasick tourists and making people tea and coffee on the boat. And I loved the tourist tour guide element. So, we all became very good at talking about this beautiful place we lived in.

Yes. So, it doesn’t sound like food was just something that arrived on your plate probably more than other people you had an awareness of the story of food and the economics of food, where your food literally comes from. Is that fair to say?

Very fair to say. And our diet was very much based on fish. I remember not being allowed to go to school before I’d had some crumbed whiting fillets and I used to complain about it and I can’t believe I complained about it. We would always have fresh food, fresh fish. We also had chickens and ducks and vegetables in the garden, and we didn’t buy a lot of food. And I think I took that for granted growing up, that everybody had that access to fresh available food. And fundamentally, and I’ve thought about this a lot in my research since. It appeared to be free, it was something we didn’t have to pay for.

We’re going to have a big conversation soon about things like food security and food sovereignty. But back then, when you were growing up, to what extent do you look back and think of how much those big conversations were a part of growing up as well? Were things like food sustainability a topic of discussion with you and your family, for instance?

Yes, that particular part of the world, like many parts of the world, has been threatened by development, forever or certainly since colonization. And at the time K’gari was being mined for sand, the coloured cliffs at McKenzie Beach were being mined for sand, and forestry was happening in the centre around Eurong. There was an organisation called the Fraser Island Defenders Organisation that many community members, including my parents, especially being people who relied on this beautiful place for their livelihood, they were very involved in that. So, there was a lot of activism around the environment and protecting what we had.

Further, for people running a charter fishing business, you have to be very careful about exploiting the resources that you’re harvesting. And there was a kind of uneasy truce between charter boat fishermen, trawlers, pretty rough and ready place in the 70s, quite a bit of friction, but there was a real sense of community and about not taking too much. And my father was a real stickler for this. He would offer – at one point in the 70s, he’d take people out for a $6 to go out and explore this beautiful place. And he had this uncanny ability to be able to line up the boats so that you were right over the bommie where the fish were, or you’d strategically drift the boat through an area where you get into a school of fish. And I remember being on the boat and people would just bring in fish after fish. So, you get into a school of mackerel and my father had some very difficult conversations with people about now we stop. You’ve got enough fish to eat.

It’s so interesting, these insights that the politics, the ecology, sustainability of food was already something that you were living and breathing throughout your childhood. When you became an adult, your career actually started off in communications and media, is that right? And you’re now a professor in that realm. So, tell me how, why, when did your focus on food and its broader conversations come into the equation? How did those two parts of you meet?

It’s a very good question. I often have to explain to colleagues as a media scholar, why do I talk about food? Why am I doing research on food movements and food systems? To me, food is a communication problem, like climate. How do we actually mobilise people and translate a lot of very complex, difficult ideas for people so that they can actually feel they have agency? So, a lot of my work is about who has a voice in these issues. Who gets to put their agendas forward? How do we create a public sphere where those voices are heard? And also, what can the media do to advance our collective thinking around how to manage some of the challenges we’re facing?

And I’m interested in these twin conversations. One, the impact that our food systems are having on the climate, but also the impact that the changing climate is having on our food systems. Can you illuminate that for us?

Yes, it’s a very interesting paradox that we need to produce the food. But the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change estimates that probably around 40 per cent of emissions are produced through our food system. If you include transport distribution and also some of the land clearing, etc. that goes to do with food production. So, food is a problem because it’s energy intensive at the moment. So, how do we change that? And I go back there to a lot of the agro-ecological lessons from the peasant farmers movement and also these other ways of knowing that we know other cultures. Such as Aboriginal Australians been creating and managing food systems sustainably for tens of thousands of years. So, we’ve got a lot of knowledges. We have to make sure they’re not co-opted by the companies that are making a lot of money already out of the fossil fuel-based fertilisers and things like that. So, we need to we need to protect that knowledge and we need to also make sure it belongs with the custodians of it and is not taken away and commercialised because the corporatisation of our food system is what’s creating hunger.

So, then we have the flipside: how is climate change going to change food availability? Some foods, as I mentioned, will disappear and temperate zones are going to become hotter. Tropical parts of the world are going to become drier, so some places will ironically become more productive as climates become hotter and wetter and you can grow more crops. But the most vulnerable people live in some of the tropical zones, so they’re the most hungry, a lot of them. And that’s going to be critical because then we’re going to have that in-country migration. And out-country migration. And that’s when we’re going to get climate refugees in huge waves. We’re already seeing it. People who cannot live close to the coastline. And this comes as a shock to us all. But it’s affecting Mumbai, Chennai, already, all those countries. It’s going to affect New York. So, this is going to happen in countries all over the world.

What is really disturbing to me as a person who grew up in a fishing environment is that the patterns of fish stocks are changing dramatically. So, there are some fabulous projects going on that’s really citizen science, where researchers at University of Tasmania are actually asking fishermen to report what they’re catching. And the beautiful red snapper that my father used to catch, probably our favorite fish in the family, is now migrating south. And you know why? Because of increasing ocean temperatures. But the ocean has another challenge, which is acidification. And that is going to kill a lot of those tiny organisms at the very base of the food chain that feed all the other species, all the way up to all the pelagic fish we love, like the tuna and the mackerel, etc. And it’s going to be dramatic when it happens. It’s a cascading effect. So, we get to a point where a population, for example, cannot sustain itself anymore, or you lose the vital species in the food chain and then the rest will start to fall.

So, when you talk about complex, difficult ideas, maybe let’s dig into a case study or an example. I mean, I imagine there are so many dimensions of food that warrant important discussions, the production of food, the consumption of food, the waste of food. These are pretty big things to tackle. So, what’s the way that you’ve seen a conversation, a difficult conversation about food tackled well and communicated well with the broader public?

Yes, there are hundreds of movements around the world doing amazing work in communicating their specific concerns about what’s happening with our food system. One thing they all have in common is that they’re very, very place based. So, every place I’ve visit in my research, there’s been a specific message about how we actually tackle challenges to do with food. And you’re right, it’s very complex. So, it has to be systemic. We have to look at the food system as a whole and we have to recognise that there are multiple causes of food insecurity, and we need to come up with multiple interventions at various points along food value chains, for example.

In terms of successful communication there is a lot of global activity going on as well. And in my initial research, when I became an academic out of moving out of the media into the university space, it was about a farmer’s movement called La Via Campesina, the peasant way. And they have been mobilising since 1993 in response to the creation of the World Trade Organization, because they realised that the World Trade Organization was probably going to only listen to the big farmers and the big organisations and the big governments. So, they’re an organisation of small-scale farmers, and they have been so successful, they described themselves as the world’s largest social movement. But they’ve been going for over 25 years now, and they’re now part of discussions at the Food and Agriculture Organisation through the Committee for Food Security and the Civil Society Mechanism. So, these peasant farmers across the world in over 90 countries have managed to create an agenda that actually is having impact on global policy.

That sounds like the global version of what I imagine a lot of Australian farmers are trying to have here, all the change that they’re trying to affect here, especially within the duopoly supermarket environment in which we live. Is that right? Like what we’re seeing here in Australia is part of a much bigger global conversation of farmers not trying to even just disrupt the chain but trying to reimagine what the chain could and should look like.

Exactly. And it’s very interesting coming back to Australia after doing international research and finding those connections and understanding that so many of those challenges they have in common. And some of that is about creating local resilient supply chains, using and eating and buying locally, respecting seasonal produce, and also listening to other ways of knowing and growing food, which includes listening to land management techniques that Traditional Owners have been practicing to understand how to grow food in a more ecologically friendly way.

As I hear all of this, I wonder how much of the onus is on the consumer and how much of the onus is on the chain itself, the producers, the suppliers, the gatekeepers.

One of my big motivations for writing the book, Food in a Changing Climate, was because I was getting quite frustrated with the amount of responsibility directed to the individual consumer, because I think that anyone who has to eat can see, for example, that food affordability is becoming a real problem and expecting consumers to eat ethically is impossible if you do not create an enabling environment. So, here the onus is on policy makers to provide people with the means to eat healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food.

So, how do we do that? How do we reduce the barriers to people’s access to that food? Because not everybody can go to the farmer’s market and buy their organic pasture fed food. And at the same time, I don’t think it’s fair to tell people what to eat and prescribe diets or tell people to stop eating particular foods. Given that food is such a personal, emotional, culturally important aspect of our lives. Carlo Petrini from the Slow Food Movement talks about gastronomic dignity. And it always strikes me in conversations about food security that it’s often about calories and having enough to eat. But you know, these farmers I’m talking about around the world, they’re talking about something called food sovereignty, which is having the agency to determine what you eat, who grows food. How it’s grown. And then who benefits from it? So, do the people eating the food benefit from it? Does the local farmer benefit from the retail process of that food? And is the planet benefiting?

Can we unpack that even more? Because I’m just taken by this concept of food sovereignty. It’s a word that we wrestle with this time of the year, especially sovereignty of land, especially on January 26, and thinking about this continent and the colonisation that it’s been through and continues to undergo. Food sovereignty. I mean, that idea of sovereign land is one with which we’re familiar. Can you just expand like where does that term come from and what does it look like in practice?

Food sovereignty translates poorly in the Western context. In Latin America, for example, where I’ve done a lot of my research. People are very comfortable talking about that because I think they’ve had that struggle with basic rights. So, food sovereignty is based on the right to food, which is actually part of the Declaration of Human Rights. La Via Campesina has gone so far to actually achieve, which is remarkable, the human right for peasants, the right for peasants to access productive resources, including forests.

A lot of – it’s all about land. So, it is very political, and it is very important, as you say in Australia, for us to have this conversation because food cannot be divorced from land despite a lot of the technological developments in food. Land also means your corner shop where you shop and your community garden and your own backyard. So, it is about land. In Latin America, the right to food is also accompanied by this concept of agro-ecology, which is about – and many people relate it to permaculture – this idea of the closed system where you reduce artificial inputs, and you don’t use chemical pesticides and herbicides and you actually again work with nature. And it includes multi-functional agriculture. So, growing multiple crops, having livestock and avoiding that monocultural mindset, which is not just about monocultures in terms of growing a lot of soy in Brazil to send to China for animal feed. You know, that is a serious global problem in terms of climate. You only have to think about it.

It also sounds like this conversation part of it is, by necessity, changing our idea of what a healthy kind of society under capitalism might actually look like. Because if you’re going to grow monoculture crop, for instance, that probably is the most efficient way to grow profits. But it’s not the most efficient thing or the most nourishing thing for the community around them. So, to what extent is it about not just changing food but also changing the way that the economy also works around food?

Exactly. Exactly. And the extreme examples are in places like Brazil, where I’ve visited people from the Landless People’s movement living by the roadside for 10 years, displaced from their land because of the growth of sugarcane for ethanol production, but also for the growing of soy. And this is happening in a region that’s not often talked about: the cerrado, which is the grasslands.

People are very interested in what happens to the Amazon. And, you know, we all know that the farming of beef has been a major source of incursion on the Amazon and resulted in a lot of deforestation. But what we’re doing in avoiding that particular practice is displacing threats by ignoring what’s happening in other very fragile, important environments. And that issue of how we actually change our food system to look after our health is so closely tied to equity. And again, it’s about livelihoods and it’s about being able to work as a community to create that local resilient food system. And you really can’t do that in many countries without that access to land to grow some food.

So, humanity right now is the biggest that it’s ever been. And as a result, we need more food than ever. And surely this puts pressure on every point of the system production consumption, the waste that’s put out. So, can we get a bit of a health check here? Because the book that you’ve written, Food in a Changing Climate, it examines the industrial food system under a changing climate. And what did you want readers to learn? And in fact, what did you learn in the researching and writing about the book that took you aback?

It was fascinating to do more research in areas I was not as familiar with, and one of it was food tech. Looking at how we actually use some of the amazing technologies and science that we have to create substitutes for some of the foods that we’re going to lose. Because there is no doubt in a changing climate. We already know loss of biodiversity means we’re going to be losing a lot of these valuable crops. We’ve already done a lot of damage through the monocultural system because we are reliant – about 60 per cent of the world’s calories come from three or four grains. We are very vulnerable. And genetic modification to an extent, one of those technologies, has been operationalised very successfully to increase yields and do certain things to prevent millions of people dying.

However, when I looked at food tech, I was fascinated about the fact that it actually is still very energy intensive and again, it is not accessible. The products that are being created, the most extreme example probably being, you know, the burgers that are supposed to replicate meat.

Oh, you’re talking about like plant-based burgers that we increasingly see on burger menus.

Yes, the plant-based ones are relatively affordable, but those cell based meats, so you know where it’s actually growing –

Oh I see, when it’s actually meat, but its lab grown.

Its lab grown. I think the first one cost something like $330,000 to produce one burger. Of course, that technology is going to improve and it’s going to make that more affordable. In Singapore, for example, I know that there are many examples of great food technologies that are now appearing on people’s plates.

Again, I want to go back to that question of food sovereignty that La Via Campesina put to us, how we grow food and who benefits from it. So, who owns that technology? You know, this could be perceived as another stage of green capitalism, where we have a lot of solutions to renewables and future food and cell and plant-based food products. But again, is it accessible to everybody? And, you know, this is a perennial problem because the technologies to grow food have been owned by multinational companies and millionaires, and they’re not available to a lot of the people who we need to be developing relationships with and enabling the livelihoods of on a local level.

Even the phrase ‘food sovereignty’ implies that it’s braiding together conversations about history as well. The legacy of colonialism. Tell us about the legacy of colonialism on food, food sovereignty.

It was really striking during the pandemic how food chains collapsed. We knew – we would see around the world that people were – the shocking, appalling working conditions in industrial meat, for example, in the US but also here. Workers who are on the killing floor and unable to socially distance without personal protective equipment, that was just one aspect of what the pandemic exposed. But what it also exposed was how the way we move food around the world is based on that ‘just in time’ model. So, to maximise economies of scale and save money, food has to move through these very tightly choreographed stages of transport and distribution. And look what happens when the ports close. It all rots.

So, it’s vulnerable. It’s fragile.

It’s very vulnerable.

It’s more fragile than we assume.

Exactly. And especially, I think it drew attention to – I just kept thinking how much energy is used to ship all this food around the world as well and how vulnerable we are. And the war against the Ukraine has only amplified that because we look at just how reliant on – the world has been you know, 30 per cent of the world’s wheat supply comes from that particular food bowl.

There’s six food bowls around the world and they are actually cut off when things happen, when things go wrong, whether it’s conflict, whether it’s climate disaster. And we saw it here with Perth being cut off for six weeks when East-West transport links are stopped because of flooding. And so, we have seen this up close and personal. And one thing about – it’s one thing to grow enough food, but you also need to get it to people. And that’s the big challenge in so many parts of the world. And it’s not a new problem. Infrastructure to distribute food to help farmers get it to market. And this again means that food waste is a major problem and it’s not happening when it slides off our plates at the end of the meal. It’s happening post-harvest on the way to market in a lot of countries.

And your question regarding colonial food ways is very pertinent because these were, if you like, the links and the narrow corridors of provisioning that was set up in the very earliest days of migration and the slave trade and exploration around the world. And, you know, Australia is still perceived by many people as a food bowl. You hear this talk about the food bowl. And yes, we’re very fortunate. We are, at the moment, are a net exporter. But with climate change, it’s predicted we might be a net importer of food by 2040. Do we want to be in that position, given what we’ve learned through the pandemic?

It’s interesting you point that out, because as we’re having this conversation, I thought, in Covid we felt all those disruptions primarily with toilet paper, but also with some of our food supplies as well. But I remember thinking in that period, and even with the war in Ukraine as well, how that’s disrupted supply chains, that, gosh, Australia, we’re still relatively lucky, aren’t we? And I wonder to what extent that that attitude is a liability for ourselves in terms of not anticipating the future that you’ve just described, but also a liability in us not thinking about the rest of the world?

Very true. And some of us are lucky because there’s 2 million food insecure people in Australia, according to Food Bank, and there’s a lot more than that. We know that. It’s a hidden statistic. Again, during the pandemic there was a lot of data about the hungry not being who you think. So, within universities, for example, staff and students reporting food insecurity, especially international students. And yes, we are complacent, I think, because we do believe in our own hype about being this amazing fresh food source. And we’re very fortunate. But we’re complacent about things like the manufacturing industries that are needed to support that food infrastructure, for example. We don’t have facilities to be able to can food. So, we actually are very vulnerable in that respect. And one of the things that really, we were lacking during COVID was the packaging crates and the plastic and things like that.

So, creating a sustainable, resilient food transport and distribution infrastructure is really important. And also, of course, number one, making sure people have got enough money to be able to afford food because it’s unrealistic to expect us all to be able to grow our own food. And our local food bowls are not giving us everything we need. So, we need to have a have a compromise. We need to – and again, La Via Campesina say this too, they’re not against trade, but they’re saying, let’s really think about how we actually look after our local populations, certainly export our surplus.

And to your point about how our food practices affect other countries, just exercise some extra territorial responsibility and think, If I export or dump my product into a particular market, am I undermining or undercutting all the local farmers? Because we know what happens. We’ve seen it here. You get cheap oranges from California. We end up churning oranges into the soil and chopping down trees. And there are a lot of farmers in Tasmania where I’m living at the moment who’ve had to return their crops to the soil, their trees. And it’s a very painful process, especially because I believe farmers like my parents, they’re invested in that landscape, they love that landscape, and they want to ensure its sustainability. So, how do we help them? And how to governments help them?

Do we have answers yet?

We don’t have the food plan that we need. It’s interesting, in 2020 through to 2022, Canada created an infrastructure fund for developing local resilient food systems. The European Commission has spent billions of dollars looking at how to reconnect local supply chains, which proved the most robust during the pandemic. In places like Italy and Spain they already had these really tight producer consumer networks. So, we really need to invest. We need to have a plan about food security, and we need to have a plan to help farmers make the on-farm transitions that a lot of them are already doing. They’re what we – one of my colleagues calls eco-innovator farmers, they are really clever and a lot of them are now working with Traditional Owners to actually think about, Okay, that’s a great tool, but how do I do it here on this Country and how do I do it respectfully as well?

We’ve talked about what that future can look like and the fact that it sounds like certain foods that are currently in our pallet, it’s an inevitability they’ll be no longer available in the future. I’m wondering, can we start talking also about alternatives and solutions that might be able to do their bit in stemming what may not be inevitabilities? For instance, you’re on the board of Food Lab, Sydney. It’s a food business incubator, what is a food business incubator, by the way?

Well, it’s not a new idea, but we created a Sydney version. That’s what Food Lab Sydney is. So, we at the University of Sydney, working with the City of Sydney, our fantastic partners and TAFE New South Wales. We borrowed the idea from our international partner Food Lab, Detroit. Now Detroit and Sydney are very different cities. So, what we wanted to do was see how does it look to do this sort of project in a city where apparently Sydney has a fabulous food culture. We all know that. Do we even need it? We know yes, because we have rates of food insecurity. But what else does a food business incubator do? It basically helps people participate in their local food economy. That’s the way I like to think of it. It helps people who’ve got a passion for food and a great idea to develop a business. So, it’s almost like a startup idea.

So, what does that look like?

Yes, well, here it looked like working with TAFE to provide hospitality training to people who didn’t have a formal education in food and also develop some entrepreneurial skills. So, give them some business training. But the most important fundamental part of the program was plugging them in to what is already a very dynamic and supportive network of food actors. So, there are a lot of people in Sydney doing amazing things already with food.

How do you help someone who has a background that has somehow prohibited them from participating? A lot of the participants in Food Lab, for example, are recent migrant, former asylum seekers, survivors of domestic violence. How do you help people who actually need just a network around them, and they’ll do the rest because they’ve got the passion, they’ve got the drive, and they’ve also got this incredible capacity to do amazing things with food. So, it’s about getting them to the next step, whatever that is. It might just be, and when I say ‘just’, this is probably one of the most important things you can do, start a local food delivery business that connects people with local suppliers. Like start a local box scheme. Or it could be developing a product and it could be launching your own range of food. And people take their own journey. And I think that was the biggest learning out of Food Lab.

People need very different things, and this goes back to our whole conversation about food and climate and vulnerability. We cannot treat everybody the same because we’re all different and we all need different types of support. So, it’s messy and it’s difficult, but there is no one size fits all. Not for individuals, not for towns, not for regions. We need to understand specific needs of people and places, and we need to work together to ensure that we create the best opportunities for these people and make sure the benefits go back into the community. Because a big part of this is about enabling local communities to participate in their own food system and access the food that’s produced by local communities rather than, again, relying on the duopoly or relying on the chains or relying on the very wealthy and well known, you know, dare I say it, restaurants and things like that. Let’s break that. Mix it up.

As you’re talking, it reminds me of earlier in the conversation about how you laid out the map for us and that Australia was behind when it came to food policy. But here you’re also offering us an insight into how effective change can be made at a local government level. And I wonder, is that where most of the change should be made, or what is the slack that needs to be picked up by state and federal governments? There’s a lot of layers of government in this country.

Yes, it’s a real challenge because Food Lab really opened my eyes as to just how helpful local government can be. So, City of Sydney, for example, runs amazing workshops for people who want to start a business. And you go to Town Hall, and you get to meet people who have been there, done that, and you realise, Oh, they were just like me. They started at zero and they felt the same as I did. They felt the same insecurities and they needed to ask for help. And one of the best things about opening up City Hall was people felt like, I belong here. One of our participants said, ‘Hey, I can do this, I can ask that this is my place. This is this is me now. I do this networking thing and I’ve got the confidence to do that.’ So, that personal sort of growth.

So, the local government as the personal point of connection [is] really important. But there’s no doubt and I think this is where we’re quite hamstrung when it comes to having a national food plan, for example. The politics gets in the way. And this is why I talk about food politics, because it is so political. It’s all about power. There have been people who’ve tried to pass bills, for example, I remember Nick Xenophon put up put up a bill that when you go into a restaurant and you have a meal, a fish meal, that you should be able to ask where that fish comes from. He couldn’t get that bill passed. What are we doing to actively make sure through policy that our food system is sustainable?

What would you like to see? What would a good national Food Plan look like? Or what are at least those tentpole things that you think are essential?

Yes. Well, interestingly enough, there have been plenty of prototypes. And the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance came up with a People’s Food Plan template in 2010, which was –.

Well, that’s quite a while ago now.

Quite a while ago. These are not new ideas. There are plenty of people who are listening to this podcast who are probably tearing their hair out going, ‘Been here, done that!’ You know, this is just crazy, we’re still talking about this. But that was a very collaborative process, and it was about talking to stakeholders around the country, and it was about having a framework that creates a truly democratic process for deciding what you need again, in what regional area.

So again, it needs to be like a sandwich strategy where you have that really strong grassroots participation, truly participatory food planning, whether it’s through local food policy councils, which are such an impressive thing in the US some places have that. In Australia we’ve got some really great local food plans in Victoria, for example. Sustain has been really instrumental in creating some really very practical frameworks for creating these local resilient food systems. And also here in Sydney, some suburbs have developed them, but we need to actually have that support from that state government and federal level. And of course, you know, it’s really challenging to have a national food plan that doesn’t actually, again, favour those who already have the power. So, a bit like the global policymaking arena, you need to put more seats at the table and have some of these voices that haven’t been heard. These local voices, along with the people who are already profiting from the food system.

When you talk about the fact that people have actually put together documents that have existed since 2010 that actually show what a path forward could look like. What do you think accounts for that kind of political inaction? It makes me think that with some issues, say climate change, the environment, there are actually ministers responsible. But when it comes to, say, enacting a federal food plan, I just wonder whose responsibility is that? Is that the Minister for Agriculture? Is that the Minister for Food? Is it a case where the avenues of gatekeeping are unclear or are there other things in the way of Australia actually taking up this torch?

Yes, I think the very things you’re talking about are the problem. It’s the siloing. We know, as I said before, the food insecurity and the loss of biodiversity and the challenges around energy, the systemic problems. So, if we look at food as a system, then we recognise that you can’t just talk about agriculture, and you can’t just talk about energy and you can’t just talk about the gender pay gap and you can’t just talk about visas for food workers. You have to talk about it holistically. So, you need a minister for food. You need it. You need a food policy officer on the local council. You need someone who is able to bring those stakeholders together. And I was talking to some friends yesterday over breakfast, over a beautiful, beautiful breakfast. And we were talking about us superpowers and we were talking about some people have got superpowers in bringing people together around the table to have these discussions about how do we take on this challenge in a holistic way? How do we not ignore something that we should have thought of?

So, let’s talk about food with the seriousness it deserves, the respect. And also remember that when you respect food, when you feed people and you’re concerned about what they eat and you give them a wonderful meal, you’re respecting them. So, how can we have a food secure country with 2 million people don’t have a meal that gives them dignity where people can’t afford to eat what they want to, or what’s culturally appropriate for them, where they don’t have the facilities to cook so that they can actually eat the food that they want. So, we’ve got we’ve got a lot to learn. But I think there needs to be a minister for food.

What I hear when you speak is that there’s a lot of responsibility that lies in the hands of government, in the hands of policy makers. And there’s a wariness, I sense, that don’t just place responsibility completely on the individual, because I think we probably feel that within ourselves that when we make it just about us, it almost feels futile. Whereas when we think of the big picture, sometimes it can be overwhelming. But I do see a pathway that you’re talking about where effective change can be made within the community. So, what should we be taking into our families, our workplaces, our suburbs that can actually make change that’s tangible when it comes to issues of food, dignity, gastronomical dignity?

We can’t just hand it over to government because that works so well doesn’t it. What we need to do while we’re mobilising, while we’re becoming activists, for a long time I was told you can’t be a researcher-activist. What’s that? Damn straight, I can.

Let me show you.

Exactly. It’s about also being an eater-activist. Talking about food, supporting your local guys all the time, shopping around, eating in season, tick all those boxes. But the other thing that we really need to do is actually get the messages, eat less, better meat. We all know that for our health. Eat ethically, listen to the people who are doing it right. You know, there are people out there who are helping educate us on what’s a sustainable diet. And we need to listen to them, amplify their messages and support them by purchasing our food from them. So, for those of us who can afford to eat better ethical food, go for it. Use the power of your coin. But recognise that not everybody has that particular power available. So, how do we actually also support the people who are supporting those people to have better diets? How do we actually participate in a kind and also an enabling food system because it’s about agency.

One thing that City of Sydney did that was terrific during the pandemic was set up a food relief collaboration, which was get all the stakeholders in the room doing fantastic things to alleviate some of the, let’s face it, pockets of disadvantage that were just emerging during the pandemic. And we had these fantastic meetings on Zoom, of course, talking about who needed food where and how we could actually provide more than food, because this is all about more than food. How can we help people help themselves and help their communities? How could we address some of the other problems that were to do with food around mental health, around domestic violence, around access to the internet? So, digital literacy and access to being able to go online and purchase your food during the pandemic, it just revealed layers and layers of connectivity when it comes to food.

So again, it was like food can be this fulcrum, food can be this thing around which we connect because it’s positive, but it can also help us give people that feeling of agency that enables them to actually be part of the solution. In other words, think of, how can I be part of my local food community and be a really positive part and actually share what I know about food? Because I think that is a really important thing. Recognise we all eat, we all have knowledge about food, share it, learn from each other.

Thank you so much for this nourishing conversation and thanks for giving us so much to think about and things to act on as well. Could you please join me in thanking our wonderful guest today, Alana Mann. And if you want to follow the program online or listen or watch conversations with climate leaders, including climate philanthropist Simon Holmes à Court, City of Sydney, Lord Mayor Clover Moore, visionary invention, waste expert Veena Sahajwalla and Dark EMU author Bruce Pascoe. All you have to do is go into the archives or subscribe online with your favorite podcast app, 100 Climate Conversations and you’ll find details about how to, of course, join us here for a live recording as well.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.