Across the county individuals and organisations are already taking the action that will propel us towards the vision outlined above. By sharing some of these here, the aim is to encourage their sustainability, replication, and escalation.
Dorset Climate Action Network Land Use Team
Dorset CAN have established a Land Use team that meets regularly to identify opportunities, share ideas, and develop specific action plans to address the issues discussed in this and the Land Use chapter. Through their early work they have identified a map of related areas to be focused on over the coming months (see the Land Use chapter). The Dorset CAN Land Use team can be contacted via [email protected]
Farmers Markets
Farmers markets provide an opportunity for local farmers and food producers to sell their produce directly to consumers. This offers both parties advantages, such as knowing where your food comes from, reducing reliance on supermarkets and potentially shortening supply chains. They take place across the county throughout the year and are a great place to find local produce.
Farming Initiatives
A number of local farming initiatives are covered in our Land Use chapter.
Community Food Initiatives
There are a number of community food initiatives across Dorset many of which offer other community benefits we’ve have selected a few examples to share below.
Slades Farm
Slades Farm Community Garden12 grows various fruits and other useful plants within a tranquil 2-acre wildlife haven. The garden features many fruit trees and bushes, meadow areas, bramble and hedgerow, and a wildlife pond. The fruit trees include many different varieties of apple, damsons, pears, and, for historical reasons, mulberries. There are also soft fruits including raspberries and blackberries.
It is located within a large urban recreation space in north Bournemouth and is open to the public at all times. The garden is developed and maintained by volunteers, with support from the council’s Parks department. There is one public volunteering session each month where anyone can turn up and help with a range of gardening and conservations tasks and projects. No previous experience is necessary. Gloves, tools, demonstrations and advice are all provided.
Started as a project by Transition Bournemouth it aims to be a long-term community-led project to develop an organic and sustainable wildlife-friendly forest garden which provides food for people, and food and homes for wildlife. The aim is to increase the biodiversity of the site, operating inclusively and accessible to all. The intention was to create a low-carbon learning resource for local people to encourage more wildlife friendly gardening, provide healthy outdoor exercise, and increase community resilience.
Bridport Food Matters
Bridport Food Matters (pictured below at a Farmer’s Market in Dec 2020) is a communication and information network which aims to be a catalyst for positive change and a provider of information on food matters in the Bridport area. Their priorities include increasing local production and demand, affordable access, healthy eating, sustainable cultivation methods, and food security in response to climate change. Initiated by Seeding our Future, it is now a partnership between Bridport Local Food Group and Transition Town Bridport.
Bridport Local Food Group
Established in 2004, Bridport Local Food Group is a not-for-profit group run by a committee of dedicated volunteers with the aim of promoting and supporting the areas fantastic food and drink industry as well as encouraging and inspiring everyone to eat healthily and to eat local. The showcase event is the annual Bridport Food Festival held in June which celebrates local producers, food & drink retailers and hospitality businesses.
Edible Garden Project
Also in Bridport, the Edible Garden Project was developed to support St Mary’s School in its bid to nurture greater knowledge of local and organic food by building a garden with polytunnel in the school grounds. This is a long-term process which is now in its 9th year and encompasses an eco-club, a gardening club, a recently planted mixed apple orchard; all working within the Sustainable Goals framework. Events and cookery workshops are designed to encourage the children’s understanding of where food comes from, how it grows, how to harvest, cook and taste organic food. We are in discussions about further developing the school’s own prepared lunches to develop children and staff’s tastes for organic vegetables and salad produce, helping them to further appreciate the seasonal nature of these, coming from our Edible Garden which they partly plant and care for. They are hoping to partner with several small organic farms to develop this further for the school and the farmer’s security.
With the new Edible Garden at Bridport Primary School they are developing raised beds, are about to add a large polytunnel and also nurture a new forest area in the grounds. At present the school buys in its catering, but it has a large kitchen which we hope will soon be used, as in St. Mary’s, to prepare in-school lunches. You can discover more on the projects blog.
Shaftesbury Home-Grown
Set up in 2009, Shaftesbury Home-Grown is a community group producing food as naturally and sustainably as they can at a 4-acre field on the edge of Shaftesbury, Dorset. All produce is for sale, first to volunteers who work at Home-Grown, and then to anyone else living in or around Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury Home-Grown is a non-profit making social enterprise with all proceeds from sale of their food used to cover costs and build up their food-growing and animal-husbandry activities.
Dorset Food and Drink
There is a huge range of fantastic food and drink made, grown, sold and served across the county. Dorset Food & Drink aims to help residents enjoy a “delicious journey into this Dorset larder to find out more about the great tastes of Dorset”.
Boscombe Grounded Community
Based in Boscombe, Bournemouth, Boscombe Grounded Community are a charity who work with others to give our community access to healthy, nutritious food. They grow fruit and veg, provide education and workshops, redistribute food surplus and create networks to help others share food. Their vision is a world where all urban communities have access to locally grown, nutritious food and their mission is to educate, share and grow, so they can reconnect members of their community with nature, with food and with each other. They aim to work with others to build an abundant, circular food system and a culture of storing, reusing and redistributing food surplus. To do this, they focus on four areas: education, community, access to food and environment.
They currently manage six projects that help their community in different ways. One example of their work is Grounded BEE'ZZ. The project was originally developed by Boscombe Forum, following a generous £3,000 donation from Lush Cosmetics. Shortly afterwards, Grounded took over the lead on the project, and went on to secure a Bournemouth Soup Crowdfunding Pot which was used to fund four new colonies.
Today, they have seven bee colonies on the roof of the Sovereign Shopping Centre roof in Boscombe – and they’re always looking for homes for more hives! They are always on the lookout for new and creative ways to connect members of the community with nature, with food and with each other, so our projects can evolve and change in response to the needs of local people.
Townsend Community Growers
On Friday 23 March, 2018, the Townsend Community Growers came together to celebrate the opening of their new growing space. Funded by a £12,000 Post Code Lottery grant it aimed to give local people confidence in growing, cooking and eating healthier meals. The funding was used to construct 20 raised beds, purchase the seeds and tools required to grow vegetables and to contract an experienced community grower to hold weekly training sessions.
The Community Growers project was developed by Townsend residents with the support of the Sustainable Food City Partnership for Bournemouth and Poole, to provide a place where locals can grow their own food, improve and develop skills, build household food security and combat food poverty (with surplus food being passed on to the Townsend community fridge).
The Dorset Diet
We’ve included a brief mention of Bridport Food Matters and Dorset Food and Drink as case studies above and highlighted the Growing Through Climate Change[1] research in the opening section of the Current Assessment section (this research is essential reading alongside this report). As with all our case studies, we encourage readers to discover more about these two organisations via their respective websites. However, these two organisations are worthy of special note given the latter’s county-wide involvement in all matters referred to in this chapter and the former’s stand-out achievements and future plans. Among these is a new collaborative project Seeding our Future, a non-profit initiative exploring resilience and adaptation to climate change. The Dorset Diet research is intended to support Seeding our Future's work on food security in Bridport and Dorset generally and is available for use free of charge by projects elsewhere.
[1] https://futurescanning.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/growing-through-climate-change-final.pdf
The UK only produces around 60% of our own food and research has shown that the global food system is increasingly vulnerable to production shocks caused by extreme weather; the “risk of multi-breadbasket failure from extreme weather likely to triple, going from a 1-in-100-year event to a 1-in-30-year event by 2040”. There is clearly an urgent need to reduce the negative environmental impacts of the globalised food system and increase the resilience of UK food security. One way of achieving this is through increasing consumption of locally produced food.
Growing Through Climate Change identifies much potential in the south west of England for future food production, providing that production adapts to warmer and wetter winters, hotter and drier summers and more frequent extreme weather.
The Dorset Diet will form part of the current work of Food Security and Local Community Resilience, two of the main projects currently for Seeding Our Future. The overarching objective is to encourage the people of Dorset to increase their consumption of food grown in the county, ultimately strengthening connections between producers and consumers whilst reducing food miles and carbon emissions. This would increase the resilience of the whole supply chain to climate change, decreasing vulnerability to global shocks affecting supply from abroad. The project is still in the early stages and is looking for further funding to progress the initial research and transform it into a useful tool and campaign.
Community Fridges
A Community Fridge is typically a social space that brings people together to eat, connect, learn new skills and reduce food waste. Help And Kindness, an ambitious project to bring together information about all kinds of help and support available to people living and working in Dorset, was launched in November 2019 and, among many other things, provides information on where you can find your local community fridge.
One example is Blandford Community Fridge. Funding for this has been provided by Dorset Council and Blandford Forum Town Council, with a commitment to funding made by the Georgian Fayre, the Carnival Committee and Sandisons Ltd (a local accountancy firm).
The fridge, located at Blandford Youth & Community Centre (next to the Leisure Centre), will be open on Wednesday mornings between 9am and 11am, at first, for anyone to help themselves to quality food from Tesco that would otherwise be wasted. Everyone is welcome – the aim is to reduce food waste and empower communities.
Sara Stringer, Social Prescribing, Wellbeing & Health Champions Lead at The Blandford Group Practice has been instrumental in driving this project and recruiting volunteers. The Town Council has arranged for the volunteers to receive the Level 2 Food Safety & Hygiene for Catering certificate and a DBS check. Each week, two volunteers collect the food from Tesco on a Tuesday evening, via the FareShare scheme. They take the food back and weigh/log it before putting it into the fridge. The following morning two different volunteers open up to greet the public and encourage them to take the food.
Your Planet DoctorsYour Planet Doctors are a group of like-minded people who are passionate about protecting the health of our planet. They bring together individuals and groups who are working in local communities to help reduce the impact of climate change and Covid 19 on their physical and mental health and help repair the damage done to our environment.
Together, we can have an impact on making our communities more resilient, more sustainable and better prepared to face the challenges ahead. We are particularly focused on food security and want to help support all growing initiatives, from window boxes to allotments, school grounds to public spaces.
The Planet Doctors recently amalgamated a total of 9 growers groups which had sprung up all over Dorset. By joining neighbourhoods together, there are now just two groups covering the recently amalgamated Dorset council areas of; BCP Growers (Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole) and Dorset Growers. Our growers groups also offer learning “Guides”, which is a great way to organise all the fantastic growing knowledge shared, in easy to find sections and these will slowly increase over time
Sustainable palm oil
Palm oil is used in lots of foods and unsustainable palm oil is a key driver of deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia. Nonetheless, many conservation organizations, including the WWF, believe that sourcing sustainable palm oil has a greater positive environmental, social and economic impact than simply boycotting palm oil altogether. Using certified sustainable palm reduces deforestation and enhances biodiversity, in turn protecting orangutans, pygmy elephants, and other endangered and vulnerable species that inhabit these rich forest ecosystems. It also helps to improve the livelihoods of the 3 million smallholder families that depend on growing and harvesting palm for a living.
The Dorset Sustainable Palm Oil Community project encourages businesses, restaurants, schools and hospitals to find out where they source their palm oil from and make changes where possible to ensure that they only use certified sustainable palm oil.
This free initiative is helping schools, organisations and businesses in Dorset to source 100% sustainable palm oil in the products that they sell, serve, and use. Several organisations, including Bournemouth University, various local school and school food providers, and local businesses around Dorset, have signed up to the project becoming Sustainable Palm Oil Champions, making the commitment to only source sustainable palm oil from now on.
Hospitality
Green House Hotel
We have noted previously how many of the issues in our chapters are interconnected. For Eat Well this is perhaps most notable in hospitality where the issues of food quality interact with waste, how we travel, how we heat our buildings and how we power our cooking processes. The Green House Hotel is a beautifully restored, 32-room Grade II Victorian villa in the heart of Bournemouth but beyond the façade they also aim to ‘eat, sleep and breathe sustainability’. In 2019, Expedia placed them in the top 10 of the world’s most eco-friendly hotels - the only UK hotel to be listed. Judges commented on the fact that everything they do is guided by sustainability.
The Green House operates observing five core principles, designed to ensure the hotel minimises its impact on the environment, whilst acting in an ethical and responsible manner:
1. Source locally; source products for the hotel as locally as they can to reduce energy waste in transportation and support local businesses.
2. Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle; will minimise energy consumption, waste and landfill and avoid unnecessary production and transportation of goods.
3. Consider what comes in and what goes out; look at the lifecycle of everything that comes into the hotel, consider where it will go afterwards and whether this will have an adverse impact on the environment.
4. Insist on high welfare standards; only deal with organisations that have high welfare standards.
5. Be transparent, open and honest to our staff and customers.
They are members of Considerate Group, whose objective is to adopt sound and sustainable environmentally friendly and socially responsible policies and practices and were awarded GOLD level for environmental status of the Green Tourism Business Scheme.
Olivia O’Sullivan, The Green House Hotel’s manager explains: “Treading lightly on the world, returning what we take with interest is entirely possible. And it doesn’t have to be worthy. It should, and can be, fun and rewarding. We love what we do here, and the way we do it. I’m incredibly proud that our team has got this recognition, because they’ve worked so hard to keep improving standards for our customers and finding new ways to go greener each year.”
Personal Actions
The table below sets out a few ways to eat healthy and make a positive difference for the planet and those people who grow our food. However, we recognise not everyone has the money to be able to make these choices, which is one reason why tackling food poverty is closely interlinked with issues of sustainable food production and climate action (see Justice for All chapter).
When eating out, you can also question restaurants about where their food comes from and what steps they take to minimise the environmental impact of their business; for example, have they signed up to the Sustainable Restaurant Association? The following table sets out some options to consider and where to get more information.
Dorset Climate Action Network Land Use Team
Dorset CAN have established a Land Use team that meets regularly to identify opportunities, share ideas, and develop specific action plans to address the issues discussed in this and the Land Use chapter. Through their early work they have identified a map of related areas to be focused on over the coming months (see the Land Use chapter). The Dorset CAN Land Use team can be contacted via [email protected]
Farmers Markets
Farmers markets provide an opportunity for local farmers and food producers to sell their produce directly to consumers. This offers both parties advantages, such as knowing where your food comes from, reducing reliance on supermarkets and potentially shortening supply chains. They take place across the county throughout the year and are a great place to find local produce.
Farming Initiatives
A number of local farming initiatives are covered in our Land Use chapter.
Community Food Initiatives
There are a number of community food initiatives across Dorset many of which offer other community benefits we’ve have selected a few examples to share below.
Slades Farm
Slades Farm Community Garden12 grows various fruits and other useful plants within a tranquil 2-acre wildlife haven. The garden features many fruit trees and bushes, meadow areas, bramble and hedgerow, and a wildlife pond. The fruit trees include many different varieties of apple, damsons, pears, and, for historical reasons, mulberries. There are also soft fruits including raspberries and blackberries.
It is located within a large urban recreation space in north Bournemouth and is open to the public at all times. The garden is developed and maintained by volunteers, with support from the council’s Parks department. There is one public volunteering session each month where anyone can turn up and help with a range of gardening and conservations tasks and projects. No previous experience is necessary. Gloves, tools, demonstrations and advice are all provided.
Started as a project by Transition Bournemouth it aims to be a long-term community-led project to develop an organic and sustainable wildlife-friendly forest garden which provides food for people, and food and homes for wildlife. The aim is to increase the biodiversity of the site, operating inclusively and accessible to all. The intention was to create a low-carbon learning resource for local people to encourage more wildlife friendly gardening, provide healthy outdoor exercise, and increase community resilience.
Bridport Food Matters
Bridport Food Matters (pictured below at a Farmer’s Market in Dec 2020) is a communication and information network which aims to be a catalyst for positive change and a provider of information on food matters in the Bridport area. Their priorities include increasing local production and demand, affordable access, healthy eating, sustainable cultivation methods, and food security in response to climate change. Initiated by Seeding our Future, it is now a partnership between Bridport Local Food Group and Transition Town Bridport.
Bridport Local Food Group
Established in 2004, Bridport Local Food Group is a not-for-profit group run by a committee of dedicated volunteers with the aim of promoting and supporting the areas fantastic food and drink industry as well as encouraging and inspiring everyone to eat healthily and to eat local. The showcase event is the annual Bridport Food Festival held in June which celebrates local producers, food & drink retailers and hospitality businesses.
Edible Garden Project
Also in Bridport, the Edible Garden Project was developed to support St Mary’s School in its bid to nurture greater knowledge of local and organic food by building a garden with polytunnel in the school grounds. This is a long-term process which is now in its 9th year and encompasses an eco-club, a gardening club, a recently planted mixed apple orchard; all working within the Sustainable Goals framework. Events and cookery workshops are designed to encourage the children’s understanding of where food comes from, how it grows, how to harvest, cook and taste organic food. We are in discussions about further developing the school’s own prepared lunches to develop children and staff’s tastes for organic vegetables and salad produce, helping them to further appreciate the seasonal nature of these, coming from our Edible Garden which they partly plant and care for. They are hoping to partner with several small organic farms to develop this further for the school and the farmer’s security.
With the new Edible Garden at Bridport Primary School they are developing raised beds, are about to add a large polytunnel and also nurture a new forest area in the grounds. At present the school buys in its catering, but it has a large kitchen which we hope will soon be used, as in St. Mary’s, to prepare in-school lunches. You can discover more on the projects blog.
Shaftesbury Home-Grown
Set up in 2009, Shaftesbury Home-Grown is a community group producing food as naturally and sustainably as they can at a 4-acre field on the edge of Shaftesbury, Dorset. All produce is for sale, first to volunteers who work at Home-Grown, and then to anyone else living in or around Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury Home-Grown is a non-profit making social enterprise with all proceeds from sale of their food used to cover costs and build up their food-growing and animal-husbandry activities.
Dorset Food and Drink
There is a huge range of fantastic food and drink made, grown, sold and served across the county. Dorset Food & Drink aims to help residents enjoy a “delicious journey into this Dorset larder to find out more about the great tastes of Dorset”.
Boscombe Grounded Community
Based in Boscombe, Bournemouth, Boscombe Grounded Community are a charity who work with others to give our community access to healthy, nutritious food. They grow fruit and veg, provide education and workshops, redistribute food surplus and create networks to help others share food. Their vision is a world where all urban communities have access to locally grown, nutritious food and their mission is to educate, share and grow, so they can reconnect members of their community with nature, with food and with each other. They aim to work with others to build an abundant, circular food system and a culture of storing, reusing and redistributing food surplus. To do this, they focus on four areas: education, community, access to food and environment.
They currently manage six projects that help their community in different ways. One example of their work is Grounded BEE'ZZ. The project was originally developed by Boscombe Forum, following a generous £3,000 donation from Lush Cosmetics. Shortly afterwards, Grounded took over the lead on the project, and went on to secure a Bournemouth Soup Crowdfunding Pot which was used to fund four new colonies.
Today, they have seven bee colonies on the roof of the Sovereign Shopping Centre roof in Boscombe – and they’re always looking for homes for more hives! They are always on the lookout for new and creative ways to connect members of the community with nature, with food and with each other, so our projects can evolve and change in response to the needs of local people.
Townsend Community Growers
On Friday 23 March, 2018, the Townsend Community Growers came together to celebrate the opening of their new growing space. Funded by a £12,000 Post Code Lottery grant it aimed to give local people confidence in growing, cooking and eating healthier meals. The funding was used to construct 20 raised beds, purchase the seeds and tools required to grow vegetables and to contract an experienced community grower to hold weekly training sessions.
The Community Growers project was developed by Townsend residents with the support of the Sustainable Food City Partnership for Bournemouth and Poole, to provide a place where locals can grow their own food, improve and develop skills, build household food security and combat food poverty (with surplus food being passed on to the Townsend community fridge).
The Dorset Diet
We’ve included a brief mention of Bridport Food Matters and Dorset Food and Drink as case studies above and highlighted the Growing Through Climate Change[1] research in the opening section of the Current Assessment section (this research is essential reading alongside this report). As with all our case studies, we encourage readers to discover more about these two organisations via their respective websites. However, these two organisations are worthy of special note given the latter’s county-wide involvement in all matters referred to in this chapter and the former’s stand-out achievements and future plans. Among these is a new collaborative project Seeding our Future, a non-profit initiative exploring resilience and adaptation to climate change. The Dorset Diet research is intended to support Seeding our Future's work on food security in Bridport and Dorset generally and is available for use free of charge by projects elsewhere.
[1] https://futurescanning.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/growing-through-climate-change-final.pdf
The UK only produces around 60% of our own food and research has shown that the global food system is increasingly vulnerable to production shocks caused by extreme weather; the “risk of multi-breadbasket failure from extreme weather likely to triple, going from a 1-in-100-year event to a 1-in-30-year event by 2040”. There is clearly an urgent need to reduce the negative environmental impacts of the globalised food system and increase the resilience of UK food security. One way of achieving this is through increasing consumption of locally produced food.
Growing Through Climate Change identifies much potential in the south west of England for future food production, providing that production adapts to warmer and wetter winters, hotter and drier summers and more frequent extreme weather.
The Dorset Diet will form part of the current work of Food Security and Local Community Resilience, two of the main projects currently for Seeding Our Future. The overarching objective is to encourage the people of Dorset to increase their consumption of food grown in the county, ultimately strengthening connections between producers and consumers whilst reducing food miles and carbon emissions. This would increase the resilience of the whole supply chain to climate change, decreasing vulnerability to global shocks affecting supply from abroad. The project is still in the early stages and is looking for further funding to progress the initial research and transform it into a useful tool and campaign.
Community Fridges
A Community Fridge is typically a social space that brings people together to eat, connect, learn new skills and reduce food waste. Help And Kindness, an ambitious project to bring together information about all kinds of help and support available to people living and working in Dorset, was launched in November 2019 and, among many other things, provides information on where you can find your local community fridge.
One example is Blandford Community Fridge. Funding for this has been provided by Dorset Council and Blandford Forum Town Council, with a commitment to funding made by the Georgian Fayre, the Carnival Committee and Sandisons Ltd (a local accountancy firm).
The fridge, located at Blandford Youth & Community Centre (next to the Leisure Centre), will be open on Wednesday mornings between 9am and 11am, at first, for anyone to help themselves to quality food from Tesco that would otherwise be wasted. Everyone is welcome – the aim is to reduce food waste and empower communities.
Sara Stringer, Social Prescribing, Wellbeing & Health Champions Lead at The Blandford Group Practice has been instrumental in driving this project and recruiting volunteers. The Town Council has arranged for the volunteers to receive the Level 2 Food Safety & Hygiene for Catering certificate and a DBS check. Each week, two volunteers collect the food from Tesco on a Tuesday evening, via the FareShare scheme. They take the food back and weigh/log it before putting it into the fridge. The following morning two different volunteers open up to greet the public and encourage them to take the food.
Your Planet DoctorsYour Planet Doctors are a group of like-minded people who are passionate about protecting the health of our planet. They bring together individuals and groups who are working in local communities to help reduce the impact of climate change and Covid 19 on their physical and mental health and help repair the damage done to our environment.
Together, we can have an impact on making our communities more resilient, more sustainable and better prepared to face the challenges ahead. We are particularly focused on food security and want to help support all growing initiatives, from window boxes to allotments, school grounds to public spaces.
The Planet Doctors recently amalgamated a total of 9 growers groups which had sprung up all over Dorset. By joining neighbourhoods together, there are now just two groups covering the recently amalgamated Dorset council areas of; BCP Growers (Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole) and Dorset Growers. Our growers groups also offer learning “Guides”, which is a great way to organise all the fantastic growing knowledge shared, in easy to find sections and these will slowly increase over time
Sustainable palm oil
Palm oil is used in lots of foods and unsustainable palm oil is a key driver of deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia. Nonetheless, many conservation organizations, including the WWF, believe that sourcing sustainable palm oil has a greater positive environmental, social and economic impact than simply boycotting palm oil altogether. Using certified sustainable palm reduces deforestation and enhances biodiversity, in turn protecting orangutans, pygmy elephants, and other endangered and vulnerable species that inhabit these rich forest ecosystems. It also helps to improve the livelihoods of the 3 million smallholder families that depend on growing and harvesting palm for a living.
The Dorset Sustainable Palm Oil Community project encourages businesses, restaurants, schools and hospitals to find out where they source their palm oil from and make changes where possible to ensure that they only use certified sustainable palm oil.
This free initiative is helping schools, organisations and businesses in Dorset to source 100% sustainable palm oil in the products that they sell, serve, and use. Several organisations, including Bournemouth University, various local school and school food providers, and local businesses around Dorset, have signed up to the project becoming Sustainable Palm Oil Champions, making the commitment to only source sustainable palm oil from now on.
Hospitality
Green House Hotel
We have noted previously how many of the issues in our chapters are interconnected. For Eat Well this is perhaps most notable in hospitality where the issues of food quality interact with waste, how we travel, how we heat our buildings and how we power our cooking processes. The Green House Hotel is a beautifully restored, 32-room Grade II Victorian villa in the heart of Bournemouth but beyond the façade they also aim to ‘eat, sleep and breathe sustainability’. In 2019, Expedia placed them in the top 10 of the world’s most eco-friendly hotels - the only UK hotel to be listed. Judges commented on the fact that everything they do is guided by sustainability.
The Green House operates observing five core principles, designed to ensure the hotel minimises its impact on the environment, whilst acting in an ethical and responsible manner:
1. Source locally; source products for the hotel as locally as they can to reduce energy waste in transportation and support local businesses.
2. Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle; will minimise energy consumption, waste and landfill and avoid unnecessary production and transportation of goods.
3. Consider what comes in and what goes out; look at the lifecycle of everything that comes into the hotel, consider where it will go afterwards and whether this will have an adverse impact on the environment.
4. Insist on high welfare standards; only deal with organisations that have high welfare standards.
5. Be transparent, open and honest to our staff and customers.
They are members of Considerate Group, whose objective is to adopt sound and sustainable environmentally friendly and socially responsible policies and practices and were awarded GOLD level for environmental status of the Green Tourism Business Scheme.
Olivia O’Sullivan, The Green House Hotel’s manager explains: “Treading lightly on the world, returning what we take with interest is entirely possible. And it doesn’t have to be worthy. It should, and can be, fun and rewarding. We love what we do here, and the way we do it. I’m incredibly proud that our team has got this recognition, because they’ve worked so hard to keep improving standards for our customers and finding new ways to go greener each year.”
Personal Actions
The table below sets out a few ways to eat healthy and make a positive difference for the planet and those people who grow our food. However, we recognise not everyone has the money to be able to make these choices, which is one reason why tackling food poverty is closely interlinked with issues of sustainable food production and climate action (see Justice for All chapter).
When eating out, you can also question restaurants about where their food comes from and what steps they take to minimise the environmental impact of their business; for example, have they signed up to the Sustainable Restaurant Association? The following table sets out some options to consider and where to get more information.
Further information
This Good Earth
Bridport-based filmmaker Robert Golden released this powerful and thought-provoking documentary in January 2021. The film examines the global consequences of our food chain and lays bare many of the land use issues we discussed in the previous chapter. There can be few better introductions to both this chapter and the Land Use one than this film, not least as it brings to life these issues and some of the potential solutions, right here in Dorset. The film has its worldwide release in spring 2022.
Todmorden – Growing food on unused land
This TED talk[1] from Pam Warhurst who cofounded Incredible Edible, an initiative in Todmorden, explains what communities can do with unused land. Pam tells the story of how she and a growing team of volunteers came together to turn plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens, and to change the narrative of food in their community.
Market Movement
Vegetarian and vegan foods have seen an extraordinary growth in popularity in recent years. This article from New Food magazine shows how ‘Analysts now predict the plant-based food market to grow by 11.9 percent by 2027 and have valued it at $74.2 billion.’ Restaurants, caterers and supermarkets should consider how they can get ahead of, rather than ignore or resist this change, particularly given ‘Google searches for “vegan” rose by 700 percent in four years and campaigns, such as the Vegetarian Society’s Meat-Free Monday, also helped cement the idea of not eating meat every day. At the same time, the flexitarian diet grew in popularity, driven by health and environment influences; today, 60 percent of people consider themselves flexitarian.’ Read the article for more information on what’s driving this, how you can save money and why, if you’re a business, you should get on board.
Traffic-light system of ‘eco-scores’ to be piloted on British food labels
A new traffic light system on food and drinks packaging is being launched to allow consumers to make more environmentally friendly choices. The scheme has been put together by Foundation Earth, a new non-profit organisation backed by the government, global food giant Nestlé and British brands including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, the Co-op and Costa Coffee. A pilot run in the autumn will see a range of food and drink carrying front-of-packaging “eco scores” for the first time, ranking the environmental impact of each item and allowing customers to easily assess whether they are buying goods that have a low-carbon footprint from suppliers focused on sustainability.
The labels are expected to shake up the supply chains of the food and drinks industry and encourage producers to be more innovative in helping reduce their environmental impact. Products will be graded into tiers marked A to G and colour-coded, with green reserved for the most environmentally friendly items and red for the least, based on a system developed by the environmental consultancy Mondra.
National Food Strategy
“The food we eat – and the way we produce it – is doing terrible damage to our planet and to our health” according to the National Food Strategy which also notes the global food system is the single biggest contributor to “biodiversity loss, deforestation, drought, freshwater pollution and the collapse of aquatic wildlife. It is the second-biggest contributor to climate change, after the energy industry”.
The National Food Strategy contains recommendations to address the major issues facing the food system: climate change, biodiversity loss, land use, diet-related disease, health inequality, food security and trade. The National Food Strategy has four key objectives: escape the junk food cycle to protect the NHS, reduce diet-related inequality, make the best use of our land and create a long-term shift in our food culture.
Transforming the food system will require change at all levels: structural, cultural, local and individual. Change starts at a local level, with talented and dedicated people. Business as usual is not an option if we want to build a sustainable, healthy and fair food system.
This Good Earth
Bridport-based filmmaker Robert Golden released this powerful and thought-provoking documentary in January 2021. The film examines the global consequences of our food chain and lays bare many of the land use issues we discussed in the previous chapter. There can be few better introductions to both this chapter and the Land Use one than this film, not least as it brings to life these issues and some of the potential solutions, right here in Dorset. The film has its worldwide release in spring 2022.
Todmorden – Growing food on unused land
This TED talk[1] from Pam Warhurst who cofounded Incredible Edible, an initiative in Todmorden, explains what communities can do with unused land. Pam tells the story of how she and a growing team of volunteers came together to turn plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens, and to change the narrative of food in their community.
Market Movement
Vegetarian and vegan foods have seen an extraordinary growth in popularity in recent years. This article from New Food magazine shows how ‘Analysts now predict the plant-based food market to grow by 11.9 percent by 2027 and have valued it at $74.2 billion.’ Restaurants, caterers and supermarkets should consider how they can get ahead of, rather than ignore or resist this change, particularly given ‘Google searches for “vegan” rose by 700 percent in four years and campaigns, such as the Vegetarian Society’s Meat-Free Monday, also helped cement the idea of not eating meat every day. At the same time, the flexitarian diet grew in popularity, driven by health and environment influences; today, 60 percent of people consider themselves flexitarian.’ Read the article for more information on what’s driving this, how you can save money and why, if you’re a business, you should get on board.
Traffic-light system of ‘eco-scores’ to be piloted on British food labels
A new traffic light system on food and drinks packaging is being launched to allow consumers to make more environmentally friendly choices. The scheme has been put together by Foundation Earth, a new non-profit organisation backed by the government, global food giant Nestlé and British brands including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, the Co-op and Costa Coffee. A pilot run in the autumn will see a range of food and drink carrying front-of-packaging “eco scores” for the first time, ranking the environmental impact of each item and allowing customers to easily assess whether they are buying goods that have a low-carbon footprint from suppliers focused on sustainability.
The labels are expected to shake up the supply chains of the food and drinks industry and encourage producers to be more innovative in helping reduce their environmental impact. Products will be graded into tiers marked A to G and colour-coded, with green reserved for the most environmentally friendly items and red for the least, based on a system developed by the environmental consultancy Mondra.
National Food Strategy
“The food we eat – and the way we produce it – is doing terrible damage to our planet and to our health” according to the National Food Strategy which also notes the global food system is the single biggest contributor to “biodiversity loss, deforestation, drought, freshwater pollution and the collapse of aquatic wildlife. It is the second-biggest contributor to climate change, after the energy industry”.
The National Food Strategy contains recommendations to address the major issues facing the food system: climate change, biodiversity loss, land use, diet-related disease, health inequality, food security and trade. The National Food Strategy has four key objectives: escape the junk food cycle to protect the NHS, reduce diet-related inequality, make the best use of our land and create a long-term shift in our food culture.
Transforming the food system will require change at all levels: structural, cultural, local and individual. Change starts at a local level, with talented and dedicated people. Business as usual is not an option if we want to build a sustainable, healthy and fair food system.