Community-led food conversations, held as part of The Food Conversation, have helped paint a picture of what a more joined-up food system, with active participation by citizens at its heart, could look like. They have catalysed local activity, forged connections within and between places, and made vital links between citizens and national-level debate.

The conversations use a simple open-source toolkit made up of short films, session plans, activities and materials. The toolkit helps people move quickly through exploring food as a system, into debates about what is working and what isn’t working, and then coming up with ideas about what needs to change and who needs to do what.

There have been over 70 of these community-led conversations in 45 places to date, involving almost 1300 people, in an incredible variety of formats. There have been day-long workshops in community centres, side-events at conferences, celebrations of local and international food culture, chats over tea in residential homes, sessions with youth groups and in schools, sessions with council officers, local business-owners and community leaders, farmers and activists, and in food banks, village halls and inner-city community centres. The numbers are a conservative estimate and we’re hearing about more happening all the time.

Designing the toolkit, promoting it, providing support and the opportunity for conversation hosts to come together, reflect and share, has been an incredibly positive and meaningful experience.

The issues that groups have chosen to discuss have focused on the relationship between food and some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as health inequality, the injustices of food poverty and dependence on food banks, business ethics, farmer livelihoods and the role of food in climate change and the nature crisis. There is a striking consistency across the nations, regions and diverse communities in which these conversations have taken place: anger and outrage, a very clear rejection of the status quo, and a call for governments to intervene to shape a fairer and more sustainable system. This strongly counters the suggestion - coming from those who perhaps benefit most from the current set-up - that price and convenience are really all that matters to people.

But the importance of these conversations goes beyond what is being said in the room and the call for policy change. They are in themselves building a different food system, one with active, connected and powerful citizens at its heart.

The conversations build connections in places – the building blocks of thriving communities. There can be no better subject than food to bring people together. Everyone can talk about it, everyone has a stake and an opinion. Better if there’s also the opportunity to share food, or even cook together. The community-led food conversations have helped create and strengthen connections between people in a place, building up social capital – that vital resource on which local resilience and the ability to organise and take opportunities depends.

They have helped develop ideas for local food strategies and helped citizens get more engaged in local food initiatives and partnerships. One conversation host in the Scottish Highlands described this nicely - “We discovered several useful links where needs could be met by offers brought to the table – A local producer wanted to share knowledge and now is going into the local prison to help teach them growing skills as they were searching for expertise. The prison also wanted a way to share their produce with the community as a way to give back, and a food bank organisation is now going to take the produce and distribute it to people in the area.” We’ve heard from many community hosts that the conversations gave them ideas, evidence and connections which have led to new projects and funding opportunities or given existing projects new energy.

They have linked up community organisations in different regions of the UK, to support and learn from each other. We ran online check-in sessions on an almost weekly basis, for conversation hosts to ask and answer questions, share their plans, or feed back on how their conversations were going. One such session was joined by a community centre manager in Manchester, a dairy farmer in Wiltshire, a sheep farmer from Gloucestershire, a volunteer at a North London food bank, a council officer in the east Midlands, a conservationist from Kent and a charity worker in Belfast. All had hosted food conversations in their neighbourhoods, or were planning to. These check-ins were always incredibly rich exchanges of ideas and experience, helping to knit together the efforts of groups and give us a tantalising glimpse of what a more coherent national movement for change could look like.

They have given local people a route to national influence. People loved being part of a high-profile nationwide project that is visible in the media and has a strong advocacy element. As one conversation host put it, “Being part of a national programme was really motivating for our team and for people taking part. They could feel confident that their views would be listened to because they were coming through to FFCC.”

We have the food system we have in part because people’s voices are not heard enough, especially the voices of people living in our most marginalised and left-behind communities. Assumptions and decisions are made on our behalf by people who are often distanced from the polluting, degrading and unjust outcomes of a food system that is not working. Not coming together as citizens in communities to talk about food, sustains the power imbalances that lead to these negative outcomes. The community-led food conversations - meeting to talk and break bread - are a straightforward and relatively low-resource means to rebalance the system. In fact, it is the oldest and simplest thing in the world, and its power is transformative. You can read more about it in this short report - and why not have a look at the toolkit and host a food conversation yourself?