Bury St Edmunds Food Coop First Meeting – Friday 27th January 2017. Join us at Edmundo Lounge from 10 am, look out for the Happy Food Logo.
Our mission is to bring affordable, healthy and sustainable food to everyone. A huge step towards this is the creation of food coops. These are groups of people who come together to buy food in bulk, enabling them to get great wholesale prices. There is, however, more to this than money only.
We live within a food system that is directed from global food commodity markets; put simply, these are prices set on food that can be achieved by producers. This means that only a few crops are produced on a big scale and are sold, unusual at a discounted price by the farmer, at a low price. This is why massive food businesses are able to offer cheap food through our supermarkets.
If we were to take back some ownership over our food democracy (we vote on our food through the pounds we spend), we would be able to broaden the range and quality of the food on offer. Let us imagine for example that there is a thousand people within a local food coop, we could set our own price for future crops and work directly with farmers to have them grow, at a fair price, healthy organic crops.
Or this power could be used to ensure that no questionable growing, preserving techniques or dangerous chemicals are used in the production of our food.
Or, we could remove the ridiculous contracts, that are currently in place with farmers, that mean they grow massive extra capacity to ensure ‘perfect’ looking crops and do not allow any of the to be sold. This on field waste is often not accounted for when we measure our food waste.
The list of benefits from rebalancing our food system in endless and food coops are a great way of achieving it.