The Food Zones
Better Food Traders share Growing Communities’ vision of what a sustainable, resilient food system might look like in the future, based around a system we call the Food Zones.
This shows what type of food could best come from where and starts to illustrate the percentage of our food we might aim to source from different zones.
It starts with the urban areas in which most of us live and moves outwards applying a kind of food subsidiarity: raising what we can as close as we can and then moving outwards taking into account our principles and other factors such as soil type, what grows best where, and the infrastructure available to support production.
It’s based on human-scale, organic, mixed farms located in and around urban areas which are directly connected to the urban communities they feed and which enable those communities to source increasing amounts of food from close to where they live.
It’s built around the idea of community sized ‘building blocks’ which encompass positive but appropriately scaled trading relationships, starting from the local and working out to global.These enable urban producers, small farmers, producer co-ops, larger farms and food imports to exist in harmony.
It’s work in progress (these things take time!) but over time, we’re driving shorter supply chains and increasing the opportunities and wellbeing for sustainable growers right on our doorsteps.