Interesting article from last month's Hollyrood magazine highlighting one of our most exciting initiatives at GCP, Plough to Plate. It very accurately portrays our thinking on the food/homelessness issue. I would say however that people don't have to 'work for their food' as it says in the first sentence, it is open for all.
Katie Mackintoshkatie@holyrood.com |
Health Correspondent
Plough to plate
14 January 2011Combining gardening and cookery classes to engage socially excluded individuals with the food system and each other
At the Grassmarket Community Project, individuals are encouraged to work for their supper. While the centre has its roots in the Grassmarket Mission, a charity which started in the Victorian times as an outreach service for Edinburgh’s homeless and vulnerable, it is striving to move away from the traditional soup-kitchen model to allow it to better support people through the difficult transitions in their lives.
“We are definitely trying to move away from that soup-kitchen model. There is, I suppose, with the soup-kitchen model, you are creating a bit of a dependency. They always have to come to you, which seems like kindness at the time but when you stand back from it, I’m not sure that it is because they will always have to come to you,” explains Zoe Jones, cookery coordinator, Grassmarket Community Project.
Rather than people accessing the service and not taking anything away with them beyond a full belly, the project hopes to help individuals cultivate new skills. Its ‘Plough to Plate’ project, for example, which combines gardening and cookery classes, aims to link individuals normally detached from the food system to the entire process, inspiring them to take an interest in what is on their plates and how it got there. Members can take part in gardening activity at the Royal Edinburgh Community Gardens with gardening coordinator Jocelyn Lockhart, learn about herbs in the group’s herb garden set among the gravestones in Greyfriars Kirkyard, and take part in cooking classes at the centre’s teaching kitchen before sitting down to a communal meal.
The centre deliberately opens its doors to a wide range of people. Some may have been or are currently homeless. Others have issues around drugs and alcohol, have experienced mental ill-health, or are struggling to cope with the impact of the economic downturn on their lives.
Preparing a meal and coming together to share it can provide a useful prop for interactions between individuals who are often categorised as socially excluded, Lockhart explains.
“I think people are often quite surprised by how easy it can be to get on with people who have a very different background from you.
People are always able to find something to talk about, even if it is the task that you are doing – it is easier to meet someone while doing a common task.” “You get a lot of positive interactions like that in the kitchen when people are stood side by side chopping onions for the umpteenth time, grizzling about it,” agrees Jones.
“And it is the same in the garden when everyone is in the garden working away and they have a common enemy – weeds,” Lockhart adds.
The centre re-opened late last summer after a six-month refurbishment and the inviting communal space is peppered with curios that tell its story. There is furniture and other wooden crafts created by the woodwork group out of donated church pews, art works crafted by the textiles group, and jars of drying herbal teas plucked from the centre’s herb garden in the grounds of Greyfriars church. In one corner, another volunteer is working with an individual on their literacy and numeracy skills; while another wall is plastered with pictures of the types of foods that are currently in season, along with information about the local businesses and farms that provide food for the group.
The concept of seasonal eating has proved challenging to put across as people have become accustomed to being able to purchase whatever they want, when they want it from supermarkets, Jones says.
“We got a glut of apples from the garden and it was very difficult to get people to understand that these are the apples now, they are coming off the tree now so if you want an apple in February, now is when you have to pick it and process it in some way, freeze it or store it in some way, so you are preserving the glut and eking it through. Whereas quite a lot of people say, ‘Can’t I have a strawberry?’ ‘No, it’s not strawberry season. Come back to me in the summer.’ So it is trying to introduce that concept in what we eat and why we are eating it at this time.” Similarly, the project hopes to build the idea of resilience through eating more locally. By chance, Jones says the recent cold spell helped to amply demonstrate the value of sourcing your food locally.
“At Christmas time when we had all that snow you saw a lot of footage on TV about supermarkets with empty shelves. We actually suffered very little disruption in our food because we source so locally. I think there was one day’s interruption with some of the meat in West Linton and some of the dairy products, but by and large, it was plain sailing and we were getting stuff through.The people at The Engine Shed at South Bridge actually walked the bread down to us, whereas there was no bread to be got in any of the supermarkets.” Similarly, today’s vegetable soup is bubbling away with potatoes dug up by the gardening group before the snowfall, and garnished with herbs from the herb garden. Lockhart explains that if they can see that the food is fresh and they feel a connection with it, then they are more likely to try the end result.
“I think the herb garden has certainly worked like that. People will say I saw that in the herb garden or I grew that. But to begin with, they didn’t really know why you would bother growing herbs. What is that, what do I do with it? And now it is quite common for the kitchen volunteers to come out and find the herbs, and the gardeners will often inform people that they dug those potatoes!” By not making a big deal of healthy eating, it happens organically, Jones says. Giving the jars of herbal tea on display as an example, she says: “I think if you have things like that just out as what you’ve got, it is just part of what you do; it doesn’t become a big special healthy thing.
Some projects are so keen to promote healthy lifestyles that they almost over do it. ‘This is healthy so you must have this!’ Whereas I sometimes think if you just make it, ‘This is how we roll. This is what we are about. It is nice and just part of the fabric of what we do’, it works better. It is a bit more subtle.” However, in addition to hoping to change the attitudes and food preferences of those who access the service, the project is also seeking to affect the way vulnerable groups are perceived by others.
“It is also quite interesting to question stereotypes of what people like to eat,” explains Jones.
“A lot of people say to me, ‘Oh, I bet you can’t get them to eat any vegetables down at your work.’ Actually, salad goes at a pace.
Enormous bowls have to be made. Again, fruit salad is very popular; it is always a big hit. And it is really healthy as well.” These prevailing stereotypes have led to some other homelessness services playing it safe by dishing up food that is “very oldfashioned, stodgy, almost like school dinners,” she says.
“I think we are trying to challenge that steadily and have things like vegetable lasagne, and pasta dishes. There is a big interest in the cooking classes, a lot of people want to try Thai food and they want to try some ethnic foods, and I think it is good to encourage that.” The project hopes to create a legacy of healthy, seasonal eating beyond the centre’s kitchen. However, it recognises that a number of challenges stand in its way.
Jones explains: “I think the main challenge we face now is it is quite expensive. We’ve got all the things we need here, but can they in any way replicate that themselves at home? Many of the people have low incomes or no incomes and some have very poor housing – they don’t have access to kitchens, access to any pots and pans, and with a chaotic lifestyle, it is not really going to be an option.” Consequently, Jones has learned to adapt the cookery classes accordingly.
“One guy said to me, ‘I’ve only got a microwave,’ and I thought to myself, ‘Well, if he is in my cooking class, I should really think up some microwave menus. Why am I even headed towards an oven? Let’s look at what they’ve got.’” She continues: “I said to another guy, ‘I’m about to buy some new things for the kitchen, where would you buy them?’ And he said, ‘Poundstretcher’. So that is where I’m going to get it from because there is no point in me spending money on top of the range catering equipment when they couldn’t replicate it in the same way, and having the same is quite important.
So if I can say, ‘I bought this bowl for £1.50,’ then they know they can go out and get one for themselves. So we are trying to see how much of this they can take home and use in their daily lives.” However, they admit that other challenges are not so easily surmountable and will require greater attention to be paid to them.
For example, it would also be helpful if people were able to access healthier, local food than many do at present, says Lockhart.
“People living on the outskirts can hardly go to the farmers’ market and when they do it is totally out of their price range. There is still an assumption that that kind of food is for the middle classes and everyone else should be content to get their stuff from Iceland. So we need to challenge that.” Similarly, the higher prices paid by individuals with metered electricity impact on individuals’ wallets and food choices, Jones says.
“You may have a choice between your Potnoodle that you only have to boil the kettle for and then you can watch some TV, or putting on the oven and cooking some roasted vegetables.
“So what we do here is slightly hampered by the life situations of the people we are working with, but then maybe we are in a position to challenge that and ask those questions.”
with it a particular culture; a culture of expectation, of progress of efficiency. We are socialised into seeing technology as some sort of path towards an answer. It has been argued that the purpose of technology is ultimately efficiency, constantly refining itself to find a more efficient means to an end. Prior to the introduction of the the combine harvester to agriculture the process of separating the grain from the stalk took a long time and lots of man power, but with its invention it reduced the time and energy replacing the less efficient technology of hands, horses and carts. This culture has taught us that it is better to be more efficient than less efficient and many times the worker becomes both dependant on the technology and a servant to that technology. Take for instance a weaver in a modern mill. The average weaver works for the loom, but rarely works the loom. The weaver's job is to keep the machine running, stop it when it makes a mistake, fix the mistake and start the machine once again. Think of the comments we hear on a regular basis, 'what would we have do without mobile phones [or the internet].' My scepticism comes in when we hand over our selves to technology, where it becomes an end in itself and we no longer ask 'is this necessary?' The best example of this is the internet, which has vastly expanded the ways we can communicate and the speed by which can get in touch with far off places, it has also made knowledge more open and shared. However I think most of us would agree that the majority of content on the internet is crap. 
I come here to clear my head and just focus on doing stuff instead of being out in the streets gang fighting and taking drugs
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