Can We Feed Ourselves?

Back in the early 2000s Hodmedod’s founders, along with colleagues at a small regional NGO called East Anglia Food Link, were increasingly concerned about the UK’s food infrastructure and the direction policy was taking.

Our capacity and preparedness to feed ourselves in the face of the connected threats of climate change, geopolitical disruption and the biodiversity crisis just didn’t seem a priority, despite obvious fragility. Meanwhile, the foods we were eating and the way they were being grown, processed and distributed were doing us no favours as individuals - to put it mildly.

Can Norwich feed itself?

In the mid 2000s we began working with a group called Transition Norwich who wanted us to help them work out whether the city could feed itself from the land around it in a way that didn’t push through planetary boundaries and didn’t compromise Norfolk’s role in feeding other cities.

This wasn’t about prepping or survivalism - we shared a vision for a joyful and abundant future. And neither were we saying Norwich and its hinterland should grow absolutely everything, even its own coffee or bananas. Trade can and should be a force for good, building relationships and bringing people together, redistributing wealth.

The Norwich Resilient Food Project

The Norwich Resilient Food Project emerged from our work. We helped establish Norwich Farmshare to demonstrate the potential of the missing peri-urban horticulture, we equipped a bakery with a small mill to produce a Norwich loaf from locally grown grain.

We quickly realised that the big lever for change - in both diets and land-use - was pulses: dry beans, peas, lentils and so on. Increasing production and consumption would involve changing behaviours and attitudes on farms and in kitchens - a huge and frankly daunting task. We knew this wasn’t the work of a small not-for-profit, that it would need new routes to market, new pushes and pulls, and to do that we’d have to establish a purpose-led business.

Establishing Hodmedod to drive more change

So in 2012 we set up Hodmedod. Our mission? Well, to change everything… but we began by very practically demonstrating new routes to market for U.K. pulse crops that stimulated both demand and supply. We started with fava beans and peas - crops that already grow brilliantly in the UK but that make up less than 5% of arable farmland and could be closer to 20%.

Over time we added other species - both of pulses and of other arable crops (cereals, quinoa, buckwheat, linseed and more) and we've developed a more complex theory of change; how Hodmedod can suppoort the shift to an agroecological food system and a move from very transactional 'supply chain' thinking to a network or food web approach that gives far more weight to relationships.

Read more about our story from there, through our first 10 years and into our second decade.

Can we feed ourselves - still an urgent question

Dan Saladino explored the question of how prepared Britain is to feed itself in a food crisis in a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme.

It was heartening to hear how we’re no longer quite so alone, though slightly depressing that things aren’t further advanced more than a decade on. Accelerating climate change and increasing biodiversity loss, combined with rising social and economic inequality only leave us feeling our work is more urgent and needed.

We feel inspired to redouble our efforts.

Help Hodmedod grow

Would you be interested in helping Hodmedod grow? We’re inviting expressions of interest or support, and we're open to any advice or suggestions. Please let us know what you think by filling in our brief survey. You can do this anonymously but if you leave your email address we’ll keep you posted as we develop our plans.

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