Our right to food

I love food – who doesn’t? It’s a joy to sit down to your favourite meal – better still, to enjoy a lovely meal with family or friends, with all the chat and banter that goes with it.

Food is more than just nourishment, it is what binds us. It’s part of our culture, feeds the soul and keeps us healthy and well. Food is critical to our everyday lives. It should be a basic right for everyone to access good nutritious and more importantly, affordable food. Not a privilege, a right!

In Scotland, we have the high-level ambition of becoming a Good Food Nation by 2025. But what does this mean? Enshrined into law is the Scottish Government’s commitment to making Scotland a nation where people from every walk of life can take pride and pleasure in, and benefit from, the food they produce, buy, cook, serve, and eat each day. The Government has essentially adopted a human rights approach to tackling poverty and food insecurity, founded on the principles of dignity and respect, to ensure people have access to affordable, locally produced and nutritious food.

What’s not to like about this? Yet, for the Right to Food to be realised, food must be adequate, available and accessible to all.

Sadly, it is widely recognised that too many people in Scotland cannot afford the food that they need to keep them healthy and well. Furthermore, the Scottish diet has stayed fixed for years, making little progress towards meeting the Government’s dietary goals, with people living in the most deprived areas still more likely to experience diet related ill health.

We also know that in rural, remote and island communities, living costs are substantially higher, partly because of the greater distance to services and large shopping centres offering lower prices. In order to address the gap between the challenges we face and our shared vision of a Good Food Nation, we need to fully understand what the Right to Food looks like in our island setting and begin to ask how Government policies are helping to progressively realise our ambition.

In October last year, Tagsa Uibhist wanted to do just that when we started our journey to find out conclusively how affordable and accessible basic fruit and vegetable items were on the Western Isles. We recruited 24 Community Researchers from Berneray to Barra, representing eight Outer Hebridean Islands, setting them on the Anneka Rice style challenge of surveying all our local shops over a six-week period. Our Right to Food survey was a community endeavour to explore, compare and make sense of how the availability and price of foods differ, both across the islands and against mainland prices and supplies.

The research confirmed our concerns that an ‘island premium’ exists for people living in Uist and Barra, who need to pay close to 30% more for their basic fruit and veg items as compared to mainland prices. The 17 basic items on the researchers’ shopping lists delivered an average basket cost of £26.64 in Uist and Barra, compared with just £20.80 for a Tesco online shop. Furthermore, our community researchers found less than half of the items they were looking for on a list which constituted just the basic fruit and vegetable items required for a healthy diet – just the basics!

The research findings showed that people living in Uist and Barra are disproportionately more disadvantaged in terms of affording and gaining access to basic fruit and vegetable items. Our findings were also in stark contrast to other rural mainland communities and evidenced worrying trends on the dietary inequalities for island communities – communities which rely heavily on long food supply chains and are challenged by ferry problems, the rising cost of fuel, agricultural inputs, food and living costs.
There is now a strong call by our community researchers for immediate and progressive action by national and regional authorities to address these difficulties in a meaningful way. Action which promotes a truly dignified island food system; one where everyone is food secure, with access to adequate, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and without the need of emergency food aid. A system where the Right to Food is understood as a matter of justice rather than charity; a Good Food Nation in which every community’s health and well-being is paramount and no-one is left behind. Our island communities demand nothing less because, of course, a right to food is a right for all.
Tagsa Uibhist is also attempting to address these challenges by expanding our community garden services at East Camp in Balivanich to grow more staple produce and create a monthly local food market with other local producers. Watch this space: a Payday Food Market is coming soon and we have exciting plans to take our ‘one stop shop’ Neighbourfood service on the road where you can buy a range of great products from local producers and beyond. Plans are afoot to outfit one of our electric vans to include a refillery service too. Yes, you heard it here first!

We are also supporting growers and crofters wanting to establish community poly tunnels and aim to provide outreach support and vegetable starter kits for anyone keen to grow in their communities.
However, our biggest news is that we plan to launch our Biadh Blasta Uibhist project this Autumn; a meals on wheels service with a difference!

Tagsa Uibhist is aiming to deliver 600 wholesome ready-made meals to our most vulnerable elderly people living on their own in our community. It is our ambition to include as much local produce as possible, so that our clients get a nutritious meal with local ingredients and minimal wastage. We are working in collaboration with Tagsa’s Care department, Macleans Bakery and local producers to deliver this service in October.

We also hope to hold a local Food Festival in the Autumn to celebrate local produce and promote the sharing and cooking of food together in community spaces.

Biadh Blasta Uibhist is about local people working together for the community good and we would welcome any thoughts and ideas about this pilot project because if successful, we would like to expand the service across our community.

At Tagsa, we are passionate about keeping our community at the heart of local food development and helping to alleviate the challenges of food insecurity on our gorgeous islands.