Food Matters

Project now named ‘Food Matters.’ This is my official explanatory statement:

In a nation of over 60 million, the amount of food consumed every year in the UK, greatly outstrips what is grown here. Food has become a commodity, and one that is often seen as less important to spend our hard earned cash on than to new TVs, cars and holidays. This hasn’t always been the case, in the post war era, food was seen as so important that rationing continued for several years after the country was stable as a whole, and this was when we still had a largely rural based economy.

Nowadays, the Great British public seem to be more out of touch with where our food comes from and how it gets to our tables than ever before.

With meat coming in plastic trays, vegetables wrapped in Clingfilm and pastries factory packaged ready for the microwave, it’s little wonder that many don’t even consider that these products must have come from an animal or plant somewhere along the way, albeit quite far down the line in many cases.

A great deal of food is still grown and produced in the UK, and increasingly those who are doing so are making a point of using it as a unique selling point, often at a premium price (does it not seem wrong that it costs less to produce something in Kenya than in Kent).

The ‘Food Matters’ project bridges this gap between consumers and producers of food in the UK. With photography and multimedia, the project shows what is going behind the closed doors of the UK food industry, ranging from small scale organic veg box farms and community gardens, to traditional livestock and arable sites, to large industrial operations with automated packing and international distribution.

The project will reconnect consumers with where their food comes from, how it is made, and the sheer scale of this multimillion pound industry that is essential to the survival of every one of us.

For companies willing to grant access for the project, it will improve their business through showing transparency and good practice in their production, as well as an opportunity to showcase any new and interesting technologies they are utilizing to make the production more efficient, greener and safer.

Food security and Food Sovereignty are not widely known terms at present, but are issues that will affect everyone increasingly in the coming years, and are only going to become more important in business and national policy. Whilst photographing the Cereal’s event and Fruit Focus for Haymarket exhibitions this year, I picked up a lot on this topic in the discussion forums, it seemed like it was on everyone in the industry’s minds, including Dominic Dyer of the Crop Protection Association and Peter Kendall of the NFU to name just 2 eminent speakers present. As an island nation that imports over 50% of the food that is annually consumed, the UK could be hit a lot harder than many of our European neighbors, if the risks are not addressed quickly and seriously. There are many different ideas, approaches and theories as to what will happen and how to tackle it, and ‘Food Matters’ aims to explore as many of these as possible, from both sides of the fence.

Some things like strawberries still have to be hand planted. Riverford Organics Aug 2011