We decided to once again share a stall with the Allotment Association at the November Farmers’ Market in Saltburn to highlight the contribution food waste makes to climate change. By reducing food waste we can help reduce climate change which will affect us but will have an even greater impact on those living in the global south. The market is always a good place to talk to people as mostly they are not in a hurry and have time to stop. This year the weather was lovely, warm and sunny with no wind, in contrast to June 2017 when it was cold and wet.
We made a display out of a rubbish bin filled with food and copied a photograph, produced by the Centre for Alternative Technology in their Clean Slate magazine, which we used as a poster. We used the format of quiz questions to engage with children and their parents. They were rewarded for their guesses with a sticker. The questions required people to make guesses about the concerning amount of food waste that exists in this country and worldwide. Almost everyone we spoke to agreed that food waste is a bad thing and they said that personally they do not waste food, so there was good support for the campaign. We distributed all of our leaflets which provided information from the Love Food Hate Waste campaign website and also statistics from the Centre for Alternative Technology on the impact of food waste both nationally and globally. This issue is not a GJN campaign so we devised the leaflets and questions ourselves. In order to use the Farmers’ Market we really have to campaign on a food related issue.
A bonus was that at lunchtime Jeremy Corbyn made a visit to Saltburn to ride down in the cliff lift and walk on the pier. Quite a lot of people were there to greet him but we got the chance to give him our leaflet and talk about what we had been doing. He said that they are trying to get the issue of food waste into their manifesto. We also got the opportunity to talk at length to his Mexican wife, Laura Alvarez, who runs her own company selling fairly traded coffee from Mexico and Guatamala.
