Food

At the moment London grows almost none of its own food. More than 50% of the vegetables and 95% of the fruit we consume are grown abroad and relies on oil to reach us. Supermarkets scour the globe for the cheapest food sources. But as oil starts to become scarce the price of fuel will inevitably rise and our current food supply lines will be threatened. Climate change and increasing competition for fresh water are also going to hit many regions that currently provide our food.

Although Belsize can’t grow all of its own food we can produce some of it. With a tiny scrap of growing space such as a window sill you can grow your own salad leaves and stop buying air-freighted herbs and salads in plastic bags from supermarkets!  With a small balcony you can grow delicious tomatoes, peas and beans that can be eaten throughout the summer and autumn. There’s also tremendous pleasure to be gained from watching nature perform its magic and reconnecting with the seasons and the soil!

We now have two public food growing sites in Belsize, one in the Premier Inn Hotel Car Park on the corner of Ornan Road and Haverstock Hill, and the other on the Swiss Cottage Open Space. 

Transition Belsize is also working on other ways to relocalize our food, such as Foraging. From blackberries to nettles, many edible wild plants can form a free, delicious and nutritious part of our diet. Cultivated fruits also abound in our neighbourhood, which is full of unharvested fruit trees (pears, apples, mulberries and more) whose fruit ends up rotting on the pavement. Our Abundance Project is about mapping fruit trees in our area, and harvesting and processing the fruit into juices, dried fruit, fruit leathers and jams.  

We are also exploring new ways of buying our food outside the regular supermarket distribution model, which puts middlemen and many miles between producers and consumers. In 2011 Transition Belsize piloted an Organic Vegetable Distribution Scheme, working with a local farmer who brought his harvest to around 20 households throughout the growing season.

We also host events to connect the community to learning skills and our abundant local food, including food growing workshops and local food production workshops. Starting in late November 2011 we're staging our first "Introduction to Urban Permaculture Design" course, a series of four workshops about permaculture, which is the main tool set for Transition solutions. 

In 2009/10 we ran a four workshop course called "Foraging For All Seasons" to teach people which wild plants are edible and which are poisonous. We're planning to run another "Foraging For All Seasons" course in 2012.