“We may be the first species to ‘choose’ a diet that is killing us and destroying our planet.”

Frances Moore Lappe

Fife - ‘a reuch Scots blanket wi’ a fringe o’ gowd’- now has the highest rate of obesity in the UK (www.thecourier.co.uk/output/2008/03/06/newsstory11028561t0.asp). The region which had the highest land under agriculture in Scotland at 80 per cent now struggles to feed itself.

Of course like most ‘choices’ our day-to-day diet is not a real choice. It’s force of habit, class, circumstances, geography and cultural conditioning. The reality in Scotland is that like so much of Scottish society it’s dominated by a huge gap between the quality of our potential – our raw ingredients - and the reality of our experience. We are the stuffed and starved of Europe, brandwashed and dispirited and dosed on a daily diet of fat, sugar, industrial meat products and ‘our other national drink’, or their cheaper imitators.

Crucially too, the relationship between producer and consumer, between town and country, between place and experience has been shattered. Food, like most else, has become meaningless, and into the void is poured all of the food porn, obsessiveness, disorder, paranoia and lifestyle jiggery-pokery. At its simplest, we have lost control over where our food comes from, who makes it and what it tastes of.

It has become difficult for people to comprehend eating food from anywhere near where they live. This is bizarre, and increasingly will become untenable. For the past ten months we – a growing network of around 400 people in Fife – have been eating food only from our own region (some foods have been sourced from neighbouring Clackmannanshire and Perthshire. The majority of the participants managed to stick to our program as much as 80 per cent) in opposition to this state of being and in preparation for another.

We asked ourselves to try this, be honest about how we got on and share and support each other in the effort. The project launched with 14 at the Big Tent 2007, and by July 2008 had 428 registered participants, representing an unknown wider community in households throughout Fife. We have held public meetings and cooked for towns and villages from Kirkcaldy to Rosyth, from Dunshalt to North Queensferry (more info at fifediet.wordpress.com).

The project aims to bring people together who want to begin to reduce their carbon impact and alter the perception of passivity and isolation in the face of climate change.

The Fife Diet aims to:

*Bring people together who want to eat good local food

Make fresh organic produce more widely available

Celebrate the diversity of local food against the insanity of transporting food around the world*

We believe that food – that thing which is immediately universal and personal - is a crucial key to three potentially revolutionary elements of political change: A way to empower individuals to make critical decisions about their lives; a toolkit for community development and regional expression, and a bulwark against the banalities of globalisation.

One of the most revealing things about the project is how quickly established norms collapse in the face of action. When we launched journalists chuckled and faces fell in incredulity. The clichés of deep fried Mars bars were repeated *ad nauseam* by churnalists (Nick Davies Flat Earth News popularises the idea of ‘churnalists’ who churn out press releases dressed up as writing) with all of the imagination of the brain-dead.

What we have since achieved – I think – is a critical mass of questioning-interest in the ideas of where our food comes from and why, and who controls our food system.

The project has been the subject of some criticism. It has been described as parochial, protectionist, and accused of the ‘local trap’ – assuming everything that is local is good. We certainly do not – having gone through a winter on root vegetables and searching in vain for decent Fife dairy products we know this is not the case.

We have found the experience challenging but also rewarding as a bioregional insight into Fife, and a social insight into what change is needed and what is worthless. We’re acutely aware that local food can be misconstrued about a sort of boutique experience of delis, farm shops and expensive farmers markets. It’s not, or needn’t be. The simple reality of the experience is that you save money by not shopping in supermarkets. (Re)creating a regional food culture is as much about social justice for the poor rural communities as it is about showing solidarity with developing countries affected by climate change now, today, not in some speculative future. The Fife Diet has also been attacked for promoting localism as a withdrawal, a disavowal of internationalism.

It’s absolutely not this. It’s about proving that for one year we can step outside the commodification of food and source the vast majority of our food from where we live. Beyond this we aim to make the wider point for feral and fair trade as part of a wider potentially transformatory alternative food movement.

As well as supporting the efforts to have Scotland a Fair Trade Nation we argue that we should also aim to become the world’s first certified Organic nation. We all know the importance of getting our five-a-day, but eating five organic fruit and vegetables a day is even better. A non-organic apple can be sprayed up to 16 times with 36 different chemicals, many of which cannot simply be washed off. The latest Government tests, carried out in 2005, found pesticides in 80 per cent of non-organic apple samples.

As a movement – a movement for environmental justice – we need to move beyond the endless search for credibility and remember to be incredible. Remember when, only a short while ago, everyone said that you couldn’t possibly stop people smoking in pubs? Local food will be the same as that. We will quickly move to the situation where the very idea of transporting food around the planet will seem as ridiculous as a 40-a-day Lambert & Butler.

The ubiquitous George Monbiot writing about Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian fiction The Road has asked (I think rhetorically): “Are we already shutting our minds to the consequences of climate change?” (www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/30/the-road-well-travelled). He writes:

*“The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we learnt that climate change could eliminate half the world’s species; that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction; that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule. But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: “if it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?”

One of the reasons the Fife Diet has had some - albeit small – impact, is that it asked people to do something positive. Too often the environmental movement fulfils the stereotype of the finger-waving naysayer denouncing modern society. We need to be more celebratory and appreciate the produce we have here. Once changed your behaviour seems ridiculous. You can do without mangoes in January. It’s no big deal.

In fact what was most striking about the project was that it made such an impact when all we were saying was ‘let’s eat food from here’. It was and is the most un-revolutionary, common sense idea there’s ever been. And yet we were paraded on the media like oddities when the reality is that soon we will have little option but to eat food in most part from our region or at least our corner of the world.

The backlash against local eating has been sustained. Much of it is propaganda, greenwash and nonsense. The much-quoted study that ‘proved’ that eating lamb from New Zealand was ‘actually’ greener than eating lamb from Scotland, was (actually) published by the New Zealand Lamb industry. Most of it uses our incredible belief in ‘experts’ to subsume our own common sense. This is at face value and in reality nonsense.

The Observer chipped in with the revelation that: “The concept of food miles is unhelpful and stupid. It doesn’t inform about anything except the distance travelled.” said the previously unheard of Dr Adrian Williams, of the National Resources Management Centre at Cranfield University. Unfortunately the paper slightly undermined its status as an authoritative source of information by describing Fife as “an island off the North East coast of  Scotland”. Where is old fashioned investigative journalism when you need it?

If the Fife Diet is part of a wider cultural shift to shed the Celtic cringe, it’s also necessary as part of a grounded effort to bring ideas and energy back into the ecology movement.

The environmental movement in Scotland needs to transform and renew itself if it is to have meaning and impact in rapidly changing and degrading times. The Fife Diet project has longer term aims to try and be part of this, to affect change in Fife and beyond. To influence and radicalise the Transition Town Movement and to begin the process of establishing stronger links within communities around food politics – exploring solutions and ideas for the coming challenges.

What we have found out is that you can eat food from where you live. That in itself is a restorative act. Now we need to re-learn how to grow, cook and eat together, how to reduce pesticide dependence and reclaim the economy from the supermarkets and the land from mono-cropped and subsidised industrialised farming.

Local, organic and fair trade needn’t be and mustn’t be seen as ideas that are separate or contradictory. They simply aren’t. In fact the sort of issues or self-reliance, self-determination and genuine international localism brought up by the critique of the anti-GM movement are at the core of this analysis. Joining the dots of this nascent food movement and making it more than just restorative is essential, and becoming in the face of the challenge of climate change, inevitable.

We have started by overcoming the cultural cringe and self-hatred that assumes that Scottish food is appalling. Then by proving that our food could be celebrated not just endured. Now we need to make the chains and arenas so that sourcing local food is as easy as it is sourcing food that has been stored, frozen, chemicalised and transported many weeks ago from the other side of the planet at the expense of workers and to the detriment of those of us who stomach it.

 Mike Small is a writer based in Fife and closely involved with the Fife Diet project