Where did it begin?
The National Food Service campaign started in Sheffield in the Foodhall Project, in the Real Junk Food Project network, in collaboration with campaigners in Nottingham’s Super kitchen network in connection with numerous projects such as who share a solidarity of cause. All initiatives from northern cities facing significant cuts in welfare services with have active communities. The First NFS symposium was held in Sheffield. It is now hosted by a different community and in a different area of the country each year. Although it comes from a much longer lineage of food activism, such as food for life and Edward Carpenters commonwealth cafe.
Historical Precedent
“Probably at some future time it will be difficult to believe that each household in the country did its own separate marketing, buying small amounts of food from retail dealers a hundred per cent above cost price, that every hundred houses in a street had each its own fire for cooking, and that at least a hundred human beings were engaged in serving meals that could have been prepared by half a dozen’
Over a hundred years ago this was the verdict of MPs in the Ministry of Food in 1917. Kennedy Jones had hand-picked a group of food reformers – R. Hippisley Cox, H.J. Bradley and Eustace Miles – to produce their Public Kitchens handbook. As late as mid 1918 the Ministry of Food was talking confidently of national kitchens becoming a ‘permanent national institution’, giving some indication of a a National Food Service that would have been developed. The demise, it is argued, was due to political factors; primarily the government’s decision to introduce full rationing but also the vocal opposition to the movement from the catering trade, and the dismantling of the collectivist ethic following the armistice.
Today, over a hundred years later, inefficiency in food distribution and food insecurity still persists despite us having exponentially more capacity as a civilisation. It’s time to bring back the welfare plans that would have solved this issue over a hundred years ago. Nationally, 13% of shops are vacant; Sheffield city centre lost 18% of its shops in five years alone despite there being a surplus of production. New public services operating at zero marginal cost can patch the holes in distribution and vacancy, optimising efficiency in our city.
