After the success of last year’s ESRC Festival of Social Science event, this year we brought you ‘Plymouth's Great Food Vision(aries)’ an interactive workshop that brought together and inspire a range of stakeholders (and services users) to become catalysts for food culture change.
By enabling knowledge exchange around the socio-cultural determinants of food, participatory creative methods were used as a vehicle to discuss and debate topical local food issues to create a vision for food that can be carried into the future.
This fun interactive workshop ran in three phases:
- Past (drawing on local historical perspective – in collaboration with Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery and Plymouth and West Devon Record Office)
- Present (showcasing current visionary food/health work) and
- Future (creative activities to consider a vision for the future of food in Plymouth (and locale)).
We teamed up with Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, who offered to share some of their historical food artefacts as part of our interactive workshops. This showcased their excellent work and supported the development of their History Centre outreach learning offer.
Joanne Gray is Learning Development Officer with a remit for communities at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. This is a wide reaching role which involves working with vulnerable and hard to reach audiences within Plymouth and the surrounding area to increase both physical and intellectual access to the museum’s collections. We also have support from the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, who have assisted us in locating local historical food images which we intend to exhibit on the day.
There was input from speakers (Dr Julie Parsons, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Plymouth, who talked about her food research at LandWorks); Dr Wendy Miller, who brought to life the importance, and historical perspective, of allotments. Finally we had the active support of Penny Tarrant (Plymouth Food Waste Partnership) and Jackie Young (Devon and Cornwall Food Association) both of whom shared their creative ideas for how we can better consider food waste and surplus.
All presentations and interactive workshops emphasised the need for positive social and cultural change in relation food and how we can place a higher value on food.
Organisers hoped that older adults attending could share their historical perspective on food, recipes and health.
