CAUGHT IN THE ACT of eating is Permaculture Australia’s Virginia Littlejohn (right) and event organiser, Tina Dimetriou, at the Randwick Sustainability Hub.
The event was Fair Food Week 2015, the annual celebration of Australia’s community food initiatives, which was organised by Tina.
Virginia, a member of the Permaculture Australia Permafund team, represented Permaculture Australia with Russ Grayson from the Communications team. Virginia spoke about Permafund, Permaculture Australia’s small grants initiative. She MC’d and co-facilitated the discussion following the film, The Edible City.
According to Virginia, public appearances like this can lift the profile of Permaculture Australia and bring it before people who might not otherwise encounter the organisation and its small grants program.
View the trailer of Edible City
Edible City is a documentary film that explores the issues of food justice, security, and sovereignty through a comprehensive view of urban farming in the Bay Area a grassroots effort that sees people responding to climate change, rising food costs and gas prices, and increasing health concerns by strengthening connections to the food they eat and reaching out to their local communities.
Food Sovereignty wasn’t around as a concept when Bill Mollison and David Holmgren wrote the first books on Permaculture. It was another 20 years, in the mid-1990’s when the Mexican peasant movement La Via Campesina came to prominence and presented Food Sovereignty as a way to speak about their struggles over control of food, land, water, and livelihoods.
The Permaculture concept had started earlier but with very much the same alignment of thinking about the need for communities to regain control in improving their lives and taking a holistic and environmentally aware approach. There is a strong similarity in the originating motivation for food sovereignty and Permaculture.
Permaculture Australia is pleased to announce that we are joining with the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network so that Permaculture groups, organisations and individuals can showcase their Permaculture projects to the public during Fair Food Week 2015 (FFW). The week is a promotion of Food Sovereignty.
Events can be as simple as a public conversation, a shared meal, film night, an open garden or open farm event, a workshop. It’s an opportunity to share your ideas and skills about food and have an event to promote localised production and healthy communities.
You will find graphics for your events and copies of the FFW logos to put up on your website on the FFW website for you to download and use.
[button_link url=”http://www.fairfoodweek.org.au” target=”_blank” style=”blue” title=”” class=”” id=”” onclick=””]List your Fair Food Week event here[/button_link]
Fair Food Week celebrates…
Fair Food Week celebrates the 2015 International Year of Soil which aims to aims to increase awareness and understanding of the importance of soil for food security and essential ecosystem functions.
Fair Food Week opens on World Food Day, 16 October 2015. This is the UN day for attention to the first Millennium Development Goal – to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. There are an estimated 800 million people chronically hungry and undernourished in the world today.
The 2015 World Food Day theme is
Social Protection and agriculture: breaking the cycle of rural poverty
Social Protection has been chosen as the theme of this year’s World Food Day (WFD) to highlight its importance in reducing rural poverty and granting access to food or means to buy food.
Social protection can be defined as a range of solutions, often combined with each others, —such as work opportunities, provision of food, money and services— that are designed to support the vulnerable and help the poor in society move out of hunger and poverty.
To help you get acquainted with the 2015 theme, we have prepared two short briefs that you can read for background information, ideas and suggestions. Please open the links below to find the material we have prepared for you.
Find out more…
[button_link url=”http://fairfoodweek.org.au” target=”_blank” style=”blue” title=”” class=”” id=”” onclick=””]Read more about Fair Food Week[/button_link]
[button_link url=”http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4646e.pdf” target=”_blank” style=”blue” title=”” class=”” id=”” onclick=””]View pdf of the State of the World — Food Report[/button_link]
Photo story by Russ Grayson, December 2015
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