Hosted by Natasha Soares, Better Food Traders with the Manchester Veg Box People.

Where you buy your food from could be seen as equally important to what you eat.

Better Food Traders enable citizens to connect with food retailers who genuinely support a better food system – they are community-led, support sustainable farmers and provide decent jobs.

By working collectively as Better Food Traders, we make it easier for people to reduce their food choice impacts on the climate and nature crisis. Using our principles as guidelines, we support those farmers, growers, organisations and businesses committed to a more sustainable food system, who feed people really well too.

We invited participants to consider the Better Food Traders nine principles and to decide which of these are the most important to them in a better food future. We also shared how you can join ‘Know Better Food’, our peer-to-peer support network for anyone who wants to make their food choices work for the environment and people. Participants will understand more about the principles behind Better Food Traders, how they are all linked and how they can see past the ‘greenwash’ to the real radical retailers.

Speakers/hosts:

Natasha Soares is Project Leader for Better Food Traders, Growing Communities’ new network for ethics-based food businesses. She was a co-founder of Growing Communities, Hackney’s multiple award-sustainable food initiative, and has been a board member of Local Greens, a South London-based sustainable veg scheme, since 2011. She also shares the ownership and work of Pear Necessities, an organic top-fruit orchard in Kent.

Amy Shadbolt is involved in the day to day running of Vegboxpeople – a veg box scheme under the umbrella of the Manchester-based co-operative Kindling Trust who use food to catalyze environmental and social change. As well as packing, driving and co-ordinating, she writes the weekly newsletter, regularly trying out new recipes to include in them – look out for her favourite Middle Eastern dishes. In pre-corona days you’d often find Amy at a parkrun, and she is the Guinness Book of Records’ world’s fastest vegetable – having run the 2019 London Marathon in 3:32 wearing a full carrot costume.

You can read a blog post about the session outcomes here.