Transition Edinburgh South is connected to a network of organisations that are passionate about food and that campaign for everybody’s right to good food.

The chair of Transition Edinburgh South, Pat Abel, is a trustee of Nourish Scotland which is a member of the Scottish Food Coalition which campaigns for a fair, sustainable and healthy food system.  She is also on the on the steering group for Edible Edinburgh.

TES are part of a movement that seeks transformation of the food system to more local and sustainable production and better access to healthy food for all. This campaigning has influenced the Good Food Nation bill which the Scottish government were committed to introducing in 2020 but it is now delayed by the coronavirus crisis.

Sadly Covid 19 is increasing inequalities in access to healthy food as even more people rely on foodbanks. The crisis also highlights the importance of growing local fruit and vegetables.

Click here for our comments on one of the other sets of proposals concerning how Scotland’s food system should be transformed – food in the Common Weal Our Common Home Plan  

Our main project, Gracemount Community Garden is about locally-grown food that is nutritious, delicious and grown organically in ways that help put carbon back in the soil and are good for wildlife.

Agricultural techniques that rely on nitrogen-rich manufactured fertilizers do harm by adding gasses to the atmosphere that contribute to climate change and air pollution. The vitamins and minerals in fruit and vegetables are important for human health but the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has declined in many parts of the world with intensive agriculture as the soil has been degraded. We believe that food should be grown in ways that look after the soil, giving us back more nutritious food and doing less harm to the diversity of insects, plants and animals.

Growing food is always also about having good food to eat. Transition Edinburgh South have organised food workshops, taster sessions and community meals to share the pleasure of food cooked from scratch using local fruit and vegetables, from garden to fork. Our cooking workshops also gave tips about using left-overs and avoiding food waste and how to dispose of peelings and scraps and not used to create harmful gasses. We no longer have access to a kitchen  but we are finding other ways of working around this. In doing so we hope to help social change.

The pie chart below is about everything people eat, not just good food. It shows, more than half of food eaten in Britain comes from overseas. Even fruit and veg that grows well in the UK is often imported, for example, 7 out of every 10 apples eaten are grown elsewhere; we believe this pattern must change.