Oxfam’s GROW Week: Cultivating Awareness about Our Food
I’m curious: How many of you are aware that October 16th is World Food Day? I confess that I hadn’t heard of this occasion before I started learning more about the food system and joined Oxfam’s GROW campaign, earlier this year. I’ve never even seen World Food Day observed on calendars or in daily planners, despite the fact that this annual observance started 30 years ago by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The date, October 16, was selected because it coincides with the FAO’s “birthday”; the organization was founded on October 16, 1945, in Quebec, Canada.
World Food Day is intended to raise awareness about the problems with our global food system and get people thinking about how they can become part of the solution to eradicating hunger, malnutrition, and poverty. This year’s World Food Day theme is the volatility of food prices and its effect on economically disadvantaged people. The exact title of the theme, “Food Prices—From Crisis to Stability”, is intended to get us thinking about the factors that contribute to price volatility and the changes we need to make to stabilize food prices. Between last year and this year, nearly 70 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty thanks to sharp and ongoing increases in food prices. Food price spikes are a major threat to food security—at a price tag we, as a global community, simply cannot afford in the short or long run.
We need to start talking among ourselves and to our government representatives about taking action to stabilize food prices. One aspect of Oxfam’s GROW campaign, launched earlier this year, focuses on food prices and notes that the world’s poor are disproportionately affected by increases in food prices. Oxfam’s latest report, Growing a Better Future (Robert Bailey, 2011), provides a good overview of both the contributing factors to volatile prices and the kinds of actions needed to stabilize food prices and the report is a good place to start learning about the issues.
Oxfam’s World Food Day Challenge: Eat Locally and Play Food Jeopardy
As part of its campaign, Oxfam has also launched GROW week, from October 15 to 22, as a means of observing World Food Day and raising awareness of the GROW campaign. In addition to organizing a variety of community based activities connected to World Food Day, Oxfam is encouraging its members and their friends to sign up for the World Food Day Challenge. The challenge is to host a public or private event that includes a meal prepared with local ingredients and a conversation about the food system.
If you’re not sure how to go about starting a party-friendly conversation about food, you might want to check out the Grow Campaign’s web site and download some of their tools. They have even created a version of the game Jeopardy in which all of the questions are about food. You can download the questions and answers (or is the answers and the right questions?) here.
I’ve signed up for Oxfam’s food challenge. In my next post, I’ll share the results of the challenge with you. If any of my readers choose to sign up for the challenge, I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments section. Until then, I encourage you to learn about what causes food price spikes and share the information with the people in your networks.
©Susan Chambers
October 16, 2011
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Susan · 
4 Comments
Posted in: Social Justice
4 Responses
I’m definitely looking forward to hearing how your Food Day Challenge went Sue! Hopefully it sparked some conversation/insights/reflection/ideas for how we help to stabilize food prices.
Hi Sharon,
I’m planning on posting part 2 in the next couple of days, so I won’t give away any spoilers. It was a fun challenge. I think I might try it again with foods locally available in the lower mainland, in the next few days.
Sorry to be so late to reply, Sue. I was aware of World Food Day; I heard about it on Facebook and from several organizations whose mailing lists I’m on. But I wasn’t aware of the challenge.
I’m all for eating locally, but I’m also a huge advocate of organic,sustainable farming, and sometimes it’s not possible to do both. I look forward to hearing how your challenge went.
Hi Pam,
I don’t know if the GROW Week campaign and food challenge was promoted all that much by the US Oxfam; I’m not sure if it was just that Oxfam Canada chose this approach to promote awareness around World Food Day this year. Overall, the meal I prepared averaged out to 83% local ingredients overall–with a couple of the dishes made entirely from locally grown or produced food.
Yes, it can be a challenge trying to get organic–or at least certified organic–and locally produced food to coalesce at times. It gets more complicated when, on the one hand, some locally grown produce may well be organic but the farmer can’t afford the certification process, and on the other hand some of the larger agribusinesses are jumping on the bandwagon and growing produce that might technically be organic but isn’t necessarily all that sustainable. As long as an item isn’t on the EPA’s “Dirty Dozen” list, I’ll usually opt for local over organic if it means a smaller carbon footprint and an opportunity to support local food producers, but that’s just my personal choice.
I think that as the food system is currently set up, there are going to be some trade-offs that are imposed on us to some extent and we have to also consider based on dietary restrictions and preferences, health considerations, etc. I see these kinds of decision moments in the supermarket as an opportunity to reflect on the dysfunctions of a system that forces to make such ridiculous choices in the first place. I suspect that those of us who live in a region where the growing season is not that long or restrictions on some of the agribusiness practices are a little too loose for our liking get to make these “forced choices” more often than we care for.
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