Public Forum Food Fight!

In March I went to the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance's public forum regarding food campaigning with guest speaker Jeanette Longfield of Sustain UK fame.

It was only a small affair, albeit it a passionate one!

Jeanette spoke about the major campaigns she had headed at Sustain including Healthy Food for Kids where a main aim of the campaign was to eliminate all food advertising during children programming hours. The campaign lasted 17 years and progressed in waves with lows such as the increase other forms of advertising such as the internet, and highs like growing public awareness and action.
She spoke about what made her campaigning successful and what she had learnt along the way. A good example is the reality of evidence based policy, which can be more closely likened to policy based evidence, or policy not based on evidence, or policy based contrary to what the evidence states.
She is a very passionate advocate of good food practices and inspires me and many alike to demand an environment that is conducive to sustainability within the food system.

The second speaker kathy Chapman From the Cancer Council spoke about the Parent Jury, an organisation focused on bringing awareness to the food choices of our children both in terms of what advertising they're exposed to as well as what is available to them at school. They are a voice for parents!
She detailed how they cleverly manipulated the use of their website to produce media releases which in turn generated a buzz about their organisation which resulted in an increase in memberships.
Most interesting was the demographics of their members and how they will use that information to target those groups who aren't represented.

Finally Jemila Hallinan from the Environmental Defender's Office (EDO) spoke about current court cases involving land disputes. She detailed cases where large organisations such as mining companies won the rights to mine land on which communities did not want this to occur.
The main reason for not wanting the land to be dug up is because the land is highly fertile and currently used for farming. Downstream environmental impacts of mining include chemical run off and land malformations due to the excavations below.
It was disheartening to know that cases like this are lost, however it is grounds to make changes to legislation which should assist in preventing this in the future.

Both kathy And Jemila's slides are available on the SFFA website:
http://sydneyfoodfairness.org.au/