El nivel de endeudamiento como condicionante de la debilidad financiera

Being simultaneously against, within and after capitalism means that the everyday becomes the terrain where our politics are fought for and worked at…Just as capitalist social relations are reproduced at an everyday level, so too ordinary everyday practices can be generative of anti- and post-capitalisms. Post-capitalism, then, is not an end point, some universal sister–brotherhood of human perfection waiting over the hill. It

175 is reconceptualisation such as these that make post-capitalist practice mundane, but

also exciting, feasible and powerful (Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010:488). Sustaining and widening engagement

A week after the Food Junctions Festival ended in May, 2010, I went to visit the Calthorpe Project, a community garden at the heart of King’s Cross. As a local resident, I was already a regular volunteer there. As usual, I was the only Taiwanese person taking part in this Friday cooking workshop with a group of senior women from Latin America. Even though there was a language barrier, I learned to do things by watching and imitating. Afterwards, everyone sat down to eat the lunch together around a table. I always enjoyed this Friday ritual. However, in addition to the proximity of this place and my personal interest in cooking, there was another reason I had come here. I had been thinking of creating a joint project with the Calthorpe Project ever since I selected it as one of the case studies during my investigation of the current landscape of community food initiatives in London.

The Calthorpe Project opened in 1984 after local people successfully campaigned against an office development on its 1.2 acre site. It is like a microcosm of London’s multiculturalism, accommodating people from different cultures. What impressed me the most was its sustainable food growing space which enjoyed much higher productivity per unit of land than most community gardens I had visited. However, this side of King’s Cross where the Calthorpe Project is located seemed to have become a Cinderella area, shunned by the new development site around King’s Cross and St. Pancras Station. Under the threat of a big funding cut from the local council, an idea of developing a new community café to increase their financial independence had been discussed for a while yet no real action had yet been taken. Taken together with its relatively complete recycling systems, I thought it would be an appropriate site for experimenting with a localised closed-loop food supply chain and exploring a new business model using the knowledge gained from my earlier investigation into community food enterprises. There were several reasons why I thought a joint project with the Calthorpe Project might be suitable. The gardening workshop and their home-made catering food had both been very popular at the Festival. We needed to move quickly to take advantage of this positive momentum for a deeper collaboration. Although The Calthorpe Project was one of the first charity organisations that UCL Volunteering Services Unit had built as long-term partnership together, previously the relationship between the two organisations was more one-way, in that UCL students went to the Calthorpe Project to do some volunteering work. My initial idea seemed to fit into the general goal at UCL to sustain and widen two-way engagement with local communities.

More significantly, based on the critical assessment of the Food Junctions Festival, there was a crucial need for introducing and mobilising a variety of food knowledge, especially from those more contradictory and conflicting issues, for developing more sustainable food systems in London. This reflection was enhanced by my attendance at an annual conference at the Royal Geographical Society in 2010. Under the theme of ‘food security and food sovereignty’, a PhD colleague and I presented the only paper explicitly on the subject of food sovereignty, while the rest of the papers were all on food security. It struck me that certain strands of thinking within the international development of food and agriculture were largely ignored in academia. This also

reminded me of one of the implications identified from the earlier phase of my investigation: the need for building collective knowledge and learning.

We realised that the right combination of team members and key partners was important to the overall success of the Festival. For this next phase of the project, I would need to find a different group of team members and key partners who would be interested in a more radical and political agenda. Another challenge was to find institutional support – both in terms of funding and endorsement – to advance this idea. I understood that this potential project would be rather different from the Festival, but was already convinced of the power of commons-based self-organisation which had led to such a successful Festival.

I was pleased that the Calthorpe Project was very supportive of my initial proposal to develop a joint project. The moment I received the green light, I thought of inviting two PhD colleagues of mine from UCL. One was a Mexican student in my department with whom I presented a paper together on food sovereignty at Royal Geographical Society. Her research was on the promotion of equalitarian spaces for participation by the most vulnerable people for building a more sustainable localised food system in Mexico City. The other one was a British student in the Planning Department researching into ‘urban commons’ – local collective practices of ownership, management and design of cities. They were both enthusiastic about my idea and made an immediate contribution in urging me to consider inviting community members to become core members of the team.

This was an important step. While at the Food Junctions we worked with many community organisations, almost all of our central decisions were made by the core team members. My two PhD colleagues both insisted that we should be more careful about power-sharing between university and community. I received positive responses from the communities to continue our collaboration. In particular, a community leader who enjoyed the Festival so much that he later called himself an ambassador of the Food Junctions Festival became one of our core team members. With his three-decade experience in community volunteering work it was logical to have him act as a bridge between university and community.

Simultaneously, we had also made some progress from the university side. There was a relatively new funding scheme, UCL Innovation Seed Fund(11)_{, offered from the UCL}

Public Engagement Unit to UCL staff and students for innovative and inventive projects that connect people outside UCL with our research and teaching. With the success of the Food Junctions, we were encouraged to enter this competition. At the annual UCL Symposium on Public Engagement we were thrilled with the afternoon. Not only had we built some new relationships but had also learned a number of new methods of engagement. We were also grateful to receive two important endorsements from senior members of the university to support our continuous public engagement: one from UCL Vice-Provost (International) and another from the principal facilitator at UCL Grand Challenges.

Unlike the name ‘Food Junctions’ which we agreed from the outset, it took us longer to agree on a name for this project. Eventually, we decided to call it ‘Foodpaths: the King’s Cross Movement’(12) _{to politicise the whole process. Inspired by new social movement}

177 King’s Cross movement, a particular kind of urban food movement, more inclusive

and accessible at an everyday level through our lived experiences. As Chatterton and Pickerill assert, “Being simultaneously against, within and after capitalism means that the everyday becomes the terrain where our politics are fought for and worked at” (2010: 488). We also wanted to highlight the role of the university in creating platforms to facilitate community participation for knowledge exchange and experience sharing through this urban food movement. Thus, Foodpaths aimed to create paths to do two things: firstly, to support our desire to change current unsustainable food systems especially around the area of King’s Cross; and secondly, to encourage university and community to help each other to develop a vision and action plan for long-term and sustainable collaboration rather than only having one-off projects or events.

Once again, we were blessed with the luck to be chosen as one of the six winners of this grant, which enabled us to plant and grow our new seeds of inquiries regardless of all kinds of uncertainties and challenges ahead.

Enacting an urban food movement

Eaters...must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship (Wendell, 1992:377).

We now come to the story of how Foodpaths Movement evolved from an idea into reality. Unlike the Food Junctions Festival, which was part of the Reveal Festival with a fixed ten-day schedule, we deliberately made Foodpaths a six-month project from January to June in 2011 with one event in each month except in April. There were two reasons for this decision. First, this prolonged and continuous engagement would allow us to communicate better the elaborated notion of ‘paths’ and ‘movement’. Second, from the organisational perspective, one event a month not only made it more manageable and less stressful, but such a programme design would also provide more space for learning. If one idea was successful, it could be applied again; if it was not, it could be revised or improved in the next event. Five major themes for each month were decided: (1) growing food in the city; (2) food and cooperatives; (3) food and women; (4) food and health; (5) food and spirituality. Of course these five themes were not definitive, yet as a catalyst project, we thought this selection could already indicate the complexity of food system and our relationships with it.

As part of this innovative experiment, we also wanted to explore ways which would allow events to unfold naturally. We designed a template structure for each event to give the whole project of Foodpaths a kind of coherence. Each event would therefore include a collective cooking section and a roundtable discussion during a shared meal with food prepared at the cooking section. The more we talked, the more we felt that both cooking and eating together as a kind of lived experience would help create a temporary space where a sense of community might emerge, which was believed to stimulate diverse and dynamic dialogues and more spontaneous interactions.

Setting up ‘Foodpaths’ at the Calthorpe Project it was logical to launch the series of five events with the first theme of ‘Growing Food in the City’ in January. We invited speakers from both university and community to share their first-hand experiences associated

with growing food in the city. These speakers ranged from a senior lecturer at UCL specialising in the global food crisis and the role of urban agriculture; an allotment holder at Spa Hill Allotment; an environmental worker at the Calthorpe Project; a volunteer at Women’s Environmental Networks; an apprentice at Growing Community; and a co-founder of Mapping for Change on participatory food mapping.

The Calthorpe Project as a site and our key venue helped demonstrate the concept of a ‘closed-loop’ urban food system, from production (community garden), preparation (collective cooking), distribution (serving to our audience), consumption (eating together) and waste management (composting). To raise the issue of food waste, the collective cooking section was led by a member from FoodCycle. We helped cooked a heap of vegetables that would have been thrown away by Sainsbury’s had FoodCycle not organised its rescue. While we ate a tasty meal, we listened to our speakers sharing their projects and experiences with us.

The discussion covered a diversity of issues. These included challenges and opportunities about how a city feeds its own population; the long-term prospect of London’s food security; possible economic models and livelihood strategies; linkages between urban and rural development; potential lifestyle changes; forms of sustainable agriculture; how to create a critical mass among different food growing initiatives in London and beyond to achieve more influential impacts on food policy and mainstream agricultural practices; and the question of who should take the lead and with what approaches. More questions were asked and discussed than definitive solutions given. However, as a kind of ‘movement’ we wanted to emphasise that not only knowledge itself but also ways of knowing and learning are profoundly shaped by and in turn shape the societies in which we are embedded. As one of the participants told us, the questions raised at ‘Growing Food in the City’ had power to fertilise barren soil and lay foundation to grow new crops.

The second event in February was organised with the theme ‘Food and Cooperatives’ for two particular reasons. First, the United Nations had proclaimed 2012 the International Year of Co-operatives. Second, envisioning a potential community kitchen at the Calthorpe Project, we thought it was important to learn from existing community food enterprises. Invited speakers included a senior lecturer at UCL specialising in cooperative history and movements, especially transnational and comparative social history; a chef from Bonnington Café; a chef and an environmental worker at Organiclea; an officer from Capital Growth; an adviser of food co-ops at Sustain; a community leader at Camden Shares(13)_{; and one of our core team member who set up Spice Caravan, a}

catering workers cooperative.

The leader of the cooking section was a chef at Bonnington Café, who had asked everyone to bring a herb or spice and to share what it meant to us. This provided a nice warm-up before we started to cook. Having learnt about collaborative cooking in the previous event, we managed to finish cooking half an hour early. Four hours after collecting leftovers from a warehouse, we sat down to a delicious meal of Jamaican stew, roast parsnips, Nigerian brown beans, yoghurt and coriander, salad and fruit. The overall flow of discussion around the table had been improved by shortening the presentation time given to each speaker. The discussion covered the historic debate about whether co-ops aim to challenge capitalism or to help it function; the implications of scale, social class and ideology of food co-ops; and issues around money and

179 The third event in March, under the theme of ‘Food and Women’, was quite a different arrangement from the previous two. Foodpaths joined local communities in the London Borough of Camden to organise and then celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD). The event took place at the Coram’s Fields, another nearby community centre for children and a city farm. We had a cooking section at the Calthope Project on the day before the IWD with a group of Bangladeshi women making traditional Bangladeshi vegetables sourced at a local Bangladeshi food grocery. The food we cooked was served on IWD. We did not invite any speakers as Foodpaths was one of the twenty stalls of other women groups doing other activities (e.g. art workshop, knitting, reflexology, etc.). In order to stimulate conversations with visitors, we decided to present a number of unusual vegetables and fruits.

Although it took considerable time to prepare for this event in advance, many practical things went wrong, including underestimating the difficulties in interacting with other local communities at a joint event like this as each group had to concentrate on their own stalls; no volunteers turning up; and not realising that this event was meant to be a space of relaxation rather than discussion. However, our concerns were quickly washed away by how surprised and amazed our visitors were by the different exotic vegetables we had on our stall, and were keen to know how to cook and grow them. Our vegetables stimulated discussions: while some asked us whether we would grow these Asian vegetables in London others challenged the issue of heated greenhouse energy consumption if we tried to grow them here. There were other more general conversations including the role of women in making family diets healthier and how families struggle to make ends meet with ever-increasing food prices. Above all, this event allowed Foodpaths to meet an even wider audience who had not necessarily been interested in sustainable food issues previously. Some of them were inspired by our presence and two women came to our next event to find out more.

Foodpaths returned to the Calthorpe Project for its fourth event under the theme of ‘Food and Health’, which could perhaps have been called ‘food and oral health’. The session format differed from previous Foodpaths events. This time an informal focus group was facilitated by a professor of the Eastman Dental Institute, which is situated next door to the Calthorpe Project. Although these two organisations are close neighbours, they had hardly had any interactions before Foodpaths. Through Foodpaths, some students and staff at the Institute discovered the Calthorpe Project and have since visited on a regular basis.

The Institute is a leading centre for oral health research, training and specialist care. Both the professor and the Institute generally had a keen interest in involving people in clinical care and research. The professor was particularly intrigued by our invitation to explore the relationship between food and oral health, which are rarely connected in current scholarship.

The cooking section was led by a chef from Hare Krishna who believed that the emotions of the cook, their consciousness, anxiety and fears can enter the food, especially grains. We took advantage of the mild weather to eat outside in the garden, sitting in a semi-circle to aid informality and discussion. Being outside meant competing with more background noise but it had the benefit of being more visible to other garden users and attracting their curiosity.

The relatively smaller group of participants, all of whom participated fully in the subject matter, made it a very inclusive and bonded group. This discussion on oral health was more personal than previous subjects, often referring back to what participants experienced and had been told in childhood and family and bringing in cultural differences. However, there was a substantial discussion about whether government, food companies or individuals bear responsibility for dental wellbeing.

Food is an expression of love, generosity and sharing. As a final event of the series, we decided to give Foodpaths a more holistic embrace with the theme of ‘Food and Spirituality’. Since the first Foodpaths event in January, we had looked forwards to a final event outside in the Calthorpe garden on a sunny June day. Come the day, it poured with rain! Undeterred, some volunteer cooks, by now familiar with the kitchen, helped the lead chef from Spice Caravan cook a vegan Eritrean meal. Spice Caravan