Peas Please: Involving Citizens in Food Activism Report
The Peas Please initiative set out with a clear mission: to make it easier for everyone in the UK to eat more veg. This mission remains important: between 2016 and 2019, 12% of people over 16 were eating less than one portion of veg a day, rising to 23% for those aged 11-16 years old, and 29% for children aged 5-10 years old. Eating more veg has benefits for our health, the environment, and the economy.
To help us achieve this mission, the Peas Please partners – The Food Foundation, Nourish Scotland, Nourish NI and Food Sense Wales – launched the Veg Advocate programme in March 2020. Our aim was to involve citizens as part of the wider work undertaken by Peas Please, based on the knowledge that we can better understand the barriers that people face in accessing veg through grassroots involvement, listening to people, and working with them to identify solutions.
Initially engaging 180 volunteers from across the UK, we aimed to understand what citizens believed it would take to make it easier for people to eat more veg. Specifically, the programme set out to:
Create opportunities for Veg Advocates to share their voices and lived experiences with businesses and policy makers, and to create food system change that is relevant and impactful.
Stimulate new and innovative action on veg in their communities.
Create a new generation of food system agents of change, through forming networks and cultivating advocacy.
In this report, we will showcase some of the work Veg Advocates across the UK have been doing to influence business practice and to help increase veg consumption in their local communities. We also look at how a network of food activists has formed. In each of these sections, we will be asking two questions:
What do Veg Advocates think needs to happen to make it easier for everyone to eat more veg?
What have we learnt about how to meaningfully involve citizens? We hope that our learnings can help shape and drive other citizen-led food activism programmes in the future.
We hope that our learnings can help shape and drive other citizen-led food activism programmes in the future.
Read the full report here.