Cork's Food Policy Council helping communities to grow their own food 

Cork is the first city in Ireland to have its own Food Policy Council.

It was established in 2014 after a pilot project studying the food environment for residents of Knocknaheeney.

The study found that, in the heart of the ‘Food Capital of Ireland’, this northside community was struggling to access good, nutritious food.

In fact, such was the prevalence of unhealthy foods and a lack of access to healthier alternatives that it was described as an obesogenic food environment and a food desert.

Plenty of research connects food environment, social factors such as employment, and health.

In short, where there is a poor food environment and reduced social opportunities, there is an equivalent reduction in the overall health of people who live in those areas.

Food is complex. It’s not just about what ends up on our plates. It also includes myriad factors, not always apparent, that affect the food choices we make.

Government policy and regulation create frameworks that directly impact all aspects of food and affect what foods we have access to, where, why, and for what price.

Individually, knowing how to budget, meal plan, store food, cook, etc, informs decisions around what we eat. If what we do eat is consistently of poor nutritional quality, this affects health – physical and mental – which then impacts health services and social welfare.

Unequal access to good food, and therefore good health, is built into every food choice we make, almost from the moment a seed hits the soil.

The Cork Food Policy Council (CFPC) works collaboratively with organisations and people with expertise in diverse areas such as community groups and gardens, public health and academic professionals, to commercial growers and biodiversity experts.

After mapping the food environment of Knocknaheeney, it was clear there needed to be a combined approach to tackling food and health challenges of an urban centre like Cork city.

Denise Cahill is Healthy Cities Coordinator for Cork city and explains how CFPC came about.

“Dr Colin Sage [co-founder of CFPC] approached Cork Healthy Cities. Food relates to health as well as other dimensions, and he recognised they were working at an interagency level and could they help to see if there was interest in a Food Policy Council in Cork,” explains Denise.

“We had a seminar to see if there was an appetite and there was, so we got the green light. We launched on St Patrick’s weekend, 2014, with Feed The City where we fed 5,000 people, highlighting food waste.”

Ever since, CFPC has worked on multiple initiatives, conducting research, engaging communities and moving towards creating Ireland’s first Food Policy. A decade on, CFPC received funding from FEAST, an EU-based project, which “aims to make it easy for every person in Europe to eat a delicious, healthier and more sustainable diet.”

ing FEAST allowed CFPC to access pots of EU funding, and, with acceptance into a project called Living Labs, recruited its first Food Policy Development Officer, Sandrine Bertin, in October, 2024 to develop a food strategy and food hub for Cork.

Sandrine brings experience working at policy level in Brussels, and a specialist in permaculture design and sustainable and regenerative practice – ideal for understanding the aims of CFPC from a policy side and the perspective of growers.

“Our first priority is to address the difficulty in accessing land,” says Sandrine. “The boundaries of Cork city have expanded and now include lots of farms and agricultural land. We would like to develop a strategy where some of this land becomes available to local growers to develop urban agriculture. It’s an amazing opportunity in a city like Cork.”

Access to land is the primary concern of small-scale farmers, particularly horticulturalists who compete with dairy farms and housing developers.

To do that, Sandrine is engaging with farms of all sizes, community growers, horticulture students – anyone who is interested in growing food for a living or for a community.

“There are several farmers who are retiring and conscious that this way of life is not for their children. They might the farm to their children knowing they will do things differently, but there is a will from some to their land onto others for growing food.”

Securing pockets of land around Cork is one aspect of developing the food hub. The other is creating a space to growers to get past barriers getting produce to market such as cleaning, packaging, marketing, distribution and making this available in a co-operative model from one location.

The genesis of this idea came from Cork Rooftop Farm. Their shared site at Glenbrook Farm includes several acres siphoned off for future use by growers, and for ive energy buildings to house cleaning and packing stations, collection and sales points, and a hive-mind for everything from microfinancing and funding to tools, equipment, marketing and distribution.

It’s a bold vision.

There are signs horticulture is experiencing some good fortune, possibly from a welcomed increase in subsidies under the National Strategy for Horticulture 2023-2027. But continued s for small-scale enterprises growing a variety of crops contribute to robust food security for fresh produce,and reducing so-called food deserts.

Getting hands into soil is a game- changer. Maria Young, of Green Spaces for Health, pioneered initiatives under CFPC’s vision for a network of community gardens in and around Cork city.

The original model garden is Togher and, together with 23 other community gardens of different sizes across Cork, it produces enough food to share between volunteers.

“It’s been phenomenal how, in just three years, the garden has enhanced the community of Togher,” says Maria. “We’ve well over 75 people interacting with the garden, and we work with local schools and the local John Bermingham Centre. We have 15 nationalities participating, with ages ranging from 6 to 82!

“It’s a real melting pot of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Nobody owns anything in the garden, everything is shared, meaning there are opportunities to work side by side with all kinds of people.”

The work of community gardens is essential for demonstrating that fresh nutritious food can be grown in densely populated urban settings, and the benefits gardens bring to communities. All dovetailing with Sandrine’s efforts to source more land for Cork-based growers.

Maria’s role as co-ordinator for Green Spaces for Health is funded through the Healthy Ireland Fund and provides a sustainable framework for seeding a grassroots movement of growing more food in cities, and the benefits that can bring.

“What we noticed is that community food growing needed investment and ,” explains Denise, “and we secured funding to hire a community food growing worker. Since Maria took up the post, that’s really given the grassroots structure, and it has helped CFPC to gain more credibility and visibility in the city.”

Such is the impact of these green pockets that when it came to lodge submissions for the City Development and Local Economic and Community Plans, CFPC was able to call on Cork City Council to commit to a food policy.

“We felt we couldn’t achieve it as individuals, but if the city as a whole committed to a food strategy, then we’d have the backing of the local authority,” says Denise.

In August, 2024, with FEAST project funding for Cork’s Living Lab (one of 12 in other European cities), CFPC launched its call for public consultation on developing a food strategy for Cork.

The unique approach adopted is for strategies, initiatives, projects and improvements all working from the ground up, rather than the top down.

“We’re moving the whole focus of food away from: you should eat this, this is the food pyramid, to: what’s going on around you that could be better and let’s help you make it better,” explains Denise.

Communities CFPC has focused on to date often don’t have access to equivalent advantages or opportunities as other communities. This way of working is democratising and empowering for the people living in those communities.

Dr Janas Harrington is Chair of CFPC, Senior Lecturer and Director for Public Health Sciences at UCC’s School of Public Health, and co-authored a report that looked at publicly available policies on obesity and sustainability from four categories of food and drink manufacturers, food service and retail.

“In 2020, we looked at public policy and published a report benchmarking the government’s actions against international best practice for creating healthier food environments. This time, through FEAST, we were able to look at the private sector.

“What we saw was a lack of transparency in of their public commitments around improving food environments,” says Janas.

“We also see that we do need to level the playing field to be fair to the businesses, and that needs to come from government policy,” says Janas.

The report notes that a key issue is that where policies on obesity and sustainability do exist, they are only “commitments, not actions”.

Ultimately, anyone can create a set of values or a corporate mission statement, but without action that is measurable, reported and transparent, those words count for nothing, as Denise points out.

“Strategies are no good without action, and action is no good without strategy. If we weren’t developing the food hub as we’re doing the strategy, we’ve no credibility in the strategy. It’s just a piece of paper.

“We’re trying to do it all; not from the top down but working with our communities.”

A strategy for a local and resilient food system for Cork is on track to be delivered by December. 

See  www.corkhealthycities.com/cork-food-policy-council