The incredible power of action
“We are living in extraordinary times where, having technology, science, and all the things that are required to make a better world, we choose not to do it. We are living in extraordinary times where millions of people are starving when we have the power to stop it,” says Mary Clear, a co-founder of the Incredible Edible Todmorden, at the Cohabitat Gathering in Poland in 2012.
Another co-founder of the Incredible Edible Todmorden and a chair of the Incredible Edible Network, Pamela Warhurst, in her TED talk of the same year, shares, “The will to live life differently can start in some of the most unusual places.”
She refers to the idea behind a gardening project, running since 2008: connecting people through food.
According to a 2017 summary report by the University of Central Lancashire and Manchester Metropolitan University in collaboration with the North West Sustainable Food Organization, the Incredible Edible model demonstrates results in building a sustainable community and changing the urban environment.
What is the Incredible Edible?
Incredible Edible Todmorden is a project that creates free gardens in public spaces throughout the city.
Pamela Warhurst and Mary Clear, with a few friends, came up with the idea in 2008. Their goal was to create something that would bring positive changes to our society and solve the existing global problems that each of us, including the Todmorden community, faces.
In her 2012 TED talk, Pamela Warhurst notes that they were trying to find a language that could bring people together; that language appeared to be food.
Thus, the IET model aims to transform and use public space to enable people to communicate more, raise awareness and talk about existing issues, increase demand for local products, thus, promoting local food production, and propagate the power of small actions, involving them in the circle of kindness.
“Our first action was propaganda gardening. So, we planted food in public places. We did not wait for permission. We just did it,” reports Mary Clear in her talk in 2012.
Nowadays, there are blooming gardens throughout the city, including police stations, the main road, hospitals, nursing homes, etc. In addition to transforming public space, the Incredible Edible Todmorden shares its results by organizing harvest and food festivals.
In 2008, the IET organized its first harvest festival, welcoming about 400 citizens. Todmorden also hosts guided tours of the famous Incredible Edible Green Route, attracting interested people worldwide.
“So, what started to develop was something we then started to call “vegetable tourism” because people were coming in bigger and bigger. So, we organized ourselves to give them a tour of the town...We were taking them through the market so people would buy staff in our local market, they go to cafes. It started to bring prosperity to the town, slowly. There were visitors, and they were spending money,” Judy Audaer, the secretary of the Incredible Edible Todmorden, explains during our interview.
In 2009, a group of people replicated the Incredible Edible idea for the first time in another city in the UK, Ramsbottom. Since then, other volunteer groups have joined the Incredible Edible, which led to the creation of the Incredible Edible Network in 2012, as a Community Interest Company, being a different organization from the Incredible Edible Todmorden.
The Incredible Edible Network brings together people from different regions of the United Kingdom, as well as all over the world. In the UK, five regional facilitators support and regulate projects and volunteer groups across the country.
According to the Incredible Edible 2018-2020 Final Report, 144 Incredible Edible groups were working on planting projects by 2020, and half of them met weekly or twice a week during the growing season.
One of the first concepts that the IE model used, which allows replicating this idea and provides a plan of action, is the concept of three spinning plates.
What is the theory of three spinning plates?
“We'll have three plates. Remember this is a food thing going on,” smiles Mary Clear during her 2012 conference talk.
The theory of three spinning plates, being part of the Incredible Edible model, is a strategy that includes three areas: community, learning, and business.
Judy Audaer stresses that the community part seems to be the most important for the Incredible Edible Todmorden, even outside of the three spinning plates concept. Some of the community activities she mentions are public cooking demonstrations and getting the “public involved in how to make food.”
Mary Clear, in her 2012 conference talk in Poland, provides another example of community plate action.
“So, we bought these tents and pans to go up to where poor people live and start to cook for them. Start a conversation of kindness with them because they are not going to come to us. We must go to them,” describes Mary.
Another project, illustrating the community plate, is the Incredible Edible Oldhill, done by the IE Network, where volunteers worked with people from Autism Bedfordshire to raise non-used beds.
The project began with a five-week course designed by IE volunteer Sahira with staff from Bedfordshire, which was open to adults with autism. This group then moved on to preparing the beds and planting the plants, helping to create a new group, Incredible Edible Oldhill.
The project also supported local businesses by purchasing plants from the local Eaton Bray Nurseries.
Critchley House, a tea garden that allows older people to reduce social isolation, also promotes Incredible Edible ideas. Started in 2015, Critchley House, run by Age UK Salford, with the support of Incredible Education, has provided its senior visitors with the opportunity to work on creating a garden at the Critchley Café and two sites in the community.
There was also an included course that brought together a group of older people interested in creating and growing a garden. The project, among other things, lets participants meet new people and learn new skills.
Then comes the learning plate. This part aims to promote and introduce gardening skills and food knowledge to children and adults.
One of the learning plate examples is the Edible Activity Trail created by the Incredible Edible Wakefield. The project, created by IE volunteers and supported by the school teachers around the Eastmoor community garden, combines gardening activities with math or English exercises, so kids can simultaneously learn and get some experience in growing food.
There is also an online established resource, produced by the Incredible Edible Bristol group, namely the Incredible Schools program. The program provides guidelines and growing plans for schools to help them run their gardens.
There are also Incredible Edible gardens run by volunteering university students. One of them is the Incredible Edible University of Manchester.
“We wanted to help local businesses, we wanted to promote local produce,” points out Judy describing the business plate, oriented toward supporting local food producers and promoting the idea of buying more local food.
Pamela Warhurst describes one of the first such steps in her TED talk. It was a campaign called Every Egg Matters, introducing an egg map.
“It's a stylized map of Todmorden. Anybody that's selling their excess eggs at the garden gate, perfectly legally, to their neighbors, we've stuck on there. We started with four, and we've now got 64,” Pam Warhurst says.
The map raised the demand for locally produced eggs and increased the economic confidence of the farmers, allowing them to expand their production.
One recent example from IE Network is Incredible Edible Radcliffe. The goals were to produce and create a place to sell local products. At the time of the creation of the market, eggs, and meat were presented from local products, but not vegetables.
Therefore, the IE team decided to use the abandoned land to grow vegetables and fruits and sell them in grocery stores and the Market Hall. Additionally, the project offered people an opportunity to learn about cultivating the land and growing crops for sale.
What are the results of the Incredible Edible?
Besides the ongoing projects, spinning the three plates around the UK and the world, the Incredible Edible model shows the results in sustainable community building and raising local produce consumption.
The 2017 volunteer survey indicated that people involved with the Incredible Edible Todmorden activities have an increasing sense of belonging to a community and friendship circle. According to this survey, “70% of respondents reported increases in ‘food growing knowledge’, ‘understanding of community issues’, ‘understanding of environmental issues’, ‘understanding of local economic issues’, ‘activeness’ and ‘physical health’.”
The report also introduced a community survey, comparing the data from similar research in 2009, revealing that 54% of respondents buy local food once a week compared to 41% of UK consumers. The most common reason to buy local produce was to support the local economy.
According to the research summary, the Incredible Edible Todmorden succeeded in creating and maintaining a “shared sense of purpose and togetherness.”
The testimonies of people involved with the Incredible Edible activities confirm this conclusion.
In the 2018 article by Naomi Larsson published by The Guardian, Mary Clear shares, “But the real culture change is about the kindness... People doing stuff for each other, for their town, bringing a tiny bit of joy – that’s important. With each person contributing a tiny bit, you can do huge things.”
Judy Audaer also notices some changes to the town and the community due to the Incredible Edible activities.
“It has proved to be very valuable and popular to meet all kinds of people and be a part of the community,” Judy indicates when describing gardening Sundays that happen twice a month.
She also shares that during the Covid-19 pandemic, growing sessions became an opportunity for people to reduce the stress of isolation. At the same time, IET brought people together, focusing more on the community than just on gardening. Their activities included little things that would help people to connect. For example, some citizens made little wooden libraries, hanging them all around town so people could exchange books.
“In every event we do, we get lots of volunteers. There are hundreds of volunteers…At every gardening Sunday it is around 30-40 people coming,” shares Judy.
When asked about her personal experience with the Incredible Edible Todmorden and its impact on her, Judy smiles, “It was a part of becoming to feel that I belong here... I think a lot of people would say the same, and I heard people saying that... It helps them to feel part of the community and the community that cares about people. It makes me love the town I live in. And that is a nice feeling. It is nice to see the town prosper.”
Are there caveats to this model?
Even though the Incredible Edible model seems to be a simple and direct way to shape sustainable communities with locally-grown food, there are still caveats to this model.
One of the difficulties comes from the organizational side.
According to Patrick Barkham's article in The Guardian, councils sometimes prevent volunteers from growing locally, citing health and safety concerns or insurance issues.
According to the Right to Grow 2022 IE C.I.C initiative, “communities are being held back from being more active by a lack of land for local food growing.” The main problem indicated by the IE C.I.C. is that the land in public sector ownership prevents volunteers from growing anything there though is not used or even abandoned.
Currently, there is a running Right to Grow campaign to create a law that regulates and makes it possible to grow food on public land.
Another difficulty of this model is making people join the projects. There is a tendency for people to not trust and resist this initiative at first, according to 2017 research.
The IET secretary, Judy Audaer, comments on this difficulty, saying, “Once we had five or six growing beds around the town and people in Todmorden started to realize that there was something happening, it was a mixed feeling. Some people would say, “What is going on? These are new people, they are newcomers, and they are not locals. What are they doing?”
Judy outlines that one of the reasons for such reactions was that people thought of the Incredible Edible Todmorden as “some kind of ingroup”, accessible only to the people in it, which was not an intention of the IET team.
Judy notes that “usually people resist anything new, don’t they?”
She also provides another reason for a possible negative reaction at first sight to the gardening activity. This time, she mentions market traders, who, at first, saw IET as a competitor, tending not to like this initiative.
“They quickly realized that it was not affecting their business. It was, in fact, bringing in more business because it was bringing new customers from out of the town,” recalls Judy.
One more point that can be a caveat to the system concerns funding.
The research of 2017 outlines that the Incredible Edible Todmorden and the Incredible Edible Network have different approaches when it comes to funding. According to the research, IET relies on “volunteer resources and limited income from tours and speaking engagements.”
Judy also confirms this way of funding.
“We never wanted to apply for public funding or even charitable funding. Because we did not want to have to meet somebody else’s goals and keep records of progress,” she indicates.
Such type of funding has its drawbacks as well, as during the Covid-19 pandemic the steady income from tours and lectures slowed down. Still, the Incredible Edible Todmorden is a self-sustaining community.
Incredible Edible Network, on the other hand, applies for public funding.
Can one recreate this model?
Yes. However, when replicating the IE model, one should not focus on strictly following the way it was done.
One needs to understand the distinctive features of the place and identify potential problems. Judy Audaer, outlining that there cannot be a blueprint that will work everywhere, gives an example.
“For example, we were talking to people in Spain and the bigger challenge for them is how do you water the growing beds. Well, we do not have a problem with water, we have a lot of rain. Too much rain. So, that’s not a problem for us, we do not have to think about it. You need to look at what are the issues in your area, in your climate, in your town, village, city, or small area of a city,” she advises.
The 2017 final report by the University of Central Lancashire and Manchester Metropolitan University, analyzing all the data and results on the IE model, also provides some points to consider for those who want to recreate the model.
One of these recommendations is to recognize the importance of establishing relationships with local structures and administration.
The final report of the research on the model also suggests developing and following the terms of reference in the organization of the project.
For example, the IET team has a schedule for gardening Sundays, which lists the dates and people responsible for certain activities on that day. Such graphics can be very helpful in organizing and implementing planting projects.
Another recommendation is to evaluate future development, considering potential progress and possible changes to key parts of the project. Also, the study emphasizes not being afraid of a possible initial backlash. That may bring valuable discussions, allowing people to communicate with each other, and communication is one of the key points of the IE model.
Another vital part is the belief in the power of small actions anco, as it is actions that can lead to change.
“Certainly, what has worked for us was starting small and just developing gradually,” says Judy Audaer.