Health Creation:
WellFed Cornwall!
We now have a rapidly growing family of us working on a programme to connect food, climate, health, soil, biodiversity and community. We met on 11 April in Newquay, decided to call ourselves WellFed Cornwall as a working title and have a whole bunch of things we want to achieve in the next 12 months. :)
Our Story
So we know we have massive problems in Cornwall (and elsewhere) around access to good food for one and all, through not enough local fruit and veg shops, not enough public transport; not enough green spaces to grow it in and not enough money to pay for it regularly! And as a result we battle with malnutrition, poor mental and physical health, diabetes, loneliness, anxiety, more diabetes, poor circulation, obesity and General Grand Misery.
And we know it costs our health care services an actual fortune to try and deal with this through medicine. Which is bonkers. Especially when we grow food like nothing else here in Cornwall; when we have fantastic community growing spaces and brilliant community based grower people, doing the most brilliant job of growing people, place and a healthy planet. Our community growing network is our actual immune system.
So a big bunch of us - community food growers, social prescribers, clinicians, public health professionals, VCSE partners, diabetes nurses, health coaches are working on a series of pilot programmes to bring health systems, and food systems, together. We're bringing food into diabetes groups, developing veggie box prescription programmes, supporting cooking groups and recipe cards and food bank groups, working with Bath and Cardiff universities to develop simple systems to capture all the right data to show the benefits to people, our health system, and our habitats and natural environments. Narrowliff Surgery in Newquay has led the way with their pilot project this last 12 months and they're sharing their learning, and building on it.
(and if you want to check out where your nearest community food grower is:
we even have a map!)
Our priorities this summer of 2024:
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we now have seven further practices who want to develop veggie box/bag pilots across West, Mid and N&E ICA - we're going to help them do that
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continue to learn from and with the patients, communities, growers and VCSE and health care professionals we're working with
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develop a set of integrated metrics, and tools, to capture all relevant impacts with colleague from Bath and Cardiff universities
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develop the network across health care professionals, community food growers and VCSE partners
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run face to face event in autumn
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secure further partners and resources
People already making food part of our healthcare and making it part of our work towards health creation.
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feedback
"Hi, I'm the bloke who made a flippant response when you asked how often I ate vegetables. I said every four weeks. I took home the box of veg you kindly gave me and reflected on it over the afternoon and decided I needed to change my attitude to healthy eating. I prepared a salad meal for my wife and myself. On Saturday I visited Asda and stocked with a variety of vegetables and will be eating more healthiy in the future, all thanks to you."
"Well, I'm getting on well with the veg boxes! This last week I had pointed cabbage which I cut into 4 and roasted. Kholrabi which I cut into thin strips with carrot and made into a slaw for salads. The fennel I used in various ways, including stir fry. The bushy leaves of the fennel I cut off, put them in vase of water to keep them alive, and and have been having fennel tea. I'm due to pick up next week's box tomorrow so will be interesting to see what's in it. I like experimenting with veg I have not had before."
resources to share:
recipe cards
these recipe cards are word documents you can download, use,edit and change as you wish if you would like to use them in your initiatives. We'll develop and gather more that would be useful for veggie box and bag schemes. Feel free to remove some unnecessary or unlikely-to-have ingredients, or change the wording, or images, to suit the needs of the people who may use them - be creative!
resources to share:
exemplar projects
We're collecting examples of emerging initiatives, and other fabulous projects - if you come across one that you think should be here, let us know!
