Since 2023, I’ve been co-chair of the Belfast Food Partnership, using a portion of my Food Ethics Council time to support what was then a burgeoning collective of organisations across Belfast’s food system. This was done partly in recognition that, although the Food Ethics Council is a UK wide charity, I live in Belfast and, in order for me not to spend my entire working life on Zoom, I needed to do some place-based work. But it was also done in recognition of the critical collaborative infrastructure that a sustainable food place represents. And the value of working within one to embed food ethics, food citizenship and latterly, the right to food, within and throughout the evolution and practice of Belfast as such a place.
This in-kind support was formalised in December 2024 for a period of 16 months via a contract with Belfast City Council (BCC), to dedicate one day a week of my time to supporting the team within BCC who were facilitating the partnership, supporting partnership members writing a sustainable food strategy for the city, and providing some momentum and structure to the day-to-day operation of the partnership. This contract was recently completed, and, although I am staying on as co-chair for another term, I want to celebrate two events in March that reflect the value of this work, both to the Food Ethics Council and to the partnership.
The first is an event that the Food Ethics Council co-hosted with Belfast Food Partnership (BFP) for the Imagine Festival – a lecture and audience discussion with Professor Tim Lang, one of the world’s foremost food policy experts and author of UK’s National Preparedness Commission Just in Time report.
The Food Ethics Council’s long standing, warm relationship with Tim made extending the invite easy, and BFP’s relationship with Queens University Belfast found us a gorgeous venue. Those things, combined with the might of the Imagine Festival, resulted in a sold-out event. The significance of Tim speaking in Belfast for the first time in two decades, just as many of the food shocks he has been warning about were coming to pass, cannot be overstated. Gawain Morrison, co-chair of the partnership, wrote about the event here and is quoted below.
Professor Lang reminded us that food resilience is not a technical issue. It is a matter of democracy, of justice, of civic responsibility. A city that has invested years in building a strategy like The Belfast Way should not be left to implement it on goodwill alone. The infrastructure for a more resilient, more equitable food future exists in this document. What is needed now is the political will — and the funding — to bring it to life.
Gawain Morrison, Chair, Belfast Food Partnership
The following day we co-hosted a workshop with our peers from Eating Better. This workshop was resourced by Food NI, with funding from DAERA awarded to raise awareness of the NI Food Strategy Framework and held in a large, bright, accessible room provided by the Council. Some members from Belfast Food Partnership attended and others catered the event, with local, regeneratively grown, ethically sourced food – on reusable crockery, with Fairtrade teas and coffees.
I’m sharing these as they are both significant examples of where policy meets practice meets people and where things can start to shift. But they are also extremely useful in demonstrating the value of working relationally. Each required so many points of contact between and across organisations (and countries). Lots of humility, trust, flexibility, logistical planning and shared values culminating in opportunities to share and pool our knowledge and insights with each other. To bolster each other. To challenge each other.
Beth Bell, Deputy Director, Food Ethics Council