Author: earthfirst

Actions co-incid­ing with the UN Con­fer­ence on World Food Secu­ri­ty and Cli­mate Change got off to an ear­ly start, with Sun­day see­ing the first of an out­break of veg­an food give-aways, in Man­ches­ter, with a spot of guer­ril­la gar­den­ing; the rash spread on Mon­day with GM labs occu­pied. The Ready Steady Skip web­site tried to soothe, but on the day, the action con­ta­gion spread…
Cli­mate change and ani­mal rights activists joined togeth­er in Not­ting­ham today to give away free veg­an food, plants & skipped veg­eta­bles.

Pass­er-bys were enticed to our stall by the offers of free chips, veg­an pasties and toma­to plants. We hand­ed out leaflets about cli­mate change & food and had lots of chats with peo­ple about the world food cri­sis & our solu­tions of eat­ing a local, organ­ic & veg­an diet. An amaz­ing num­ber of peo­ple already grew there own food & lots more were encour­aged to give it a go. We had a real­ly pos­i­tive response from the pub­lic and peo­ple seemed gen­uine­ly inter­est­ed in the infor­ma­tion leaflets we hand­ed out.

More pho­tos.

The next free veg­an food give­away in Not­ting­ham is going to be on the 4th July.

A hand­ful of us then vis­it­ed Fresh & Ecoworks com­mu­ni­ty gar­den based at St Ann’s allot­ments. We had a tour of the amaz­ing gar­dens & saw a bril­liant exam­ple of local, organ­ic food being pro­duced in the city. See
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/nottinghamshire/2006/08/348168.html
and
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/nottinghamshire/2007/10/382929.html

We tod­dled off home in the rain, chilli plants in hand, inspired to grow our own.

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Food & Cli­mate Change Action — Lon­don

For the Food & Cli­mate Change day of action, Whitechapel Food Not Bombs and Brix­ton Reclaim Your Food teamed up to serve free veg­an food in front of a Mac Don­ald’s in Cam­ber­well.

The groups had a stall right in front of a Mac Don­ald in Cam­ber­well for two hours, serv­ing out fresh­ly skipped, lov­ing­ly cooked free veg­an food to passers by, and engag­ing peo­ple in con­ver­sa­tion about the link between the food they eat and cli­mate change. For good mea­sure, the group was accom­pa­nied by a bicy­cle sound sys­tem, to liv­en up the atmos­phere.

All in all, over a hun­dred serv­ings were giv­en out, count­less more peo­ple saw the stall and were giv­en leaflets high­light­ing some of the links between food and cli­mate change on the fol­low­ing top­ics : waste ; veg­an­ism ; organ­ic food ; local­ly pro­duced food.

The menu includ­ed a spicy mash, a cur­ry, a pump­kin soup, a sal­ad, some gua­camole, some stuffed aubergines, some veg­gies burg­ers, an apple cake, a fruit sal­ad and more.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the Mac Don­ald’s man­agers weren’t too hap­py about peo­ple giv­ing out free food in front of their win­dow shop — but the police seemed to decide oth­er­wise. The groups were asked to remove a ban­ner from the Mac Don­ald win­dow shop, but were oth­er­wise per­mit­ted to stay there as long as there was­n’t too much obstruc­tion.

londonfnb@lists.riseup.net
http://www.londonfnb.org

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25 pro­test­ers organ­ised by Bio­fu­el­watch and Food Not Fuel, Lon­don came togeth­er for a protest out­side Newham town hall in East Ham on Sat­ur­day to raise pub­lic aware­ness of the plan­ning appli­ca­tion for the UK’s first bio­fu­el-fired pow­er plant to be built, in Beck­ton. Ban­ners and plac­ards quot­ed many sta­tis­tics such as the num­ber of peo­ple going hun­gry because of agro­fu­els and the num­ber of peo­ple who could be fed with one tank of bio­fu­el. Over 500 sig­na­tures object­ing to the plant were collected…it appears that Beck­ton, one of the most pol­lut­ed Lon­don bor­oughs, is pre­pared to fight back.

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In Lon­don, veg­an cam­paign­ers we took to the streets of Chancery Lane to
treat the city work­ers to some veg­an food sam­ples. The response was good,
with a range of inter­est­ed peo­ple com­ing to taste the food. We gave away
hun­dreds of recipe book­lets, and leaflets for this year’s Lon­don Veg­an
Fes­ti­val.

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Bris­tol Protest Over Tesco’s Bio­fu­els Claim

Bio­fu­els far from the panacea to petrol prices and cli­mate change, have added to the glob­al food price hike by tak­ing land pre­vi­ous­ly occu­pied by food crops. A study by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta found that grow­ing bio­fu­el on con­vert­ed rain­forests, peat lands, savan­nas or grass­lands cre­at­ed up to 420 times more car­bon diox­ide than it saved.

Wheat Prices have dou­bled in the UK over the past year, and con­sumers and retail­ers have so far man­aged to absorb this. But else­where in the world, peo­ple are going with­out wheat (and oth­er sta­ples) and bak­ers are going out of busi­ness.

To illus­trate this issue, a dozens bak­ers (rather than a bak­ers dozen!) will be fol­low­ing up Bris­tol Ris­ing Tides demo in April of this year to illus­trate the true cost of Agro-fuels. They will be at Tesco, East­ville between 4.30pm and 7pm

Ms Bread of Bris­tol Ris­ing Tide said:

“The ques­tion is do we want do feed our cars or feed our­selves?”

Tesco has made false claims about the source of the fuel sold at its ser­vice sta­tions, accord­ing to an inves­ti­ga­tion that found that the chain sold the most envi­ron­men­tal­ly dam­ag­ing types of biodiesel ‑Palm Oil — whilst claim­ing that it ‘s bio­fu­el was sourced from rel­a­tive­ly sus­tain­able UK-plant­ed rape seed oil.[2]

Mr A.Baker of Bris­tol Ris­ing Tide said:

“Its now clear that we leave big busi­ness to deal with cli­mate change, this is the kind of thing that will hap­pen — a bloody dis­as­ter”

At this years Cli­mate Camp (3rd — 10th August) there will be a nation­al day of action against Agro­fu­els.

[1] Bris­tol Ris­ing Tide is part of the Inter­na­tion­al Ris­ing Tide for Cli­mate Jus­tice net­work
www.risingtide.org.uk
[2] The Times,April 14, 2008 “Tesco green fuel ‘adds to cli­mate change”

Leaflet

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Wait­ing for (social) Change!

4/06/2008
Today in the Char­ing Cross area of Glas­gow a group of wait­ers invit­ed passers-by to ‘Taste the waste’ and sam­ple their free food. The menu was made up entire­ly out of skipped goods from super­mar­ket bins and includ­ed such delights as: home­made veg­an fre­quent fly­er banana cake, skipped chip, res­cued roast veg. and binned beans. This was part of the call to action on Food and Cli­mate Change by the Net­work for Cli­mate Action (http://networkforclimateaction.org.uk).

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Liv­er­pool host­ed a free veg­an food fair at its social cen­tre ‘Next to
Nowhere’. Around 50 peo­ple attend­ed and loads of food and infor­ma­tion was giv­en out. The event allowed for a lot of infor­mal dis­cus­sion, with a social area cre­at­ed for this pur­pose. Peo­ple were delight­ed to hear that they can come back for veg­an food every Sat­ur­day after­noon 1–5pm.

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Pigs say: If you care about cli­mate change, eat less meat, milk and eggs

On Tues­day June 3rd, a group of pigs made a small action for a more veg­an Ams­ter­dam. They hand­ed out veg­an snacks to encour­age peo­ple not to buy that ham for din­ner. It may look like the pigs act­ed out of self-inter­est, but today their mes­sage was that meat pro­duc­tion is a major cause of cli­mate change. While the UN is con­fer­ring in Rome on World Food Secu­ri­ty and Cli­mate change, the pigs put a focus on that aver­age Euro­peans have a diet of dis­as­ter. Rais­ing ani­mals for food gen­er­ates more green­house gas­es than all the cars and trucks in the world com­bined.

Quite some peo­ple in front of the Albert Hei­jn on Joden­breestraat were hap­py to taste the organ­ic, veg­an falafel and choco­late cake and many said they are veg­e­tar­i­ans already. Peo­ple were sur­prised to hear that pro­duc­ing one kilo of cheese cause as much green­house gas emis­sions as dri­ving a car for 60 km. A Brazil­ian woman had wit­nessed the expand­ing soy fields used for feed­ing ani­mal indus­try.

“Con­sumers can make a huge improve­ment by avoid­ing ani­mal prod­ucts and imports, and by sup­port­ing local, organ­ic farm­ers instead. But humans need to organ­ise them­selves fast against the dom­i­nant cul­ture if they want to save them­selves from cli­mate chaos” the pig­gies stat­ed after all the food had been hand­ed out.

Tonight, Wednes­day June 4 from 19 there will be a film night in Plan­tage Dok­laan 12, with organ­ic veg­an food and ideas on how to com­bat cli­mate change. (See pro­gramme on the web­site)

Web­site: http://www.howtocookaplanet.net