Resurgence & Ecologist spoke to co-founder and ‘actionist’ Dee Woods about what resilience means to her and the Granville community.
Granville Community Kitchen is a community hub that organises food-centred activities for residents in South Kilburn, an area in north-west London once known for its high levels of crime and poor housing. Since 2014, the kitchen has grown from serving around 50 families to over 200, and has built a safe space for the most disaffected to raise their voices to advocate for structural change at local, national and international level.
Can you tell us about Granville Community Kitchen, how it started and how it has grown over the years?
There were a variety of reasons it came about. One, we had a community garden, which we started in 2012, and we wanted to teach children and young people how to cook. And two, we were observing people in the community who couldn’t access food. At the same time I was affected by a disability benefits decision and found myself with very little money to live on. I thought: I’m not going to a food bank. We have so many skills, so much knowledge in this community that I’m sure we could do something to support each other. The kitchen started from that.
How have your activities been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic?
We’re doing food aid serving 200 families, with a reach of 800 people a week. Within that we’ve also started the Good Food Box veg box scheme. It seems important to be shifting from food aid as a model to be able to feed people. People should be able to have an option to afford to feed themselves. So we started a solidarity organic veg box scheme and that’s picking up. The aim of that is to support people with low incomes. Our smallest bag is £3.10, the equivalent of a Healthy Start voucher, with a solidarity price so that people pay more if they can afford to. In that way they are supporting both the farmer and people in the community. This is true mutual aid.
Our garden is still open, and we make ourselves available to people for a little chat when we deliver food parcels. We went over and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to one of the elders the other day. We give flowers to people, little things to boost their spirits during this time, because people are really suffering – young people and elders – we just try to bring some cheer where we can.
How do you source the veg boxes?
We work with the Landworkers’ Alliance and Better Food Traders for most of our vegetables. We also work with the African and Caribbean Food Heritage Network to source food from West Africa that will meet the cultural needs of African, Caribbean and South American people in the area. There aren’t any local shops that cater to these needs now. There is a Marks & Spencer in Queen’s Park, and more recently one of these independent supermarket chains that carry, in my opinion, non-food. That’s because of gentrification.
American food justice activist Karen Washington uses the phrase ‘food apartheid’ instead of ‘food desert’ or ‘food swamp’ to talk about limited access to affordable and nutritious food in a particular area. What do you think about this term?
If you think about it, deserts and swamps are more or less natural occurrences. That’s not true in an urban or rural setting. In a lot of underserved areas in the UK you don’t get any real markets or real shops offering good food. It might be one corner shop and a proliferation of chicken shops. These same neighbourhoods have poor housing, high instances of food insecurity and obesity. It’s down to planning. Somewhere someone or several people made deliberate decisions about this. This is an example of how systemic inequalities are perpetuated.
