The Incredible Edible Network is flourishing (by Robin Gale-Baker)
Back in 2008, two women (Pam Warhurst and Mary Clear) in Todmorden in West Yorkshire in the UK, founded a group called Incredible Edible Todmorden. They were looking for a way to tackle the big challenges of climate change and sustainability, as were many others. Incredible Edible has now grown into a network of around 1,150 initiatives around the world, including around 200 in the UK.
My husband Paul and I spent a month driving around the UK and in most towns we came across 2-4 beds of Incredible Edible vegetables, always well tended and available to the public. Scattered throughout these towns, on pieces of previously unused land, were more beds of herbs, vegetables and fruit trees. This led us to researching what we had known of as a single initiative just 16 years ago.
The second Incredible Edible group started in 2009, and 3 more in the following year. Then in 2012, Pam Warhurst did a TED talk that went viral and the movement was off and running.
Incredible Edible is based on the radical idea of growing food in unused spaces, with or without permission, and sharing that food around the community. Pam Warhurst and Mary Clear imagined this as a way to involve as many people as possible in a measure that would tackle climate change. It is also a model that can potentially be applied to almost anything – housing, energy, transport, etc – and is about not waiting for permission to act but taking things into your own hands as citizens and getting on with it. One of their catch phrases is that “it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission“.
Incredible Edible values “being positive, local, connected, brave and active” and their motto is “if you eat, you’re in“. They conceived of a model of 3 spinning plates (‘learning’, ‘community’ and ‘business’), with the idea that small actions matter and lead to big change and big conversations. Learning to grow food leads to increased connectedness and sense of community, and this in turn leads to an understanding of the importance of local food, and this then leads to people being purposeful in buying local and supporting local growers, farmers and retailers.
The network now includes more than 1,000 groups worldwide. Not bad for a group that didn’t ask for permission to begin, had no money, did not set up a bureaucracy and has made a substantial impact on the ways that we nurture the planet and live and support each other through ‘small actions’.