Feeding Our Future: Using blogs and social media for social change

by Tris Hussey on March 3rd, 2008

We talk about a lot about using social media for all sorts of things, but it’s not often that we talk about social media for social change. Sure, it has been a part of the landscape for a long time, we just don’t hear about it as often as we should.

Up here at the University of Victoria there is a symposium later this week called Feeding Our Future looking at the food system. Not just how food is grown, but also how it is transported and how governments influence food policy (yes, governments have food policies).

My friend Sushil is writing for the blog for the symposium as an experiment in continuing the debate, discussion, and conversation around all the issues (and more) covered in the symposium.

Sushil isn’t new to writing by any stretch (she is a published author, journalist, educator, and currently working on her Ph.D. in sustainable gastronomy at UVic), but she is new to blogging. I think she’s doing a good job, given the constraints that she has been put under.

Of the posts that she’s written I like this one on how there aren’t the popular slogans, bumper sticker level, about food issues:

We need a similar bumper sticker campaigning for sustainable food policy. I AM VOTING FOR HEALTHY FOODSYSTEMS — or some such sentiment. Why do all the major political parties in Canada, on both provincial and federal levels, have nothing resembling a food policy platform? How can it be that the key element humans need to survive — nourishment — does not qualify as a policy position or a Ministry to call its own?

What is a healthy food system? That is something that is being worked on, but look at it this way. Look at the food in your local supermarket. How much of it was grown within 20 miles of you? 50 miles? 100 miles? Now think about not only the cost of growing the food but transporting it. Now consider that food is much less nutritious than it was just fifty years ago.

Scary stuff. Through this blog, which has more of an academic than bloggy feel to it, the people behind the Feeding Our Future symposium hope to raise awareness, spur action, and maybe change things for the better.

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