Sarah J spoke with Christian Ecology Link

Sarah: If people are interested how could they find out more about this project?

Barbara: You can go to www.christian-ecology.org.uk/loaf

LOAF principles

Sarah: I noticed that you're encouraging people to gather from the community and have feasts and you can download some place mats. Tell me about that.

Barbara: Indeed you can. Food is all about enjoyment and community and I think there's nothing better that builds a community than sitting round a table and sharing food together. We produced these place mats which you can print out from our website. Just the fact of putting this paper place mat on the table where people are going to sit and eat we found gets people thinking and talking about food and that's got to be a good thing.

So if you are going to put on a communal meal you can download the place mat from our website and print it out. Your communal meal can be as simple as homemade soup with vegetables from your own garden or the local farmer's market; you could have some locally baked bread and some fair trade coffee to finish it off. One meal I went to in Hertfordshire was giving a talk on LOAF and they'd put on this fantastic spread and they'd got pickles, jams, rolls, cheeses and vegetables. Each food had a little label telling you what it was, where it came from and where it had been produced.

Sarah: You talked about making sure we support local farmers and fairly traded goods; what's the global perspective on us making sure we think about how and what we eat?

Barbara: Many people are asking questions about food production supply systems, which are all at risk from changing environmental conditions, irregular rainfall, floods, droughts and storms hitting all over the world. What the big boys are saying is that we need to go far more into the larger scale industrial GM agriculture business. It's surprising in a world where chemically based industrial agri-business seems to reign supreme, but in fact much of the world's food is grown on small farms. In Africa small family farms make up about 80% of the farms and feed an estimated 70% of the population. In Asia 200 million rice farmers or farms as small as five acres produce most of the rice consumed in Asia.

Sarah: Is your LOAF project key for youth to join so they can help with your projects?

Barbara: Oh yes, absolutely! We're not precious about this LOAF campaign or principles; we'd love anybody to pick up on the ideas; never mind about mentioning Christian Ecology Link. Just ask people to use their LOAF and do the common sense thing and eat in a way that isn't going to trash the planet. So, yes please, young people get out there! Get active! Sadly in both Africa and Asia a lot of these small farms are being grabbed up by the large corporations and companies and this is very worrying because they're extinguishing these small farms and it's combining family farms and monoculture units, so there's room for campaigning too in order to save our family farms because that's where the food for local people is being produced and that's our future for farming and not the large agricultural lot.