Hot conversations: Learnings From Our ‘Hot Food’ workshoP
Last month, Sweltering Cities, Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation and Regen Melbourne hosted a half-day workshop: “Hot Food: Building Melbourne’s Food System Resilience in a Warming World.” Our Food Systems convenor, Dheepa Jeyapalan, reports back on what we learned.
The “Hot Food” workshop was open for anyone to attend and aimed to spark dialogue about how we can nourish Melbourne’s population during extreme heatwaves – conversations that are currently missing in both climate resilience and food systems spaces. We had a full house with stakeholders from all parts of the food system, community and climate resilience sector.
hot topics: from food costs to food swaps
The event began with expert presentations exploring the intersection of extreme heat and food resilience.
Dr. Rachel Carey, Senior Lecturer in Food Systems at University of Melbourne, spoke about rising food costs since the millennium drought, vulnerabilities in food distribution due to centralised supermarket hubs, and the shrinking peri-urban food bowl, emphasising the need for a food systems approach.
Dr. Catherine Trundle, Senior Lecturer in Public Health at La Trobe University, challenged how we conceptualise heat, highlighting how it impacts our physical and mental health as well as community wellbeing. She pointed to the chronic stress caused by a lack of agency during heatwaves and urged us to see heat as an ongoing condition, not isolated events. Dr Trundle proposed solutions that address the health impact of heat and food stress by giving people agency by reducing housing stress, insecure work and inaccessible urban infrastructure.
Courtney Young, Woodstock Flour Co-Founder and Peer Learning Manager at Soils for Life,
Shared the impacts of extreme heat on farming, including water retention and adaptation strategies. She emphasised the critical support that organisations like Soils for Life provide to farmers in adapting to climate change.
Edgar Caballero Aspe, Education and Sustainability Coordinator at Banksia Gardens Community Services, highlighted the prevalence of food swamps in Melbourne’s northern suburbs and the inequitable access to nourishing food for those on low-incomes. He highlighted the importance of avenues for communities to be able to grow food themselves through urban farming. Edgar shared his experiences working with the Broadmeadows community and the Banksia Gardens’ community garden and cafe projects.
Sticky questions
During a Q&A session, forum participants raised lots of sticky questions. Common themes arose around the corporatisation of food systems and supermarket duopolies; strategies for heat-resilient planting; and international examples of food system resilience against extreme heat.
The panel spoke to the idea that many viable solutions are already known – with most present in the room already enacting those solutions everyday. The challenge, they pointed out, lies not in the solutions but in the collective action and support required for those programs to be widely accessible to communities.
Scenario mapping: Forecast for extreme heat
To ground the conversation in reality and bring theory into practice, participants were guided through a scenario that felt all too plausible in today’s climate. The aim was to help people better understand how extreme heat could ripple through every stage of our food system, revealing both vulnerabilities and opportunities for action.
The scenario:
Melbourne enters its fifth straight day of extreme heat with temperatures remaining between 42 and 45 °C.
The questions:
How might this event impact the way we:
Grow, farm and produce food?
Process, store and move food around our city?
Procure and buy food?
Nourish ourselves?
Prepare, cook and share food?
Waste, reuse or recycle food?
Identified impacts:
Food production declines and income loss for farmers.
Increased food spoilage and food-borne illness.
Greater food insecurity and reliance on ultra-processed foods.
Inequitable health and wellbeing impacts on already marginalised communities.
Strain on the wellbeing of food delivery workers and those employed within the food system.
Rising energy costs and food waste.
Growing community isolation and tension.
Strengths Mapping: What we can build on
This exercise also revealed important gaps, calling attention to the urgent need for new policies, investment flows and a shift in the way we talk about and value food. Some of the ideas that emerged were:
First Nations leadership and cultural connection
Embed First Nations knowledge and wisdom into food systems, advocating for First Nations food sovereignty.
Foster spiritual and cultural connections to Country.
Recognise food as more than sustenance: food is culture, identity, and community.
Community networks and local resilience
Strengthen existing community networks to encourage neighbour check-ins during extreme weather.
Promote food sharing and swapping within communities and shared access to storage, cooking and kitchen facilities.
Expand support for neighbourhood houses and other community hubs as key food and heat resilience centres.
Position schools as climate resilience hubs through initiatives like school meal programs and farm integration.
Educating around food safety, especially during extreme heat.
Support community-facing and community-led organisations to build heat resilience with targeted community support, training for staff, facility upgrades and more.
Urban farming and local food access
Identify and prioritise urban farming spaces; support “right to grow” legislation to increase access to land for communities.
Protect Melbourne’s food bowl from further urban sprawl and development pressure.
Increase visibility and financial support for local food producers through local procurement policies and funding for organisations supporting nature-aligned farming.
Policy, planning and governance
Integrate food systems planning into climate resilience and heatwave response strategies.
Develop and implement a Victorian Food System Strategy, as recommended by the recent food security inquiry, in alignment with climate adaptation plans.
Update legislation governing workplace safety to ensure workers at all parts of the food system have protections during heatwaves.
Update planning legislation to:
Enable more public markets and urban farms.
Prevent supermarket monopolies in new suburbs.
Address harmful land banking practices by large supermarket chains.
Financial instruments
Introduce a sugar tax, using revenue to subsidise healthy, locally-produced food.
Create a transitional fund to reduce risk for farmers shifting toward regenerative practices.
Mandate superannuation funds to invest in small-scale, local farmers.
Explore Universal Basic Income as a stabilising mechanism to support household food security
Next steps and direction
Based on the discussions during this session and the interests of the participants that attended the session, there were a few actions that this collective of actors could get behind or explore further action in:
Strengthen the capacity of urban planners, climate resilience and food system actors
There’s a clear need to better equip those who are planning for extreme weather events to address food system resilience and for those in food systems to better plan for extreme weather events. By supporting the rollout of the upcoming Foodprint toolkit and identifying further capacity gaps, the group can help strengthen both planning and food sector actors to embed climate resilience, adaptation thinking and advocacy into their work.
Support and expand community hubs and explore models for emergency responses
Neighbourhood houses and other community hubs are already playing a key role in local food resilience. The group can advocate for greater investment and staffing to encompass complementary services like urban farms and community gardens while also supporting investment in community-facing and community-led organisations to increase the heat resilience of their communities and operations.
Engage non-traditional allies in food system action
Expanding the movement to include urban planners, climate resilience actors, and others less commonly involved in food work can build momentum. By helping them understand food system vulnerabilities and providing tools to advocate for the disruption of the supermarket duopoly and greater investment in public markets, local grocers, urban farms and community food sharing models, the group can advocate for broader reform.
Deepen focus on unexplored topics
Further exploration is needed in areas like worker safety, the role of schools in resilience, and financial levers such as taxation and Universal Basic Income. These could come to life by continuing the conversation and inviting diverse expertise for future gatherings and workshops.
We’d love to hear from both those who joined us and those who couldn’t make it this time: your insights will help shape how these next steps can best support your work and priorities. In the meantime, Regen Melbourne, Sweltering Cities, and the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation will continue collaborating to explore how we can bring these proposed actions to life and build momentum for a more resilient, equitable food future.
Any participant is welcome to join the Greater Melbourne Heat Alliance to hear more about regular meetings and future events. Email info@swelteringcities.org to join.
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