Imagine a Melbourne fed well, locally and affordably
Imagine if food was no longer a commodity, but the glue that connects our communities – sustaining the environment and promoting a healthy, thriving Melbourne. This is the vision of Regen Melbourne’s newly launched Nourished Neighbourhoods Earthshot. Lead convener, Dheepa Jeyapalan, shares the wildly ambitious thinking behind the project, and how it aims to transform Melbourne’s food systems.
A city of markets, local restaurants and community gardens
A neighbourhood is more than just roads and sidewalks. It's the vibrant tapestry of our houses and gardens, parks and playgrounds, schools and markets, restaurants, cafes and corner stores. What makes each neighbourhood distinct is its reflection of the cultural makeup and values of its community: what people care about, how they spend their leisure time, and the food they love to eat.
Yet increasingly, Melbourne’s neighbourhoods are losing their local foodie character. They're becoming homogenised – saturated with identical logos, food chains and supermarkets. The family-owned corner store gives way to chain convenience stores. The local fruit and vegetable grocer is replaced by cookie-cutter supermarkets. The cafe run by a local family becomes another burger joint franchise.
Melbourne’s neighbourhoods and communities are vital components of our food system, yet they're often overlooked in discussions about food security and sustainability.
The true cost of homogenisation
If Melbourne becomes a city of food chains where every suburb looks identical – what happens to Melbourne's identity? And what does it mean for the health and wellbeing of our communities?
This transformation has profound impacts on community health and our sense of belonging. The latest CSIRO stocktake of Australia's food system confirms that places where people buy food are often social spaces where communities interact and build connections. When these spaces become sterile and disconnected from local culture, communities lose part of their identity.
While chain businesses may provide employment opportunities and convenient access to food, they operate as extractive forces, using local labour at lower costs while funneling profits to distant shareholders who have no connection to the communities they serve. The wealth generated by these neighbourhoods flows out rather than circulating within the community.
Unfair and unbalanced: the food geography bias
This transformation isn't uniform across Melbourne. As you move away from the city centre, the problem intensifies. Melbourne's growth corridors and outer suburbs have higher ratios of unhealthy fast food outlets to healthy options, with less walkable access to markets and grocers.
Residents in these neighbourhoods must work incredibly hard to nourish themselves, unfairly harder than those living closer to the city center. The saturation of these areas with chain stores means that profits are continuously extracted from these communities, leaving them economically depleted
Even in communities that appear to have vibrant high streets of delicious food – think Coburg, Dandenong, Footscray – it would be safe to assume that most of the money flowing in would be to the supermarkets, rather than the many locally owned small businesses that exist.
How can we ensure every dollar spent in your neighbourhood helps support a food system that is local, healthy and affordable? One that cuts out the multinationals and centres humans.
Left: Nicole Barling-Luke, Director of Earthshots; Right: Dheepa Jeyapalan, Nourished Neighbourhoods convener.
Enter: Nourished Neighbourhoods
Just like Swimmable Birrarung and 300,000 Streets, Nourished Neighbourhoods rolls 12 months of sense-making, stakeholder engagement and research into an ambitious project that envisions Melbourne as a city of neighbourhoods that nourish both their communities and our ecosystem.
Imagine walking down your street – past community gardens, food hubs and your local urban farm – to the neighborhood cafe. You order breakfast from a menu where over half the food has been sourced from producers in Melbourne. All of it is sustainably grown, harvested and transported. Imagine doing your weekly grocery shop at local businesses and fresh food markets within 15 minutes of your home; shelves stocked with diverse, seasonal and affordable produce.
This vision disrupts the current flow of money, redirecting it toward communities and food growers, and supporting every Melbourne resident's right to nourish themselves.
It’s neighbourhoods where food comes from as close as possible to where it's sold, creating shorter supply chains that connect communities directly to their food sources. These neighbourhoods are supported by diverse, interconnected supply networks so that when one pathway is disrupted, others remain intact, ensuring communities can continue accessing fresh food regardless of external shocks and stressors, like the food shortages experienced during the pandemic.
A Nourished Neighbourhood means every dollar spent in your suburb creates a ripple effect of prosperity. Your money doesn't disappear into distant corporate coffers, but circulates within your community, supporting local businesses. Or flows to nearby neighbourhoods where your food is grown, strengthening the economic foundations of food-producing communities. This creates a resilient web of mutual support where neighbourhoods nourish each other – both literally and economically.
Why do we need a Nourished Neighbourhoods Earthshot?
Regen Melbourne recognise the tremendous work already done by local and state governments, social enterprises, nonprofits, and community groups to ensure people can nourish themselves. But we also know this is becoming harder with increasing food insecurity and rising food prices.
We need to work collectively with our eyes on a prize greater than ourselves. We hope this Earthshot can provide that aspiration for our sector while highlighting the role of cities and their neighbourhoods as places for food system transformation. We must not look away from the complexities of disrupting our economic system as we work toward a nourishing food system.
Making doughnuts out of dollars
Despite Australia importing only 11% of its food, our food system remains vulnerable to shocks and stressors because profitability has become the narrow, sole measure of success, rather than the system's ability to nourish both people and planet. The National Farmers Federation's focus on delivering a $100 billion agricultural industry overlooks the people who eat food and how the farmers themselves are going to be able to nourish themselves.
Our food system is inextricably linked to our economic system. By embracing concepts from doughnut economics and wellbeing economics, we can fundamentally rethink how we define food system success. These frameworks, combined with measures of nutrition, health and regeneration, guide us toward a food system that truly nourishes both people and planet.
The era of single-lens solutions is over. We can no longer afford to address our food system through only a health lens, or only a climate lens, or only an economic lens. The complexity of our challenges demands a multi-dimensional approach. When we design interventions with multiple perspectives integrated from the start, we create holistic solutions. When we don't, we risk solving one problem while inadvertently creating others, potentially causing greater societal harm than the issues we set out to address.
A new measurement for success
In a nourished neighbourhood, how would we measure success beyond export market profitability? Would it be the number of joyful food experiences you have? How often you share meals with loved ones? How easy it is to get your hands in the soil and harvest your own food? Or the number of local cultural grocers in your neighbourhood who know exactly which farm that radish came from?
To move toward nourishing neighbourhoods, we need to measure food system success differently – shifting from metrics tied to growth and GDP to ones focused on nourishment. This requires a long-term perspective. With increasing global shocks, stressors and conflicts, export markets are becoming increasingly vulnerable. If our food system's success depends on these external factors rather than people's ability to nourish themselves regardless of conditions beyond their control, we're building on shaky ground.
Imagined state: Nourished Neighbourhoods
How we will bring Nourished Neighbourhoods to life
Making the invisible visible: mapping our food economy
To create Nourished Neighbourhoods, we first need to understand where we are now. We'll be identifying and highlighting the actors and actions already pushing us toward this vision, creating visual maps that show who's doing what in our food system. More importantly, we'll shine a necessary light on where money flows in our neighbourhood food systems, revealing to communities exactly where their food dollars go and empowering policymakers to create meaningful policies that support nourishment.
2. Empowering communities through understanding
We'll work directly alongside communities to help people see the food system more holistically. Too often, the trade-offs and complexities of our food system are dismissed as "too hard" for everyday people to understand. This patronizing approach fails our communities.
If we want people to engage in meaningful dialogue, to advocate for nourishing neighbourhoods, and to demand an economic system that better supports their health and wellbeing, we must support them to understand the system. Only then can they engage meaningfully in advocacy efforts that create real change.
3. Fostering intergenerational leadership
We'll work within our sector to create spaces for mutual learning, collaboration, and intergenerational knowledge sharing. The future food system leaders need to be supported, celebrated, and given agency to create the transformation our communities require.
This means ensuring that those who are underrepresented in our sector, whose leadership we desperately need, are supported and connected with the previous generation of actors who are willing to share their platforms and knowledge. True transformation requires both fresh perspectives and accumulated wisdom.
4. Sustaining the movement
We will continue building on the work we've been doing over the past year, including our popular Substack, the Cornucopia, which keeps our community informed about the latest food system developments. We'll partner with others to run events that surface new ideas, hold workshops that build capacity, and write stories that communicate the transformation required to keep our sector's aspirations high.
If you’d like to be involved in any of the work above or hear more about the Nourished Neighbourhoods earthshot please contact dheepa@regen.melbourne .
