Food for thought: reconnecting with food

“LOTS OF MONEY IS BEING MADE, BUT IT’S NOT FARMERS MAKING IT; IT’S MASSIVE COMPANIES SELLING ULTRA-PROCESSED RUBBISH”

Images: Helena Dolby, Rachel Jones

Borough Market, which is run by a charitable trust, exists “for community, the love of food and a better tomorrow”. This statement informs everything from our Food Policy to our work with local schools; it also sparks lots of questions about what we do and why we do it. This autumn, we’re throwing some of those same questions out to experts beyond the Borough Market community.

This week’s answer comes from Chloë Dunnett, founder of Sitopia Farm, a small, not-for-profit organic farm in Greenwich. Named after a book by the author Carolyn Steel, which explores how food is both the cause of and potential solution to many of the world’s most pressing problems, Sitopia Farm seeks to reconnect its visitors and volunteers to the soil, the joy of good food, and each other.

Could we all benefit from being more connected to the source of our food?

Food is at the heart of many of the crises we face as a society: the health crisis, the environmental crisis, the crisis of inequality. That means it can also be part of the solution.

Among the many failings of our food system – and it’s both a symptom and a cause – is how disconnected most people in this country have become from the food they eat. Most of what we consume is a mystery to us. We have no real clue how it was produced, who produced it, how it got to our shelves, and the impact it had along the way. Building stronger connections with food, and helping people understand how important those connections are, is a big part of our work at Sitopia Farm.

Our approach to small-scale regenerative farming, with its focus on soil health and biodiversity, is unusual but by no means unique. There are lots of organic farms out in the countryside growing amazing produce and selling directly to their local communities, just like we do. But that other part – creating connections and spreading a wider message about food and farming – is something that, because we’re in London, surrounded by millions of people, we’re almost uniquely positioned to do.

When visitors come here for the first time, on team days, courses, school visits or as volunteers, we often see them have a bit of a moment. It starts with the sensory impact – the beauty of the place, the colours and scents, the sheer diversity of the plants. Then they get to taste how delicious food can be when grown in rich soil with minimal intervention and eaten right there at the source.

Produce loses nutrients and flavour with every day that passes. The shorter the gap from harvest to table, the better it is for you and the better it tastes. For me, one of the most exciting things is converting our visitors, particularly children, to things they’re convinced they dislike. Tomatoes are a common one. Most people have only ever had the supermarket version – watery and sour. Give them a cherry tomato straight from the vine in the middle of summer and the sudden change to their expression as the intense hit of sweetness bursts in their mouth in a sight to behold. In that instant, you can’t help but appreciate how different food can be when grown this way.

Equally importantly, they get to see and experience the hard work that goes into producing that food. We want to give people the chance to get their hands in the soil, to use their muscles in the service of the plants. I defy anyone to spend a day in the hot sun or relentless drizzle, watering, planting, weeding, pruning, harvesting, and not then think a little bit more about what has gone into creating the produce they buy in the shops. I wouldn’t suggest that everyone should do what I did, leaving a secure job to become a farmer, but I do think we could all do with understanding a little better what farming involves.

This place offers a personal connection to the failures as well as the successes. Each year, some of the things you plant will do well and some won’t. When you spend time at Sitopia Farm, you quickly come to understand the vulnerability of our food supply. Farming in this country is a hard way to make a living, and it’s being made even harder by our changing climate. In the short time we’ve been here, we’ve seen such wildly varying seasons. Last year we had an unusually wet spring and quite a cool summer. This year saw the hottest summer for 70 years and the driest spring in 50. You simply can’t plan for that.

Extreme weather is just one of many challenges faced by farmers. When you zoom out, our current food system has two fundamental problems: it’s simply not profitable to make good food, and good food is priced beyond the reach of too many people. It’s a classic case of market failure – a lot of money is being made from the food we eat, but it’s not farmers who are making it; it’s massive companies selling ultra-processed rubbish. We’re succeeding in churning out cheap, abundant calories but failing to produce food that nourishes people and doesn’t kill the planet. Collectively, we pay for that cheap food in other ways. A big study by the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission in 2024 put the annual cost to the UK of diet-related disease at £268 billion – almost as much as the UK’s entire healthcare spend – and the environmental costs are equally staggering.

Those problems are systemic and need to be addressed at the very highest level through a national food policy. But as individuals, we’re not without power – that’s why the connections we make here are so important. We all vote with our forks three times a day. For those people who enjoy the luxury of choice, what we choose to buy has a direct, tangible impact. And the good news, as the experience of sampling our produce straight from the soil clearly demonstrates, is that we don’t have to make those choices purely for reasons of virtue. Many of the things we know we should do, both for our own health and the health of the planet, can seem like a chore. But eating a carrot that tastes better than any carrot you’ve eaten before is not an act of self-sacrifice, it’s a genuine pleasure.

Part of our role at Sitopia Farm is to grow those amazing carrots. Over the course of the year, what we harvest here provides about 20,000 meals through veg bag subscriptions and deliveries to restaurants and grocers. Our bigger job is to plant the idea that a better way of producing food really is possible.