The Food4Macc organisation was formally dissolved in November 2022 after 13 successful years, when its public liability insurance cost became disproportionately high for the level of activity being undertaken.

It was established in 2009 as a voluntary group that aimed to ensure that food growing skills were retained, making us more resilient to fluctuations in the price and availability of our food.

Food4Macc was instrumental in establishing numerous food-growing community gardens in various public spaces in Macclesfield; and at many local schools and care homes.

It also ran a garden share scheme matching up owners of under-used gardens in the Macclesfield area with aspiring growers – typically taken from the allotment waiting list.

This website records what Food4Macc accomplished and is a source of information that some other voluntary groups might find useful. (For example, its lessons learned, policies, procedures and sources of funding).

Several of our volunteers are interested in supporting similar projects on an informal basis in the future, and they can be contacted via this email address:-

food4macc@gmail.com

The retiring committee members

Updated November 2022.

Our Three Main Activities were:-

Food4Macc aimed to engage members of the community to develop local food supplies
using these strategies from the Transition Town movement:-

• Encourage the growing of food at home, in allotments, on borrowed land, public spaces, and local farms.

• Support local food producers and those who sell or distribute local produce

• Raise awareness of the consequences of rising fossil fuel costs on our food prices.

• Increase co-operation between groups working on different facets of the Climate Change and sustainability problems.

Over 7 million tons of food is thrown away each year, costing each household £50 a month.

The Love Food Hate Waste website offers lots of simple tips to reduce food waste

What was it all about?

We had become dependent on oil for fertilisers and for fuel to transport our food from distant sources.

About 40% of the food we eat was imported. That includes an astounding 95% of our fruit and most of the wheat in our bread.

This reliance on food from abroad is perilous. During the 2000 fuel strike, Sainsbury's chief executive wrote to the prime minister to warn that food supplies would run out "in days rather than weeks". Supermarkets rationed bread, sugar and milk.

Meanwhile, cheap high-quality fruit and veg in the supermarkets have discouraged us from growing our own food. Children no-longer learn these skills from their parents, and small farms have become non-viable.

If we look 10 or 20 years ahead, we can anticipate that higher oil costs will reverse these trends and it seems like a good idea to plan accordingly; to encourage local growing of food, and to reduce our dependence on oil-derived fertilisers.

Individuals may feel impotent in the face of this coming storm, but communities working together can be powerful. Some 150 towns around the UK have started "Transition Town" movements, which have demonstrated how much can be achieved.

Typical strategies include making disused land available for allotments, ensuring that food-growing skills are re-learned and practised, planting of fruit trees in public places; encouraging supermarkets to promote locally grown produce. etc.

We have a short PowerPoint presentation which you view as slideshow or as a printable pdf document.

Our History

Our interest in this subject was kindled by a Sunday Times article by John Paul Flintoff in April 2009, and we started to sound-out our friends. Download the Sunday Times article as a PDF file here

We decided that rather than aiming to be a Transition Town we would first of all see what we could do about food miles.

We held the first of a series of monthly public meeting at the end of September 2009 and began work on our first community garden at Prestbury Beaumont in December 2009.

Over the next 13 years we had a number of achievements:

• We established seven community gardens, and supported food growing projects in twelve local schools.

• We ran a series of evening talks on different food growing topics at All Hallows College, and gave lectures as guest speaker to other local community groups such as W.I. branches.

• We resurrected the Potato Seed Sale day, which had been started in Bollington, and ran it each year in the Town Hall - until the room hire cost became prohibitive.

• We matched up fourteen owners of disused vegetable gardens with people to cultivate them under our Garden Share scheme. 

• We had a formal constitution and public liability insurance in place.

• In September 2010, we created a sister organisation, Food4MaccDirect, which set out to make it easier to buy local food in Macclesfield. We ran this 'click and collect' service for six years until it became apparent that other businesses had sprung up to serve this market, and it was wrong for us to compete with them using our volunteer labour.

• Instead we published a directory and map of local food sources on our website.

• A foraging map shows sources of food in public places such as blackberries and apple trees.

• In early 2011 we held meetings to launch a Transition Town movement for Macclesfield known as Macc2020.
  
  We hoped that this would grow to encompass the other aspects of the Transition Town movement, not embraced by Food4Macc. Unfortunately the hierarchical 'management structure' proved ineffective, and the group fizzled out.
  
  In 2018 the challenge was picked up once again by a new group Macctastic, this time with a collegiate structure that encourages groups interested in topics, such as litter and transport, to act independently and meet occasionally to compare notes in organised public meetings.

• See our promotional videos page

In the autumn 2022 our public liability insurance premiums were consuming a huge fraction of our income, and we decided it better to dissolve the formal structure of the group, and leave our volunteers free to support causes under their own volition and at their own risk.

The main casualty of this decision was that our bank account had to close, and we would no longer be able to fund projects. The remaining assets were distributed to other local groups with similar aims to our own.

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