Tesco has gone bust. Buying "organic" has lost its meaning. A student spends his Saturday afternoon planting up the rooftop communal vegetable garden with the old man from next door, whom he hasn't spoken to since he was 10. In the adjacent block, a former investment banker looks after a woman's child in the co-operative crèche, while she sorts out the compost. Fantasy? Not according to the chef turned social entrepreneur Arthur Potts Dawson, who believes the big supermarket chains have had their day and the demand for a more ethical social model could and should come sooner than we think.
"Right now, food co-ops are the future," Potts Dawson says with confidence. "They are perfect now because of the financial troubles every one is in. Then once they have established themselves as de rigueur I think they will be a very nice place to work in."
"The People's Supermarket", owned and run by the people who shop there, is the future of British food, says Potts Dawson. But the idea on which it is based, a food co-operative, is nothing new. In fact, the Rochdale Principles that form the basis for the modern co-operative movement have remained unchanged for more than 150 years. So why is it relevant now?
"People don't have money, but they need the basic cohesive qualities of support," Potts Dawson says. "Supermarkets don't really sustain a community and they completely remove people from the food chain." Which is why on 1 April, Potts Dawson will embark on a nine-month experiment, filmed by Channel 4, to show that an alternative model, using communities and local food networks, can offer an alternative to supermarkets. "The pilot is one shop and once it is filmed and goes aout live, it will hopefully generate so much interest that I am hoping they will spring up on every street corner," he says.
"The co-op should be at the heart of whatever community it's in," says Potts Dawson. "If it was in the middle of a tower block in Tower Hamlets, then it should serve the community there. And on the King's Road, likewise." When the project is up and running, as well as the shop itself, it will consist of a cafe, kitchen, meeting place and a crèche. Members will be able to shop there and use the facilities in return for volunteering their time.
If anyone is capable of spearheading this mammoth task, Potts Dawson is definitely the man for the job. Launching the much-lauded Acorn House, "London's first eco-friendly training restaurant" and Water House – a first for the catering industry on many counts of pioneering waste reduction systems – has earned him a role as a London Leader working on the Sustainable Development Commission. He is a chef by trade and has cooked since he was 16 for several Michelin-starred restaurants including Roux Brothers, La Tante Claire and River Café, but his social and environmental entrepreneurial work with the Shoreditch and Terrence Higgins trusts have also contributed to his public profile. "I'm a chef, I'm a cook, I was created by this industry, and I like to think I'm giving back. But I'm not giving back because I can make a scallop soufflé, I'm giving back because I can make compost," he says.
Making the People's Supermarket come to fruition is not just a matter of organisation and logistics. Potts Dawson says teaching is a fundamental element: "It's really important to teach people how to get food," he says, "how to grow it, how to pick it, how to prepare it and what's safe to eat."
The on-site kitchen would allow members to turn fresh food into secondary products before they hit their sell-by-date, thus extending its shelf life by either vacuum packing or freezing. "There's still going to be waste, it's difficult," says Potts Dawson, "but hopefully it will have an extra lease of life. That's quite important when it comes to waste management.
"I'd like to think the co-op is not aimed at anybody," he says, stressing that everyone in the community should be a member. But there are specific groups which he thinks could especially benefit from giving up a few hours a month to get cheap food and interesting work in return: retired people fit enough to work, students and the unemployed. And he believes there would be opportunity for communities such as local schools, prisons and hospitals to benefit, too, by providing them with fresh, local food.
The difference between Potts Dawson's vision for the future and pre-existing small-scale health food co-operatives, is that it would strive to compete with supermarkets across the country. "It wouldn't compete with local businesses, it would embrace them. But if you've got an empty town with just a supermarket such as Tesco taking the piss out of it, then I say why not give them a run for their money?"
While a location for the co-operative has not yet been found, Potts Dawson is looking for a building in a well-populated urban area. The project rides on getting public funding, which depends on the co-operation of local councils.
Sarah Alldred of Co-operatives UK – which supports co-operative enterprise – says across the country it has seen "a growing interest in food co-operatives". The days when co-operatives were for trendy middle-class worriers are fading fast, with affordable food distribution services leading the way from deprived areas of London such as Tower Hamlets and Greenwich, to the suburbs of Manchester.
Food co-operatives depend on collaboration among communities, but Potts Dawson argues that if, in addition, people grew one tenth of their own food, it would provide a real educational legacy.
"If people grow things themselves, their children understand, then schools in the area know that this community's generating something with its own energy, to consume. And what it does do is highlight that wherever you live, in an urban setting, or a country setting, food is important and don't disregard it."
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