This week, our Caring City team are exploring the urgent issue of food poverty in Hungry Nation – Part 1 – a performance co-created with volunteers and service users at the Feeding Coventry social supermarket at Foleshill Community Centre.
Part of our Reform the Norm programme, the project invites audiences to listen, eat together and join in the debate, as ten performers share their stories, raising awareness of the systemic barriers people face, and questioning how we might begin to overcome them.
Ahead of performances on Friday 3 December, director Jo Newman told us more about the process of developing the project and the impact she hopes that it will have.
The Hungry Nation project actually started after I met Sarah from Strike A Light while working on a show for the National Theatre called My Country (A Work in Progress). That piece was a listening project where we interviewed people about their thoughts on Brexit, to try and uncover the complexities behind the polarised arguments that were being presented in the media.
During that time, we discovered that we were both really passionate about raising awareness around food poverty. Sarah was working on an initiative to offer “culture vouchers” by partnering up theatres with food banks, and meanwhile I’d been talking to The Trussell Trust who approached me to see if I’d be interested in making a show to raise awareness about this issue. We’ve been working for years to develop the project, and the issue has only become more and more urgent, with the number of people using food banks growing exponentially.
In 2018, we had a period of research and development with Jasber Singh, an academic from Coventry University who specialises in this subject and as part of it hosted a debate around food poverty. At that time we were shocked to discover there is “no right to food” in the UK, and we wanted to see if we could use the project to galvanise conversations around this. Since then, thanks to the incredible work of Marcus Rashford and Ian Byrne MP, there is now a national campaign around Right to Food and Coventry has just become a Right to Food City. So now we can look at how the project can create meaningful change in the context of these vital campaigns.
It’s a really interesting subject to tackle, because while there are lots of local charities and food distribution organisations doing incredible work and making a huge difference to people’s lives, there’s still a question over whether they should need to be there at all, because ultimately people are finding themselves in these situations over and over again because of systemic and structural problems. What we’re really hoping to do with Hungry Nation is find out what some of the barriers are that people face, why they are there and what changes can be made to prevent people from ending up in these situations.
The connection we’d made with Coventry University through Jasber led us to the City of Culture Trust. We were really inspired by the work they were doing, particularly through the Caring City team, which has this amazing ambition to make work that is integrated in the community. We wanted Hungry Nation to be a co-created project: we didn’t want to just parachute in and take people’s stories to fit with our ideas, we wanted to make something collaboratively with people who had lived experience of food poverty and that’s something that City of Culture really understood and responded to.
From there, we started getting to know the food bank network of the city, and got particularly interested in the work of Feeding Coventry, the first and largest social supermarket at Foleshill Community Centre. The key difference between the social supermarket and a food bank is that you pay a fixed price of £4 to get a weekly shop with all the essentials, which you can choose and pick up yourself – the space is set up like a supermarket – or it can be delivered. And there are plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, some of which are grown in the garden at the community centre.
Even though food banks provide important support and can be a real life line, we’ve found there are barriers some people face in terms of getting there, whether that’s asking for help, going through formal routes to get a voucher or how it feels to queue up for a freebie. The social supermarket is open to anyone and enables people to pay for their food, and there’s dignity in that.
Similar to our work on My Country (A Work in Progress), we started the process of creating this show with a listening project. To do this, we trained up a group of volunteers from the social supermarket to gather stories from each other and the people they were working with. We gave them Zoom recorders and they interviewed each other, and this both helped us get to know the people we were already working with, and helped us come across new people who wanted to be involved. The interviews have formed such an important part of the research for the project and have given us a huge range of perspectives on the intricacies of the issues which are faced.
We then ran a series of open workshops with visiting artists exploring theatre, poetry, music and legislative theatre, and we have a cast of thirteen participants. And they’re an incredible group of people – among them are visual artists, chefs, DJs, poets and musicians, so the performance itself will be bringing together different art forms. There will also be food – eating together has been a really important part of this project through the workshop and rehearsal process, and will form part of the sharing so that the audience can eat together and have meaningful conversation.
In a lot of ways, Coventry feels like the perfect place to be presenting Hungry Nation. It strikes me as a city where there is a huge love of food. There are so many independent restaurants and shops with food from so many different cultures. But at the same time, sadly, there’s a huge need here in terms of food poverty and so many organisations working tirelessly to support people going hungry. So it feels like such an important place to start this conversation.
In order for the discussions to be really meaningful, it’s important that we have a wide variety of people coming to see the show, and as well as a range of local people and people working within charities and food distribution organisations we are targeting some key changemakers, policy-makers and advocates, including MPs and councillors. This is only the first part of the project, and we really want to continue working with those people in the next phase of the process to find out how we can really make positive change.
The sharing will be a combination of music, poetry, stories and debate which has been co-created with the group, and we hope to be able to give people a sense of agency around this issue, and an opportunity to help us work out what we need to do next to contribute to real change. I hope that we can open the minds of people who perhaps don’t know much about the challenges around food insecurity, speak to the people who are in positions of power about what needs to happen and for people who do have lived experience of this, I hope it will be affirming to hear similar stories being shared and to help us work out how to move forward in a hungry world.
Reform the Norm: Hungry Nation – Part 1 will be performed at 1.30pm and 7pm on Friday 3 December at Foleshill Community Centre.
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