Going for Gold: Six months in, time to up our game

It has been six months since Bristol launched its bid to be a Gold Sustainable Food City, an ambition to bring the whole city together to change food for good. 

By collectively changing the way the city produces, buys and eats food, we can have a hugely positive impact on the environment, our health, wildlife and communities, and tackle some of the leading causes of climate change. 

However, to have the impact needed for Bristol to achieve Gold, we need to up our game. See below to find out how you and your organisation can get involved. 

So far we have seen:

• Organisations switching to caterers that source most of their ingredients from the UK including some grown locally in Bristol
• Several organisations and individuals that have changed their weekly milk delivery to milk in reusable glass containers rather than plastic
• Schools learning about food waste, collecting and weighing their food waste and setting up food waste collections for the first time
• Meat Free Mondays introduced at all catered halls at the University of Bristol
• People and organisations ditching plastic and switching to reusable water bottles, coffee cups and cutlery
• People growing herbs and vegetables on their balconies, planting bee-friendly plants in their garden, swapping food they’ve grown with neighbours and volunteering in community gardens
• People prioritising independents and markets where they can buy local refill detergents etc. and buy loose produce so there’s much less packaging to recycle
• Support for fruit and veg box schemes from local farms

It has been fantastic to see all these efforts so far, and to reach over 1,000 actions.

We now need even more action to help Bristol truly become an example of how a city can work together to transform its food system and culture, for other cities to follow, across the UK and globally.

How you can get involved:

• Register on the website, log any actions you or your organisation is already taking or would like to start doing, and make sure you revisit the site to update your actions to ‘I’ve/We’ve made this change’ once complete;
• Spread the word! We want to get as much of the city involved in the bid as possible, so help us by spreading the word among your friends, colleagues, clients, communities and network. There’s a toolkit with logos, key messages and graphics to help you do this;
• Get in touch – if you have a question about Going for Gold, would like to contribute a blog for the website, or need any support in order to get involved, please get in touch at hello@goingforgoldbristol.co.uk.

Thanks for all you do and, together, let’s change food in Bristol for good.