‘The system is the problem, not people’: how a radical food group spread round the world

Pam Warhurst insists she’s no anarchist. Nevertheless, the founder of Incredible Edible, a food-focused guerrilla gardening movement, wants the state to get out of people’s way.

“The biggest obstacle is the inability of people in elected positions to cede power to the grassroots,” she says.

Sixteen years ago, Warhurst left a conference addressing sustainability and climate change feeling utterly bereft at the prospect of what faced humanity. It was on the train home from that event that she made up a plan to encourage people to take charge of their own food resilience.

Since then her idea has taken root across the UK and around the world, with at least 150 Incredible Edible groups across the country, from Orkney to Cornwall, and sister movements in France, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and even Argentina.

Her message is simple. Failures of leadership around the unfolding disasters of climate breakdown, plummeting biodiversity and social disintegration have left people with only one choice: to take matters into their own hands.

“Because I am interested in systems change,” she says. “It’s the system [that is the] problem, not the people.”

At first glance, Warhurst, a plainspeaking West Yorkshire woman, is an unlikely radical. But she has the kind of inspirational energy that makes listeners’ hairs stand up on the backs of their necks.

Her big idea is guerrilla gardening – with a twist. Where guerrilla gardeners subvert urban spaces by reintroducing nature, Incredible Edible’s growers go one step further: planting food on public land and then inviting all-comers to take it and eat.

“I used food because it seemed to me that we needed to act fast,” Warhurst says. “We needed to get experience as soon as we could, and probably food was the thing that we could demonstrate an alternative way of living around, in a really simple way.”

The group started life in Todmorden, Warhurst’s home town in West Yorkshire, in 2008, with a band of friends getting together to plant food crops in public spaces. The idea caught on, leading to newspaper coverage and a feature by the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Warhurst was invited to give a Ted talk, which went viral.

“The Ted talk was just dead straightforward,” she says. “It just said: we can move mountains if we believe in ourselves and we can demonstrate there is an alternative way of living our lives, let’s start with food and see where we go.”

Warhurst conceptualises the mission of Incredible Edible as three spinning plates: “You grow, in the place you call home, food to share – sometimes you ask permission, sometimes you don’t. You share the skills you’ve got, you find out who knows how to do things in your community.

“And the third plate is, if you’re really going to try to create impact in the place you call home, you have to try and support the economy, you have to try and see if there’s local jobs in it.”

The result is an all-round benefit for the community: free, healthy food, physical activity, and a forum to connect with neighbours in an increasingly atomised society. And for Warhurst, it shows something else: “What it’s doing is demonstrating that in a crisis when you’ve not got a load of money, there’s a lot you can do if you trust the people.”

How has the group managed to thrive and survive for so long, and how has it managed to spread so far? “Our longevity is down to the positive message that inspires people to just do it, rather than corporate-speak around theory. And sharing cuppas and smiles as we work together in our neighbourhoods, all in it together to make life better through sharing food.”

But as much as Warhurst’s idea has simplicity and wholesomeness, it also has a radical streak. At its heart, Incredible Edible is about hijacking public spaces – spaces nominally owned by communities, and paid for through their taxes, but administered and jealously guarded by public authorities.

And that is where Incredible Edible meets its biggest challenge: the dead hand of the state. “There are too many ‘noes’ in the system, when it comes to: ‘Can I grow food on this land?’,” Warhurst says. “And most people don’t do what we did in Todmorden. Most people ask for permission. Because that’s the type of nation we are. We do that type of thing.”

What is the solution? Incredible Edible is calling for a “right to grow”, which would make permission to plant on public land automatic, and create obligations for local authorities to facilitate it. In that is the kernel of a much bigger idea – one that goes beyond food.

“This is saying: look, in a time of crisis, [at] what we, the people, can do, and how we can use land differently to get better outcomes,” Warhurst says. “You could theoretically apply it to energy, you could theoretically apply it to housing, you could theoretically apply it to a lot of things, but I’m only doing food.”

What this is about, she says, is nothing less than “a new relationship between the citizen and the state”. Incredible Edible has already demonstrated it can make a material difference to people’s lives.

“We’re repurposing people power and we’re repurposing land, and that’s the bottom line,” she says. “We’ve got oodles of both of them … just respect people and create frameworks that allow them to just crack on and do these things instead of having to fight the system all the time.”

And with that, Warhurst says, there is hope for the future.

“God knows I wish that we weren’t in the state we are in as a planet, and I wish we weren’t in the state we’re in as a nation. But we are where we are and there’s no point having a moan about it – you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and do something.”