What is Fair Food Week?
Coordinated by the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA), Australia’s Fair Food Week shines a light on our new story of food.
During Fair Food Week, you will discover events across the country to celebrate fair food, great growers, and good eating:
forums
workshops
speakers
films
farmers’ fairs
food swaps
community garden and farm tours
and more.
This year, AFSA invites anyone keen to get involved in Fair Food Week to join us for a flagship event as we launch our new book, Eating Democracy: The True Cost of the Food We Eat with Costa Georgiadis on Saturday 21 October 2023 at SAGE (Brinja-Yuin Country, Moruya NSW).
Eating Democracy tells the story of eleven eaters doing things differently, navigating their paths to grow, provision and cook in ways that are fair to soil, water, plants, animals, and people. These eaters are helping to build a new food system based on culture, community, and personal, public, and ecosystem health without blowing the household or the planetary budget. From now until 19 September, you can pre-order your copy of Eating Democracy - click here to be one of the first to read it!
If you’d like to focus your Fair Food Week efforts more locally, we’re calling on all groups, from farmers to food hubs, schools to universities, to host their own event as part of Fair Food Week. If you’re interested, click the link below to host an event near you.
Let’s continue to put food sovereignty on the Australian table so farmers can keep farming… so that young people will feel encouraged to go into farming, so that family farmers around the world know that we are acting for their sovereignty… and so that all eaters can continue to input democratically into improving our food system.
It’s time to shine the light on the new story of fair food flourishing across Australia. Viva!
What’s fairness got to do with food?
Lots. Let’s start with farmers not being paid well by major retail chains for the food they grow and raise for us. Then there’s excessive food imports that unfairly disadvantage not only Australian farmers and farm workers but our food processors as well. And about much of that imported food… do we really know how it was grown and processed… and what was put on it to make it grow or easier to process… whether farm and factory workers enjoyed healthy, good and fair working conditions?
And there’s one more thing about fairness, and that’s about fair access to good, tasty food for the thousands of Australians and their children living on low incomes.
So, what’s that got to do with me?
It’s your chance to do what it is that you do best when it comes to food wherever you sit in the paddock-to-plate-and-back-again journey. You’ll have our support to grab attention via print and social media, word of mouth advertising, promotion at markets, restaurants, cafes, and libraries.
All over the country during the Fair Food Week people create and participate in story-telling, workshops and other events the possibilities of which are limited only by your imagination.
Most of all, during Fair Food Week, enjoy food produced fairly — that’s fairly in the social, economic and environmental sense.
How can we make it happen?
Fair Food Week is a self-organising, national event.
Find out more about hosting an event
Fair Food Week is a good idea we want to see take off because it’s about food fairness for all of us. So, it’s time to put on our thinking caps and plough into that random access memory of our brains, there to find creative, crazy, innovative and intriguing ideas for you and your friends to make something wonderful happen during Fair Food Week.
Contact AFSA for more information.
