Liverpool’s Food Insecurity Task Force have launched Liverpool’s Good Food Plan, a strategy to create a city “where everyone can eat good food” and that will address key issues related to the food we eat in Liverpool.

Phase one of the Good Food Plan is about tackling the immediate and urgent challenges that the City is facing while building a framework and foundation to create real systemic change in the medium and long term.

Thirty-two per cent of adults in Liverpool are food insecure, Liverpool is home to three of the 10 most economically deprived food deserts in England, only 12 per cent of youngsters aged 11 to 18 eat their five-a-day (NDNS 2021).

A survey of the menus of 26 per cent of nurseries in Liverpool found them all to be deficient in energy, carbohydrates, iron, and zinc.

Meanwhile, an estimated 140,000 tonnes of food is wasted in Liverpool City each year, producing approximately 368,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year, the equivalent of the CO2 produced by 80,033 cars in one year.

The Plan addresses key issues including acute hunger; chronic food insecurity; access to and take-up of healthy, nutritious food; and the sustainability of food supply in Liverpool, and is focused around five goals:

• Goal one: Good food at points of Crisis

We want to ensure people in crisis get access to good food quickly and easily.

• Goal two: Uncovering the True Scale of Food Insecurity

We want to better understand and document the scale and experiences of food insecurity.

• Goal three: Enabling Food Citizenship

We want to enable people to have the power, voice, resources and motivation to shape their local food environments and the food system as a whole.

• Goal four: Shifting Policy and Practice

We want to shift policy and practice to enable good food to flourish.

• Goal five: Connecting the Community

We want to bring together a community of people and organisations that have a part to play in achieving good food for all.

The Good Food Plan delivers part of one of Liverpool City Council’s Pandemic Pledges, ‘Good Food, Warm Home’, announced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It also supports Liverpool’s City Plan vision to create a “thriving sustainable, fair city for everyone” and builds on the existing and ongoing work of the Poverty Action Group and Liverpool’s Healthy Weight Declaration.

Liverpool’s Food Insecurity Task Force said that it “sees this time as a pivotal moment in history; a time of significant change and challenge that also presents a rare opportunity to “define what good food means to us”.