Whether in its politics, ethical businesses, community activism or the arts, Brighton and Hove has built a reputation as a progressive city, a city willing to ask questions about the future.
The three-day BrightonFoodStory festival starting on 2 October will carry on this tradition. It will be an idea-led event designed to change the conversation around food and provoke a civic-minded, inclusive buy-in to the developing food strategy of the city.
With ambitious plans for the festival already well advanced this seems a good time to explore what a food strategy for a progressive city might look like when its residents and its tourists can become part of the change they want to see.
Food has always been part of the Brighton and Hove story and there is already an especially vibrant food culture in the town. You can see this on any Saturday morning in the Open Market where local vegetables sit alongside artisan bread, Sussex cheeses and fresh coffee.
Across the city, independent cafés and restaurants champion seasonal produce, while community gardens, allotments and food-growing projects flourish in neighbourhoods from Moulsecombe to Hove. Beyond the suburbs lie the South Downs and the productive farmland of Sussex, landscapes that have shaped the region’s food for centuries.
A prosperous city but with many challenges
Yet Brighton and Hove also reflect the challenges facing every modern city. Food insecurity remains a reality for many households. Farmers face economic uncertainty. Nature continues to decline. Climate change is already affecting the landscapes that surround us, while diet-related illness places growing pressure on public health.
What do we do with the waste we generate (and something like a third of all food produced is lost or spoiled somewhere along the way)? Every meal we eat connects us to an extraordinarily complex network stretching from our local fields to global supply chains.
Climate:Change, the Brighton and Hove think tank, has been exploring the role that the city’s food system plays in our response to the climate emergency and it seems the deeper we look, the more we can see how the food system quietly shapes almost every aspect of city life. Food connects climate and biodiversity, certainly, but also health, education, business, planning, transport, waste, inequality and community resilience.
You might think we were studying food. Actually we are studying Brighton and Hove.
The three pillars: a window into the city
Climate:Change’s brief is essentially to help accelerate the transition towards an environmentally sustainable and socially just future through a Brighton-based lens.
Much of the analysis begins with carbon. But as the work has developed, so the thinking has evolved. It’s understood that food systems account for around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions but as we consider the food system, we are led from farming to land use and from land use to biodiversity which is linked to public health then to schools and hospitals. Big institutions lead us to procurement and waste, and supply chains and economics. And from there to politics.
Clearly food is much more than an environmental topic. It is a window into the way a city organises itself.
The city is fed through three principal channels, each with its own strengths, challenges and opportunities.
The first—and by far the largest—is the food we buy for ourselves. Everyday tens of thousands of households are served by supermarkets which supply most of what people eat. The scale, logistics and purchasing power of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Aldi et al have transformed food retailing over the past fifty years, providing extraordinary choice and helping to keep food affordable for millions of people, notwithstanding the continuing pressures on household budgets. There are many independent shops too, but supermarkets are an indispensable part of everyday life and will remain central to Brighton’s food future.
The second channel is institutional catering. The schools, the hospitals, the two universities, the care homes and several large employers collectively serve many thousands of meals every day. Although less visible than supermarkets, these organisations possess enormous purchasing power and have a huge impact on what many people eat.
The third channel is the hospitality sector. From independent cafés in the North Laine to neighbourhood pubs and award-winning restaurants and street food vendors, hospitality is woven into the city’s identity. There are some 1200 commercial establishments in the city and they attract outside visitors, create employment and pioneer new ideas in sourcing, menus and sustainability.
These three pillars of the food system are interconnected. Farmers can supply supermarkets, wholesalers and restaurants, possibly at the same time. Schools and universities educate future chefs and food scientists while buying food for thousands of students. Consumer demand influences supermarket shelves.
Too often debates about food set one part of the system against another: local food against supermarkets, business against community, public against private. We need to get beyond this. Brighton and Hove’s food system will only become healthier, fairer and more sustainable if all three pillars evolve together.
The challenge is to harness the strengths of each, building stronger relationships between them so they support healthier people, build a stronger local economy and enable a thriving natural environment. And also help get the carbon emissions down.
Creating a sustainable future
So how do we achieve this? Brighton already possesses extraordinary knowledge, creativity and commitment, and many organisations working to design a more sustainable food system. What is needed now is not simply more research or individual projects, but stronger relationships and a shared understanding of the opportunities that already exist.
Brighton and Hove City Council has a key role here, with more power than people realise. The Council can use its role as buyer, convener, planner, and public health authority to start to reshape demand at scale. If the council can coordinate effectively, it can shift the city and county food economy without directly regulating it.
This is not an unrealistic vision. Some of it is already happening but the challenge is to connect the dots. Brighton and Hove must become known not simply as a city that talks about sustainability, but as one that demonstrates what it looks like in practice, a pathfinder for other cities in the UK and across Europe whose ambition is create a sustainable future for themselves.
The author is the Food Lead at Climate:Change, Brighton.
BrightonFoodStory will run Oct 2-4 2026. On Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th, New Road will be transformed into “a smorgasmord of talent and taste” as the best of our restaurants take to the street to show us what great food can do to raise the game in hospitality, reduce the carbon footprint and build a circular economy in the city.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
