By Paula Pereira for FlyingWineWriter.com
Voedsel 1000 comes from G1000 which is a process where people can talk about different subjects and found out solutions. In this case, the theme is the food system in Brabant in the Netherlands. I attend this event in Den Bosch.
We start a simple conversation in a group of four and changed team over time. After the first round of questions, we made the group bigger to eight participants. The group has a producer, a professional, an inhabitant, a politician, education and NGO member.
The room is plenty of people (~1000) and every table has a computer screen. We work with Prezi presentations and make a layout of our conversation and ideas. I talk with pork and a milk producer. Later with many old people in the 70s or 80s. The most difficult for me is to remain tolerant with people who want to control the conversation, such people in politics for example. I notice that when I talk about the definition of health, everybody gave a high score to the quality of food as something almost 100% guaranty of health. I had to say that there is a genetical factor here that we have to take into account. Later, I remark that exist a cultural influence in the way we see health. At this point, I wonder why a woman found that cultural differences are not influencing the food system. It irritates me in the end. Anyway, the game consists of avoiding conflict and only say what we think about the subject without aggression.
The theme selected to talk in groups are health, awareness, education, innovation; circular, trust, sustainable; local and wildcard(unpredictable). All the Prezi presentations are online and free to see in the voedselforum, however, everything is in Dutch. The most popular Prezi presentations are related to honest price, knowing what we eat and circular economy.
Imagine. We start a discussion like this such “a wine forum”. If the questions about food in general are: How are we dealing with climate change? How are we maintaining clean air and soil? How can we produce healthy and tasty food; protecting animals and the environment?
We could ask: how is changing the way we produce wine in different countries? How are people reacting to the information they found about wine? What is the effect of climate change, information; online markets or politicians on price and consumption of wine?
We can investigate global or local. In The Netherlands, we have a platform online where people connect with each other and promote their business to potential consumers. The wine sector has many aspects that make it a very small group of people who really are educated and work in the sector. We have to understand the way people want to eat in the future.
I guess after this meeting that people want to eat healthy and at the same time pay a reasonable price. If the production of food becomes unsustainable and we still waste food, only by not implementing the right technology of the method of production, there will be a fail in the system. For wine consumers have to be almost the same line of thinking, however, many wine producers are selling their wines at lower prices, they should understand that for drinking wine you need certain knowledge for real appreciation. Otherways, it will not achieve the “standard of health” that people are looking for.
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