The Soil Association led Food For Life Partnership has been awarded the prestigious BBC Radio 4 Derek Cooper Award.
The award recognises “unsung heroes, whose work has increased our access to, and knowledge and appreciation of, good food”.
For five years the Soil Association and its three partners in the project – Health Education Trust, Garden Organic and Focus on Food Campaign – have been working with schools and communities across England to transform their food cultures,.
Sheila Dillon, presenter of The Food Programme and host of the awards ceremony in Birmingham, has described the Food for Life Partnership as “the most important food project in Europe”. Speaking in the Summer she described the impact of the Partnership’s work: “For years, for decades, we’ve been looking for this golden way of changing attitudes to food. The Food for Life Partnership has changed things, it’s remarkable. It seems to me that if we lost what the Food for Life Partnership has achieved it would not only be a disaster for the schools and the children, it would be a disaster for the entire British society.”
Reading-based True Food Co-op, which operates a shop and several mobile markets in local community centres, won Best Retail Initiative.
