Inspired by the Fife Diet there are moves to get folk in Edinburgh munching on a Forth Diet.

An initial meeting about the Forth Diet project will be taking place at the Quaker Meeting House on Victoria Terrace in Edinburgh on Saturday 14 November 2.30 - 4.30pm AND Monday 16 November 3 - 5pm. You can find more details on this below.

A Forth Diet would be about
• eating food that comes from near where we live. Pretty radical, eh?
• appreciating the food that has links to our land, our coasts, our history, our culture. Best way we've found to appreciate food is to find it and eat it.
• discovering the food we want to eat that isn't easily available locally. Maybe we can do something about that.
• making friends with the artisans, small-scale food producers, dedicated farmers, organic growers, local shops, restaurants, schools and community projects that already work with local food.
• giving business to the above and creating a demand for their produce, thus helping to sustain local food networks. We believe that many people are looking for an alternative model to the huge, complex pan-global distribution network that dominates our food growing and purchasing at the moment. Oh, and the huge, complex, pan-global thingy is also dysfunctional and unsustainable, so eating locally is likely to become an imperative. No harm in getting a bit of practice in.
• cutting carbon on a personal, community and regional level. You change your eco-friendly lightbulbs once every 10,000 hours, you put out recycling once a week, and you eat three times a day. Eating is relevant to climate change.

A Forth Diet would NOT be about
• eating turnips all the time. Unless you really want to.
• cutting out things you really like eating and drinking, like coffee and chocolate. You may find you discover small local specialists who have even better coffee and chocolate. We're not banning foods. Let's eat and enjoy what we do have around us and buy in what we can't grow but can afford to trade, fairly. 
• Hitting targets. The guys doing the Fife Diet reckon they got close to 80% local food in their diet. But we don't want to set rules. The Forth Diet is about helping to increase the local supply of things you want to eat, as well as introducing you to the food that should be most readily available, but bizarrely isn't. The Forth Diet will be about eating more local food than you do at present. Take it as far as you want and as far as you can.
• Spending more money. Again, the evidence from the Fife folk is that they spent considerably LESS money on food. What they found was that they wasted a lot less food, used what they bought more constructively and stopped buying the same thing week in week out from the supermarket. They did spend more time preparing food. We've heard that some people actually quite like spending time preparing food. Believe it or not, we've even heard that some people prefer preparing food for real than watching it happen on TV.
• eating a boring diet. After all, the only things growning in all of the Borders, Lothians, Fife and Forth Valley are turnips.

You can follow the Forth Diet for a week, a month, a year or just try a meal. We intend to develop a community around the folk following a Forth Diet to share recipes, resources such as good places to buy, tips on seasonal eating and ideas that drift in from other local eating projects around the world. We're not alone, you know. We'll organise meals, cooking demos and events to let more people find out what we're up to. With sufficient support we'll be able to tap into funding which would begin to bolster the project with practical structural support such as distribution hubs, local transportation, community fruit and vegetable gardens, teachers and educational resources.

We'll be launching the Forth Diet officially in spring 2010. If you want to start eating locally right away, please just do so. Tell us that you're joining in and please stay in touch on info@slowfoodedinburgh.co.uk. If you can, keep a food diary so that we can share challenges, solutions, useful shops, great recipes and handy hints with others who want to be part of it.

Forth Diet Meeting

Please join us on the 14th and/or 16th of November to find out about - and feed into - the proposed Forth Diet. The 'Forth Diet' (our working name for the project) aims to bring together those that produce, distribute, prepare, sell and eat food locally to develop ways of significantly increasing the availability of local, low carbon food across Edinburgh and the surrounding areas.

We are hoping to bring together as many interested people as possible, to get more feedback on the proposal and to gauge levels of interest. We hope very much you will be able to attend this meeting and would be most grateful if you would forward this invitation onto any other local producers, retailers, community groups or foodies you think may be interested.

When:  Saturday 14 November 2.30 - 4.30pm AND Monday 16 November 3 - 5pm

Two meetings - one during the working day and another at the weekend - so that both those coming in a voluntary and professional capacity can attend.

Where: The Quaker Meeting House, Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh

What:  An informal meeting to learn more about - and feed into plans for - the 'Forth Diet' proposal.

You can expect the meeting to tell you:
- What the project outline looks like at this stage, and what that might mean in practical terms
- What the organisational structures might look like
- What an associated funding bid could consist of
- Where this fits into the bigger picture

We'd like to find out:
- What you think of the proposal
- Any additions, changes, opportunities or challenges you can see
- How the project could link in with, support or learn from your existing work
- How you or your organisation might like to be involved, for example:
    ◦    You might just want to be be kept in the loop with what the project is doing?
    ◦    You might like to become a 'project supporter', without (necessarily) committing to developing it?
    ◦    You might like to join the core working group and contribute time / expertise to help make it happen?

The 'Forth Diet' is an exciting and unprecedented opportunity to create a critical mass to help transform our food system, the role food plays in our lives and communities and our collective futures on the planet!

If you do intend to come along, please email info@slowfoodedinburgh.co.uk so we have a sense of numbers.

Please use the same email if you have any queries or questions.

Thanks,

on behalf of the 'Forth Diet' working group, including:
Out of the Blue
PEDAL
Slow Food Edinburgh
Transition Edinburgh
Transition Edinburgh South
Transition Edinburgh University
Whitmuir Organics

Meanwhile, here's the Fife Diet's top 5 reasons for eating locally…

1. YOUR FOOD WILL BE FRESHER AND TASTE BETTER: Food that you buy locally has often been picked within the last 24 hours. In contrast, supermarkets have to store and keep food in transit for days or weeks.

2.YOU WILL SAVE MONEY: every time you go to the supermarket you buy stuff you really don’t need, then put in the bin a few days later.

3.YOU’LL BE HEALTHIER: eating seasonal, fresh unprocessed food is packed full of vitamins and minerals, free from harmful preservatives and good for you.

4.YOU WILL REDUCE YOUR FOOD MILES: food miles are the distance travelled between food being grown and it appearing on your plate. A recent investigation found that of 20 fresh items bought in a supermarket, each travelled 5,000 miles. This is a serious but preventable cause of climate change.

5. YOU ARE SUPPORTING THE LOCAL COMMUNITY. A pound spent locally generates twice as much income for the local economy.