Be Prepared: What Happened When Belfast Faced the Food Question
A personal reflection by Gawain Morrison, Co-Chair of Belfast Food Partnership and Co-Founder & Director of Brink!
On the evening of Wednesday 25th March, something shifted in the Great Hall at Queen's University Belfast. One hundred and fifty people gathered under the gothic vaulted ceiling of the Lanyon Building — not for a gala dinner, not for a graduation — but to talk about food. About hunger. About what happens when the system that feeds us fails.
Professor Tim Lang, one of the world's foremost food policy thinkers and author of UK’s National Preparedness Commission’s Just in Time report , had come to Belfast. And he had not come with comfortable news.
Professor Tim Lang presenting to the Imagine festival audience at the Lanyon building.
The UK, he reminded us, is only 54% food self-sufficient — one of the lowest rates in Europe. Ninety-four and a half percent of all retail food passes through just nine companies and 131 warehouses. A single disruption — a flood, a conflict, a cyber attack — and those supply lines buckle. There are no binding laws in this country requiring government to ensure people are fed. Current UK policy advises citizens to keep three days of food at home. What happens after three days?
A more important question should be how much do we think our familys’, our friends’, and our neighbours' lives are worth protecting? Would this shift the thinking to dealing with our broken food system today?
These are not abstract risks. In Northern Ireland, Trussell data tells us that one in five households experienced food insecurity in 2024. Not in a warzone. Not in a country experiencing famine. Here. Now. Among us.
This is why the evening felt so significant — and why it felt like more than just a talk at a festival.
Because alongside Professor Lang's address, Belfast Food Partnership used the moment to preview something that has been years in the making: The Belfast Way, a civic food strategy built through genuine cross-sector collaboration, developed with voices from across the city's food ecosystem — producers, community organisations, public health advocates, educators, chefs, activists.
The Belfast Way is not a wish list. It is a serious, actionable framework covering supply chain resilience, community food infrastructure, public procurement, and local producer support. It asks hard questions and offers considered answers. Reading it, you feel the weight of the work behind it — the meetings held, the relationships built, the compromises reached. It is exactly the kind of document that should be a city strategy.
And that is precisely the problem.
It isn't, yet.
Belfast Food Partnership is calling on DAERA and local & central government to recognise The Belfast Way as a model for civic food resilience across Northern Ireland, and to fund its delivery. That call deserves to be heard — loudly, and by the people with the power to act on it.
Professor Lang reminded us that food resilience is not a technical issue. It is a matter of democracy, of justice, of civic responsibility. A city that has invested years in building a strategy like The Belfast Way should not be left to implement it on goodwill alone. The infrastructure for a more resilient, more equitable food future exists in this document. What is needed now is the political will — and the funding — to bring it to life.
Beth Bell, Co-Chair of the Belfast Food Partnership, introducing Tim Lang
My co-chair Beth Bell, who chaired the evening's conversation with characteristic warmth and precision, put it well: the food system connects everything. Health, environment, economy, community, culture. What we grow, buy, cook and share is not peripheral to public life. It is at its very heart, and as Beth says regularly ‘without good options people can’t make good choices’,
Tim closed the evening by saying something that every politician should be saying ‘Whoever you are, we want you to be fed in a crisis’, and judging by the food statistics that we heard this evening, that crisis is well and truly with us.
Walking out of the Lanyon Building into a brisk Belfast night, I found myself thinking not about crisis — though the risks are real — but about possibility. About what it means that a city like ours has people who cared enough to build The Belfast Way. Who showed up on a cold wet Wednesday evening to have this conversation. Who refused to accept that food insecurity is simply how things are.
Belfast has a strategy. It has the partnerships. It has the will.
Now it needs the investment to match.
Read The Belfast Way food strategy and add your voice to the call for its funding.
Gawain Morrison, Co-Chair of Belfast Food Partnership and Co-Founder & Director of Brink!
Beth Bell, Co-Chair of Belfast Food Partnership, Deputy Director of the Food Ethics Council, and Co-Founder of Carrick Greengrocers
The "Be Prepared: Civil Food Resilience" event was part of Imagine! The Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics, hosted at the Great Hall, Lanyon Building, Queen's University Belfast on 25th March 2026. The event was organised in partnership with the Food Ethics Council and Belfast Food Partnership.