This Project is about the creation and use of a series of 10-12 archetypal Birmingham households. Their purpose is to enable us to create ‘narrativium’ scenarios, grounded by evidence-based work, to engage different audiences with aspects of the food system and the challenges generates for planetary as well as human health.
We envisage this work will contribute to other projects in identifying the impact of existing and emerging stresses, degradations and failures in city’s food supply system.
We have currently completed the first two stages, and are now applying for funding for the third ‘narrativium’ stage.
The first stage was a survey of relevant data sets:
- Birmingham City Council demographic census data which is here.
- The National Diet and Nutrition Survey
And because there’s evidence the Millennial generation, in the States at least, are making different choices than earlier generations:
- The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service report Food purchase decisions of Millennial households compared to other generations (Dec 2017)
- in the context of this blogpost by NatCen, about the NDNS and teenager diet: http://natcen.ac.uk/blog/
discovering-diet-and- exploring-eating-with-uk- teenagers
note: Re the US data, there is also:
- Eve Turow Paul’s presentation on the topic at the Oxford Farming Conference 2018:
https://www.ofc.org.uk/sites/ofc/files/papers/Eve%20Turow% 20Paul.pdf - And this blogpost by her: Generation Yum
The second stage was to create 10-12 households. Think of them like the sketches of different households you see in the media after the Chancellor’s budget, there to illustrate the effects of it on different demographic and social groups.
We’re embarking on the third stage; i.e. the planning and design of some form of ‘narrativium’ which will interweave these different characters we’ve devised into a series of A Day in the Life of 10-12 real households by oral historians with visual interpretations, culminating in an arts instalment at Ort Gallery.