The Lincolnshire Food Summit is an opportunity for organisations in the food system to come together to share inspiring practice, discuss key issues, and solve problems together.
This year’s summit brought together 100 food system stakeholders to explore civil food resilience, as a place-based response to the important Just in Case report by Prof Tim Lang.
Food Resilience means different things to different people: some are thinking about diversity in crops, diets or supply chains, others about the survival of their farming business or community organisation, others about how to get adequate food on the table for their households – how to afford and access healthy diets day to day.
But these issues are fundamentally connected, and fair, inclusive solutions to food resilience require us to see them as such.
The purpose of this year’s Lincolnshire Food Summit is to bring multiple conversations on food resilience into the same room, co-create a shared picture of the issues in Lincolnshire, and develop place-based responses together.
The Summit will be of particular relevance to those involved in the food system, from farming, retail and catering, through policy, education and health, to social food support, community kitchens and local growing projects.
What you told us
Local food infrastructure was the dominant call to action — delegates want food hubs in towns and villages across Lincolnshire (prioritising areas of food poverty), a Lincoln city food distribution hub, and closer links between farmers and communities.
Education was the second most cited area, with strong consensus that food growing and cooking should be embedded in schools from an early age, with paid school growers and chefs — and that community cooking and growing programmes need to include families and the wider community, too.
Cooperation and connection came through clearly — people feel that siloed working in government is a barrier to the systemic change that is needed. Locally, there’s is a recognised need for community spaces for food growing and cooking to be designed into urban environments. There was a strong appetite for more networking and events like this to happen more frequently, and across Lincolnshire.
Funding underpinned almost every other theme — for food hubs, school food, community projects and skills. In particular, people wanted training inagroecologicalfarming to take place on farms by farmers themselves.
Policy asks focused on prioritising food education in the curriculum, a dedicated cross-departmental Food Minister, and planning requirements to support community growing in urban areas — allotments and community gardens, and food space in new developments.
Links you asked for:
GoGro
Rob and Eamonn from GoGro made your delicious lunch. They also run educational and community workshops around Lincolnshire.
Lincolnshire bread
Grain of Truth bakery (baked the incredible range of bread at the Summit using wheat flour from John Turner)
The Inkpot Open Days
The first Saturday of every month 10AM-4PM:
-Farm tours 11AM and 1PM
-Refreshments: pulled beef baps, hot drinks & cakes
-Car parking available
-Toilet available (not an accessible one)
Eat Local Lincoln
Find out more and register your interest in the Lincoln community food project, based on the Planetary Health Diet, as discussed at the lunch table conversation hosted by Andrew Brown.
Middle World Farm
Opportunities for volunteering and work experience at Middle World Farm near Bardney, as well as a seasonal veg box collected from the farm or delivered in Lincoln area
Updates by email
You asked to hear more from the panelists, and actions arising from the event.
Programme & people
Keynote speakers
Sarah Bridle
Sarah is a Director of the AFN Network+ and Professor at the University of York. Sarah works on reducing the climate impacts of food and helping avert potential food system crises by climate and other events.
Dominic Watters
Dominic is a researcher and speaker on food insecurity, influencing policy from his own lived experience as a single dad on a council estate, and on behalf of seldom-heard communities facing the pain of poverty and food insecurity in the so-called “garden of England”. Dominic is founder of Food is Care CIC.
Potential Pathways and Solutions to Acute Food System Crisis in the UK, by Sarah Bridle et al can be found here.
Panel discussion: Diverse farming & supply routes
Hannah Thorogood – Chair
Hannah Thorogood is an Organic, Regenerative, Permaculture Farmer in South Lincs, at the Inkpot Organic Farm.
Hannah also teaches regenerative farming across the country at university level and is the regional manager for Pasture for Life, working with farmers across the country to support them to lower their inputs and become more regenerative.
Socials – @Inkpotfarm
Martin Taylor
Martin Taylor is Director and head grower at Middle World Farms – a bio-intensive CSA in Washingborough near Lincoln.
The farm supplies seasonal veg boxes to households in the area, and creates training and volunteer opportunities in nature-friendly horticulture.
John Turner
John Turner, and his son Jack, are organic farmers at Turners of Bytham, experimenting with diverse wheats and short supply routes.
Mathilda Dennis
Mathilda has been running Stenigot since 2024, an estate in the Lincolnshire Wolds, which has been Organic since 1997. It was a highly productive veg farm under Mathilda’s fathers management. Currently it is in transition to restore the Wold top to calcareous grass, providing diverse habitats and a more climate resilient system.
Stenigot has apple orchards, a community garden, asparagus, forestry, beef cattle and a beautiful chalk stream.
Panel discussion: Access to healthy diets & good food environments
Simon Hawking – Chair
Simon is a visionary leader in community-led social action, currently serving as the CEO of Acts Trust in Lincoln, which runs the Lincoln foodbank, Community Grocery, coordinates more than 300 volunteers and pioneers innovations like Night Light Cafes and the Restore programme. His work focuses on shifting the narrative from emergency aid to sustainable dignity, successfully reducing food bank dependency in Lincoln through strategic intervention and community-centric coaching.
Harriet Atkins
Harriet is the manager of the Grocery at the Open Door in Bardney
The Grocery is a not for profit eco project providing quality surplus food produce from our local supermarkets, farmers and community groups; avoiding landfill and filling our local village cupboards for a fraction of the price of their weekly shop.
Martin Walmsley
Head of Shared Revenues and Benefits for City of Lincoln Council and North Kesteven District Council, Martin has worked in Revenues and Benefits services for 30 years.
He has led initiatives relating to anti-poverty, welfare reforms and Universal Credit support, and has a passion to work with partners to alleviate food poverty and provide a range of holistic solutions to help people get the help they need. Working with food banks is a key component in this work.
David McAleavey
Dr David McAleavey is a behavioural scientist and public health spatial planner working across South Tees to align planning, transport planning, and public health.
He leads whole‑systems approaches that embed Health in All Policies, physical activity, and healthier food environments within spatial planning and local policy frameworks.
Lunch table conversations
Art & Culture as part of a just transition
What would happen if we approached the future of food through music?
Music is a traditional way to tell stories and recall important information about food – there are many songs about growing, harvest, preparation and eating. Music can bring these traditions into the present and future, breathing life into old songs with new arrangements.
Neuroscience tells us that music can increase people’s openness to new ideas and nudge them towards healthy food choices, whilst stories from climate action show that music bring different communities together to imagine the future. Gastrophysicist Charles Spence even calls sound “the forgotten flavour sense” – think of the crunch of a fresh lettuce, or fish and chips accompanied by the sounds of the sea.
So, what if music could help us to communicate in better, fairer ways about food, to grow a healthy, sustainable, and delicious future?
Jacob Thompson-Bell is a musician and researcher creating music and multimedia across live performances, releases, and installations. His work connects with ideas, people, and practices beyond music, most notably in food and ecology, in which he has led projects with a wide variety of collaborators, including Kenyan farmers, climate activists, and international food and drink brands. His music has been played on BBC Radio 3 and programmed in venues including Le Delta (Namur), Tramway (Glasgow), and Kings Place (London). Jacob is a founder member of multi-sensory food-music collective Unusual ingredients, and a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Lincoln, U.K, where he leads the Lincoln Centre for Ecological Justice.
https://jacobthompsonbell.com/
https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/law/research/lincolncentreforecologicaljustice/
School Food
Join Hannah Clark for an update on the proposed changes to the School Food Standards and a discussion on the current picture and future challenges facing Lincolnshire’s children, schools and caterers.
Having worked across various roles in schools for 14 years including Operations Management, Hannah joined Lincolnshire County Council’s Food Education Team in 2021.
The team supports Lincolnshire schools with all aspects of food including policy, provision and education.
Resilient chicken
Emma and Theo will be hosting a conversation about people’s experiences of vulnerability and resilience across different parts of the UK food system. Although their specific focus is the UK chicken industry, they welcome insights from a range of people, including farmers, growers, household food budgeters, and industry. Building on recent work, they will discuss how eating, growing, feeding, and managing chickens – in different ways – creates risks and opportunities. Some topics include animal feed, breeds, veterinary medicine, ultra-processed food, byproducts and waste.
Emma Roe FAcSS is a Professor in More-Than-Human Geographies at the University of Southampton and is the Lead of the TRI-SoMe Chicken project – Towards Resilient Industrial Socio-Metabolic relations. She is a cultural geography and an interdisciplinary social scientist with more than 20 years of studying industrialized livestock and meat systems in the UK, Europe and the Global South. Her conceptual work is grounded in understanding contexts that support practical ethics of care between humans, the animals that sustain them and the environment.
Theo Stanley is a social scientist at the University of Southampton. He has spent the last 18 months researching chicken feed, genetics, disease, and health.
Community Food Growing Forum
Exchange advice on growing, preserving, cooking, skill transfer, and advice that fits challenging contexts for community food production.
Mark Schofield is part of a community-centred charity that is trying to break out of food and green space poverty. He is a conservationist, previously working at PlantLife and Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, with expertise in wildlife ecology and creating wildflower meadows.
Eat Local Lincoln
“Eat Local Lincoln” aims to provide exactly the right amount of locally produced vegetables, with the recipes and other ingredients needed to make fresh, unprocessed, healthy meals – which are not just good for people and for the local economy, but which are also good for the planet, easy to cook, and striking the right balance of affordable for the consumer whilst respecting the needs of quality producers. He would welcome constructive feedback before the service launches, as well as input from local producers and others who might want to be involved.
Andrew Brown has a background in education and project management, but in recent years has moved more into local social and planet positive initiatives, in and around Lincoln.
Nudging sustainable diets
Applying nudge principles to promote sustainable food choices and improve dietary choices through habit formation and the use of social robots as an alternative platform for persuasion.
Aura Anderson-Ross is a PhD Student at the University of Lincoln funded by the SUSTAIN CDT focusing on using social robots as nudging agents to promote sustainable and greener dietary habits. Previously conducting an experiment in a university canteen showed the potential of robotic nudging agents with a stronger effect on consumers eating choices than posters.
The Civil Food Resilience theme for the Lincolnshire Food Summit 2026 is a response to the important Just in Case report by Professor Tim Lang, which you can find here.
£25 supporter tickets and £5 low-cost tickets also available