Dee Woods first got stuck into food activism after she was suddenly stripped of her disability benefits by the British government. Left raising two young children on very little money she thought that ‘as a community we can do something better than just the food bank’. So she co-founded the Granville Community Kitchen, which has blossomed into a garden, vegetable box scheme and all-round intercultural food hub in South Kilburn, northwest London. Dee is now involved in advocacy at a city, national and international level.
Stefanie Swanepoel is part of an organic farm project run by the ‘kos gangsters’, an all-woman group of farmers from the Ocean View township in Cape Town.1 Since starting up in 2019, the co-operative now grows vegetables like lettuces, tomatoes and beetroot, runs a café out of a renovated chicken coop and a bakery, and has a nursery of seedlings for home growers and gardens of wild food, indigenous medicine and herbs – all out of a 0.6-hectare plot. A writer, researcher and food systems expert, Stef explains how growing crops in Ocean View, ‘one of the most violent communities in South Africa’, helps heal trauma while filling bellies.
