Across the UK, food is failing too many people. Children are growing up on ultra-processed meals, diet-related illness is rising sharply, and the everyday skills of healthy, affordable cooking are being lost. However, Wales offers hope of a better approach.
Cegin y Bobl is a young, pioneering charity: the name is Welsh for The People’s Kitchen. It has a big vision of strengthening local communities, and a clear game plan of achieving this by using food as a catalyst. Cegin by Bobl’s approaches have been validated by successful pilot programmes in Carmarthenshire, and they are seeking funds to scale up substantially.
Cegin y Bobl’s vision is ambitious but practical: a Wales where everyone has the knowledge and skills to feed themselves healthy, delicious food. Achieving this does not depend on persuading people what to think, but on enabling them to act. The charity works through a range of hands-on programmes with children, families, educators and communities, all based on practical cooking and shared learning.
Carwyn Graves, a co-founder and prime mover in Cegin y Bobl, explains “We aim to create radical change in a food system which is currently focussed on ultra-processed food with little nutritional value. We recognised that the Welsh Government’s funding of free school meals for primary schools gave us an opening.”
Cegin y Bobl is guided by a diverse team of chefs, teachers, educators and organisers, many with national-level experience in food, hospitality and education. They have created a set of recipes which provide tasty, fresh meals from organic ingredients for the Welsh Government’s budget of £2.31 per meal per child. I have eaten one of their sample meals, prepared in a village hall kitchen for seventy people, and it was delicious.
Carwyn explains further: “Currently, most school kitchens are just reheating cheap ready-made meals, and that’s what the staff and the children are used to. We realised that system change means involving everyone: cooking staff, teachers, kids and parents. And the best way to do this is participatively.” Cegin y Bobl’s Food Discovery programmes take primary schoolchildren on a six-week training to discover the world of healthy, fresh, seasonal food by cooking meals from scratch. Simon Wright, award-winning chef and Strategy Director for Cegin y Bobl, says, “It’s high-wire stuff, teaching a roomful of small kids to use sharp knives and open flames, but they love it, they’re sensible and they learn fast.”
The climax of the six-week programme is a meal produced by the children for their parents. This enables the healthy food conversation to move into the whole local community, and helps adults to realise the problems of mainstream food both in the school and in the family.
As a result of these programmes, families report cooking more from scratch, and using more fresh healthy ingredients. Alongside this, Cegin y Bobl works with partners to deliver tailored workshops responding to local needs, from early years nutrition to links between food, mental health and wellbeing.
These themes are explored powerfully in the writing of Carwyn Graves, a co-founder of Cegin y Bobl, whose work traces the deep relationship between Welsh landscapes, food cultures and ways of life. His book Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape offers a reminder that many sustainable practices are not innovations, but recoveries. See my blog.
Wales offers unusually fertile ground for this work. The Well-being of Future Generations Act, the new Curriculum for Wales, free school meals in primary schools, and emerging local procurement pilots all point towards a more integrated approach to food. The Welsh Government is taking the food security risk seriously (see more here), and initiatives like Cegin y Bobl can contribute a lot to food resilience if they are scaled up and rolled out across Wales.