What's outside the food movement bubble and why should we care?

After reading far too many 2017 trend round ups, our co-founder Alex decided to dish up some of the big picture stuff happening outside the Youth Food Movement bubble with our volunteers all over Australia. We wanted to share it beyond, because we don't want to stay within our bubble. We've seen what happens in the last year when bubbles get really comfortable, and then they bursts (loudly). Big thinkers are starting to talk about a new currency: social trust. This is the fabric of society that makes the economy keep ticking over. It’s the permission we give each other to play the role we have in the food system. Ministers and bureaucrats across Australia are talking about it a lot (dairy farmers think about it A LOT, so do NSW and the CSIRO).Excitingly, Australia has high levels compared to countries like the US or UK, yay! This episode of Freakonomics covers it well. Reading all of this was like a big mental high five because our work is all about building social trust in a better food system. Go us!But before we get ahead of ourselves I need to tell you we’re in a bubble. This is sometimes hard to remember in the face of curated Facebook feeds: not everyone cares about food as much as we do. And before you get all devo and give up, one thing we love about the world and want more of is diversity. The silver lining is that many people care about something (which is way better than caring about nothing).This video gives a good snapshot of consumer trends for 2017, and food totally makes the cut (at 16.10sec). Knowing what other people care about means we can tap into that and help them to see food, ingredients, cooking, growing in the same way they do refugees, technology, ethical fashion and sport.And finally, pop your bubbling beverage of choice because we just crunched our numbers and last year we directly touched the lives of over 91,225 people! This isn’t counting social media passive scrollers. This is people who read something of ours, or listened to us speak, or volunteered, or worked with us in some way.Here's to a world where a healthy food system is the default, not the alternative.Image credit: Nikki To