Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Pam Warhurst, fully Pamela Janice Warhurst

British Community Leader, Activist and Environment Worker known for Founding the Voluntary Gardening Initiative "Incredible Edible"

"I wondered if it was possible to take a town like Todmorden and focus on local food to re-engage people with the planet we live on, create the sort of shifts in behavior we need to live within the resources we have, stop us thinking like dis-empowered victims and to start taking responsibility for our own futures."

"Can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture? … Yes, and the language would appear to be food."

"There's so many people that don't really recognize a vegetable unless it's in a bit of plastic with an instruction packet on the top."

"Incredible Edible is trying to do a number of things. It’s trying to reconnect communities using food as the medium. It’s trying to re-skill communities using local food, and it’s trying to stimulate economic opportunities, no matter how modest, again with a focus on local food."

"Local economies really matter. Sticky money really matters. People love to spend money on food, if they’ve got it. Visitors to a town love to seek out what’s local and special."

"It’s the first response [food banks], not the final response. It cannot be the only way you want to do these things. Increasingly I think many people are seeing their work complementing that of the food bank. What we would want to do, and our relationship with the food bank, and we haven’t got a very proactive one at the moment, but we’re working one up, is to do what a lot of communities are doing, which is to say, this is the box of food. What we want to do is come in and help people make that go further or allow them over time to substitute what they’re doing themselves for the things they have to ask other people for, and make themselves more self-sufficient and more proud of what they're able to achieve."

"For me, what’s really important if we are to reconnect people long term to the environment, to a more sustainable approach to living without having used those words, which is the long term goal, local economies allow you to make financial decisions locally that take on board social and environmental impacts. They just do! It’s a no-brainer. You don’t want to poison your kids, you don’t want to live surrounded by polluted land. All these things will come, as people start to understand that they have the means of change in their own hands. So for me, that whole idea of institutional detachment impacting on our lives, you break that down with local economies. So the long answer, because it’s a long-term project, it’s a forever project, Incredible Edible. I do think it helps us put in place the things that in 10 or 20 years’ time, we will say, thank God we started to do that 20 years ago."

"We’re interested in lost arts, it’s about taking that to the next stage and saying “we used to be able to make bread. We used to be able to make pickles and jams and know what to bottle when. So why don’t we find the folks who can teach the neighbors? Why don’t we roll out a Come Dine With Me program, where people are invited in on the estates and we make something really simple?” That’s the informal bit."

"Human beings are amazing in their ability to rise to a challenge. The upside of austerity if there is one, is absolutely not for those experiencing it, but for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, get off your backsides and do something about it. Incredible Edible is one way that people can do that. "

"Through an organic process, through an increasing recognition of the power of small actions, we're starting to believe in ourselves again; and to believe in our capacity - each and every one of us - to build a different and a kinder future."