‘Growing your own’: a multi-level modelling approach to understanding personal food growing trends and motivations in Europe

Growing food for personal and family consumption is a significant global activity, but one that has received insufficient academic attention, particularly in developed countries. This paper uses data from the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) to address three areas of particular concern: the prevalence of growing your own food and how this has changed over time; the individual and household context in which growing takes place; and whether those who grow their own food are happier than those who do not. Results showed that there was a marked increase in growing your own food in Europe, in the period 2003–2007. This increase is largely associated with poorer households and thus, possibly, economic hardship. In the UK however the increase in growing your own food is predominantly associated with older middle class households. Across Europe, whether causal or not, those who grew their own were happier than those who did not. The paper therefore concludes that claims about the gentrification of growing your own may be premature. Despite contrary evidence from the UK, the dominant motive across Europe appears to be primarily economic — to reduce household expenditure whilst ensuring a supply of fresh food

Communicative practices in staff support of adults with intellectual disabilities

This chapter is about some of the ways in which adults with intellectual disabilities (such as, e.g. those with Down syndrome) communicate with those around them — most specifically, with staff who are charged with supporting them. Such staff help service users live independently, by overseeing their day-to-day household activities, arranging travel, planning leisure outings, and providing accompaniment to institutional appointments. In the United Kingdom (UK),1 recent government policy places great value on the activities of support staff in the promotion of choice, control, and empowerment. The Care Act 2014 (UK Government, 2014) placed a duty on local authorities to promote an individual’s well-being, which includes ‘control by the individual over day-to-day life (including over care and support)’ and ‘participation in work, education, training or recreation’. In doing this, the authority must have regard for ‘the individual’s wishes, views, feelings or beliefs’, with the individual ‘participating as fully as possible in decisions … and being provided with the information and support necessary to enable the individual to participate’

Mental health, nature work and social inclusion

In this paper the powerful relations between mental health and nature are explored with reference to past asylum horticultural practices and to contemporary community gardening schemes for people with mental-health problems in the United Kingdom. Through the use of archival evidence, alongside contemporary voices of experience, understandings of the therapeutic and social dimensions to nature work are outlined and deconstructed. It is argued that particular discourses concerning the powers of nature (work) in managing madness and mental-health problems are largely consistent across time and space (from the asylum to the community). However, in the contemporary era it is particular types of nature work that arguably contribute most directly to state agendas for social inclusion, and therefore to securing the place of people with mental-health problems in mainstream society. By briefly profiling the voices of staff and ‘volunteers’ from two urban garden schemes in England and Scotland, different experiences of garden work as ‘restorative’ and as ‘interventionist’ will be discussed. I conclude by evaluating how embodying and enacting gardening work act as a sustainable vehicle for new versions of social citizenship for people traditionally marginalised in mainstream society