“Mindfulness here goes far beyond learning to chew our food slowly and taste it, although that’s a start. It means thinking of everyone who helped to bring it to us. It means thinking of all the non-human beings involved in creating our food, from soil bacteria to bees, and especially those whose lives we have taken for our food.” (Jane Powell)
Jane has been a food activist all her working life, looking for ways to grow and distribute food better for a healthier planet. She applies an extensive skillset including mindfulness to her work.
One of the ways that mindfulness can help us is by becoming aware and curious about our emotional reactions. Early on Jane discovered that doing too much in the wrong way led to disappointment. Her search for a deeper understanding took her to Buddhism which taught her how to trust that she is part of an interconnected world, and how not to get hooked by reactive patterns.
Keen to bring this perspective and tools to her public engagement with farming work, Jane realised that she wanted to find secular ways of expressing the wisdom she had found in Buddhism. She studied mindfulness with Breathworks and trained extensively in non-violent communication and other modalities.
Mindfulness invites us to slow down and contact a deeper, more embodied experience. Through Jane’s project called Food Values it became possible to talk about how strongly people want to see a world in which everyone has enough to eat. Jane discovered that events that included sharing food created an atmosphere of presence and embodied attention:
“We found that organising events around shared meals naturally had the effect of slowing conversations down and giving people a more embodied experience. I think that was a crucial part of the work actually, not just ‘talking about values’.”
This project grew into the Wales Food Manifesto, which later gave rise to the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference.
Mindfulness not only helps us to become aware, but it can also support our hearts to open to caring more about ourselves, about each other and our wider world. These same conversations about food revealed that drawing attention to these universal values of compassion, care and equality leads to the growth of the essential qualities of courage and confidence. The courage to turn towards what might happen to our food systems in the face of harvest failure or war. The confidence to find our way from plentiful supplies to the vulnerabilities of shortages and the potential horrors of starvation and societal breakdown.
Alongside these macro explorations and preparations, Jane experiences delightful micro steps that can happen for individuals when encouraged into connection and change:
“After a community meal, quiz and games for all ages in a primary school, a parent came up
to me and said with tears in her eyes, “My little girl always refuses to eat potatoes.
We have terrible fights. But today, she was enjoying herself so much she just forgot she didn’t like them and ate them all up. Thank you so much!” It wasn’t about the potatoes, of course.
It was about her child having a strong experience of being part of a bigger community
and forgetting herself in the process.” (Jane Powell)
To date Jane has worked with Welsh Government, the UN’s Conscious Food Systems Alliance, and many food organisations around the UK. A particular inspiration has been the Food Citizenship project. She is now working for the UNESCO Dyfi Biosphere which is a source of global connections.
Going forwards, she is setting up a charity along with others called CyFAN Cymru that will hold the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference and run other events as well.
In summary, Jane’s work with food is to point out the compassion and connectedness that already exist and find ways to strengthen it. Simple practical tasks like growing vegetables in schools become opportunities for personal and collective transformation. Applying mindfulness to such a core aspect of life as food shows how a practice can grow from learning to pay attention to actively supporting all to take some responsibility for how food is created, and to choose carefully what is bought and eaten. Then with every meal, we can be helping to create more health and connection in the world.
For further information go to:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-powell-food