Social Permaculture: The Better Eat Better Movement

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We’ve been working on the The Better Eat Better project with 3Pumpkins’ Tak Takut Kids Club (TTKC) for just over a year. Using permaculture design methods, we’ve helped shape, identify and formulate spaces, strategies and systems for a site specific community kitchen and garden as well as food and health programme.

Permaculture design goes beyond agriculture and gardening. I’ve written about this before. It is not just about agriculture, shaping the land, building spaces or gardening. It is also about techniques, design solutions and strategies that address social, health and economic needs at a community level.

The Better Eat Better project presented us with the opportunity to practice social permaculture, which essentially involves applying principles and design methods to human systems and communities.

Figuring out how best to bring tangible permaculture design methods into the complex realm of shaping human relationships with food, their environment and health as a community, is what I’ve been delving into the past year.

Drawing Some Inspiration From Nature

We gain by looking to natural environments to model collaboration, co-existence and collaboration, essentially ‘the art and science of designing beneficial relationships.’ Nature shows us many examples of this in practice, below I’ve listed three such examples.

1. Adaptive Collaboration

Flocks of birds and schools of fish engage in collective decision-making to navigate their environments effectively. The coordination observed is not a result of a single leader dictating directions. Decisions and behaviour emerges from interactions between individuals. Each member of the group influences and responds to the movements of its neighbours, creating a dynamic and adaptive system.

Social permaculture draws from this by encouraging social learning; a way to communicate, share and learn in an informal but highly effective manner.

The community at Boon Lay Drive learns in the kitchen and garden through frequent and consistent activities planned at a set and predictable time. They learn from each other and communicate through various means, such as visual cues and hands on grow - cook - make - play - shop and share experiences. Doing these activities together in an applied manner enables the community of children and adults in the space alike to share information about the environment and make swift adaptations collectively. For example, there was a need for healthy snacks at the community kitchen during tea time. So to quickly tackle the problem everyone came together to see what could be prepared quickly, in an affordable way, with little manpower, that allowed for a healthy choice without compromising on taste and flavour. The solution? Everyone agreed upon nuts and fruits!

In this way, adaptive collaboration allowed us to push forth swift and easy solutions without compromising community health.

2. Open to Co-creation

In a forest, different plant species thrive in specific niches based on their strengths. Some plants excel in sunlight, while others flourish in the shade. Together, different species make up a resilient forest.

Similarly, social permaculture helps us identify and nurture the unique strengths of individuals within a community. For instance, enabling elders in the community who are passionate about healthy eating to lead baking and cooking in the kitchen. Or tasking natural communicators to facilitate dialogues with children as part of our participatory action research efforts.

And let’s not forget the children at TTKC themselves, raising their status and giving them a chance to bulk cook in the kitchen, shape the community garden and create content about food choices made everyday. Along the way this gives us insights into into lifestyle, time, environmental and economic patterns and realities that stand in the way of communities from making better food choices. Hence helping us better design our education programmes and initiatives.

3.Holistic Co-existence

The collaboration between coral polyps and algae is essential for the holistic health of a reef. It's not just about individual survival but about creating a thriving ecosystem. Coral polyps, provide the structural foundation by building intricate calcium carbonate skeletons. Simultaneously, algae, living within the coral tissues, engage in photosynthesis, convert sunlight into energy and provide crucial nutrients to the polyps. This mutually beneficial relationship is known as symbiosis.

On the ground we used holistic co-existence to look beyond individual well-being and work together to create a flourishing community that can adapt to challenges while maintaining overall health. I’ve always believed that health is not an individual but a community journey. Using this inspiration from nature we are creating a movement of children navigating through space and time at TTKC together to enable and influence each other towards better food eating habits on site.

Being Mindful and Site Specific is Critical

Applying permaculture to social systems involves fostering relationships and partnerships that go beyond immediate needs, creating a resilient and adaptable community that can thrive in the face of challenges and changes. We also must not parachute agendas. Social permaculture helps address challenges the community themselves recognise, prioritise and aspire to resolve.

In my next reflections and sharing about the Better Eat Better programme, I will talk about the power of a community garden in enabling children to make better food choices.