When 'Not Enough' Means It's Time to Share: Dr Lucy Wallace’s Episode

By Sandy Glanfield

This month I am going to a funeral. Black, head to toe. The unusual part is who we are burying: not a person, but a system. On 23 June, during London Climate Action Week, Dr Lucy Wallace is holding a funeral for the food system, and I will be there, taking it seriously and quietly delighting in the idea.

It sounds like a joke. It is also deadly serious, and that is the point.

I spoke to Lucy for this week's episode, Building Bridges in the Food System. She is a peace-builder, someone who has spent years in a sector she calls rife with conflict, coaxing people who disagree to sit at the same table.

It took me a moment to see how that connects to a funeral. The funeral is not about blame. There is no shortage of fingers to point about how we ended up with a system that feeds us without nourishing us, or the planet. But a funeral asks something different. It asks us to come together in loss rather than anger, to grieve the same thing in the same room.

That is its quiet cleverness. We have intellectualised our food system into reports and targets that are easy to nod along to and forget. A funeral makes you feel it instead. The obituary remembers anyone who has eaten a tomato that actually tasted of something. For me it is cucumbers that no longer taste of summer. You cannot put that loss in a spreadsheet. You can mourn it.

Here is what I keep turning over. So much of what is broken comes down to the fear of scarcity. There is not enough, so we close the doors and guard what is ours. It is very human, and incrementally disastrous.

But what if "not enough" were not a signal to hoard, but the moment to share? What if it were the point where we look honestly at what we have and ask how to make sure everyone has enough?

That is the thread in Lucy's work. Divided, we count our own resources and hold them close. Together, we can pool them, rebuild, do things differently. We all have a stake in this.

Underneath it sits an old idea, the one at the heart of what we do here: treat others, and the planet, as you would wish to be treated. Much of what has gone wrong is what happens when we forget it. Taken seriously, the rule means keeping a seat for the people we would rather shut out, and sharing when there is not enough rather than guarding our corner. It reaches beyond the room too, to those we will never meet, to those who come after us, to the soil and the climate. It is really a question of who we count as one of us.

That is why I am willing to dress in mourning and mean it. A funeral is an ending, but it clears the ground. You cannot reimagine a food system while still trying to revive the old one. You have to let it go first, together, and then ask what could grow in its place.

So I will see you there, if you are coming. I will be the one in black, a little tearful and oddly hopeful. Because the surprising thing about this funeral is what we might bring to life, once we stop pretending we can do any of this alone.