Tuesday, 20 January 2026
Pam Warhurst talk on 18 years of Incredible Edible
The audience at the latest Lit & Sci talk might have felt overwhelmed had they read Pam Warhurst's CV beforehand. Someone serving on that many committees, spanning issues of such national and global importance, could easily be imagined as superhuman – and therefore a little removed from everyday life. How wrong we would have been.
From the moment she began to speak, Pam's simple, direct and powerful approach struck something deep inside us. She was one of us to the bone. Almost immediately, she seemed to say: stick with me – we're going on a journey. This is how I began a quiet revolution, and you can do the same, as long as you stick to your knitting.
Her message was disarmingly simple: this is me, and you are no different in what we want for our children and grandchildren. If you want to hear the story of what we did, let's crack on.
And we were off – on a race through eighteen years of Incredible Edible. It began with sketchy notes, about three spinning plates, on a Virgin Rail serviette, written on the way back from a talk by Tim Lang on food policy in London. That journey ended with Incredible Edible being named in the July 2025 Government Food Policy, alongside Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food, as a prime example of a community organisation, 'already working with citizens of all ages and backgrounds to develop growing and cooking skills.'
What we were witnessing was a masterclass in how change really happens: from the grassroots upward.
It was Pam's ability to tell stories about her passion that had us sitting up and taking notice. We could all have read hefty documents such as – Government Food Policies, The Right to Grow, the history of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, the Sustain Alliance papers, or the research of Les Levidow and colleagues on community food growing. But without Pam's gift for storytelling, without her tales of trail-blazing individuals and groups planting food on their streets and in public spaces, we would have been left swimming in a pool of noble words and worthy ideas.
Instead, we were given stories we will remember for years: how she and a few friends dug up a park corner that had been little more than a dog toilet; how raised beds outside a police station sparked an unexpected burst of community cohesion; how a woman in Glasgow defied an authority that blocked her right to grow by planting everything in wheelbarrows.
From these stories, Pam lit a fire. She pinned Todmorden on the map. Today there are more than 200 Incredible Edible groups across the UK and around 1,000 worldwide. She is always generous in crediting the friends who made it possible, but without her drive, those first three spinning plates might well have run out of momentum. Thank goodness she stuck to her knitting.
With many thanks to Roger Gill for this report
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