The Comb Lab letter : Food from the Combrailles (Alimentation Origine Combrailles — AOC)

After months of preparation, Comb Lab is getting ready to set up its stand at the Combrailles Food Forum on Saturday 17 May in Saint Gervais d’Auvergne. This event, the first in what we hope will be a long-running series, has been appropriately named Alimentation Origine Combrailles – AOC. The aim of the day is to bring local producers and consumers closer together, in other words to encourage – in Combrailles as elsewhere – local distribution channels to ensure that everyone has access to a satisfactory quantity and quality of food.

We see this AOC forum as having a dual significance:

• On the one hand, it serves as a showcase for the Combrailles Territorial Food Programme (PAT), There is a plan to set up an inter-PAT scientific research group in the Puy-de-Dôme, as three such programmes are currently underway in the department.

• On the other hand, it’s not lost on anyone that the inflation in food prices, the faltering of the hypermarket business model, the back-and-forth over the artificialisation of farmland, the recent call for help from the Restos du cœur to replenish their coffers – in short, all these circumstances highlight the growing pressure affecting food security.

To put it more bluntly, the safety or guarantee of food safety is at stake. Despite climate change, devastating health and weather events and volatile energy markets, the need to eat persists!

In practical terms, we see this forum as a major opportunity to :

• Bring local producers and local residents together for discussions;

• Emphasise the irreducible nature of food: availability and satisfaction in terms of both quantity and quality;

• Understand that the way people buy food differs when they have a large budget, or when they are counting every centime, or when they are using food aid. Hence the silliness of using the expression « those people » to refer to those whose food-buying strategies are based on different rationales from our own.

From one edition of the forum to the next, Comb Lab, with its partners, will be running citizen workshops focusing in particular on the interactions between soil health, food production and local vitality at a time of environmental uncertainty, when human intelligence is being pitted against self-learning machines, and when the rule of law is being challenged out of hand.

To kick-start this process, we’ll be running three sessions of ‘serious games’ on our stand, for young and old alike. Three opportunities to bring forum visitors together to explore the interactions between food and regional dynamics from three angles:

• The health of the soil, which provides the proteins, carbohydrates and lipids essential to the organic life of individuals and societies;

• Human health (eating properly) in relation to the overall health of all living things in the biosphere;

• The energy cycle: soil quality and culinary know-how enable the microbiota to transform food into energy, which is partly used to care for the soil and maintain the vitality of living organisms.

Everything fits together. Hence the importance of capturing the fears, hopes and expectations of citizens in order to enrich the political choices that determine local development. To achieve this objective, Comb Lab works closely with the life sciences and the humanities.