The Future is Local: Why it's Urgent to Localise our Food and How to Start a Food Swap

When the next storm hits, I don’t want to be in a supermarket aisle fighting with the masses. I want to be in community, in a shared garden, with real food, where there's plenty for everyone.

A photo by my sister Angela in the Sunshine Coast, QLD at Woolworths from March 2025.

Supermarket aisles devoid of humans. Shelves stripped bare. Fluorescent lights buzzing in a hollowed out space — the echo chamber of a broken food system.

This was the scene my sister stumbled into at Woolworths when she ducked in to do her regular grocery shop before Cyclone Alfred hit Queensland in March. Within 24 hours, the storm would be onshore. But the supermarket storm had already hit.

She was stunned — there wasn’t a single piece of fruit or veg on the shelves. People had panic-bought everything. She wasn’t there to stockpile or hoard, just to get what she needed to feed her family for the weekend. But the shelves were cleared, the energy was chaotic, and the place felt post-apocalyptic.

Because we’ve been here before. Remember the early days of the pandemic? In Melbourne, where I live, our local supermarkets looked like scenes from disaster movies. Shelves cleared of toilet paper first (ha), then pasta, rice, tampons, baby formula — anything vaguely essential to survival.

The panic. The fragility. The false sense of food security exposed.

Not to mention the floods in Queensland that have wiped out masses of livestock — devastating farmers and choking already-stressed supply lines. Natural disasters are no longer rare. They’re the rhythm now.

I haven’t set foot in a Coles or Woolies in years. I boycott the giants — the corporate duopoly that feeds us industrialised, plastic-wrapped, ultra-processed rubbish while bleeding our farmers dry. These conglomerates decide whether a banana is ‘too ugly’ to sell. They control supply, dictate price, and greenwash their way through exploitative practices.

This is not just a broken food system. It’s a violent one. It punishes the people who grow our food, it pollutes the land that sustains us, and it reduces us — consumers, women especially — to anxious scavengers, scrabbling for what’s left when the shelves are bare.

If we are reliant on a supply chain we don’t have control over, we are in serious strife as a human race.

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The Trauma of the Food System

And here's the part we rarely talk about:

Our food system is a cause of deep trauma. We’re so profoundly disconnected from our food that we don’t even realise the damage it’s doing — to our bodies, to our spirits, to our sense of place. Food travels thousands of kilometres to get to us, stripped of nutrients, stored in cold silence, wrapped in oil-based plastic. By the time it reaches our mouths, it contains no real nourishment.

We cannot heal ourselves without healing our food system.
And we cannot heal the food system without healing the land.

This week, I attended a community forum with Helena Norberg-Hodge — the author of Local is Our Future and producer of the brilliant film The Economics of Happiness. She’s been advocating for localisation over globalisation since 1975! Her message was urgent and clear: localisation is not just a nice idea. It’s our only chance.

So how do we do it?

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The Answer is Community

Community — from common and unity — means finding others with a shared vision, a shared hunger for something better. People who also believe that a localised food system is the antidote to this dystopian mess.

At our farm, Kookaburra Rise in Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula, we’re in the infant stages of a project to help make this vision real. We're removing invasive, sun-choking pine trees and pittosporum and expanding our garden to build a super-sized veggie patch and plant an orchard.

In the two years we’ve been here, we’ve grown enough for ourselves and for gifts to family and friends when they visit. It’s been a tiny gardening operation in comparison to our plans over the next year. Ric, my partner, says that we need excess produce before we can swap it, so we should just focus on that. I tell him: We can’t wait till we have ripe tomatoes to swap next season. We need to start building the community now.

Because how do we know what to grow unless we know who else is growing what? Maybe what we grow is what someone else lacks. Maybe the thing we think is small — a glut of basil, the proliferation of tomatoes — is the seed of connection to others with excess olive oil, apple cider or home-made wine?

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A Blue-Print for your Own Food Swap Community

So, I’ve drawn up a little plan to make it happen while we build Food Forest 2.0. Here’s what we’re planning, and have begun doing — and what you could do to start your own localised food system:

Eat seasonally, buy locally - start now to educate yourself, eat what’s in season and buy locally from the little guys, the small businesses who are the backbone of community.

Create a vision — ours is grounded in our manifesto line: “Beyond our own land, we dream of a thriving, self-sufficient community across Red Hill—one that barters, shares, and sustains itself with the gifts of nature.”

Map the district — research who, within a 10km or so radius, is growing food, and make contact to ask if they’d be open to getting involved in a local food swap.

Find the existing food communities — are there already food swaps or community initiatives nearby that we can join or learn from?

Study what’s working — look to other regions in Australia where this is happening well (ie Community Supported Agriculture) and see how we can adapt their models.

Start organising — build a working group of locals, a committee, who want to co-create and drive this initiative forward.

Attend local markets - attend the local farmers markets and speak to vendors about their experiences and ideas.

Learn by joining other local communities — for example, I’m volunteering at our local Red Hill Op Shop to help out, and understand what makes it such a success.

Friend-raise before fundraise — build interest and demand from the community (at least 20 or so people) before exploring funding options.

Talk to council — to see what support or funding might exist for grassroots, localised food systems. Could this become a blue-print for them in other districts?

Find a home — maybe there’s an old hall or underused community space ready to be transformed into a hub for local food exchange.

Prioritise equity — explore how excess food could be made available to those in our area who are struggling, food banks and other charities.

And I am sure there are plenty of other things to add to this list. Please comment here if you have ideas, connections, links, knowledge to share.

I am all too aware, that the vast majority of people don’t have the privilege of large tracts of land to grow food on. You might be saying ‘it’s all very well and good for you, but I don’t have the land or the community connections’. But everywhere you look, there is land to grow food. From apartment balconies to footpaths bearing useless dead grass, to empty corner blocks, to parks and community gardens. And everywhere, there are people struggling, hungering for community.

Food can be grown everywhere and anywhere. All it needs is the will and some creative thinking — and a handful of humans who care as much as you.

Because when the next storm comes — and it will — I don’t want to be fighting with the masses in the echo chamber of an empty supermarket.

I want to be in community, in a shared garden, with real food, where there's plenty for everyone.

We’ve survived the pandemic of Covid.
But will the next pandemic be one of food scarcity?

A pandemic not of viruses, but of empty shelves, collapsing soil systems, and the loneliness of disconnection from the land.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The solution is already growing — in backyards, balconies, veggie beds, shared plots, and neighbourly chats.

Let’s feed the future. Together.

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Carolyn Tate is an author, educator and community-builder who writes to advance the rights of women, nature and the environment. This Between Two Hills Substack publication is FREE and delivered bi-weekly. If you like what you read, please support her work by sharing it with a friend.