All these issues lead to significant health challenges since statistics from the Victorian population Health surveys show that only 5% of adults eat the recommended amount of fruit and veggies each day in Cardinia Shire, 70% eat takeaway meals each week and about a third of adults drink soft drink every day.
One in four adults are experiencing obesity and residents are experiencing high rates of diabetes, health disease and poor mental health. Tackling these complex challenges requires an innovative and cohesive response where all of the members of the community will need to play the role. Council is pleased to officially launch today the Cardinia Food Circle’s project, a collective impact approach to transforming our local food system. Many of the solutions to improving the community well being can be found by enhancing our local food system, so that everyone has access to affordable, nutritional food. Earlier this year Cardinia Shire’s livability plan was adopted by Council identifying food as one of the seven critical areas of focus to address in the health and social policy. And this is a very big in challenging in our community. Today’s forum has been based around 4 action areas that have been identified in this plan including land for food, and that’s where the food bowl kicks in. If we can have that preserve as a food bowl then they can’t leave housing in there, they can’t really subdivide the whole area and it will be preserved for that reason. Also too the local food, economy is a second area. Food literacy so people understand what they’re eating and hopefully they can make really good choices from that and recycling food and water to grow food.
