But how to do it? There didn’t seem to be much in the way of political leadership from the big parties, particularly around the environment. So I thought it might be worth seeing if we could create a model town in my home town: Todmorden in West Yorkshire. I got together with my friend Mary to see if we could make the town, which has a population of 15,000, significantly self-sufficient in food, in the process promoting environmental awareness, greater resilience and a worthwhile legacy to our children.

For us, it was a question of finding a way to make these issues and changes accessible to ordinary people. So we built it round the idea of ‘local food’ - it was what we called our Trojan horse. And we thought about who we would try to involve, and how we would do it, through three things: community, learning and business. We like to explain what we do through the image of a plate-spinning show: everyone can spin their own plate, and each individual plate is interesting and worthwhile in itself, but only if you spin all three plates do you get a ‘show’: a sustainable community.

We think that is something people are now ready for, taking control of their own lives to some extent. People don’t want to wait for someone else to do this and they do want to contribute something from their own experience to make life better for themselves and their kids. It’s been the most exciting bit of work I’ve done for a very long time.

This is an entirely bottom-up initiative. We couldn’t wait for either money or approval from anyone else. What we wanted to show was that a community working on its own could get a heck of a long way in a short time. The principle we’ve adopted is: let us, as a community, get on with what we want to do, whether it’s as a farmer, a shopkeeper, a teacher or a parent. Where we have approached local government for help, it’s not been on the basis of going cap-in-hand for cash, but on the basis of getting more land to grow food and getting access to council publications to advertise what we do.

For example, six months in, we went to the council and asked for more land. The council did a survey, found out what they owned and whether it was being used or not. Then, the council created the first-ever community licence for land. Now, a street just needs to turn itself into an association of some kind, give the council a tenner for the licence, and then take on the running of that land for the purpose of growing food. It’s not permanent - the council can always take the land back later - but in the meantime we can use it. Forget waiting lists for allotments - find a bit of land, get permission, and grow on it.

The most successful of our ‘plates’ has been the community work. We wanted to create a cultural shift where people grew food in their own gardens rather than thinking it’s all too difficult. The problem is that we’ve had two generations now who are disconnected from the land. Grandparents know how to grow food, but the current crop of parents and children don’t. So we started with ‘propaganda gardening’, growing food on pieces of land in prominent, town-centre positions: verges, derelict sites, whatever it might be. This really captured people’s imaginations, and we had some great leaders there who cleared land, planted herbs and vegetables, built raised beds where the land wasn’t good enough, and so on.

We are not saying that you can feed a whole community just by doing that kind of thing. But we’re trying to stimulate debate, and get across to people that they can actually do it themselves. People are seeing food growing around town and getting used to the idea of taking it home with them. It’s trying to set up a notion of mutual exchange: ‘I’m growing this food, and you can just have it for free. But why don’t you trying growing something to share, too?’ It’s all about creating an ethos of community and sharing.

It’s had a positive impact on the area, too. Despite assumptions to the contrary, these growing areas are not vandalised. On the contrary, these were often bits of land that were neglected. Now they are no longer dog toilets or beer-can dumps, but attractive places that people are used to going to get their veg. Mary has been at the forefront of this by making her own front garden a place where people know they can come along and get vegetables. It’s also kicked off an environmental debate, because people then wonder about the pollutants from cars and what it means for the food we grow. So even though we didn’t start the project to have a discussion about the local environment, that discussion has arisen naturally as a consequence.

Now we’re doing seed swaps, we’ve got courses starting on how to grow things, we’re encouraging people to be community champions. We’re working with the local social housing organisation, Pennine Housing, to go to the estates, do roadshows, talk about what it could mean for everyone. Anyone who has ever watched Jamie Oliver cooking with food from his own garden could be doing exactly the same thing themselves.

We’ve recently had a new polyclinic - a kind of large, expanded doctor’s surgery with lots of extra services - opened in the middle of town. As usual, it had a few plant beds around it full of prickly shrubs. With a bit of negotiation with the council, the developers and after getting planning permission, we took out many of those shrubs and replaced them with edibles. Now we’ve got fruit trees there instead: apple, pear and cherry, plus blackcurrant bushes. We’re putting in raised beds for the staff to plant herbs and the like in their lunchbreaks and generally use growing food as a way to de-stress. And the doctors are, unsurprisingly, right behind the idea.

This is all about slowly changing people’s attitudes to food, not just in the sense of growing their own, but also about the decisions they make when they go to the shops and buy things.

That brings me to the learning ‘plate’. This isn’t just about kids in school, but about how we can do something meaningful above and beyond growing our own food. We need to have a culture in this country of young people coming through, who understand the importance of good soil, sustainably grown products, and connecting with the local farmland and the hills and how that is all managed.

Because of the strength of interest locally, Calderdale Council put forward Todmorden High School to be the local centre for the Diploma in Environment and Land Studies. From 2011, young people in the area, rather than feeling failures because they can’t do calculus or brain surgery, will have the opportunity to get a qualification and do apprenticeships in land management skills. Hopefully, in 10 years time, we’ll have a group of young people who can see a career ahead in land management, farming, horticulture and market gardening.

It’s also about using land around schools. So, behind the high school there is a lot of empty, open land. We’ve now put in for a lottery grant for £750,000 to build glasshouses to produce, among other things, fish using aquaponics, to the highest environmental standards; the nutrients in the water from the catfish, prawns and the like will be used to help grow vegetables. We’ve also got a market for that food, through selling it back to the school, to local old people’s homes, and through the town’s market itself.

The scheme will be run as a social enterprise, with the kids from the school having somewhere to get hands-on experience of growing food. It’s also a first, in that the school has created an initiative with the community at its heart. The headteacher is very keen to put local food culture at the heart of teaching, too, whatever the subject being taught.

The result is that kids are growing up in an environment where growing food is central. Indeed, this all begs the question: why not build schools from the outset with sustainability in mind, rather than believing that the answer is to just bung a couple of solar panels on the roof?

The third ‘plate’ is business - and specifically, farming. We want more restaurants serving food grown immediately in Todmorden or within a 30-mile radius. We don’t just want farmers’ markets, we want local produce sold in our mainstream market every day.

We’re saying to local farmers that we believe there is real interest and support for what you’re producing here in Todmorden. One of the local farmers, thanks to this support, has produced the first Todmorden organic cheese. It’s fantastic and he can’t produce it fast enough to meet demand. Another wants to turn her farm into an educational establishment with schools giving her a bit of money to take a look around a real working farm. A third farmer has expanded her stock of free range chickens and rare-breed pigs, and is expanding into other meat poultry.

These are not huge changes, but it does mean with local support at least three farmers are going to get better incomes out of it. If we can get an increase of 10 per cent in what’s sold to the immediate locality, that’s got to be good for supporting local farms. We’ve tried this out specifically with our ‘Every Egg Matters’ campaign, where we’re aiming to get every free range egg in Todmorden to be locally produced. We’re encouraging everyone to keep their own chickens, Pennine Housing are allowing their tenants to keep chickens, and we’ve created an ‘egg map’ of people selling eggs locally. Now we’re trying to make that more viable by setting up an egg cooperative, so that people really can go into a shop and buy Todmorden eggs.

We’ve been very successful in raising awareness and creating debate through growing food right where people live. But we also know that we cannot be sustainable as a town by planting up verges. We need people to do their own thing, learn about local food, and support local business. We’re not doing this because we’re particularly passionate about growing veg. We doing this in an attempt to find a way to give our children and grandchildren the chance of a better future. Making food production local and sustainable is a vital part of that.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Pam Warhurst is co-founder of Incredible Edible Todmorden.