Sustainable Food

As we make our way up the Carretera de l’Arrabassada, just 30 minutes away from the city centre, we reach Can Calopa. This 16th century country house is home to the city’s only remaining wine-producing vineyard, the Vinyes de Barcelona. Not only is this estate rich in vines and olive trees, but it also has a housing and working project for vulnerable people.

Can Calopa, one of the estates and projects in the cooperative L’Olivera, is a comprehensive housing and working project. “Not only do we give people work, we also offer a residence where people of legal age with various abilities come to live. People at Can Calopa come from situations where they are at risk of social exclusion and 90% are referred by Social Services”. They may be people who have lived in centres for minors, or lived rough, or have suffered abandonment or a lack of shelter and protection”, explains Santi Pérez, the coordinator of the support service at L’Olivera Home.

They are tasked with sowing crops and looking after the land, harvesting the product and bottling it, and selling it to the public through the Vinoteca, a tasting space that offers small dishes, also made by the workers here.

They also live here. There is also a residence with a capacity for twelve people on the property. Others live in rented flats in Molins de Rei. They tend to enter from the age of 18 through to around 30, “but there’s no specific age for getting on the project, the only thing is you have to have a certain degree of autonomy”, explains the coordinator.

Living and working on this project allows them to improve their work and social skills while they get support from professionals like Santi. “They get help in all areas: punctuality, decision-making… everything to do with aptitude and working skills”, explains Pérez. The overall goal of Can Calopa: “is for all these people to be able to lead normal lives and join ordinary companies and have complete financial independence”.

A bread with flavours and….values

A little further south, in Santa Coloma de Queralt, the cooperative L’Aresta puts bread on the table and the focus on social transformation and sustainability, based on agro-ecology, food sovereignty and the social and solidarity and feminist economy.

Their work is carried out through four branches: education, with workshops in schools; facilitation, basically for social projects; research, with the compilation of reports that contribute to transformation; and the production of bread at their own bakery.

The municipality in Tarragona is where the bakery is located, where they use craft techniques to create all their products, from sourdough to brioches, sweetbreads, cakes and buns. L’Aresta embarked on this project eleven years ago on the premises of a bakery that had closed down.

All their products are made with organic flour from small producers in the Tarragona area, “who we coordinate with to set fair prices, optimise costs for raw materials such as flour and spelt, and fix pricing agreements”, explains Gemma Flores-Pons, a partner in the cooperative. The nutritional quality of these types of flour has meant its consumption has become more widespread and led to questionable practices: “There’s a lot of profiteering, the product gets held and the price goes up. We reach an agreement with the producer so the price is fair for producers and for consumers” explains Flores-Pons.

At present, six people work in the bakery: three making bread and sweet products, two taking orders and issuing invoices and another providing occasional support when the workload is heavier. Although they mainly deliver orders in Tarragona and Lleida, they also get baking orders from Barcelona through the cooperatives Mespilus, La Senalla and others.

Filling the pantry with delicious sustainable products, and with heart

Yet L’Aresta and L’Olivera are not the only initiatives seeking to transform reality for the better. We could fill our fridges and pantries with food that has helped to change our surroundings.

Another example is Delícies del Berguedà: their yoghurt is used by top chefs -for instance by Ada Parellada- and is a local product made in the Berguedà area by a labour insertion company that supports young people with dual pathologies and their families. Another is the experience of Alternativa 3, which also transforms: over 400 organic and ethical products, where raw material purchases include fair trade cocoa and coffee, and products are made locally. Similarly, es-imperfect jams are made by the Fundació Espigoladors, which fights food waste while providing labour insertion for people in vulnerable situations.