OUR VISION
The Local Food Club (LFC) is a nation-wide, community-led initiative facilitated by The Locavore. Our attempt is to create meaningful change in our local food systems by nurturing connections, sharing learnings, and enabling collective action.
Our vision is to create a network of local, people-first communities that help us move from passive consumption to active engagement with food systems—supporting producers, strengthening local economies, and deepening public understanding of how food is grown, processed, sold, and consumed.
We envision the Local Food Club as a distributed network where:
- consumers understand the realities behind how their food is grown
- people upholding our food systems are centred with dignity, agency, and context
- learning is ongoing and accessible
- action happens collectively, at a scale appropriate to each locale or community
- impact is measured not by visibility or growth alone, but by depth, continuity, and care
OUR MISSION
The Local Food Club (LFC) helps people do good through food, together, and close to home.
We bring people together to understand where food comes from, who sustains it, and how everyday choices can support livelihoods, food cultures, and local economies and ecologies. We turn awareness into participation, and care into action.
OUR CORE INTENTIONS
1. To Build Agency Around Food
We help people see themselves as participants in food systems, not just consumers.
2. To Centre the People Behind Food
We foreground the labour, skill, and risk behind producing food, and encourage respectful relationships with food workers.
3. To Strengthen Local Food Cultures
We support living food cultures shaped by place, season, climate, and community—not fixed ideas of tradition.
4. To Grow Community Through Care
We build spaces grounded in listening and curiosity, actively resisting elitism, purity politics, and exclusion.
5. To Enable Collective, Everyday Action
We encourage small, practical actions that grow from learning into sustained, locally meaningful practice.
6. To Foster Local Stewardship
We nurture decentralised leadership rooted in care, reflection, and shared responsibility.
WHY IT MATTERS
Food helps us see some of the most urgent challenges of our time more clearly. Climate change, livelihood insecurity, cultural erosion, ecological damage, health crises, inequality, all show up in what we grow, buy, cook, and eat every day. Yet, for most people, food is still largely experienced as a private choice shaped by convenience, marketing, and fragmented information.
Across India, small producers are at the receiving end of volatile incomes and shrinking margins. Local markets and regional food cultures are being reshaped by standardised supply chains, shifting consumption habits, and climate uncertainty. Knowledge about seasonality, sourcing, and labour is being lost, while many people feel removed from these realities, unsure how their daily choices relate to larger systems.
The Local Food Club creates a connecting layer in this landscape: a social space where people can build understanding and responsibility together, without needing expertise, privilege, or certainty.
Lasting change in food systems does not come only from top-down solutions or individual lifestyle shifts. It emerges when communities understand the systems they are part of, care about the people and places behind their food, and feel supported to act collectively, even in small ways. The Local Food Club helps cultivate these conditions.
HOW THE LOCAVORE'S VALUES SHAPE LFC
The Local Food Club is where The Locavore’s values are practised in everyday ways.
PURPOSEFUL
Everything we do is anchored in a shared purpose: helping people engage more thoughtfully with food systems. We value depth, learning, and continuity, and welcome visibility when it strengthens understanding, participation, and collective impact.
CREATIVE
We use creativity as a way into complex themes. We make realities around food, labour, and climate more accessible and engaging through storytelling, play, and experimentation.
OPEN
We are welcoming and non-judgemental. You don’t need expertise, perfect habits, or ideological alignment to belong here. Curiosity, respect, and a willingness to listen matter more than certainty or correctness.
AUTONOMOUS
We trust local communities to lead. The club is decentralised by design, allowing different groups, neighbourhoods, and towns to shape how shared themes show up on the ground in ways that make sense for their context.
EMPATHETIC
We design and facilitate LFC with care for people’s lived realities. The community makes space for different capacities, constraints, and ways of participating over time.
Who the LFC Is For, and Who It Is Not For
The Local Food Club is for those who:
want to engage with food beyond taste, trends, or simply an act of consumption
are curious about where their food comes from and the people who make it possible
listen, learn, and reflect—even when things are complex
want to fit in small, meaningful actions into everyday life
value care, respect, and collective responsibility
You don’t need to be an expert, activist, or a “perfect” eater to belong here.
The Local Food Club is not for those who:
want to promote themselves, their brand, or their business
seek to dominate conversations or impose a single “right” way to eat
engage in racism, casteism, sexism, homophobia, or other forms of harm
participate to extract content or signal clout
are driven by purity politics, moral superiority, or shaming
We would love to hear from you. Share your feedback, leave a testimonial, and tell us what more we could be doing to make the Local Food Club better! Write to us at connect@localfoodclub.in.
The Local Food Club—a new initiative by The Locavore, in association with Rainmatter Foundation—brings people across India together to celebrate regional flavours, share meals, and build community. To get the latest updates on LFCs, sign up here.