Eating pizza to fix the planet: Wildfarmed Flour at TCH
We’re excited to announce our new partnership with Wildfarmed flour in all our on-site coffee shops. Wildfarmed’s mission is to use regenerative farming practices to fix food and fix the planet. Their flour is now being used in all our café’s homemade sourdough pizza – as if you needed another reason to enjoy a post-climb refuel at the Hangar… Read more about the amazing impact of Wildfarmed below.
Who are Wildfarmed?
Wildfarmed is a community of bakers, chefs, farmers, and growers whose overriding premise, put simply, is to fix the planet by fixing food. Wildfarmed prioritises soil health and never uses pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides, so the land is left rich for future harvests. This in turn ensures that any Wildfarmed loaf of bread, or pizza at the Hangar, will always be ‘cide free and nutrient dense.
How & why did it start?
On his way back from playing a gig Andy Cato, one of the Wildfarmed co-founders and one-half of 90s duo Groove Armada, read an article about the horrors of the industrial food system.
The article concluded that “if you don't like the system, don't depend on it”. This struck a chord. In a self-proclaimed “act of lunacy” Andy sold the publishing rights to his music and bought a 100-hectare farm in Gascony, France.
Andy has dedicated his life to learning a better way of farming, which allows nature and farmers to thrive. Joining forces with Edd, the strategic thinker behind the business, and George, whose education initiative, GROW, runs nature-based learning programmes in schools, Wildfarmed was born. Learning on the job, Andy used his outsider position to rethink conventional farming methods and in 2018, he was the first Briton to be made Chevalier L’Order Merit de Agricole and in 2020, Andy was awarded the Laureate prize for innovation by The French Ministry of Agriculture for his progressive and innovative vision.
Andy returned to England with his family in 2021, where out of 3,500 applicants, he won a 20-year tenure of a 295-hectare farm in Oxfordshire, which has become Wildfarmed’s HQ, through the National Trust.
Why does it matter?
It all starts with the soil. We don’t need any magical technological inventions to solve our biodiversity and climate crisis. We already have the most remarkable invention of all, soil! All we have to do is keep our soil healthy by keeping it free of 'cides and covered in leaves.
Sounds simple. And yet, most reports suggest that we have between 60 to 80 years before our planet's soil is too depleted to produce food. Imagine if we collectively apply the same level of gusto to regenerating soil, as we have done to wrecking it.
You may be thinking why, as climbers, does this matter to us? Soil is the backbone of nature, it's the starting point for pretty much all life on earth, that place you love to go on a sunny weekend and enjoy the sublime feeling of peace out at the crag where all your worries are left on the ground. Without looking after our soil, this wouldn’t be possible.
This is why we've spent the last 15 years developing a farming system that puts soil health first whilst simultaneously producing nutrient-dense food. We’ve been working hard to create an end-to-end, fully transparent supply chain that empowers farmers, food businesses and consumers to become part of the solution to the world’s most complex problem.
In Andy’s own words, “to make a rapid impact on the climate emergency, the greatest agency we have is through agricultural soils.”
Everybody knows the environmental mega-crisis is looming and wants to do their bit. However, most feel overwhelmed by the enormity and abstraction of the problem.
But what if the way to fix the planet is simply by….eating?
What if we could grow a range of super tasty, highly nutritious food that is available to everyone, not just the privileged few? So that every single piece of toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch or pizza at the Hangar is a decision that directly shapes the health of our planet?
Healthy Soil = Healthy Plants = Healthy People
Eat pizza, fix the planet
Come down to your local Hangar and try our amazing new sourdough pizza recipe using Wildfarmed flour – you’ll be helping fix the planet after all!
