It’s Election Day and I’m on a train on the way home from the RHS Spring Show at the beautiful Malvern Showground, where I have been helping my friend Barry to explain the message of Transition Towns on his Chris Beardshaw scholarship show garden. Designed on a circus theme, ‘Juggling the balance’ conveyed through mainly floral planting the value of community and, of course, that food will always play a leading role in any vibrant collective group.

Transition Towns have more to do with the Guild of Food Writers than we might immediately think as the late Miriam Polunin’s partner David Fleming has long been regarded as one of the guiding lights in this international network of community groups, joining together to offer a positive response to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

Basically, we live an energy-voracious life in the UK and are less aware of green issues than many of our European neighbours. Chichester, my home city, is worse than most in terms of ecological footprint for, if everyone lived in the same way as we do, we would need 3.49 planet Earths to sustain us all. Clearly that’s impossible and so, with fossil fuels being used far more quickly than they are being replenished, we have to create a less oil dependent lifestyle for ourselves and a key way of doing that is to learn to live again in communities, having conversations, knowing our neighbours and sharing local resources. And local, seasonal food, a subject so close to many of our hearts, is a key way of achieving the first steps towards a resilient food economy that will not collapse, leaving us short of supplies, when it snows, when volcanoes erupt or when the cost of oil/transport makes moving foodstuffs, especially those that are fresh and full of water, around the globe a non-viable, and possibly non-ethical, proposition.

Of course, there is no easy answer to this conundrum for the vast majority of people have the Supermarket Habit and are too time-poor to shop around for the supplies that they need. Having a local veg box – not Riverford or Abel & Cole, but from local market gardeners – is a great way to start and locks you into planning meals around veg, to which you may add protein as you wish. Just dropping meat will not help as there is now significant opinion that mob grazing actually helps to replenish the health of pastures and makes far more energy sense than cutting silage to take into barns to feed to animals indoors. Anyone who has read The Fight for Fordhall Farm by Ben and Charlotte Hollings, (shortlisted in the Guild Awards in 2008), will have an insight into the importance of healthy, vibrant grassland for grazing.

Home growing is satisfying the need to reconnect to where food comes from for many people, but we need to be realistic about what we can grow in our gardens, working in conjunction with our local market gardeners to maximise their talents and to make best use of local available land. There is little point in growing main crops potatoes in the average garden and Brussels sprouts don’t look fabulous from the house whereas architectural artichokes are great – to look at and to eat. Fruit is actually a better bet for the home garden, with a few salad crops, giving the option to grow things seldom seen in greengrocers like gooseberries and redcurrants and leaving the provision of winter staples to the people with the land and knowledge to do them best. And that starts to build a coherent local food economy. There is also a significant body of thought that if people fail and give up growing their own, they will be more passionately locked into buying locally, even if they no longer produce food themselves.

It’s now a week after the Election and I am returning to the computer to finish this piece. Transition Towns are about new energies, new ideas, communities living and working together rather than individuals working apart. It might sound a bit cosy, like our new coalition government’s rose garden press conference, but it surely has the greatest potential for helping us to change our attitudes to how we use the world’s resources, including food. It is an enormous challenge, just as being truly satisfied with a diet of local seasonal food might pall if we don’t have about 10% of our storecupboard coming from the Tropical or Equatorial regions of the world where they need our money and we need their bananas, spices, coffee, tea and cocoa. What we don’t need is Africa’s water captured in green beans and roses but we do need to support those communities who have come to rely on us. There are no easy answers, indeed our coffee culture may have to change as processing the beans is one of the most water-hungry processes and may not be sustainable indefinitely. Who will suffer most is we have to go caffeine cold-turkey? Well, of course, the coffee growers. The problems are truly enormous.

Rosie Stark is hoping to plant nut trees in Primrose Hill with her Transition Group – who else out there in the Guild is involved? We have much to offer with our food and communications skills and the rewards for being a part of Transition may not be monetary but they are enriching. My husband Nick thinks I am becoming a radical campaigner! I think I have simply changed my habits and, through that, my outlook. I have met some wonderful people with whom I would never have connected but for Transition.

The biggest challenge for me, however, is the concept of a local food hub, to make it possible to get food from the producers to the public, to make it easy for more people to actually buy local food, and to ensure that this is done without customers or producers having to drive miles to deliver small quantities while using lots of fuel and therefore negating the energy efficiency of local food. This is not easy. But it has to be done. It’ll take years, but by doing it through the Transition Town movement it will be easier as people can see the coherent arguments for Doing Something to start the ball rolling. I do believe that all councils should have to provide a free market place for the trading of local foods, properly serviced and for the good of the local economy. Perhaps it will come? Local food is indeed In Transition, and at the heart of the Transition Movement. Season this with your support.

Rosemary Moon is building up a series of Food Courses at West Dean College near Chichester, and working on www.moonbites.info, her local food website. She is actively involved in aquaculture with two companies and continues to work with the training department of Waitrose.