About
Public Diners
Nourish Scotland is a food policy and human rights organisation in Scotland. It has been championing the idea of public diners for the past three years.
The ask is for government to step up for food, like it has stepped up for other aspects of wellbeing – education, transport, healthcare.
The approach is to build consensus around getting governments, both national and local, to back public diners as transformative, long-term public infrastructure in neighbourhoods across the country.
Where did the idea for
‘public diners’ come from?
There is public infrastructure for many aspects of our life: public transport, public universities, public hospitals, public parks, public libraries, and even public mailboxes. But there isn’t something there for food.
This is where the work on public diners began: could we get a piece of public infrastructure for food, and what would that look like? “Well, what about those Civic Restaurants?” said one member of the Nourish team.
During the 1940s and 50s, Civic Restaurants were a chain of UK state-supported restaurants that people could count on dishing up a good meal at affordable prices.
“I think Poland still has something like this” said another member of the Nourish team. Bary mleczne (milk bars) are diners that the government provides subsidises for so that they can serve high-quality meals at low prices.
State-supported restaurants emerged as an idea worth exploring – not as a response to food insecurity, but as the public infrastructure we are missing to support universal access to quality food.
At a conference in 2024, we began this exploration with over 200 people from across the country and across the food system. We came out with a strong shared sentiment:
We are missing a piece of public infrastructure for food, and we are feeling the effects of this gap in many ways. State-supported restaurants, better described as “public diners”, could work here today.
This sentiment was expressed in the 2024 report Public Diners: The Idea Whose Time Has Come. From here, we have continued a full-scale co-production process designed to put the ‘public’ in public diners.
Not many people remember designing their public library, where their local bus stop is, or how the NHS was set up, but we hope many will remember designing their public diners.
Where it’s been and where it’s going
2022
Nourish Scotland start co-designing the concept of public diners
2024
Early 2024
A public diners conference takes place – it starts a national conversation about the potential future of this new public infrastructure.
Late 2024
The public diners report is released. It contains the co-designed policy proposal for public diners across the UK
2025
A national consultation effort takes place via a series of suppers, exhibitions and working groups across the country
2026
A test site will be launched in Dundee. It will evaluate how public diners work in practice and pave the way for governments to back public diners across the country.
