“Demonstrate demand and I will help you grow pulses* in Oxfordshire,” he said. 

Keen to take this on, we did some thinking. We learnt that not only are there currently only 4% of us eating enough fibre - something we decided we wanted to help improve by selling fibre-rich pulses - but that 2026 is revving up to be the ‘Year of the Pulse’.

In the UK, we’ve had the Bean Meals project in Leicestershire (in partnership with Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute), while the Give Peas a Chance in Aberdeen is now piloting getting more pulses into school meals. Meanwhile, the National Lottery has funded the Food Foundation charity (and partners) to the tune of £1.4m for three years to Bang in Some Beans, following on from their Peas Please campaign in partnership with Veg Power. At Reading University, there is the brilliant Raising the Pulse campaign and, to continue the bean buzz, there’s a global Beans is How campaign - 120 organisations aim to double bean consumption in Europe by 2028. 

That’s a lot of Pulse campaigns! But there's even more happening closer to home in Oxford. 

At OxFarmToFork, we keep hearing from Oxford’s college chefs that students are requesting more plant-based nutrition in their meals – just as they are at the University of Kent, too. 

To help meet this demand, this week we launch beans and pulses from Hodmedod’s on our OxFarmToFork platform. But why are we selling these in Oxfordshire?

Quite simply, now is the time to get the ball rolling for our vision of 2027, when we will be growing pulses ourselves on our doorstep. Ultimately, we hope to sell our produce into schools and hospitals. One of our growers, Jamie at Blacklands Organics, is considering where he can make space to grow pulses, as is Gail Buswell in Garsington, the site of Worthy Earth’s new market garden. 

As a nation, we need to become more food resilient, and eating and growing more pulses is one great way of nudging us towards less dependence upon imports. If you’d like to know more about the importance of increasing demand for pulses, listen to the recent episode ‘Is Food Processing the ‘Missing Middle’?” from The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4. 

We heard Josiah’s challenge last yaer, and now we raise it again here: can we, as a marketplace, demonstrate the local demand for pulses? Can we help the University of Oxford do it, too? 

If you are a chef or buyer, look out for Hodmedod’s products on OxFarmToFork's marketplace. If you are a student and would like to be involved in building a campaign to get more beans into your Oxford student population, get in touch today. 

There’s nothing like a challenge to make change happen – it is clearly time to collectively ‘Raise our Pulse’. 

* A pulse includes beans and grains 

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