try it for yourself!
Good Food Lover, Ilfracombe

Unsurprisingly there is now so much media coverage about food and its provenance; rogue ingredients and over-dominant supermarkets that many people are being completely turned off by the brouhaha. That is a shame because much of the message is based on commonsense. And if you can see through the green-washing and the supermarkets jumping on the eco bandwagon to the detriment of genuinely concerned food producers and suppliers… then you have every chance of being able to improve your diet exponentially as well as ensuring that your money is going into the local economy to sustain more local businesses.
Let’s take the organic free range egg. Fabulous. Even better if it sourced within, say, ten miles of where you eat it – dreadful, environmentally that is, if trucked half way across the country via a supermarket depot before you drive miles to your local supermarket to buy it. Polluting goodness knows how many miles of road verges and hedgerows, fi elds, streams, rivers and fodder crops that will become the meat you eat…
Take the banana. Not since rationing came to an end and the banana came back onto the British market has any fruit had such a press. Yes bananas are unique and they are delicious. They can be eaten as is or blended into cakes and desserts. They can also be organic or fair trade or both. Or fair trade grown without organic status or plain ordinary farmed bananas. They have, however, had to travel one hell of a long way in refrigerated holds to get to this country and even the most holy of organic fair trade bananas will have been trucked to a distribution point and stored under yet more refrigerated conditions. Doesn’t all this refrigeration contribute to global warming and isn’t it crazy how many miles those bananas will have travelled before your child, or mine, unzips it and consumes it in mere seconds. And as for the supermarkets they charge us a considerable premium for fair trade bananas with only the tiniest fraction of that premium going anywhere near the grower who like as not remains on the poverty line but we’re suckers for it all anyway.
There is simply too much rubbish touted – much of it coming not from the mouths of the genuinely environmentally concerned but from the conglomerates who stand to make even more money by suckering us all in. Do we want those organic, air freighted in blueberries at that infl ated price when we realise how much it has cost the environment to get them to us via the supermarkets…? Think about it, reject it. Wait until our own season commences and buy them with a local pedigree.
As a rule of thumb I’d say we should all aim to buy at least half of our food from local producers and whenever possible or affordable to choose organic or chemical free food. That way we will certainly bring about a reduction in some of the food miles burned to fi ll our plates. This is, of course, not to say that the local baker doesn’t buy in flour from mills as distant from us as The Fens or Yorkshire Dales. Better that though than the imported frozen bake-off “breads” that supermarkets import from giant factories overseas – arguably with the dual motive – one to sell us the frozen imported stuff as “baked in- store” (as if we are are really that easily fooled) and two to get the scent of baking bread wafting around the store to make us hungry which encourages us to fill our trolleys. It is very easy for any mechanised bread factory to apply the rustic finish of a few seeds or grains to the production line process and how easy it seems it is to convince us into buying it as the genuine article. And have you seen how huge supermarket trolleys are becoming these days as if to shame us all into buying more to fill them…
We should also start to question whether we need to eat any imported meat or fish or fruit or vegetables at all. Other countries are delighted to dump their surpluses on us – selling them cheaply to the same supermarket buyers who drive our own producers into bankruptcy. Do we want France’s second rate apples or Spain’s worn out (and potentially ill-treated) battery chickens? Do we need onions from New Zealand or fi ne beans from Kenya? The answer is a resounding no, no thank you and as for Egyptian potatoes and American watercress, forget it.
Consider how many local food producers there are available to you. Do the research and it will surprise you. How many farm shops do you pass on your journey to work or could you get to instead of the supermarket? Have you looked at the pick your own growers or the very local vegetable box schemes? Do you use a local butcher who can tell you exactly where that steak or piece of lamb came from? Are you using local grocers who are supplied by local producers – these can be your best sources as many of the producers do not sell to supermarkets and supply only independents as a matter of principle. Here you will find local baked goods, preserves, chutneys, pickles, cheeses, yoghurts, vegetables, fruits as well as everyday and more unusual regional grocery items.
The best thing to do in the light of all of the current hysteria is simply to think through what matters most. For the majority of us it is conscience free shopping and consumption. For me in Ilfracombe it is a plate of Ilfracombe grown potatoes and runner beans with an omelette made with organic free range eggs from nearby Braunton, thickened with cream from West Hill Farm at nearby West Down and mushrooms grown in my own garden – washed down with cider from a farm near Blackmoor Gate and followed by gooseberries, from a local lady who grows everything in her own garden without any chemicals and was also responsible for the runner beans and the potatoes, whipped into a fool with the remaining West Hill Farm cream… Personal number of miles travelled on foot to buy these things… less than two as all the items were bought from one local shop bar the cider which was bought for me by a friend who was passing the farm anyway and the mushrooms which I picked myself. Packaging: one cardboard egg box which went for compost as the farm isn’t allowed to reuse them because they have to be dated stamped; one plastic pot for the cream – washed out for use when I next plant seeds, cider in a reusable plastic flagon; everything else put straight into my cloth shopping bag… Good food, clear conscience… Now if we all had just one meal devoid of cross country haulage, costly packaging and that was also locally bought then I’d say we’d all be in better shape in more ways than one…