Decent food

Absolutely Mick.

I am quite fortunate in that my partner is to appear on the next Masterchef - I therefore get to try lots of lovely new things most evenings -

Have you tried white asparagus?

Tonight we are having pan fried scallops, with a beetroot and horseradish puree, topped with crispy panchetta - followed by a wild sea trout dish.

I drove her to Borough market (LDN) on Saturday, just to get some wild sea trout etc, all the way from Hull.

Well, I agree with you wholeheartedly there Mick.

Today I had lunch at the Narrow, Gordon Ramsay's pub in East London.

Starter was pork pie with home-made piccalilli, followed by braised pig's cheek with neeps and mash, washed down with two pints of Deuchars IPA; all of it, as far as I'm aware, sourced within Blighty.

Great value at £21 too.

I actually think that within the next 10 years, imported food will become prohibitively expensive anyway, so we will eat more local and home-produced food; taxation on imported foodstuffs will possibly be unecessary.

Exotic foods/produce out of season will become a rare treat, as they were in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s.

K

Kevin

I know a few Buyers who work for Tesco and their opinion is that imported food will become cheaper and cheaper as logistics get cheaper and cheap imports can be played off against each other. You can threaten the mexican farmer with competition from the bulgarian etc.

Sad but there you go.

Regards

Mick

I agree with you that the power of supermarkets allows them to bully suppliers and play them off against each other, but I believe that logistics will actually become more expensive - and, to the influential middle classes in this country, less palatable.

It will be a decade or so before this happens - and imports may get cheaper in the short to early medium term - but I think it will happen as oil costs rise and air freighting becomes more expensive and less politically acceptable.

Time to get on that waiting list for an allotment, methinks!

The general consensus is that as the market grows for plant produced fuels the cost of food will increase making flying it round the world un-economical because land used for human food will be given over to the more profitable biofuel.

Too right, Mick. We have an organic veggie box delivered every Tuesday - have done for years. All grown about 10 miles away. You have no idea what will arrive, so choose the meals around what you get.

Nigel

Agreed Mick.
Make the buggers eat turnips and parsnips.

Dear Mick,

Your not going "green" are you? You are absolutely right, IMO! Personally I only eat Strawberries during Wimbledon fortnight! Like Pancakes you could have too much of a good thing!

ATB from Fredrik

You said:

"I would love to tax all imported food so that if some chav wants to scoff strawberries from Timbuctoo on Christmas day, he can bloody well pay for the priveledge of polluting the world with the unnecessary transportation."

I disagree. He is already paying the fuel cost for transportation in the price of the berry. If he wants a strawberry on Christmas, or a pear in July, what is the harm in that exactly? Is the fuel mispriced in your view? Because of the environmental burden? I figure if they do not burn the jet fuel for berries, they will burn it for something else. That is what it is for, after all. The government will waste the taxes on something more frivolous than the berries. And some more socially useful application of the fuel will be denied by an artificially high price.

All in all a bad idea in my opinion. We import your cigars, gin and single malt over here, not to mention your solid state electronics, when we have passable local alternatives, and such ideas as yours could have negative effects more extensive than you might imagine.

well Joe 90, that means more prime NZ lamb remains here. sigh.
Surely that's an environmental balance for imported Naim, eh? Our NZ Sheep for your British Hifi.

Besides, the ships would be going back to the UK empty otherwise.

Even better than our sheep for lada deals of the 80's.

quote:

Originally posted by bob mccluckie:
Agreed Mick.
Make the buggers eat turnips and parsnips.

Parsnips au gratin, together with minced meat. Yummy !

Food has become a commodity with no respect for it's provenance. Meat is packaged on a little raft of foam to mop up the inconvenient smudge of blood. Any remnant of soil is scrubbed from vegetables.

Pricing is only one way to change behaviour (and local food needs to be good value too) but people need re-educating about food and agriculture. This should start at school; my sister-in-law is a cookery teacher but last year she was furious with me for mentioning to her teenage kids that the calf we had all watched being born on the adjacent farm would be fattened and slaughtered and hopefully end up in our freezer at some point! Her (suburban) kids are presumably taught that meat grows on polystyrene.

These same kids would not eat fresh eggs from that farm or field mushrooms picked by me that morning, terrified by the lack of a 'use by' date or a covering of clingfilm.

Every school could have an allotment, the kids can eat the food they have grown.

Bruce

Probably one of the most sane things you have ever said Mick. I don't know whether anyone who watches TV food programmes has noticed, but all the emphasis these days is on locally grown seasonal food. It is high time that processed & GM food is recognised for the garbage that it is, and that is exactly what out of season produce is. Apples are frozen and tomatoes are genetically modified to stop them ripening during shipping, with the result that they don't ripen at all and taste like an ice cube.
Kick it all out.
People need to be educated/re-educated and it takes time, but a bit of encouragement is better than pricing policy. You wouldn't want to make un-seasonal food appear to be a "luxury food" and elevate its status now, would you! You know how these footballers wives wannabe's think, and they are your chav royalty.
I'd also be careful about branding people idiots because of what they chose to eat:

quote:

if some chav wants to scoff strawberries from Timbuctoo on Christmas day, he can bloody well pay for the priveledge

So...that was you last Christmas then, was it?

But is it not the case that we have to import even the staples of our diet because we do not have the capacity to feed ourselves from what the UK produces?

What you propose would reduce the availability and hence increase the price of basic foodstuffs. What would the chavs do then, poor things?

I'm guessing that if we concentrated on seasonal foods and went back to traditional farming methods as the organic food consumers would want us to do, we should be able to produce enough, and the farmers might be able to get back to doing their job properly instead of destroying the countryside with pesticides & nitrates.
Diccus is going to have to wave goodbye to his olive oil though.

I doubt it and organic farming produces even less per acre...

just found this "Overall, the UK imports just under 50% of its overall food requirements, which at 1996 figures amounted to almost £18 bn. Of this approximately two-thirds comes
from EU sources with the remainder from third countries." - here: http://www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/fsa010303.pdf

Okay, currently, but don't we have the capability to produce more?

I appreciate that the CO2 footprint per kg of aviation is unbelievably high. However, you should also bear in mind that worldwide aviation in total accounts for just 5% of emmissions.

20% of emmissions is caused by shipping (and this is rising).

75% of emmissions is accounted for by domestic use - that's you and me in our little houses with lighting, heating, petrol-guzzling cars that go nowhere or, indeed, go from Hull to London for a fish...(sorry, couldn't help the cheap shot!)

It's easy to point a finger at the aviation industry, but even if we stopped all flying tomorrow it would only make a minor dent in the emmissions of today - so minor that it wouldn't even count!

We need to work out ways to generate our own clean energy. We need to have more efficient homes. Lose those hardly used fireplaces we're so fond of, and which account for huge heating losses in winter, lose the incandescent lightbulbs and promptly drop the quality of your sound systems, switch off sound systems when not being listened to, and kill their quality...oh dear...never gonna happen...

My issue with food production is not just a green one, it is about respecting our local industries for social reasons too.

By failing to support local production, in its full seasonal range and variety, we are destroying the fabric of the countryside, physically and socially. Farming is not just about employment, it shapes our landscape.

The French seem to have retained a pride an their agricultural production that we lack.

Bruce

One can only support local production of anything when one can afford to do so.

Most people posting on this forum can probably afford to spend more on produce - and no doubt many do already, wherever it is sourced.

France is about four (?) times larger than the UK with about the same population, and enjoy EEC subsidies beyond what they desrerve

My organic foodbox costs about £8 every other week. The rest of the stuff we grow in our 2 12x6' raised beds (salad stuff). I get supplied with free game during the Winter (healthy nutritious & tasty food which one can hardly give away) & lots of fishermen I know give me fish during the Summer. We also eats lots of pulses.

I am not some tree hugging hippy type. This is not expensive produce. It is also easy & quick to prepare. Whilst I respect the right of people to eat a strawberry in Winter which is 2 weeks old & has travelled 3000 miles, there are alternatives. It may only be 5% of global CO2 but it is still 5%.

Education is the key here. I think people are changing their habits with the likes of Rick Stein, Jamie Whatsisface & Hugh F-W but it will take time. If we can educate, demand will change & so then will the supermarkets.

Off to meditate in my teepee now...well, see another patient.

aswillman

You are indeed fortunate (or forward looking) to live in the countryside where boxes of produce are cheap and readily available, and, of course there is nothing cheaper than free meat and fish.

Perhaps you could tell us how this might work in London, Birmingham, Leeds etc?

We could, of course, all move to Upavon...

quote:

One can only support local production of anything when one can afford to do so.

Most people posting on this forum can probably afford to spend more on produce - and no doubt many do already, wherever it is sourced.

France is about four (?) times larger than the UK with about the same population, and enjoy EEC subsidies beyond what they desrerve

Nigel, I cannot argue with any of that, the problems of making home produce both economically viable for producers and competitive for consumers are clearly complex. It is however true that many families with little spare money actually spend more than they need on food because they buy pre-cooked items and ready-made meals rather than fresh basic ingredients. Being able to use these ingredients to prepare simple cheap food is an issue for many.

Bruce

That is a fair comment...but...

The point being that food doesn't have to be expensive. Locally produced seasonal vegtables, whilst not an exotic imphala love fruit or whatever, are flavoursome & nutritious.

Yes I am lucky living where I am (played against the fact we have 1 bus a year, 2 streetlights yet still pay massive council tax) but it's the principle that's important.

Ultimately I don't have the choice of going down to my local Sainspants or Tescos as I don't have one (yet) but those who do (London, Birmingham) can choose either not to buy the air freighted stuff or shop at a greengrocer.

The other point is if we didn't stick by all the EEC rules & had lots of little farmers with lots of subsidies & lots of little rural markets we could be like the French. But then we have 000's of civil servants to ensure that we do.

PS Nigel, I would send you a red cross parcel of crayfish but my trap floated off downstream...!

quote:

Originally posted by Mick Parry:
About six months ago, Mrs Mick and I decided to make sure that the bulk of our food is to be that supplied from the UK and in season.

I would love to tax all imported food so that if some chav wants to scoff strawberries from Timbuctoo on Christmas day, he can bloody well pay for the priveledge of polluting the world with the unnecessary transportation.

Mick

I agree 100% - enjoy that Asparagus - British Food is at the top of my agenda too.