Re: Farmers Weekly Food Miles Campaign - Local Food is Miles Better
- From: Steve Firth <%steve%@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 12:56:19 +0100
On Sat, 03 Jun 2006 09:47:24 +0100 (BST), "David G. Bell" wrote:
My own feeling is that quality, not necessarily strictly organic, and
traceability, should be the key. If you're the farmer who has grown the
olives, it doesn't matter whether the trees are in Italy or in Oz's back
yard. But a bottling plant in some corner of an industrial estate, and
an anonymous tanker coming in from the continent; allowing that is
debasing the whole idea.
The headache with farmer's markets for me is that they are acting against
the idea above. I'm banned from selling any of my produce at a UK farmer's
market despite the fact that all of the ingredients I use were grown by me,
harvested by me and processed by me. I can vouch for the integrity of
everything I do from start to end, and all the money goes direct to the
farmer (me).
However they do allow people to sell products that they have not grown
themselves and they permit (for example) individuals to "make" products by
visiting a cash and carry, buying the ingredients in bulk then "processing
" them at home. My biggest gripe is with "flavoured" oils. People do things
like this:
o Buy cheapest olive oil at a cash and carry. This will be the grade that
Italians refer to as "lampante" and as it sounds, this means lamp oil, good
only for burning. It is solvent extracted from the waste left behind on the
factory floor.
o Buy cheapest lemon/orange from the supermarket. These will be wax coated
to preserve them.
o Chop up fruit and pour over olive oil, allow to infuse. Sounds OK,
doesn't it? But the wax from the fruit is soluble in olive oil. Also it's a
bad idea to have wet fruit in olive oil because that way lies the growth of
Clostridium botulinum.
o Alternatively, add herbs bought from the supermarket or taken from the
garden. See comment about botulism.
However this process qualifies the person making the product to sell it at
a farmer's market. <sigh>
We OTOH create our "agrumato" oils by adding unwaxed fresh fruit to the oil
press and milling the fruit with the olives. Then we centrifuge the oil to
remove all of the water, so that there's no chance of botulinus poisoning.
It costs a lot to do it the way that we do, but we end up with a product
I'm happy to sell. What's being passed off in the UK market I wouldn't put
on my food.
I love the idea of farmer's markets but the practice is flawed. Oh, and as
the UK sponsors of the SLow Food movement, I'm *very* annoyed that the
local farmer's market is advertising itself as "Slow Food" apparently
unaware that this is Slow Food (tm) and they are guilty of infringement.
Taking legal advice on that at the moment.
.
- References:
- Re: Farmers Weekly Food Miles Campaign - Local Food is Miles Better
- From: Jim Webster
- Re: Farmers Weekly Food Miles Campaign - Local Food is Miles Better
- From: "David G. Bell"
- Re: Farmers Weekly Food Miles Campaign - Local Food is Miles Better
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