I watched an old episode/report, by the late, great Fyfe Robertson, regarding our food chain, this weekend.
Very interesting it was to, being from 1975, I thought it was unusual as it highlighted and warned about many dilemmas we face today.
Over different segments of the report, were short verses of folk singing and one in particular struck me.
“Save us from the farmer, with the chemistry degree”
It’s accurate even today.
Every small town/village, in the 1970s, had it’s own green grocer, ironmonger, newsagent, post office, hairdresser, milkman (/farmer), cafe, fish and chip shop, baker, butcher, etc, with a couple of pubs thrown in.
You could easily, as many often did, survive quite well and easily, without having ever to venture into a larger town centre or supermarket.
It was wonderful for the environment, as most shops stocked local produce to the area, visiting the cash & carry or the local meat auctions (there was always one or two in nearby towns/villages).
Most business owners were known by name, their sales were often measured out, your wares put into a paper bag, as per your order.
Somewhere along the way, these life blood small businesses faded away and the small towns/village centres became just a converted house on a road that went through what has recently become nothing more than a housing estate.
Gone are the days of taking bottles back for 5p a time, or the sheer joy of 2 ounces of sweets or the 10p mixed bag, shared with your mates, all with grubby hands, that often left you with a different coloured tongue or mouth.
The disappearance of these life blood small businesses came the growth of the supermarkets. The edge of town monstrosities, that have systematically devalued all the modern day food that we now eat, in return for huge profits.
In the midst of all this “Advancement” (not a word I’d use for it) our food chain today is hardly recognisable from it’s once fundamental place in all our lives.
One example: The humble apple.
In the 70s you had a choice of green or red, that was about it, unless the Halloween season was upon us, in which case you also got the rare treat of a toffee apple (chocolate apples were not a thing yet).
One thing that could be said with certainty, was that the apple consumed was “Fresh” only a week or two old, from being picked from the tree.
The small businesses had no room to store many of them, also there’d be sales when they needed to move stock.
There would be a chain, that involved the grower (orchid), to the wholesaler, then on to the village green grocer.
All the money remained local to the wider area, usually the county.
If you were lucky enough to know of a nearby apple tree, then you pulled a couple and ate them as you played out.
Move to today, where the term, “Fresh” is very different.
A supermarket apple can be anything up to around a year old and still be labelled as, “Fresh”
They are often grown outside of the UK, many times, outside of Europe.
Why? Is it because strict food legislation does not cover produce grown outside of European countries?
The apples are then transported across the seas in refrigerated containers, burning oil & diesel in the process, where they land in the UK and are packaged in polythene bags.
Some are even chopped up and processed into polythene bags, or made into ready meal ingredients.
They are then distributed out to supermarket warehouses, using yet more diesel and refrigeration, from there, distributed to supermarket stores on the edge of a large town, using yet more diesel and refrigeration.
Once here they are stored and refrigerated again, more energy, where they finally go out on the shelves, leaving you, the job of travelling to the edge of town, more diesel/petrol, buying them, travelling back to your village/estate, yet more energy, where they are put in your fruit bowl. (Do people still have these?)
If you’re very lucky, the apples won’t rot within a couple of days, as they haven’t been stored under refrigeration, as they have for months of their journey from tree to storage to travelling to warehouse to packaging to warehouse to supermarket to shelf.
In the 1970s, your village greengrocer, you knew where they’d come from, when they were picked, how old they were and there wasn’t the huge amounts of energy involved in the process.
The growers were kept in regular check by inspections by local food standards officers.
The apple you got was grown local, picked local, sold local, transported local to appear on the shelf in your village shop.
When it started to age, then it was reduced in price and you got a discount for buying it.
Today, you have no idea where it has come from, what conditions it has been grown under, what’s been used as feed, etc.
You don’t know how old it is, how long it’s been off the tree, what route it’s travelled, where it was packaged, how long it’s been kept in refrigeration, etc, etc.
On this one single food source alone, is there anyway we can get it back to how it used to be produced and sold again?
I doubt it.
An apple today is not the same as the apple I grew up eating.
Apply this same scenario to many other food in the UK’s food chain, we are in dire trouble, with health costs to add on top.