The Tracing Paper

March in England and the peach seems an impossibly distant and exotic fruit, its heady summer aroma almost unimaginable. Out of season peaches always disappoint and the sickly syrupy sweetness of the tinned fruit is altogether different.

But late March in Suffolk and peach trees, most of them tight against a south-facing wall for warmth, are in bloom. After the modest white blossom of the early flowering cherry plum, the lurid pink of the peach is a herald of the nectar sweet summer fruit.

The peach, Prunus persica, has been cultivated in Mediterranean Europe for thousands of years. Once thought to be of Persian origin, it’s now known to be native to China. Even so, it produces superb fruit in favourable conditions even as far north as England.

Philip Pullman once wrote that books are not eggs, his point being that every book is different whereas we expect every egg we buy to be the same. Agreed, books should not be treated as a commodity, but nor should eggs. Every egg is an individual creation, laid by a hen of some particular variety, fed and kept in a particular way, in a particular location.

I was reminded of this comparison of books and eggs, and the telling assumptions implicit, on a recent rare visit to my local Tesco (looking at the labelling of their meat, on which more later). Many of the packs of meat carried photos of genial looking farmers surrounded by apparently happy animals in beautiful countryside. All very well, and I’m sure these pictured farmers are doing an excellent job, tending their livestock and the countryside, and producing good food.

But how much of Tesco’s meat comes from these pictured farmers? This is an illusion of provenance. Returning to the comparison with books, it’s rather as though a bookshop sold all its books under Jane Austen’s name, simply because she wrote some of them. We deserve to be told more about how our food’s produced and where it’s from.

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The British are unusual in making a strict distinction between apples for eating - raw - and apples for cooking - though most of these can be happily eaten raw if stored for a few months.

Of all the varieties of cooking apple, the Bramley is by far the best known and loved, its tart flesh erupting into creamy fluff on cooking. The Bramley is a British culinary icon and particularly associated with Wisbech, in the Cambridgeshire Fens, where the large trees of old were traditionally underplanted with gooseberries (reported in the superb inventory of British foods, The Taste of Britain by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown).

The rich fenland around Wisbech still produces much fruit, though over 50% of the orchards have been lost since the 1930s. But hope is now at hand, with figures from the dunnhumby Academy at the University of Kent showing a 12.7% growth in sales in 2006. (dunnhumby run Tesco’s clubcard and the academy makes some of the vast database available to academics and food businesses.)

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Fair Trade for British Farmers is a new campaign to raise awareness of the problems faced by British farmers and how choosing fairly traded and priced British food can help. Country Living magazine and the Farmers Guardian are leading the campaign, with the support of Waitrose.

Our daily shopping choices shape farming and the food system, from the viability of farming and the farmed landscape to the conditions of everyone working to produce food. The campaign focuses on the plight of farmers and the landscape, but makes no mention of other workers in the food and farming industry.

Express your support by signing the Fair Trade for British Farmers online petition, but use the message of support box to express concern for the conditions endured by food and farming workers as well as farmers - “British farmers deserve support and fair prices, but fair wages, conditions and treatment are essential for all workers in the food and farming industry.”

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Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation, yesterday compared the big retailers to invasive species like the Nile Perch and Japanese knotweed. Honey fungus (Armillaria mellea and related species) also springs to mind, its superficially attractive fruiting bodies sprouting up prolifically while insidiously killing off surrounding plants.

Over the last few decades, the rise of the major multiple retailers and the increasing share of the grocery market taken by supermarkets has dramatically altered our townscapes.

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Cherry plums: a promise fulfilled The fruit ripen in mid-July

The arrival of the cherry plum blossom in late February for me marks the turn of winter, the first promise of the fruits of the summer ahead. Suddenly winter’s drab colours are enlivened by stretches of brilliant white blossom on still leafless trees in hedgerows, at wood edges, across commons and on garden boundaries.

Wherever this earliest blossom breaks the greys and browns of winter, July and August will bring abundant golden or scarlet fruit, honey sweet with sharply sour skin. It’s often said, and repeated this month by Simon Barnes in the Times, that the cherry plum rarely fruits in Britain, but I’ve collected reliably good crops for years.

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Food is one of the few essentials of human life.

Each of us has to eat every day to provide the energy for our daily lives and to maintain our health and the substance of our bodies. But eating is more than a mere biological necessity, but something worth living for. The joy of eating is a wonder of everyday life, our meals daily social and cultural events.

The British countryside is a farmed landscape, created by the need to produce food. The nature of much of our most beautiful countryside depends on grazing or other farming activities. Globally, much of the planet is shaped by food production. Urban areas too are moulded by the supply of food, the character of our streets largely determined by the shops we choose to buy our food from.

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