Apr
10
2007
Sometimes the simplest words turn out to hide concepts of thorny complexity. Putting together my seasonal food cloud for April, I struggled with the question of whether to include Mediterranean oranges.
Oranges are one of the joys of winter and early spring, especially the peculiarly sharp sweetness of Sicilian blood oranges. But should they really be called seasonal here in England, hundreds of miles from the citrus groves of the Mediterranean?
Our idea of seasonality is closely tied to the concept of local. After all, just as all news is local - somewhere - so every basic foodstuff is local somewhere. (A lot of processed food, combining globally sourced ingredients, can hardly be said to be local anywhere.) And all fresh food must be more or less in season somewhere. (But only more or less, since modern production and storage methods have stretched the seasonal limits of many foods, providing English strawberries in December and New Zealand apples in October.)
After decades of increasing globalisation of food supply, local (and seasonal) food is enjoying a long overdue revival. Local food can be fresher, more sustainably produced, culturally richer and tastier - especially when its at the peak of its season. But not all local food is good food, nor is all good food local. Winter would be bleaker without those Mediterranean oranges, life poorer without chocolate and mornings near impossible without coffee. Continue Reading »
Apr
05
2007
No crop dominates the British arable landscape quite like rapeseed (Brassica napus, also known as oilseed rape, the edible variety as canola).
From the very beginning of April, previously mundane green fields of this member of the cabbage and turnip family suddenly erupt into luminous flower.
Across lowland England, great swathes of countryside are painted yellow. Rape covers around 3.5% of England’s farmland and approaching a tenth of the countryside in some counties, such as Bedfordshire.
What is all this rapeseed for?
Of all the major crops, it’s probably the one with the least obvious connection to our food. Indeed, much of the rapeseed crop is put to industrial uses, from the production of lubricants and adhesives to cosmetics and gardening products. Many varieties aren’t even edible, containing high levels of the toxic erucic acid.
But the main use of the oil rich rapeseed crop is for the manufacture of cooking oils, margarine and processed foods, with much of the by-product used as animal feed. Globally, rapeseed is the third most important source of cooking oils. It’s essentially a commodity crop, the products it goes into culturally divorced from the productive fields. Continue Reading »
Apr
03
2007
Seasonal food cloud for April (
, 513k) - now available to download for easy reference and printing. Ideal for your fridge, noticeboard or back pocket!
Seasonal food can’t be bettered - it’s fresher, tastier, often more local and cheaper.
The supermarkets may have tried their hardest to break our relationship with the seasons, offering every type of food all year round, but seasonality is enjoying something of a revival. Air-freighted Peruvian asparagus, hot-house strawberries and Australian Brussels sprouts in July (spotted last year in Sainsbury’s) just don’t compare. Continue Reading »
Apr
02
2007
To decode your food, use The Tracing Paper’s Food Tracer - a searchable list of all UK identification codes.
What are those oval codes?
If you buy meat - or fish, milk, cheese or any food produced from or by an animal - in the European Union, you should find an oval symbol like this somewhere on the packaging. This example is from a Tesco own-label apple turnover. What is it and what does it mean?
More fundamentally, why does our food carry obscure codes that mean little to the consumer? It’s all part of a food system that relies on traceability - allowing food to be traced back along the supply chain, in theory to the point of production - but provides consumers with little in the way of transparency - clear and accessible information on where the food comes from.
The oval symbol is the EU identification mark (or on wholesale cuts of meat from an abattoir, the very similar EU health mark), required by law in this form since 1st January 2006 (with some allowance for the phasing in of packaging etc) on all food of animal origin, except for eggs.
Continue Reading »
