The Tracing Paper

When people eat (source Cabinet Office) Enlarge

The Tracing Paper is mostly interested in what we eat, where it comes from and how it’s produced. But the when of food is also changing in revealing ways.

This graph - one of many intriguing graphic displays of the data of our food in the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit’s analytical report on its recent study of food - charts the striking changes in when we eat between 1961 and 2001.

What’s supper?

50 years ago the nation was eating four distinct meals a day, at pretty definite times of day - breakfast between 7am and 8.30am, lunch between noon and 1.30pm, tea / dinner between 4.30pm and 6.30pm, and supper around 10pm.

Today, British mealtimes are all slightly later, less distinctly identifiable and spread over a longer period of time. The fourth meal of the day, a supper just before bed, has almost completely vanished, replaced by a steady grazing throughout the evening.

(A letter in Saturday’s Guardian questioned whether anyone other than David Cameron still uses the word supper. It looks as though the meal may have fallen from favour before the word, though I’m still happy to follow the OED’s definition of “the last meal of the day”, whenever that might be.)

Breakfast? Anyone?

Examining the detail of the chart confirms other trends. Breakfast used to be a clearly defined and generally eaten meal, with over 80% of the population having eaten by 9am. Only around 60% of us have eaten anything by noon today.

It’s remarkable just how few of us are eating at any one time. In 1961 almost a third of the country was eating lunch at 12.30pm. Now, no more than 15% of us are simultaneously eating at any time of day. 6.30pm is the most popular time to eat in 2001.

From dining tables to water coolers

Of course, much of this confirms much discussed trends: the decline of mealtimes, the rise of snacking and meals eaten on the hoof. The decline in family meals is a perennial source of concern and subject of news stories. Still, the extent of the change is surprising: the rhythm of the day’s mealtimes is being replaced by a continuous pattern of national consumption.

(The Cabinet Office report gives The changing practice of eating: evidence from UK time diaries, 1975 and 2000 by Cheng et al as the primary source of this data.)

What influences food prices (source Defra) Enlarge
Note the fourfold effect of the oil price

The UK government is at last waking from its long complacent slumbers and asking serious questions about food security. After enjoying an abundant supply of ever cheaper food for the last five decades, the developed world may at last be beginning to realise that we can’t take the essentials of life for granted indefinitely.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, has long been warning that we are “sleepwalking into a crisis”. Is it possible that we’re waking up in time to find another path?

A rash of reports

After years of waiting for a decent government report on the food system, three come along at once.

Following last week’s Cabinet Office publication of the most important policy statement on food for decades and a Treasury report on global commodities (mostly focusing on food and energy), Hilary Benn (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) yesterday released a Defra discussion paper on food security.

Recognising the issues

While Tim Lang talks about “a new era”, even the government is openly raising questions of:

unforeseen disruptions
(Defra)

instability and uncertainty
(HM Treasury)

long-term challenges for world food security
(Cabinet Office)

The Cabinet Office even admits

we are still a long way from having an environmentally sustainable food chain

and

none of [agriculture's emissions and use of resources] is sustainable in the long term

Change to the food system is inevitable and it’s imperative that we do whatever we can to change it for the better.

UK Self-sufficiency

The Defra paper pulls together some revealing figures on the UK’s ability to feed itself. Continue Reading »

The Co-operative Group has announced today that it’s agreed to buy Somerfield for just short of £1.6 billion, a long way below the £2 to 2.5 billion Somerfield’s owners expected when they put it up for sale in January.

The co-op is different from other retailers. It’s owned by its customers (the 2.5 million who have elected to become members) and has a long commitment to quality, healthy food and to the environment and animal welfare. This is a momentous development in British retail.

The Big Four becomes The Big Five?

The take-over would give the Co-op an 8% share of the grocery retail market, catapulting it into the league of the “Big Four” retailers - Tesco (with 31% of the market), ASDA (16.8%), Sainsbury’s (15.9%) and Morrisons (11.4%). Waitrose would be a distant sixth with 3.9%.

With a focus on smaller convenience, community and rural stores, the Co-op already has more outlets than any other retailer. Somerfield’s 880 stores would give the Co-op over 3,000 in total, even after an inevitable sell-off of 200 or so for local competition reasons.

Providing quality food

From the earliest days of the Rochdale Pioneers, the co-operative movement has been committed to providing its members with pure, unadulterated food.

In the 19th century, adulteration of food with cheaper bulk substances was widespread. Alum and chalk were often added to flour, while loaves were bulked out with pipe clay and sawdust. Other adulterants were intended to improve flavour cheaply but were often toxic, such as the bitter mixtures containing strychnine added to beer.

Working in the interests of consumers, rather than purely in pursuit of profit, the early co-operative movement sold food its customers could trust and led the way for reforms in food law.

Pioneering ethical trade and animal welfare

More recently, the Co-op has led further improvements in the standards of food and drink, with a strong and clear ethical policy.

In 1995, the Co-op started to label eggs from battery chickens as “Intensively produced”, despite such honest labelling being strictly illegal. The law was changed, all eggs are now more transparently labelled and the move towards wider use of free range eggs continues. (Hellman’s are currently running and advertising campaign to promote their recent move to free range eggs.)

The Co-op has also been ahead of the pack on ethical trade, switching all its own-brand block chocolate, then its coffee and now tea, to Fairtrade. Besides the widest Fairtrade range of any retailer, the Co-op’s Sound Sourcing Code of Conduct supports reasonable working conditions, living wages, no child labour and trades union membership.

Led by its members

Of course, the Co-op is not a perfect retailer and has plenty of room for further improvements in the quality and sustainability of its food. Most importantly, though, the Co-op is owned and led by its members. The acquisition of Somerfield will widen the opportunity to have real ownership of the food we eat.

The welfare of chickens has received long overdue attention this year. Most prominent has been Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Chicken Out! campaign, which may not have succeeded in changing Tesco’s welfare policy (for now) but has evidently shifted some demand from conventional to the higher welfare Freedom Food, free range and organic chicken.

Rising demand, rising prices

Earlier this year, my local butcher (The Cookery on Stoke Newington High St) was briefly unable to source British free range chicken at all. They’re back in stock now, but the price has risen from £3.50/kg to £4.80/kg, pretty much in line with supermarket prices.

Still, it’s a fair price to pay for a tasty chicken raised in reasonable conditions. Ideally, I’d choose organic - better welfare, better flavour - but I like to use my local butcher and he doesn’t sell them yet.

Raising awareness

Kate, at A Merrier World, has written compellingly about the ethics and economics of free range chicken and is running a blogging event, Let Them Eat Chicken, to help raise awareness of the issues. This post is my contribution to the event.

Where’s that chicken from?

The label on my chicken clearly states the company that produced it - Crown Chicken of East Anglia, whose website provides some information at least on the feed, farms and production methods. I’d still like to know more about the chicken I’m planning to eat (What was it fed on? Where exactly was it produced? What breed is it?) but it’s better than nothing.

Decode your chicken

Some chicken tells you even less about its provenance but you can always find out a little more by decoding the EU identification mark - the alphanumeric code in the oval outline that should be on all food of animal origin. This won’t actually tell you where the chicken was produced, but it will tell you the last processor in the supply chain. For chicken, this is generally an integrated slaughterhouse / processor / packer.

The EC at the end of the code simply indicates that its a European identification mark; the UK or other national code at the beginning gives the processor’s country. The bit in the middle identifies the particular processor and site - the Tracing Paper’s Food Tracer will help you decode this (for example, here’s the result for my chicken’s code, 5007). Continue Reading »

“Cherries on Tree” at Park Farm orchard
from Ida@Sustain’s Flickr

Recipes Online

Cherry recipes from UK food blogs

Recipes in Print

Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book
Wild Food by Roger Phillips

Mid-July and it’s the height of the all-too-brief British cherry season.

For their sublime aroma and intense sweetness, and for the sake of our desperately declining cherry orchards, do whatever it takes to find and eat some British cherries over the next couple of weeks. We’re losing our cherry orchards at an alarming rate and the only way to save them is to eat more British cherries.

Finding British cherries

Henrietta Green’s Foodlovers Britain is running the CherryAid campaign to promote and support the British cherry, leading up to British Cherry Day on Saturday 19th July. Particularly useful is the directory of Pick Your Own and farm shops selling cherries.

The wonderful and distinctive Common Ground also celebrates cherries within its Orchard Path “journey through trees, blossom, fruit…”

The Romans to thank

Cherries have been cultivated in Britain since their introduction - like so much else - by the Romans, but almost all our once extensive cherry orchards have been lost since the War. Of the 30 to 40 thousand acres of orchards 60 years ago, we’ve now under a thousand acres left.

Cherries were grown across the south and west of the country, with the greatest concentration of orchards in Kent - close to the hungry London market and the growing expertise of the continent - since the 16th century. British cherries are almost exclusively English cherries - though much grown in nearby Herefordshire, I can find no record of cherry production in Wales.

Traditionally grown as large standard trees, harvesting cherries was a laborious process involving long ladders, scissors and sieves. Like other commercially grown fruit, almost all modern cherry growers now use dwarfing rootstock for smaller trees. Harvesting is far easier and the trees can be netted to protect the valuable fruit from hungry birds. A few old orchards survive, such as the illustrated Park Farm orchard, where the custom of letting sheep graze beneath the trees also continues.

Sweet and sour

A little like cooking and dessert apples, cherries come in sweet and sour varieties, though the sour are now very little grown. There are dozens of varieties of both types - the Brogdale National Fruit Collection has 306 varieties of cherry in cultivation, from Alba Heart and Aldridge’s Unknown to Yellow Spanish and Zweitfruhe - all descended from two species still found growing wild in Britain.

Prunus cerasus is the parent species of the sour cherries, while Prunus avium (known as the gean or mazzard) is parent to the sweet varieties. The fruit of Prunus avium can be as delicious as any cultivated cherry but the birds generally get to them first. Legend has it that the wild trees still grow along old Roman roads, where passing Romans discarded the stones.

Eating cherries

What to do with cherries? It’s hard to resist just eating them, savouring them one by one. But the food blogging community has plenty of suggestions for more adventurous uses of cherries, from traditional Kentish cherry batter (better known by its fancy French name, clafoutis - cooked and blogged by Alex at Eating Leeds and Cook Sister!, amongst others) and madelines with cherries to lemon and cherry posset to Girl Interrupted Eating’s inspired Wild Mallard Duck with Balsamic Cherries and Lentils.

Farewell huffkin, long live the cherry!

Another traditional confection, the cherry huffkin - a flat, round tea-cake with a hole in the middle filled with hot cherries - seems sadly extinct. By eating more British cherries, we can help make sure the cherry doesn’t go the same way.

Postscript - The huffkin lives!

Happily, it appears that the huffkin lives on after all. In his travels round Britain with a fork, Matthew Fort tracked down a baker who’s recreated the huffkin - Martin Flynn of Oscar’s Bakery at 3 Limes Place, Preston Street, Faversham, Kent. There’s talk of the distinguishing dimple in the top but no suggestion that it might contain cherries.

Figure illustrating food prices from Food Matters

The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves.
(Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste)

This unlikely quote is one of three that open the new Cabinet Office report on food policy, Food Matters: Towards a strategy for the 21st century. Less surprising, is the dropping of a fourth quote that found its way into the earlier analytical report:

I’ll bet what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal.
(attributed Martha Harrison)

Taking food seriously

Tim Lang stated in his keynote speech to the recent Growing Food for London conference that we’re now living in “the most dangerous … but potentially the most interesting time for food policy”. True enough, the British and other governments are now recognising that we can no longer take for granted a stable global supply of cheap food.

Just a glance at the report’s chart of the price changes in major foods since 2000 is enough to convince anyone these are extraordinary times for the global food system. And desperate times for those already spending a significant proportion of their income on food. In the UK, where just 9% of average household spending is on food, most of us are lucky enough to enjoy plenty of leeway before rising prices make us hungry.

More than just leftovers

As Felicity Lawrence notes in the Guardian, the cabinet office report is a serious document that was only trivialised by Gordon Brown’s launching it by talking about eating up our leftovers.

The report makes some striking acknowledgements of the problems with the food system:

• its dependence on increasingly scarce and expensive resources
• its enormous emissions of greenhouse gases
• the social inequalities in what and how we eat
• the health impact of our diets

Out of this list, the Number 10 spin doctors chose to highlight an issue, waste, and more particularly household leftovers, that while undeniably important was always the one most open to ridicule.

The Prime Minister’s lavish 18 course meal (or was it just 8, or as many as 19?) with his fellow world leaders only made his talk of leftovers appear even more ridiculous and patronising.

More to digest

There’s a lot more to consider in this report, and we can only hope that these critical issues are aired and debated once the 18 empty plates and leftovers are just a memory. Expect more from the Tracing Paper at least…

Salad grown at Growing Communities‘ urban plot
Springfield Park, Clapton, North London

London’s City Hall hosted the inspiring Growing Food for London conference last Monday, 30th June, organised by London Food Link (if you live in London and are interested in food then join!) with the London Parks and Green Spaces Forum, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.

Growing in and around London

The day looked at approaches to growing food for London in or near the city, from domestic production, allotments and transformed public spaces to community food groups, city farms and the surviving working farms on London’s fringe.

Mayor Boris Johnson stumped in during the morning tea break, mug in hand, expressing his apparently unbounded support for urban agriculture in an off-the-cuff speech. He professed that he’d like nothing more than to uncork a bottle of London fizz at the opening of the olympics and asserted that there should be “a lot” of allotments in the city.

Production in decline

Like any city, the growth of London has pushed the production of food further from the centre, particularly over the last 200 years. Long gone are the times when lavender was grown on Lavender Hill and asparagus cultivated, rather than just sold, at Nine Elms.

The decline in production in the Greater London area even within the last 40 years is striking. In 1970, there were significant clusters of horticulture along the Lea Valley, in London’s south-west corner and along the Thames estuary. Today, only a handful of growers survive.

Potential for growth

Still, it’s not all concrete, bricks and tarmac. Two thirds of London’s area is still green space or water, with the potential to produce food. Even soil-less front gardens and window sills have potential for container growing, as promoted by Food up Front, “the urban growing network”.

The artist Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates project (documented and illustrated in his new book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn: A Project by Fritz Haeg) targets the cult of the lawn, imported to the United States from England. Continue Reading »