Plants and fungi can be dangerous. For all our very real concerns about healthy diets, chemical additives and pesticide residues, it’s wild, natural plants that have the potential to cause immediate harm and even death.

For anyone tempted by the delicious and healthy (if you’re careful) bounty of nature, the Stationery Office’s authoritative Poisonous Plants and Fungi: An Illustrated Guide is the single most important book to read.

Forager, beware!

Anthony Worrall Thompson’s recent confusion over henbane and fat hen amply illustrates just how crucial it is for anyone thinking of picking or using wild plants to know the poisonous as well as, indeed better than, the good to eat.

You’d have thought the word “bane”, hardly suggestive of good things, would have encouraged some reflection on the edibility of the plant. Not only did the chef fail to check just what he was advising, so did the editors and subs at Healthy and Organic Living, which published his risky recommendation. Responsibility is essential if harvesting wild plants is to be part of healthy living.

A quick check of Poisonous Plants and Fungi would have confirmed that henbane is:

a dangerously poisonous plant with an action similar to that of deadly nightshade

Fortunately it is “uncommon in this country”, but confusion and misguided experimentation has led people astray in the past:

A 20-year-old man who chewed four flowers to produce an intended pleasant sensation was found lying on a footpath; he became excitable and restless, with a rapid pulse and hot dry skin, and had difficulty in seeing and swallowing. He experienced hallucinations and behaved in a bizarre manner; recovery was complete in 48 hours.

At least this incident ended happily, though the book is full of less happy cautionary tales, providing ample warning to the careless forager. Woody nightshade, false morel, death cap, thorn apple and cherry laurel are just some of the plants that have killed people.

Toxic detail

Poisonous plants and fungi excels in the detail it provides on precise toxicity, likely symptoms of poisoning and known cases. It’s invaluable in informing the forager of the plants that must be avoided (with good photos too) but is also useful in clarifying just how toxic each plant is.

Googling for [poisonous honeysuckle], for example, might give the impression that it’s far too dangerous to grow within reach of children, who may well be tempted by its luscious looking berries. It’s reassuring to read that the berries are “harmless or of very low toxicity”.

Unexpected poisons

Many of the plants we think of as perfectly edible can also be poisonous if not properly prepared or if the wrong parts are eaten.

Elderberries are commonly made into superb cordials, jellies and more, but don’t be tempted to use them for uncooked juice. Eight members of a party that drank raw elder berry juice had to be airlifted to hospital in 1984 after developing severe symptons of poisoning.

Even fat hen (which Worrall Thompson intended to recommend) should be approached with caution. Like other plants of the beet family it contains high levels of oxalates and another substance that causes sensitivity to sunlight and survives boiling. Especially if eaten raw and in large quantities, there’s a danger subsequent exposure to sun causing blistering and ulcers. Personally, I’d err on the safe side and only eat modest amounts, well cooked.

The potential toxicity of potatoes is reasonably well known, but a surprising number of stomach upsets are probably caused by dodgy potatoes without the cause ever being suspected. The rule here is never to eat potatoes that have started to turn green or sprout (peeling and cutting out the bad bits isn’t good enough) and make sure children don’t eat the leaves, stalks or berries.

Be safe, know your enemy

The toxicity of some plants and mushrooms may seem alarming. It is!

However, the well-informed forager can feel confident in accurately identifying the berries, leaves and fungi that really are good to eat, and really good to eat. Wild hops, wild garlic, St George’s mushrooms, ceps, cherry plums, sloes, (cooked) fat hen and much, much more are all too good to miss.

Read this book, know what to avoid and enjoy the safely delectable fruits of the wild.

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.)

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. Our current self-sufficiency ratio is currently around 60%, meaning that 60% of the food we eat is produced in the United Kingdom, following steady decline from a peak of 80% in the mid 1980s.

UK Self-sufficiency ratio (Defra) Enlarge

Self-sufficiency in the 1980s was higher than at any time since the early 19th century, representing the peak of post-war agricultural intensification. The nadir of British food production was between the World Wars, when as little as 30% of our food was home grown and Britain relied on its empire to feed it.

Britain was last 100% self-sufficient, or as near as makes no odds, over 250 years ago, when our diets were limited to what we could produce and global trade was almost non-existent. Current food imports are only in part driven by our taste for a diet beyond the temperate produce of these islands. We only produce 80% of the temperate produce we consume.

The benefits of trade

There are powerful arguments for some international trade in food, and not just the exceptionally varied diet we enjoy with barely a thought for the intricacy of the mechanisms that put tea, bananas and tuna on our plates.

The economic law of comparative advantage tells us that all should be better off if we specialise our production and trade. Food security must be considered a global issue and we have to share the world’s production if we’re all to have enough to eat. On the other hand, some trade is simply a profligate waste of resources or a shameful transfer from the poor to the wealthy.

Trade can also bring resilience to our systems of food supply, allowing the movement of food to alleviate unexpected local shortages through severe weather, crop failure or animal disease.

Not just local or global, but sustainable, resilient and equitable

Rather than wasting our time on a polarised argument (local v global), we should be attempting to answer the very difficult question of what constitutes a sustainable, resilient and equitable balance between universally advantageous trade and appropriate local production.

UK Food imports by country (Defra) Enlarge

Where does our food come from?

Defra is proud to tell us that no more than 13% of our imports come from a single country, avoiding too much fragile dependence. The majority of imports come from the countries closest to us and are more to do with production techniques and history than extending our diet beyond the confines of our temperate climate.

Our principal supplier is the Netherlands, a country that recognised early two opportunities that now underpin much of our food supply: the advantage of glasshouse production of fruit and vegetables to produce consistent crops through an extended season; and the opportunity to use cheap global grain supplies to produce higher value meat, particularly pigs and poultry. Both types of production are heavily dependent on energy inputs.

A role for communities

The Cabinet Office paper acknowledged that:

community groups, voluntary organisations and social enterprises have an important role to play in supporting activities that promote healthy eating and more sustainable production and consumption, and in encouraging public debate about food issues, and thus in promoting new social norms that facilitate behavioural and cultural change

However, there’s nothing about community, co-operative or domestic action in the Defra paper, which recognises deep-rooted problems with the modern food system without countenancing any truly radical possible solutions, such as those discussed in the recent Growing Food for London conference.

Be consulted

Defra has published this as a consultation paper and is inviting feedback, before issuing a final policy statement on food security later this year. Read the full food security discussion paper and have your say on this critical issue.

Read more…

• Ensuring the UK’s Food Security in a Changing World, Defra’s food security discussion paper
• Patrick Holden of the Soil Association responds to the Defra discussion paper

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).

Using the whole bird

Higher welfare chicken always costs more, for the very good reasons that the birds have been allowed more space, longer lives and sometimes better feed. I believe it’s a price worth paying, taking the attitude that I’d rather eat better chicken less often and always buying a whole bird.

It’s really very straightforward to joint a chicken and the savings are extraordinary. One large chicken will give at least 5 portions or as many as 10 small portions (4 half breast, 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 wings). The carcase can be boiled up (with a few bay leaves and pieces of carrot, onion and celery) for stock. I even try to glean a few extra scraps of meat from the boiled carcase - enough for a light lunch.

If you’re lucky enough to get hold of a chicken with giblets (like the superb Sutton Hoo organic chickens I used to buy in Suffolk), the liver and heart provide more delectable morsels.

Finally, a recipe

Recipes aren’t really the Tracing Paper’s thing and I have to admit I’m almost incapable of following one. I cooked a tagine with this chicken, (very) loosely following the recipe for lamb (!) tagine in Jill Norman’s The New Penguin Cookery Book.

It’s a flexible recipe, basically involving an emulsion of oil and water, flavoured with ginger and saffron, in which the meat is browned before more water is added, with onion, garlic and other vegetables. Towards the end of cooking, parsley, coriander, preserved lemons (peel only) and olives are added. Served with cous cous, it certainly works for me - delicious!

“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.

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…

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.

Haeg claims that lawns occupy more space than any agricultural sector in the US, and challenges their idolisation by transforming front lawns into productive gardens. In the UK, he led a transformation of a grassed communal space in front of social housing, now known as the Brookwood Edible Triangle.

Community groups can build strong links between city residents and the farms on the city fringe and beyond, as well as making the most of opportunities to grow food within the city.

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

Growing Communities, in Hackney, is one of the most inspiring examples, providing 450 households with mostly local, organic produce, some of it grown on their own inner-city sites.

A growing imperative

With food prices rising fast, there’s an ever stronger personal incentive to grow even just some of our own food in whatever space we have available. Some of the most expensive foods, such as herbs and salad, are also the easiest to grow.

The total production of farming in the London area is estimated at £8 million / year, more or less £1 per person. If every Londoner grew just one pot of herbs on the kitchen window sill, that alone would be equivalent to London’s commercial agriculture.

The issues underlying the rise in food prices are an even stronger imperative for urban production. As Carolyn Steel points out in her excellent new book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, 30 million meals have to be provided in London every day. Rising oil prices, declining resources and a growing population are placing an increasing strain on the mainstream models of food supply.

It’s time we started producing some of these meals closer to home.

Recommended reading on domestic growing and urban agriculture

• Growing round the houses, briefing paper on food production on housing estates, by Ben Reynolds (Sustain) and Christine Haigh (Women’s Environmental Network)
• Edible Cities, report on study visit to urban growing schemes in Milwaukee, Chicago and New York, by Ben Reynolds and others (Sustain)
• City Harvest, older but still instructive 1999 report on the potential for urban food production, by Tara Garnett (Sustain)

The Guardian reports that Barack Obama has written to Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive of Tesco, to urge him to engage with the US trade union representing workers at Tesco’s new US venture, Fresh and Easy.

Without union engagement, the union claims that Fresh and Easy’s workers are stuck with no written contract of employment and working conditions that compare unfavourably with Tesco’s employees in Britain.

“Talk to us!”

The possible future US president’s intervention is a success for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which has been campaigning to encourage Tesco to talk to them. Despite Tesco’s strong relationship and partnership with USDAW, the British union representing 85,000 of its workers, they’ve so far reportedly refused all invitations to engage with UFCW.

Global standards or double standards?

Tesco assert that their workers are free to join the union and that they’ve “engaged with community leaders”, but it’s a far cry from their partnership with USDAW in Britain. Elsewhere, the trades union movement has raised questions about labour relations in some of Tesco’s other oversees operations, such as Tesco Lotus in Thailand.

UFCW has dubbed Tesco the “Wal-Mart of Britain”. It’s a confusing turn of phrase, as another British supermarket, Asda, is actually owned by Wal-Mart. And while Wal-Mart’s attitude towards unions is notoriously uncooperative (except in China), Asda, like Tesco, has a rather good relationship with British unions.

The different approaches taken by companies around the globe demonstrate the importance of labour laws and established workers’ rights. Britain is no longer a cushy environment for trades unions and their workers, but it’s a lot more comfortable than America and other countries.

Easy facts?

UFCW has teemed up with “grocery workers, food industry professionals” to create freshandeasyfacts.com, also known as freshandqueasy.com, to publicise their campaign against Tesco. Don’t bother trying these links to the Fresh and Easy Facts homepage from the UK. It’s blocked to UK-based browsers, presumably for legal reasons.

Other pages are accessible, though, such as “Get the Facts“, which summarises and links to various stories, mostly in the British press, about Tesco’s environmental record and infringement of food safety laws.

Hard facts?

Strangely, there’s no mention of working conditions or labour terms. It seems USDAW, apparently disappointed and frustrated by Tesco’s failure to talk to them, have chosen to mount a broad attack on Tesco’s record.

There’s even a video questioning just how “easy” Fresh and Easy is, whose entire argument is based on the absence of leading brands from the shelves, where own-label products dominate. Another video - an extract from a BBC Whistleblower documentary - exposes undercover footage of apparent breaches of food safety laws.
Frightening and entertaining they may be, but these videos are hardly relevant to the issue of labour standards.

For a serious analysis of Tesco’s relations with the unions, at home and abroad, read UCFW’s report, The Two Faces of Tesco (pdf, 4.25Mb).

Here, the hard facts about working conditions in Fresh and Easy are compared with those in Tesco at home in Britain. “No written contract of employment”, “Fresh & Easy employees are allowed only 60 hours paid time off [a year], and this must be used for time off sick as well as for holidays”, “Fresh & Easy only guarantees 20 hours of work per week”? It doesn’t sound right.

Still from Our Daily Bread - spraying sunflowers

Loyal visitors to the Tracing Paper will have noticed a distinct lack of activity over most of the last year. I’m ashamed that I only just avoided a clear six month hiatus with a (very) brief post about the superb documentary on the modern food industry, Our Daily Bread. My only excuse is that this blog has had a lot of competition for my attention - not just a growing family but moving house and changes in my working life too.

Return

As I start to dip a toe back into the water of blog, it’s hard to know where to start. The last year has proved an especially long time in food, with the development of a global food crisis that was almost unforeseen a year ago. As late as September last year, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) issued a stark press release, “Food Price Explosion a Myth Says BRC Food Price Analysis“. Explosion may be a little strong, but rising food prices are undeniably here and becoming more than just an inconvenience for British shoppers.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation food price index has been creeping up since 2002, but its upward trend accelerated markedly in May last year and food prices are increasingly volatile. Recent flooding in America seems to have done away with earlier hopes for a bumper harvest that might alleviate the situation.

The consequences of rising global food prices are, of course, immeasurably more drastic elsewhere in the world, with food shortages, hunger and riots across the globe. World leaders are suddenly talking about food after years of complacency about unending cheap and stable supply.

Questions, questions

Debate rages as to what’s causing this food crisis: The price of oil, and, more fundamentally, declining oil supplies? A run of poor harvests - bad luck or the effect of climate change? Market speculation? Growing demand from fast growing economies like China and India?. A dwindling number of optimists assert that it’s a blip, against the pessimists’ claim that scarce and expensive food is here to stay. Who are the realists? Few agree on the cause of the crisis, let alone just what should be done about it.

The media are, at last, paying attention to some serious issues with the way we produce and consume food. The intrinsic relationship between food and energy - especially oil - is coming under long awaited scrutiny.

The spectre of food shortages has reawakened debate about GM food - a solution to the need for higher yields or potential environmental disaster? Meat, too, has been under the spotlight, with growing recognition of the enormous demand on resources of livestock.

Chicken Out, Welfare In?

British consumers may be feeling the squeeze of higher food prices, but Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has led the vigourous Chicken Out! campaign against cheap conventional chicken. Demand for higher welfare poultry has grown, pushing prices for free range chicken up from £3.50 to £4.80 a kilo at my local butcher.

Tussling with Tesco

The Ubiquitous Tesco

The campaign is now taking on Tesco, also the subject of allegations about tax avoidance schemes in the Guardian and Private Eye. Tesco has taken legal action against the Guardian, as well as individual critics of its operations in Thailand. Over in America, the success and labour conditions of Tesco’s Fresh and Easy operation have been questioned. Probably of most concern to the giant grocer is the recent unexpected slowdown in its sales growth.

Seasonal and Local

Closer to home, interest in seasonal and local food continues to grow. The ubiquitous Gordon Ramsay waded clumsily into the debate with a wild assertion that restaurants should be fined for using unseasonal produce, immediately attracting critical scrutiny of his own menus.

Passing Seasons

Meanwhile, seasons have passed - broad beans, plums, chanterelles, blackberries, apples, rosehip, sloes and more. Now the asparagus season is all but over.

More…

The Tracing Paper will be returning to all this and more in greater depth over the coming weeks and months. It’s been a long time, but there’s much more to come…