bitful

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

A few things I learnt by avoiding imported food and drink for a week:

• your choice of fresh fruit and vegetables is obviously limited, understandingly as it's winter, although I wonder if it gets any better at al in the summer;
• it is very, very difficult to find sandwich meat (sliced ham, chicken or turkey) that has not been put together from more than one animal "from the E.U.", without paying through the nose for someone to decorate each individual slice by hand with mustard grains or something;
• Spain and Italy have similar climates and I would have expected them to export in a similar way their produce, and yet most of the tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, garlic and chives I found were from Spain, with only some top-of-the-range cherry tomatoes on the vine coming from Italy. Either Spain is cheaper, or Italy is so entangled in bureaucracy that people have given up trying to import stuff from there;
• certain issues are still not very clear and would require further investigation. For instance, are the living condition of Danish chicken supplying cheap frozen breasts any worse than the previous owners of the fresh British ones that cost three times as much and claim to be reared to the supermarket's own standards? What are these standards? Perhaps that they never let chicken rot in their own shite in the dark with no space to move for longer than a week? I will have to look that up;
• also, is it carbon-gentler to eat a local apple that has been grown in an artificially-heated greenhouse, or to let it grow naturally in a sunny country and get it into the UK in a plane that is carrying passengers anyway? I think apples are kept in a chilled room since autumn (carbon emissions of a chilled room, anyone?) but Dr B. insists they are grown in greenhouses.

I have enjoyed and will stick to some of the choices I made during this week:

• leading brand yogurts (made in the UK with milk produced near the factory) versus cheaper imitations from France. I find no difference in taste, and I like the idea of supporting local employment and reducing the need to transport so much stuff. Although they are 15p more expensive each, which at the rate of two per day on a work day comes up to about six pounds a month. Ouch;
• fresh chicken breast is juicier, firmer, altogether more pleasant and savoury than frozen ones (around four pound 50 per kilo), and I might stick to it but look out for special offers and price reductions, because at full price it would cost me about 16 pounds more per month. Ouch;
• I did not really need to bake my own bread to make sandwiches to eat for lunch at work, but it was so delicious that I might treat myself for a bit longer;
• I am now so very off sandwich meat, I cannot stop picturing big vats of leftovers from more succulent cuts being liquidised along with a few bones and the occasional feather, then pasted together with gelatine for my, uhm, pleasure. If I can afford it, it's Wiltshire ham and if I can't, it's London Quorn.

There are just a couple of limitations I am not prepared to put up with:

• I like my fresh salads, I have a large mixed one three to four times a week, and I might cut that down but not give it up entirely. My wellbeing depends too much on that lovely mix of leaves, cucumber, tomatoes and peppers;
• similarly, I like fruit so much that it is an absolute pleasure to enjoy a larger variety. I'm not talking strawberries every day in January or even exotic stuff, but the occasional orange and satsuma, and a few pears now and then.

In short: I am prepared to pay more for national nicer meat, and possibly dairy produce, but will keep making concessions to fresh fruit and vegetables that we cannot grow ourselves.

And now would you please excuse me, I've got a breakfast of Sri Lankan mango, Venezuelan papaya and Indonesian starfruit (peeled and chopped in Kenya, then packaged in India) to attend to.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 6:56 am and last modified on January 30th, 2007 at 9:18 am, and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.