Are we losing our links to local produce?

I enjoy nothing more than a trip to a farmers’ market – especially some of the enormous ones in London! But I think the problems are twofold – convenience and cost.

I’d love to buy my bread from the local bakery, my veg and eggs from the local farmer and my fish from the fishmonger, but I simply don’t have the time to do that alongside my bulk shopping. Personally, while I’m perfectly willing to pay a bit extra for good quality local meat/veg, I can understand why the price puts people off when food bills are continuously rising.

Just a small correction, Florence. CPRE is currently the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The organisation has changed its name a couple of times, so it’s hardly surprising that we get confused.

It makes no transport food thousands of miles when it can be grown locally. It’s great to support local farmers but surely the environmental issue is a higher priority. Most of us use supermarkets, so it is vital to push them to stock local food.

I wish that supermarkets would sell much more local produce, and label it properly. At the moment, my local Tesco has Yorkshire carrots grown in Scotland. 🙂

A lot of people say they “don’t have the time” to go round the local shops to get the best produce. In many cases that is genuinely true but in an awful lot of cases it is just not true. It is a question of the management of time and the priority we attach to different activities. For some people doing their social networking is far more important, or reading the newspaper, or washing the car. The supermarkets, of course, capitalise on the fact that they stay open later so that people can do their shopping after they get home from work [or as their last port of call before they reach home]. Enterprising local shopkeepers would do the same . . . but with rare exceptions they don’t. Being retired we can, and do, use the local butcher, baker, greengrocer and fishmonger but it takes quite a bit of organisation: the butcher closes on Tuesday afternoons and has usually sold out by 3 pm; the baker also has little left after 2 pm; the greengrocer only comes on Fridays for the Charter Market; the fishmonger is always at the Charter Market and sometimes on one or two other days but I have not yet deduced any regularity in those appearances. There is a Farmers Market on the second Saturday of every month but the producers’ visitations are similarly erratic. There is an anything-goes market every Saturday which often has an egg man or a pie stall, or both – you’ll never guess, plus someone selling whatever is in season [like asparagus at the moment] but if you don’t get down there by ten o’clock the seller of the superb sausages will have sold her stock and gone. Morrisons and Tesco on the other hand are open all hours, just like our traditional shops used to be.