Wow – someone's discussing food security

Owen Paterson has, rather charmingly, suggested that it would be a really good thing if people bought more British-produced food.

Now it’s not often that I find myself in agreement with the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – a man who infamously stated that badgers “moved the goalposts” – but on this matter I am.

Although what he’s asking is rather more difficult than Paterson bimself might realise, for a number of reasons – not least among them, cost.

At a time when increasing numbers of British households are finding it difficult to make ends meet, food is often one area where people feel that they can buy cheaper.

It’s nearly a year ago that the horsemeat scandal broke and one of the points that emerged with some clarity was that the cheaper the meat product, the more likely it was to have been adulterated with something that was never listed on any label.

The consumer needs cheep food and, in order to continue to make profits, the company needs to cut costs as well as the price. Given that there were extensive chains of companies involved in the production of these products – all of whom needed to turn a profit – it can hardly be much of a surprise that someone in that chain decided to cheat.

In early autumn 2012, I spent a day with trading standards in Northamptonshire.

This was an area where the (Conservative) council valued the service provided and was trying to protect it against cuts, but it had already been reduced to a point where much work was being done by phone instead of visits – the logistics of a semi-rural county made many visits too time-consuming.

I was shown around the store of contraband merchandise that had been intercepted and impounded. There was no shortage of tobacco – mostly produced, it was explained to me, in China, and containing … well, just about anything, including floor sweepings.

There’s not a world of difference between that and the horsemeat fiasco.

The level of tax on legal goods such as tobacco is an issue – not least for those on low incomes.

But in the case of fresh food, tax should not have an impact.

There is a culture in the UK of believing that food should be cheap. How anyone expects quality to come at the least possible cost is an interesting question – food viewed simply as fuel, again –  but increasing poverty means that increasing numbers of people have little realistic choice in the matter.

There are also plenty of cases of people who need convenience food because they have no facilities to cook – and of those visiting foodbanks for help who can’t afford the money to fuel a cooker.

In none of these cases is it remotely an option to tell people to ‘buy British’, unless you’re going to be able to guarantee that the Brit option is the cheapest and most readily available.

Then there’s the rise of supermarkets – to the point where they now have 80% plus of the UK grocery retail trade – which is also part of the problem.

The knowledgeable butcher who would supply cheap cuts as well as prime ones, the corner shops and the independent general stores that would stock local produce have, if not entirely disappeared, been hammered into endangered species status.

Many people have also lost the skills required to cook from scratch and therefore the chance to control more of what they eat – and then there’s the related attitude toward shopping; that it’s best avoided as much as possible excepting the once-a-week stock up at some tin box you need a car to visit.

Add to that the damage that has been done to UK farmers and producers by the same supermarket behemoths slashing prices and forcing the cost of those cuts on to farmers and producers.

Joanna Blythman has written much on the subject. If you choose just one of her books to read, then pick Shopped: The shocking power of Britain’s supermarkets.

As I’ve illustrated a few times on here, supermarkets are not as cheap as they might seem – and this is particularly true when it comes to processed foods and ready meals.

Another related problem is the cultural shift in the UK away from seasonality. Both as individual and commercial customers, many Britons now expect strawberries and asparagus in December, for instance.

And the supermarkets, with their global reach and massive financial clout, are only too happy to oblige.

So we have a world in which asparagus sprouts in Peru, where it is draining the water supplies of local communities, and where carnations are grown in Africa and flown to places where people will die without a water-guzzling bloom grown out of its natural season and habitat.

Quinoa, that most hip of foods, grows only in the Andean nations, but export is forcing up the price of what is a staple crop for local people. The export price had risen from $0.80 per kg in 1970 to $3.029 per kg in 2011, according to the UN.

And the UN designated 2013 as International Year of Quinoa in recognition of the Andean peoples that have grown the crop in the past and the present, through “knowledge and practices of living in harmony with nature”, and as an attempt to draw attention to food security issues.

Blythman also puts the sword to the wishy-washy idea that non-indigenous foods grown in the developing world for export is massively good for people in those parts of the world and therefore A Nice Thing.

No – you don’t get to justify munching Peruvian asparagus in January with any such patronising twaddle.

There are things we can’t grow in the UK – cocoa, coffee, lemons for instance. But in the case of the first two, they don’t need to be flown around the world as soon as possible after harvest. And lemons can be imported from our own home continent.

But much of what we import is in order to maintain all-year-round availability of seasonal produce.

On food security, it was also only last year that the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) warned that Britain produces less than two-thirds (62%) of the food that the country consumes, down from 75% in 1991. It called on the government, public and food industry to help.

Perhaps Paterson’s comments are that help?

A couple of years before the last general election, David Cameron told the NFU conference that any future Tory government would help farmers – by advising them on how to set up co-ops.

I don’t know whether this has been forthcoming, but this does seem to be one industry that – badger culling aside – the government is not realistically interested in helping, which is move away from traditional Conservative policy anyway.

Which point leads us to another interesting issue.

One cannot help but wonder how increased farming is going to be affected by the planned opening up much of the British Isles to fracking.

Surveys have shown, for instance, that much of east Lancashire is sitting on huge reserves of underground gas. It’s also farming country, and fracking has form when it comes to problems.

In just the last few days, four states in the US have confirmed water pollution from oil or gas drilling, while increased radiation has also been found in water and blamed on fracking.

This is in direct opposition to the claims of industry and some politicians that there are no dangers and problems hardly ever happen.

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Fracking in the Ribble Valley seems like rather risky business – for the environment and for domestic food production. And obviously east Lancashire is not the only area that could be affected.

It’s hardly the actions of a government that is being friendly or helpful to its traditional allies in the rural communities.

So while it’s good to see people actually acknowledging that food security is important and needs tackling, however nice the sentiment, simply asking people to ‘buy British’ is not going to change a single thing – and most certainly not while the issue of low and lowering incomes, and the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ are such major problems for so many.

The noble porker: a tale of modern Britain

It could be said that the noble pig is a perfect snapshot for the state of British food as a whole.

Once upon a time, long ago, before enclosure took land away from ordinary people, before industrialisation drove millions out of the countryside and into the urban grime to find work, many homes and smallholdings would have had a pig.

It would have been kept through the year, grazing naturally, before being slaughtered as autumn came on and the nights pulled in.

Butchered, it would have been salted and preserved in many ways, nose to tail, offering food for the winter ahead.

If a more personal connection with pigs died along with the connection most of us have to the land, farming continued.

Like so many parts of our food culture, the post-war era saw an increase in factory farming and, with it, a reduction in the variety of pigs that were reared in the UK.

Many breeds died out, casualties of the growing fear – abject in so many ways – of real, natural fats.

Stand at even a proper butcher’s counter today and you may well hear people wanting lean pork.

We seem to have lost the understanding not only that natural fat is a perfectly good and healthy part of a diet – but also that it is essential for flavour.

With pork too, there’s the added importance of fat providing moisture for a meat that can easily become very dry.

But on an English autumn Sunday, what could be better to consider eating than some roast pork?

Precisely because of the ease with which you can let pork get overly dry, it’s not a meat I cook often. Which in turn, also means that I don’t get much practice.

But on Broadway Market recently, although I’d been considering lamb, Matthew had a lovely rolled, boned piece of loin that caught my eye.

To be precise, he had three rolled, boned joints – only one of them, though, had oddles of fat running through it and not just on top.

So with the clear blue overhead and the trees just moving toward a riot of colour, I settled on that – and then began to wonder just what to cook with it.

What I opted for was to use perfect seasonal ingredients to compliment it.

So first, I made up some sage butter – easy enough: a little dried or finely-chopped fresh leaves, blended into some softened butter and then allowed to harden again.

Next, the oven was set to 220˚C (fan).

I took the joint and with a bit of careful knife waggling, made a few gaps for the butter.

The skin (which had already been scored) was salted and then it went into the roasting dish with just a little fat (lard, of course) to start us off.

It then got 20 minutes, before the temperature was reduced to 170˚C, and is cooked for a further 30 minutes to the 500g. My joint was just over 1.1kg.

After that, you ratchet the temperature back up to 220˚C and give it a final 10 minutes, before taking it out and letting it rest for up to half an hour.

That allowed perfect timing to do a few roast potatoes (in lard, in another dish), to which I added a few (rinsed and drained) cannellini beans for the last few minutes. The beans cook magnificently in lard, taking on a wonderfully creamy quality.

I’d also taken two dessert apples, scored them around the middle, removed the top part of the core, filled the small cavity with more of the sage butter and then ‘lidded’ that with the top of the scoop-out core and stem.

They cooked with the potatoes, once those went into the oven after their par-boiling. And, of course, they need around 45-55 minutes.

The juices from the meat were mixed with plain flour, before some decent English cider was added (not the very best, but not Strongbow or Diamond White!).

The crackling was beautifully brittle, with an feather-light pillow of fat beneath it; the meat was tender, perfectly cooked through and delightfully moist.

Everything else worked well – and the gravy was the real deal. The whole combined for a perfect autumn feast.

Now that’s what you do with the noble porker.

Ode to beer

Many years ago, in the sort of semi-mythical, dewy-eyed past that might have appealed to the likes of John Betjeman or JRR Tolkien, the hop fields of Kent were a thriving affair.

In the age-old tradition of agricultural work, seasonal labour was essential, and working-class families from London would go down to Kent for their holidays to work in the fields – and get a welcome breath of fresh air.

But it’s a while since the county’s hops grew. And while I was aware of that fact, I hadn’t given it a great deal of thought – let alone realised what this actually considered what this means in practice.

Belgium is a country that takes its beer seriously. It could be argued that it takes beer more seriously than anywhere else in Europe.

Consider the scale: more than 1,000 different beers are brewed in this small nation. In Brugge, there is a bar where you are handed a menu a good inch thick, listing more that 400 different beers.

On our own visit to Bierbrasserie Cambrinus – named for the king of Beer – once we'd got to grips with the vast choice, we tried Petrus Oud Bruin and Bink Blonde.

The former was a 5.5 dark beer a that had been aged in oak. It had a really sharp, sweet first taste, which soiftened on the palate as the sourness came in to play. Very nice.

The latter was also 5.5 (the menu includes beers up to 11, so we were being very sensible). This was much fruitier, with a nice, bitter aftertaste.

Not that you knock such stuff back – but then, when it actually tastes so good, you feel less inclined to do so.

On our final afternoon, we did the tour of the city's famous brewery, De Halve Maan, which first opened its doors in 1856.

Our tour guide was a woman with a magnificently dry way. She told us, for instance, that since beer was approximately 80% water and people say we should all drink more water, we could do that by drinking more beer.

It was also educative. I learned, for instance, that hops are related to cannabis, and that they are used in beer as a preservative. They also add the distinctive bitterness to the taste.

The cogs clunked about a bit and a light came on. The hop fields of Kent have died because we're not using as many hops in our domestic brewing industry. Why not? Because the likes of Interbrew are just using chemical preservatives instead?

Some years ago, a colleague and I did a little experiment. We discovered that, even having just a couple of pints of our work local’s generic cooking lager at night (Carling, in this case) gave us both hangovers.

So we decided to try the bitter instead – Bass, if memory serves me right. It was from the keg and not the barrel, but we gave it a shot for a month. The difference was clear. No muzzy heads.

But bitter is not as popular in the UK as it once was – much of what is consumed is that sort of cooking lager.

Things are changing in the UK – as with food. Microbreweries are cropping up, brewing beer properly.

The only unfortunate thing is that good quality food – and drink – are presently viewed as expensive, middle-class fads that are beyond anyone else.

But back to Belgium.

Many beers in the country are Abbey beers – brewed originally in monastic institutions. And as if that religious connection isn’t enough, there is even a small shrine in De Halve Maan, to Arnoldus, the patron saint of brewers. This really is a very Catholic country.

Entirely understandably, the Belgians are very proud of their beers. There is a belief that, although the country benefits by not having anything like the Reinheitsgebot, the German law of 1516, which stipulates that beer can only be made from barley, hops, malt and water.

That, our guide explained, allows brewers to flavour their beers in different ways. The Hoegaarden Brewery’s eponymous wheat beer, for instance, is flavoured with coriander and orange peel.

It’s a tad deceptive to pretend that German beers don’t have a variety of flavours simply because brewers there stick to those four ingredients – they most certainly do, as even a passing acquaintance with German beer will tell you, but there’s certainly a very wide variety of superb tastes in Belgium.

We also tried Jupiler – which was an exception to the rule, being simply a pretty generic lager.

Our first beer in the city was ordered generically – and we found ourselves with a basic Czech brew, which was okay, but not really what we’d had in mind.

A Kriek cherry was very pleasant. And we had a very pleasant dark house beer at Uilenspiegel, the hotel/restaurant where we ate on the first and second night.

The only beer we had more than once was Brugse Zot – brewed at the De Halve Maan. Well, I say “brewed”: it’s ‘cooked’ there and then the rest of the process takes place at a different site.

Brugse Zot is lovely and fruity – and the dark version is nice too. They do also brew two stronger beers, but we passed on those.

So there you have it: a very brief look at Belgian beer. And the taste was even nicer.

All brawn and no brain?

The worst thing about holidays is that they end. Well, some holidays at least. I can think of one or two where I've been relieved to get home.

A case in point was a fortnight's canal trip around the 'Leicester Ring' in 1999. We had done brief narrow boat cruises before, but this was the big one. This was going to be two whole weeks of getting away from it all.

It rained almost non stop. The Other Half, insisting that the division of labour was traditional, did the driving bit, as this was, apparently, technical. I, as the woman, was assigned the locks.

Over a hundred of the bleedin' things, including a full flight at Foxton, where I had the pleasure of helping to provide the entertainment for the gongoozlers - those people who go and stand by locks and watch others do the hard slog.

In between, I made bacon buttes and mugs of tea, handing them up from the cabin for The Other Half to consume while driving us along. And spent much of the rest of the time sitting inside, away from the grey and the drizzle, trying to teach myself to play solitaire or reading a biography of Robert Kennedy.

The only thing I remember with pleasure was Eiffel 65's hit single, Blue, which was featuring heavily on the scratchy radio at the time.

I cooked in the evenings too, even though this was before my days of culinary please (let alone culinary know how), but this too seemed to be part of the supposedly fair division of labour. For some reason, I retain vague memories of sausages and peeling spuds and boring, bland vegetables.

In Leicester itself - a city I had carefully avoided since being invalided off my degree course some 17 years earlier - it peed down, illustrating how fanciful were the claims of the manufacturer of my kagool to have made something vaguely waterproof.

There I was, standing on the towpath, struggling with a lock that wouldn't budge, getting rapidly soaked and cursing aloud, while the self-appointed skipper told me to calm down.

We had set ourselves far too tight a schedule for a fortnight: there was no chance to spend a day moored up, talking to the teenage ducks and simply relaxing – or going ashore and visiting something – if we were to stand a chance of getting the boat back to the yard on time - which, as it happened, we didn't quite manage anyway.

'No,' I said later. 'Never again!'

Returning from France does not, however, involve the same sense of relief, strangely.

Don't get me wrong – I enjoy my work, I like my colleagues and I absolutely missed the cats.

But riot-torn Hackney sometimes lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. And it's expensive too. For the first time, I've realised how much more it costs for a loaf of decent bread in London than in the south of France.

A quarter of a large, round loaf cost us €1.40 in Collioure. A half cost me well over £3.50 yesterday. For three weeks, I ate the stuff happily; nibbling away and appreciating texture and taste, rarely needing – or wanting – anything on it.

Now even the artisan stuff seems mediocre. So not only can I now not enjoy the fruit I could out there, I have to pay considerably more for a decent version of that most basic commodity, a loaf of bread.

And yet, for all the cost, the reality is the same: in the UK, we spend a smaller percentage of our household income on food than anywhere else in Europe – and still think it's too much. And let's face it, I'm making an effort to buy the better stuff.

But it's not haute cuisine we're talking about here – hell, I can't even get brawn, or 'head cheese' as the French call it. Why? Because it was banned in the wake of the BSE outbreak – that disease caused because profit came before safety, and UK farmers were allowed not simply to feed the remains of sheep to those well-known bovine carnivores, but they were allowed to cook it at a lower temperature, thus making it cheaper, but not killing off the scrapie in the sheep.

But no, the problem wasn't this – the problem was brawn itself, so it has to be on the banned list for us Brits.

As as for the cheese ...

But markets in general are fascinating across the Channel. The produce might be cheaper – but they seem to take even more care over it. The way stalls are laid out, for instance, always delights me.

And just look how beautiful these little cheeses were at the quay side Sunday market in Bordeaux.

Perhaps it's expecting too much for common sense to prevail over brawn – just as it seems to be to hope for a culture in the UK where food is actually taken seriously and valued, and those who do this are not viewed as a wealthy and greedy minority.

Oh well ... I shall just have to knuckle down to an autumn of serious cooking to try to compensate for such joys as the bacon sandwich I had last week for breakfast one day, when my appetite got the better of my common sense and experience: cold, over-cooked bacon, on stale bread.

And people wonder why I rate France so highly ...

Me and Bob Dylan and Manchester Day

It's not often that you get to pen such phrases – but Manchester's the sort of sophisticated place that allows me to link my name with that of Mr Zimmerman.

'And why's that?' I hear you ask.

Yesterday, after finishing work, I pottered out with the camera while the sun was shining above. One of my targets was only a few metres from the hotel – the former Free Trade Hall. I say 'former', because it was, a few years ago, converted into another hotel.

It was built on the site of St Peter's Fields, where in August 1819, cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 who had gathered at a meeting to demand reform of parliamentary representation. At least 11 people were killed and 400 injured in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre.

The Free Trade Hall was originally erected in order to mark the repeal of the Corn Laws. As an auditorium, it has played hosted to all manner of acts, from Kathleen Ferrier to the aforementioned Dylan to Pink Floyd to the Sex Pistols.

But back in the 1970s, when I was attending Fairfield High School for Girls, our annual speech day took place there and I, as a member of the choir, would be on stage.

Setting aside memories of the obsessional need, as young ladies, to keep our visible knees together at all times while sitting on the stage, I remember it as a fabulous place – vast and magnificent. It seems nothing more than an act of cultural vandalism to have destroyed everything of it except the facade.

I remember the acoustics as being good. I remember performing Windmills of Your Mind one year.

It doesn't seem inappropriate to muse on such a thing this week, as I listen to debates and pen stories about the human face of the government's austerity plans.

One of today's debates featured the small matter of meat inspectors who work for the Food Standards Agency. Many are being bullied and abused – not just by the big food producers, who want to cut corners in the drive for extra profit, but also by the FSA itself, over which the industry "holds too much sway", as one delegate put it. And these are not, I assure you, timorous types claiming such a thing.

So which is more important? The profits of big agriculture (and the big food retailers) or our health? And if the latter will have no negative impact (or risk of negative impact) on the former, then why the need for any abusive behaviour?

Do we really need to be reminded that BSE – or 'mad cow disease', as it was colloquially known – was a direct result of the food industry doing two things:

• feeding a vegetarian animal the flesh of other animals (sheep);

• asking the government of the day to let it reduce the temperature at which it could 'cook' said sheep remains in order to save costs.

The first was going right against evolution, biology and nature, whatever you want to call it. The second showed where priorities lay. Both were just begging for trouble.

We really shouldn't be having this sort of discussion at all, but the reality is that the government actually wants to get rid of any form of independent regulation – and replace it with self regulation. How many of us really trust that, given the interests involved?

Now just to be clear for anyone who's new to this blog: I am not opposed to profit. I believe in a mixed economy. And I don't think that everyone should be on the same wage.

But when profit is allowed to be the most important factor in a situation, you don't just get BSE, you get Southern Cross and you get Winterbourne View as well.

I find myself, frankly, not so much depressed by the approach of the current government, but by how effective has been the promotion of the idea of profit as the be all and end all of everything, which has been promoted – or not tackled – by successive governments, hand in hand with an entirely ideological belief that private is always better than public.

Fortunately, my mood was lifted by managing to catch the end of the second Manchester Day Parade, with community groups from across the city taking part. Colourful, vibrant, noisy and fun.

The picture at the top of this post is of two participants from the city's Chinese community, who had got together with a number of other groups to form one massive dance and music troupe.

And after showing our faces at one of the first socials of the week, we managed to find decent fodder in Gio, an Italian restaurant barely even a stone's throw away.

It was carpaccio beef with shaved Parmesan and rocket for me, followed by the sort of large prawns that require you to get your fingers messy, and than an indulgently big portion of ice cream – chocolate, vanilla, pistachio and strawberry.

And that was entirely enough to lift the spirits.