Out & About September 2017

We all need to take more notice of what we eat, where it comes from, how it is packaged and what happens to that packaging. ROMILLA ARBER is a passionate advocate of responsible food production and disposal and sets out the case for how we can all be more aware Making a difference

W hen you are out and about this month give a thought to how your food ends up at your table. I have for a long time been interested in the politics of food and in particular how it gets to the consumer. If someone asked me why I would have been crazy enough to buy a pub and restaurant, open a wholesale food business and five coffee shops, the only answer I can give is that I wanted to prove that the supply of food could take place in a more equitable manner, fairer to the consumer, fairer to the suppliers and fairer to those employed by a food business. I also think that food is too good, too important and too precious to be produced badly and cheaply with little concern as to the consequences of its production. We are going to have to accept that food will become more expensive and more difficult to produce. We are already 13 per cent less self- sufficient with our food production in the UK than we were 20 years ago. Most of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the rise of the supermarket in cutting the prices paid to farmers, which has had the effect of putting a lot of UK farmers out of the game. With this in mind, consumers have to expect to pay more for their food and treat food with a little more respect. One of the more frequent complaints we get when we open a new coffee shop is from people annoyed that our sausage rolls cost more than the ones sold in service stations.

We can’t all keep consuming and disposing of what we don’t need in landfill sites. Most of the packaging we use in our coffee shops is compostible so we need to get composting them and encourage our customers to do likewise. The world is a precious place and the food it provides a precious commodity so let’s treat it as such.

Without wanting to state the obvious, we pay our staff more to produce our sausage rolls, our staff more to deliver the sausage rolls, our shop assistants more to sell them and we use quality ingredients that cost a little more and we pack our sausage rolls full of sausagemeat. Should a product that involves the breeding, rearing and slaughter of an animal be a cheap product or a premium product? So how else do we do to try to make a difference and be a more thoughtful business? We try to engage with the communities in which we operate. For example, in August we started our Honesty bike challenge and walking group. Although these groups are designed to help market our business, they are also conceived with people’s mental and physical well-being in mind, which sits well with our ethos and principles. As the production of food becomes more challenging, I really think that it is going to become more and more important to source food locally wherever possible, cutting down on food miles and assisting the local community and, of course, local producers. We are making a real effort in the coffee shops to find local producers who can supply us with good, locally-made products that will add to what we already offer. For example, this month we started stocking beautiful nut butters made by the Nut Butter Company, based in Fordingbridge. They are seriously good. This year I am also determined to find a way of disposing of waste in an environmentally- friendly way.

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