Out & About Summer 2018

FOOD & DRINK – HONESTY

Eat Fresh ROMILLA ARBER is a strong advocate for locally-sourced home-grown products. She urges everyone to think about what they are eating and where it comes from this summer

A s I write this article I am sitting in my office wearing a scarf and jacket as I refuse to put the central heating on at the end of April. Many centimetres of rain are forecast for this weekend and it is hard to address my mind to the summer months, but try I shall. We have been busy at Honesty, opening a coffee shop on Overton high street and re-opening the tea rooms we manage on behalf of Houghton Lodge, near Stockbridge. The wholesale business is getting busier, which leads me to believe that people do care about the provenance of their food – when you see the list of ingredients in some super-processed Summer in Britain is like no other time to celebrate all the rich flavours and tastes that fresh ingredients can bring to the table. Look out in our shops for all the new products we are introducing. This summer we shall extend our salad range. We have introduced some fresh smoothies in our Hungerford shop, available to takeaway in our compostable cups with paper straws. It is amazing what power we as consumers have. See how the public are forcing businesses to ditch plastic straws and to pay more attention to reusable cups for coffee. One should food it does make you wonder whether it really is food at all.

Look at America, for example, where the poultry industry has

recently tripled its production from approximately six billion kilos to 18 billion kilos per year in order to satisfy demand. The Americans don’t actually eat 18 billion kilos of chicken. They eat predominantly the breast meat from 18 billion kilos of chicken. The excess ends up elsewhere – pet food for example. It is also fed to fish – because it is so cheap. It’s also exported to other countries, such as Mexico, which has caused some chicken-producing parts of Mexico to suffer hardship. Those unemployed chicken workers then go to the US to look for work, illegally or otherwise, often undercutting the wages of American workers, thereby creating resentment. These are the unforeseen consequences of deciding that we only want to eat chicken breasts. Would it not be easier to eat the whole bird? It is a funny world we live in. We want to eat what we want to eat and expect to be able to without thought to the consequences of doing so. So make a difference this summer and eat fresh, seasonal, local, British produce. You can be the difference.

never underestimate the power of people to make a difference. It has also been interesting to see the surge in people turning to veganism. I am not a vegan, but I have for a long time felt that we eat too much meat in the western hemisphere. What is perhaps more of a problem is that we eat too much of certain cuts of meat without giving thought to what the other bits of those animals get used for. If your actions require a sentient being to give up its life, then at least have the respect not to waste the resulting product. The cuts we seem to covet above all are the ones that come from the parts of the animal that actually do less work, have less fat and are consequently rather bland in flavour. Our fascination with boneless chicken breasts is a good example to illustrate the unforeseen consequences that our choices have on the food chain and life in general.

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