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Julian Cottee, Sanjay Kumar & Geoff Andrews
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Geoff Andrews
I’m Geoff Andrews from the Open University. In this podcast, I’m going to be discussing the power of the supermarkets, the revival of interest in local food markets and whether there’s an emerging crisis in the food system. This is a time of big changes in the global food system, global trade or as some say globalisation’s expanding massively, challenging the livelihoods of local producers, the seasonality of food and bringing more powerful large corporations, above all supermarkets. At the same time there’s a new interest in local food with a rise of farmers’ markets and a new awareness of environmental issues and biodiversity.
I mean, with me in the studio to discuss these issues, I’ve got Julian Cottee, Co-Founder of Cultivate, a community owned social enterprise, which brings fresh local organically grown food direct from farmers to the City of Oxford, and Sanjay Kumar, chef of the Headlands Hotel in Cornwall. Can I start by asking you Sanjay is there a crisis in the food system?
Sanjay Kumar
Geoff, these are exciting times, and I guess convenience food has slowly crept into the British eating habits, and we have slowly started eating ignoring the cycles of nature, and yes there is a crisis in the food system in
Geoff Andrews
So it’s cheap convenience food that’s at the heart of this crisis.
Sanjay Kumar
Yes, convenience food has turned us into unadventurous shoppers who are working and shopping and eating and consuming against the cycles of nature, and it is making us separated from the cycles of nature.
Geoff Andrews
Julian, is crisis the right word to describe the food system at the moment?
Julian Cottee
It’s an interesting word, because walking into a supermarket you certainly wouldn’t think there’s a crisis. We’re at a time when we have a cornucopia of food available to us. I think it’s more akin to a time bomb really. It’s a situation where cheap readily available food is masking huge costs at other times and in other places. It’s a huge environmental cost in terms of the CO2 emissions associated with transporting and growing food, but it’s also a social cost associated with the low prices paid to farmers and a broader biodiversity cost in terms of monocultures and destruction of local ecosystems.
Geoff Andrews
And one of the biggest challenges at the moment, some people say, you know, that’s at the heart of this crisis or this time bomb or the availability of cheap convenience food, is the supermarket. And we know in
Julian Cottee
I wouldn’t straightforwardly want to set out to bash supermarkets; I think it’s more complex than that. It’s true that supermarkets have become by far and away the dominant way in which we do our shopping in this country, and 97% of grocery sales are rung through supermarket tills; about 78% of those sales are in just four big supermarket chains. There’s a huge dominant force there, but that force can be used in a variety of ways. It has been in some ways very pernicious in terms of squashing prices to primary producers. In other cases, for example look at the Co-op supermarket turning their entire range of chocolate over to fair trade, they can have a huge impact on the entire supply chain.
Geoff Andrews
Paradoxically, Sanjay, there’s been this new interest in local food.
Sanjay Kumar
Yeah.
Geoff Andrews
And you’re a chef based in
Sanjay Kumar
Local food is very significant to me as a chef, because it creates a symbiotic relationship with nature, the produce, the producer and my menu. As a chef I work as an informant and a decision maker as to what the consumer will eat today, and being in a relationship and a harmonious connection with local food gives me the power to give the right economic fresh local choice to the consumer at the right time of the year and in the right season.
Geoff Andrews
Can you give me an idea, some insight into the kind of local producers you meet, you know, the local markets you visit?
Sanjay Kumar
Local produce is all about eating the right food at the right time of the year, be it asparagus, be it sardine, be it tomatoes, be it berries. It’s about the anticipation is the joy of eating strawberries in summer just as it is being vine ripened under the sun as much as sun we get in Cornwall. It’s about eating asparagus when it comes out of ground in such a force that you are possibly harvesting it three times a day. It’s about sardines which come into the Cornish waters in the summer, only for a brief period, and it’s about eating the right food at the prime so that you get the best nutritious value and yet enjoy the fact that you’re not being across the border, over the counter and not knowing what is the origin of food. It’s about connecting to the base, to the heart of the food where it comes from and getting it through the real person who is possibly in many cases vending the food himself or herself as well. So it’s a journey from the plough to the plate or from the boat to the plate through the food producer itself, and it’s a great story.
Geoff Andrews
There’s some local food knowledge that’s in the Cornish community, the markets and so on that you’re relying on.
Sanjay Kumar
The power of knowledge draws experience from traditions, and nature has a strong role to play as far as nutrition and health is concerned, and if a food producer brings some food to the local market, he has his reputation on the stake as much as I have it as a chef. It is a journey which is clean, good, clean and fair where you know that the food that is being brought from the source to the plate has a story behind it and it is good for you.
Geoff Andrews
Julian, Cultivate is attempting to change the eating habits of the people of
Julian Cottee
Well I mean I’ll add to what Sanjay’s just said that local food is really about people at its heart. It’s about the quality of the food and it’s about people. And what we’ve started in
Geoff Andrews
This is directly from the farmers to the community.
Julian Cottee
Directly from farmers the same day, so the relationships that we have with the producers and with the customers are at the absolute core of making the social enterprise work.
Geoff Andrews
And is this sending a message saying to consumers in
Julian Cottee
That’s the idea. We think it’s our job not to sit back and criticise what’s going on in other parts of the food system, but to come up with alternatives that are economically viable, competitive, but also really attractive and fun. And that’s what we’re setting out to do, we’re trying to create energy and movement behind local food in
Sanjay Kumar
It also reduces waste, because it takes me back to the pre-refrigeration days where you only shop for so much as you need on a daily basis, so the food is not staying in your refrigerator for a long time; you are buying fresh local produce and consuming it within a day or two. I have a classic example: a bag of spinach which stays in the fridge for more than eight days at 37 degrees loses half of its folic acid, so you’re eating basically leaves with no nutrients in it. So possibly it’s taking spinach from the field to plate within one day and consuming it at its prime, is that what you’re trying to do?
Julian Cottee
And we’re starting to change how we shop as consumers. I think we’re less setting out with a list of things from a recipe to buy, but we’re going out to the producer or the local retailer and saying what’s in season, what have you got? Buying up what’s fresh and lovely and making something out of that, and a key element of what we’re trying to do is have the producers there present at the point of sale so that they can inform and communicate with the customers, tell them what’s going on in the field, show them the tops of the beetroot as well as the beetroot stem itself, and explain to them how they can use that in their cooking for example.
Geoff Andrews
And let’s be clear this isn’t just market for posh people who’ve seen on the many food programmes on TV that farmers’ markets look good and so on, this is a community. You’re providing a service to the community really is that what you’re saying?
Julian Cottee
That’s our challenge now is to go beyond the very committed core of people who buy local, a fantastic group of people, but tend to be environmentally conscious, well educated, middle class. Now we’ve got to go out to other groups of people within our community who have the desire and passion to eat fresh local food, but maybe need other ways of accessing that food, and we’ve got to create those.
Sanjay Kumar
I don’t personally think that farmers’ market is a place only for people who have a lot of money. I come from Indian humble backgrounds and local market or a hart or souq is a formula that has run for less-resourced civilisations for a long time. And I guess shopping locally is not about the resource, it’s about the interest.
Geoff Andrews
Yet despite this interest in local food some people are predicting that with increasing economic pressures people will return to the supermarket in search of cheap convenient food, how would you respond Julian to that?
Julian Cottee
I think it’s certainly not the case that local food is always more expensive than supermarket food. There are great efficiencies to be had in transporting things over smaller distances. And if you compare fresh good quality produce to supermarket packaged meals or pre-prepared foods, then there are certainly savings to be had from buying locally.
Geoff Andrews
Sanjay?
Sanjay Kumar
Absolutely! Poverty should not be used as an excuse to eat unhealthy or unadventurously. Look at the humble chicken, if you buy a whole free range organic chicken from a farmers’ market, you can use it from the wishbone to the tail, and use it for four or five different meals, and feed a family for a couple of pounds extra. As compared to that, if you buy a pre-packaged set of chicken breasts from a supermarket, which might look cheap in the first instance, but won’t give you the value because possibly it will shrink to half its size, and won’t have the taste and the flavour and the nutritious value that it gives to your family. So at the end of the day shopping local has its own benefits, and it definitely does not have to have the economic tagline attached to it, look at the value not the price.
Julian Cottee
I would add to that though Sanjay that food has become undervalued. We’ve seen downward pressure on food prices to the point where food is now cheaper than it’s ever been at a time where we’re economically better off than we’ve ever been, and we’re spending less and less on food, and the hidden cost of that is pushed down to farmers at the lowest levels. At some point we had to see a recalibration of our value chain and supply chain, and it may be the case that in some instances produce needs to become more expensive to reflect what is fair for producers, and you see this with the fair trade movement in the developing world, but maybe there are similarities with what needs to happen in our own backyard.
Sanjay Kumar
It’s not all doom and gloom; there is definitely a lot of good light in the future. We just need to focus on making the most out of resources.
Geoff Andrews
And finally, looking at the bigger picture again, one of the impacts I think of the industrial food system has been the decline of people wanting to work on the land, who wanted to be farmers. Can I ask is that likely to change and what does the future hold for consumers and producers Julian?
Julian Cottee
We’re now at a time where the average age of farmers is 60+ in the
Geoff Andrews
And one of the things you get from the US in particular is when people talk about critically the cheap food economy, food movements in the US and making all these connections it seems to me between the environments, between local food, between education and the wider political economic system, so they have a kind of holistic approach rather than seeing food as a sort of nostalgic return to the past.
Sanjay Kumar
US is the nucleus to bring change, and I guess a lot of movements I would say have begun there and have been models for the whole world to follow, and I guess change will come beginning in US and following through in the whole world.
Geoff Andrews
But we’ve had movements in
Sanjay Kumar
Yes.
Geoff Andrews
And I know you’ve been involved in a campaign to save the sardines. So it’s not all negative in
Sanjay Kumar
The future of British food is bright. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight and my recent campaign to bring Cornish sardines back into fashion, one bite at a time, shows that education is the key to eat healthy.
Geoff Andrews
Okay, I’m sure this debate is going to continue. I’d like to thank Julian Cottee and Sanjay Kumar.
13’25”
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