Recently Brian, a friend of mine, blogged about food miles (see entry here ). This is the concept of how far your food had to travel to get to you. Here that can mean quite some distance. I recall the first month that we were here we bought a packet of mixed berries. Strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. It wasn’t until I was eating them that I saw the country of origin (which can sometimes be difficult information to obtain). It was something like this… the Strawberries came from Spain, the raspberries from Argentina and wait for it, the blueberries from Egypt! Kate and I agree that food miles aren’t good for the environment. ALSO food miles aren’t good for food! Quite often, the food has to be picked/collected in a very unripe/un-ready state to be OK for the distance it’s about to travel. It’s not only distance which is a consideration, but mode of transport. We get our fruit and veg delivered by a box scheme company Able and Cole. One good thing about this company, besides their organic produce, is that they never FLY food, ie our fruit and veg has no “airmiles”. So we feel it’s important to reduce the carbon footprint of our food. However, this said, we don’t eat potatoes all winter because of our views, we do end up with variety. I’m not sure where everything in our Veg box comes from, but variety is important too.
I have also taken this idea to heart with my wine consumption. France is very close to the UK, so I feel I should drink more French wine. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it??
Another thing Brain was on about was honey. Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with Australian honey! (he was complaining how Capilano is widely available in supermarkets…) But I might be biased… I’ll point out that he’s correct, British honey is hard to find. We found out that British honey is not very strictly regulated. Imported honey on the other hand has to meet very strict criteria, in particular the content has to be quite “clean”. ie low herbicide levels. The bees aren’t to picky, they seem to be attracted by any pretty flower, so I guess these regulations are a good idea. That said, local honey is something that we came accross while we were doing the rounds of the county shows. We even ended up with a creamy honey made from bees collecting in canola fields. The canola honey was amazing! Besides being very tasty (surprisingly) it was solid white in colour!
All that said, it’s the local farmers market Friday week, so I’m extra inspired to get up early to go buy me some local produce…