I have been a fan of farmers markets and local produce shops for a long time, I like knowing, and seeing, where the food comes from, and some of the best advice about ways to serve the food comes from the people who grow or rear it. So it has been really nice to see that the supermarkets are selling a lot more local produce. You can now buy local milk from most of the big supermarkets, although it tends to cost more – strange that it doesn’t have to come so far, but hey ho.
Also the thing that I really like are th local soft fruits, mainly the Berkshire strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries that have appeared. It is great. The weather over the summer was not good enough to allow for going along to our local pick your own farm, so how convenient that you can go along to your local Tesco or Sainsburys and buy “Berkshire strawberries – grown just outside Wokingham”?
But then I got to thinking. Yes, they are grown locally. Yes, they are sold locally. But where do they go to in between these events? Do the farms themselves wash and pack the strawberries into the marked Tesco plastic punnets and then deliver them to the stores? I am pretty sure that they are not packed at the store itself. So my question is this – are local fruits really better in a food mile contest than produce grown elsewhere and shipped to my local store? For example, Wokingham strawberries picked and then sent to Wales for packing, and sent back to Wokingham, have got more food miles than Hertfordshire strawberries picked, sent to Wales for packing, and then sent down to Wokingham.
In a bid to get to the bottom of this, I have written to both Tesco and Sainsburys HQ’s. I will keep you posted.