We are blessed in the Cotswolds to have some of the finest food producers anywhere in the UK.  Stroud Farmers’ Market definitely has to be among the best in the country, a place not only to buy some of the freshest food in the area, produced to very high and often organic standards, but also to meet the food producers and farmers selling natural, great food directly to the public.  One of the best bits is chatting to them, finding out what they do and how; the more you know about where your food comes from, the more able you are to make your own choices.  The important part here is access to traceable information.  At LMCG, we encourage people to visit our site at Sheepscombe, so they know how we grow the food that ends up in our weekly veg boxes.

Which got us thinking…You may have seen the recent story about an organisation called the Real Bread Campaign (RBC), which challenged the labelling on bread rolls sold by Marks and Spencer (M&S).  M&S claimed the rolls contained only five ingredients, which turned out to be misleading.  They were challenged by the RBC, which was upheld by Birmingham City Council’s Trading Standards Authority (M&S’s Primary Trading Authority) – so, M&S is possibly either not as transparent as you might first have thought or the company needs to review its legally descriptive, food labelling procedures. 

Another recent food story attracting attention is the proposed introduction of gene-edited bananas (also known as ‘precision breeding) into UK supermarkets.  Apparently, the benefits of gene-edited bananas is that they won’t go brown.  Also they would have added vitamin D, but as humans derive vitamin D naturally from sunlight and it’s already added to lots of prepared foods, we wonder why this is necessary.  Whether or not a few brown marks on bananas (this is a very useful, natural indication of sugar content, by the way) puts people off, remains to be seen, but the point is, if these gene edited products are so desirable – gene-edited tomatoes and strawberries apparently are also on the list – why will they not be clearly labelled?  Salads and fruit grown in vertical farms, also recently introduced into the food chain, do not have to be labelled, which raises the question again, if these ‘improved foods’ are so desirable, why not label them?  Or charge a premium, come to that, in the same way the organic market is manipulated, but more importantly, people should know more about the effects of growing food this way so they can make a choice.  

At Stroud Farmers’ Market you can directly ask how the food is produced, however, it seems not all information will be so simple to verify.  An article published online by Riverford Organic Farmers in July this year, states: “English law is changing. By the end of the year, you won’t know whether you’re eating a genetically altered potato, head of broccoli, or tomato”. You can find the full article on their website (see links below) and it’s a wake up call for anyone who thought they could entirely trust the food system in this country. 

Come and see how we grow salads and veg to organic standards, any Tuesday or Thursday morning between 10am-12midday.  Ask questions, there’s no subterfuge here and we’d love to tell you more about what we do.  If like many of us, you buy your food from various sources, then ask questions of those sources too – whether it’s a supermarket, cafes, takeaways or the actual food brands – in person, by email, on social media… you deserve to know if the company involved is telling the whole(meal) truth. 

Want to know more?  Wicked Leeks and Say No to GMOs have both published useful information. Try this link and this here, if you want to research this issue further.