Farmer’s fury at Tesco lamb mince label

This headline so soon after the Horse meat scandal shows how the supermarkets have become complacent. Are consumers really that addicted to supermarket shopping?

They promised fair labeling but are already mixing UK lamb mince with New Zealand to add value in the eyes of the consumer. Will it add value and surely their excuse of needing to ‘maintain availability’ is rubbish, they could easily have UK & New Zealand Lamb Mince on the shelf?

Complacency is a very dangerous word and often spells the end of an era for a successful business. I really hope this is the case as I am sure we would all be much better off without supermarkets.

Much better using your local alternative, of butchers, bakers, farm shops, dairies and delis. To find them use our BigBarn local food map. Watch out for ‘£’ signs meaning cheaper than the supermarket, or a rosette meaning you can ‘Crop for the Shop’and help build your local, more sustainable, food industry.

Help Launch the brilliant MooMan Movie

There is a brilliant new movie about to hit our screens if we all help give it a gentle push. If you care about the plight of dairy farmers and the commoditisation of food read on.

The MooMan was the surprise hit of Sundance Film Festival 2013. The story of a farmer, Steve Hook, and his favourite cow Ida.

Steve is a farmer with a sparkle in his eye, passionate about his cows, producing organic raw milk, and keeping the family farm small and sustainable.

Sadly he is a rare breed in the farming world. Every day one small, family run farm, closes. Luckily Andy Heathcote and Heike Bachelier of Trufflepig Films wanted to show how important these small family farms are. And what better way than to make a film showing how surprising, and beautiful, the world of this farm is.

Unfortunately releasing a film is an expensive business and Andy and Heike want to do it properly. They are planning the best trailer possible, posters, and to tour the film to cities, towns and villages up and down the country – but to do this they need help to raise £20,000.

For more and to help bring the film, that Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper called, his “crazy favourite”, to a UK cinema near you, ClICK HERE.

BigBarn is a great supporter of small dairy farms and have blogged about the how much more sustainable small farms, selling direct, are, than mega dairies. For a taste of Steve’s Raw Milk buy online in the BigBarn MarketPlace by clicking here.

Misleading food advertising

Fresh local veg

Getting ready for work this morning I spotted two very dodgy TV adverts. Tesco ‘price promise’ and Walkers crisps.

Misleading because those watching will think Tesco must be ‘cheapest’ when on many products local suppliers are cheaper due to a shorter supply chain.

And Walkers, claiming they are a caring company, by sourcing flavouring ingredients from British producers. Quality crisp makers like Pipers, Fairfields, Just Crisps, Burts and Corkers have been doing this for years.

A few years ago pressure from these high quality crisp makers made Walkers switch from frying their crisps in Palm Oil, high saturated fat, to the much healthier, sunflower oil.

When Walkers ran an advertising campaign about the switch it was cut short when people like me asked why it had taken them so long!

So please ignore these dodgy adverts and shop locally to find better, fresher, food that is normally cheaper than the supermarket. And ask questions to get the facts and the story behind the food you buy and feed to your family.

Grow your own and Crop for the Shop

1942 Poster

Grow your own is growing in popularity. Even the government are now telling us to Grow our own to avert food shortages.

In these austere times should we all start growing our own to save money? Or is growing food more about enjoying the satisfaction of planting a seed and slowly watching it turn in to delicious food?

At this time of year asparagus is the god of fresh vegetables and a shining example of how quickly a food can spoil as time passes after picking. Sweetcorn is the same, my friend Nick insists that his wife has the water boiling before picking his corn, and removing the husk as he runs back to the kitchen!

Really fresh sweet corn

This is the kind of passion and enthusiasm we Brits need to feel about our food, and I am sure that growing food helps. Certainly the project we ran with a primary school proved this, with kids who said they hated vegetables munching on raw carrots they had grown. Click here for the video.

At BigBarn we are keen for everyone to have a go at growing food and even start trading it locally with our Crop for the shop scheme. All part of our mission to build a social, LOCAL, food industry, as an alternative to the anti-social national one, that gives neither producers, or consumers, a good deal.

There is no doubt that by cooking and eating fresh fruit and veg, half this country’s population would become more healthy, and save money. Seasonal vegetables are normally very reasonably priced compared to a ready meal, or imported food, especially if sourced locally.

A home baked potato could cost around 5p compared to a McCane ready made one, in a box, for 50p. Likewise a soup made from chopped mixed veg and some stock cubes will be a fraction of the cost of tinned soup and much more nutritious.

BigBarn Local food map with icons & rosette flag

Growing veg can also kindle some artistic flair like my bean pole wigwam made from willow poles pruned from a local overgrown willow tree.

So there are now 4 reasons to grow your own; save money, get healthy, get enthused and artistic accolade, and, make money by selling your veg through local shops.

To find these shops look for icons marked with a rosette on BigBarn, if your local food shop is not flagged with a rosette, or not on BigBarn, please tell them all about us.

Asparagus now in season, at last!

Has spring finally sprung now Asparagus are appearing? What better way to celebrate the change of the season with fresh, delicious, healthy, local, or home grown, asparagus.

Asparagus is best eaten within 2 hours from picking. The longer you leave it the more the natural sugars turn to starch and the base becomes stringy and inedible. So now is the time to find your local Asparagus grower and gorge yourself on really fresh shoots, or buy crowns and create your own asparagus bed for a crop in 2 years. You could even make money by selling your excess through local shops via our Crop for the Shop initiative. For Monty Don video on this click here.

If like me you are lucky enough to have an Asparagus bed you will cutting selected tips already, 4 weeks later than last year.  I planted my beds 3 years ago and can only pick until the 1st June (next year mid June).  They are delicious and incredibly sweet and tender if picked and cooked straight away.

I will be filling in any gaps this year with new crowns and hoping to try out some new recipes so that we can gorge on the crop and not get bored of such a healthy vegetable.

To find your local grower click here, to buy online click here, for Asparagus crowns click here and for recipes click here and type ‘Asparagus’ in the search box.

Guest Blog: The history of coffee and a new era.

Our guest blog this week comes from Mariners Coffee Merchants’– how coffee circled the Earth.

Roasted coffee beans

Like tea, the coffee business has been dominated by big food corporations grabbing market share, then marketing brands while cutting cost and quality. Small firms are now moving in, and by selling direct, consumers are able to buy better coffee at a reasonable price. For some great suppliers try our MarketPlace here.

There’s an awful lot of coffee from …….

Brazil springs to mind as the place on earth where the coffee we drink comes from. It is true that Brazil and Columbia produce the most, but the story of coffee does not start and end there. Our story begins on another continent back in the mists of time.

Coffee and its cultivation originated in Ethiopia many centuries ago. According to legend, a tired young boy called Khaldi was herding goats. He was exhausted, but his goats still had boundless energy – they had been eating the red berries that had ripened in abundance on some nearby bushes. Khaldi tried some of the fruit himself and was at once re-invigorated – he was the first human to experience the caffeine kick. How the chewing of coffee fruit evolved into brewing coffee from the dried and roasted seeds still remains a mystery. The chewing of raw coffee fruit (or “cherries”) is still practised today in parts of Eastern Africa and Yemen.

Some time after Khaldi, coffee became highly prized. The effects of caffeine helped monks and viziers to stay alert during their long working hours. Around nine hundred years ago coffee farms became established in Yemen, across the mouth of the Red Sea from Africa. It is from here that the rest of the world took its coffee – even the farms in Kenya and Ethiopia would be planted with Yemeni strains in the 19th Century. The Yemeni port of Mocha was the principal trading place for coffee from the 15th to the 19th Century and gave its name to the varietal exported from there that has a distinctive, natural taste of chocolate. The practice of adding chocolate to coffee to create a mock Mocha is a modern Western invention to reduce cost.

Jesuit missionaries travelling in Arabia in the 15th Century were among the first Europeans to taste coffee. Dutch merchant adventurers stole seedlings from Yemen and transplanted them to their new colonies in Java in the early years of the 17th Century. Around the same time, a Muslim pilgrim from India called Baba Budan smuggled seeds home in the folds of his clothes – thus establishing India’s coffee industry long before European dominance of the sub-continent.

Javanese coffee was being sold across Europe by Dutch traders by the 1690s. King Louis XIV of France zealously guarded the Java coffee plant he had received as a diplomatic gift. When asked by Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu for a cutting to take back to Martinique the King refused. Undeterred, de Clieu broke into the Royal Botanic Garden and stole a cutting. After an epic voyage escaping pirates and nearly dying of thirst – de Clieu gave his water ration to the seedling – coffee had crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. The French colonies in the Caribbean soon began planting coffee and exporting beans to Europe, giving rise to the Bourbon varietal.

Coffee transferred to the Latin American mainland during the early decades of the 18th Century. Each transplanting created further mutations. An act of espionage brought coffee from French Guiana to Brazil. The dashing Lt. Col. Francisco de Melo Palheta was despatched to seduce the French governor’s wife. He returned with a bouquet of flowers – and coffee seedlings – to establish the largest coffee farming industry in the world.

After two centuries of smuggling, piracy and slavery, coffee had circumnavigated the globe and had become a major international industry. Coffee is now the second most globally traded commodity after oil. Coffee is still grown in Yemen, but the industry there is hardly noticeable. Coffee is grown in a tropical belt on three continents; each country and region produces distinctive varietals with their own unique characteristics.

Getting people enthused about food and cooking

We have great food in this green and pleasant land, more varieties of cheese than the french, and hundreds of hours of cookery programmes on the TV.

So why can’t we Brits get more enthused about food, and cooking? Perhaps this video will help?

Not terribly British but inspiring all the same. Buying and cooking food should not be a ‘drudge’. Don’t believe the TV adverts, and the shelf space devoted to ready meals. Yes, we are all busy and work lots of hours, but let’s finish the day with a great meal, around the table with the whole family swapping stories about the day, congratulating the cook, and perhaps, even discussing the ingredients!

So what will make us change? The Horse meat scandal has made many more people think, and talk about, where their food comes from. More people have given up ready meals to cook from basic ingredients, and are pleasantly surprised to find they are saving money.

A butcher told me last week that a few young people had come in the shop and could not believe how cheap, lean mince, was, and were enthusiastically discussing what they were going to cook with it. Is this the Jamie Oliver generation?

If we can get cooking, and growing, food in schools perhaps a new food era is not far away. See our school food growing video here.

To help, BigBarn is here to help people find the freshest, best, ingredients, celebrate the seasons, (still waiting for asparagus), videos and recipes, and the story behind the food for the dinner table conversation!

If anyone has a story on how your family, or friends, get enthusiastic about food and cooking, your feedback is very welcome below.