Local food

The local food movement, which is of great interest to all of us or certainly should be, is a very complex issue. 

While we all applaud the new drive toward "localism", it is the duty of those at the artisan/production end of food to move things on a bit. 

The strides we have made in the last few years are really quite amazing, and now, the much more difficult thing to achieve will be to move "localism" outside the foodie fraternity.

The hardest nuts to crack would be those people for whom value for money and cost are the biggest motivators. The problem with this group is not their unwillingness to act, but the lack of the right tools to do so; tools like education and the means to generate the raw material to cook with - you might say, the ultimate conundrum of the chicken or the egg. 

When we do crack it, the food culture will change beyond all recognition. Maybe then we'll be able to look back with pride, at all the many people who fought so hard for this change in so many ways, remembering that it was the many individual drops of rain into a bucket that eventually filled it.

Pig Swill

One of my youthful memories is of Mr. Mulgrew in his mazda pickup collecting the kitchen waste (or pig swill as it was known) from the local hostelries. Normal kitchen waste would be taken home to feed his omnivorous pigs, and this would make the pigs a little over fat but choc full of flavour (not dissimilar to the much vaunted rare breeds pork of today's Artisan butchers).  The first reason for not feeding the pigs of today entirely on swill is the modern requirement for uniformity of size and fat cover of the animal. It has been ascertained that the way to get more uniform carcasses is to spilt the feed into twenty percent cereal ration and eighty percent swill. There is also a concern for balancing the carbon footprint generated by cereal/ soya consumption, but the consensus is that there is no way to entirely cut out the soya consumption by pigs straight away.  The second reason, is the disastrous Heddon-on-the-wall foot and mouth outbreak.  This made legislators run scared from swill feeding, and an EU wide ban on swill feeding pigs very quickly followed.  It seemed at the onset of the ban that most people hadn't considered the crime of food waste to landfill as an issue .... This issue always has in my view, been one of the most important food and farming issues. Thankfully, it's also a view that many sections of the media now seem to be adopting.