50 / 76
W
hen you are out and about this month
give a thought to how your food ends
up at your table.
I have for a long time been interested in the
politics of food and in particular how it gets to
the consumer.
If someone asked me why I would have been
crazy enough to buy a pub and restaurant,
open a wholesale food business and five coffee
shops, the only answer I can give is that I
wanted to prove that the supply of food could
take place in a more equitable manner, fairer to
the consumer, fairer to the suppliers and fairer
to those employed by a food business.
I also think that food is too good, too important
and too precious to be produced badly
and cheaply with little concern as to the
consequences of its production.
We are going to have to accept that food will
become more expensive and more difficult to
produce. We are already 13 per cent less self-
sufficient with our food production in the UK
than we were 20 years ago.
Most of the blame for this can be laid at the
door of the rise of the supermarket in cutting
the prices paid to farmers, which has had the
effect of putting a lot of UK farmers out of the
game.
With this in mind, consumers have to expect
to pay more for their food and treat food with a
little more respect.
One of the more frequent complaints we get
when we open a new coffee shop is from
people annoyed that our sausage rolls cost
more than the ones sold in service stations.
Without wanting to state the obvious, we pay
our staff more to produce our sausage rolls,
our staff more to deliver the sausage rolls, our
shop assistants more to sell them and we use
quality ingredients that cost a little more
and
we pack our sausage rolls full of sausagemeat.
Should a product that involves the breeding,
rearing and slaughter of an animal be a cheap
product or a premium product?
So how else do we do to try to make a
difference and be a more thoughtful business?
We try to engage with the communities in which
we operate. For example, in August we started
our Honesty bike challenge and walking group.
Although these groups are designed to help
market our business, they are also conceived with
people’s mental and physical well-being in mind,
which sits well with our ethos and principles.
As the production of food becomes more
challenging, I really think that it is going to
become more and more important to source
food locally wherever possible, cutting down on
food miles and assisting the local community
and, of course, local producers.
We are making a real effort in the coffee shops
to find local producers who can supply us with
good, locally-made products that will add to
what we already offer.
For example, this month we started stocking
beautiful nut butters made by the Nut Butter
Company, based in Fordingbridge. They are
seriously good.
This year I am also determined to find a way
of disposing of waste in an environmentally-
friendly way.
We can’t all keep consuming and disposing
of what we don’t need in landfill sites. Most
of the packaging we use in our coffee shops
is compostible so we need to get composting
them and encourage our customers to do
likewise.
The world is a precious place and the food it
provides a precious commodity so let’s treat it
as such.
38
We all need to take more notice of what we eat, where it comes from, how it is
packaged and what happens to that packaging. ROMILLA ARBER is a passionate
advocate of responsible food production and disposal and sets out the case for how
we can all be more aware
Making
a difference