Reblogged from saffronbunny:

Turn on the telly and you’re likely to catch a bearded man foraging on Channel 4 or a BBC fledgling MasterChef shouting about seasonal and local; look at your bookshelf and you’ve probably got at least one over-priced TV-endorsed cookbook which you’ve barely opened. Yet despite our recent ‘food renaissance’, some of the most obvious sources of local and seasonal food don’t feature in our shops, on our shopping lists or even on our culinary radars. Veal is one of these (as are rabbits and …

On the morning of my visit to Pextenement Farm I came, by chance, upon an article in the US Farmers Weekly headed ‘Cheese producers urged to focus on breed for carbon reduction’. Not all cows, it seems, are the same. The lighter weight Jersey versus the Holstein uses significantly less land and water resulting in a 10% reduction in carbon emissions when the milk is used in cheese. The reasons are several but fat content is a big factor, Jersey milk has 4.8% fat as against the Holstein’s 3.8% which means more milk solids for cheese. I was curious how Pextenement would fare here.

Stoodley Pike inspired the name for Pike's Delight

Carl Warburton greeted me warmly and provided a brief resume of how he came to leave HBOS just as things were going pear shaped and set about building The Pextenement Cheese Company in 2008. He explained how production started at the beginning of 2010, barely two years ago, but in this short space of time he now makes quite a range of different cheeses including: East Lee, a fresh soft cheese; Pexo Blanco, a semi-hard cheese for use in cooking; Pike’s Delight, a cheddar style cheese matured for 8 months and, what I had come for and easily the most successful, Pexommier – think ‘Coulommiers’ and you’ll get the idea. There’s also Devil’s Rock Blue, a soft blue cheese, about to be launched, more about this later.

My main task, since the cheese room does not afford much space for working, was to keep out the way but I managed a token contribution towards the end of the process. The milk, all 220 organic litres at a time, comes a few hundred yards from the neighbouring family dairy farm. Carl puts the milk through a pasteuriser in a small room next door to the cheese room. He tried raw milk at the outset but wasn’t convinced it was the right way to start, but may revisit this in the future. I arrived just before the moment at which cutting the curd took place.

It takes roughly a litre of milk to make a 170g Pexommier cheese 9 cm in diameter, so we could expect a good 200 that afternoon. At 32 ^oC and about an hour after cutting Carl declared the curds ready to go into the cheese baskets. Temperature, it seems, is the critical factor at all stages of the process.

While the curds drained and sank to the bottom of their baskets, Carl and James, his assistant, performed a swift and efficient scrub down of the cheese room after which it was time to turn the Pexommiers and my chance to help. I managed, at Carl’s invitation, to turn a half dozen or so of the incredibly soft cheeses in the time Carl and James turned the other 200 plus cheeses in a skilled and quite rhythmical way.

Carl will turn the cheeses once more first thing in the morning before they receive a brine wash and a dip in a solution of penicillin which allows the characteristic soft white bloom to develop on the mature cheese. The final stage is 10 – 14 days maturing at a temperature of about 12^oC before delivery to numerous local retailers and restaurants. Pexommier has a shelf life of 28 days and really needs a good time at room temperature if you are to experience that distinctive rich creamy taste. Carl made over 100 attempts to get the technique right when he started, but now has an artisan cheese fully deserving of the Silver Medal it gained at the British Cheese Awards in 2011. There’s even a special heart shaped version for Valentine’s Day!

Pexommier Cheese

We sampled, as a reward for all my hard work, some Pike’s Delight, 8 months old but still very youthful, an impressive Brie and a quite mild Pike’s Delight Blue, but for me it was the Devil’s Rock Blue that was the real star, a soft, delicate blue and lusciously creamy, named after the ominous rock perched at the top of the hill behind the Farm.

So what about those cows? I learned that the family have a mixture of breeds in their closed herd, but they produce a high 4.4% fat milk – not quite that of a Jersey but much better than the standard 3.8% and so carbon friendly too! Carl has come up with something really rather special, Pextenement cheese will be making regular appearances on our table! It will soon be available online too, so you can all try it.

Carl has posted a series of photos illustrating the story of Pexommier, you will find it here and for a review of Pexommier by North/South Food click here. North/South Food are also featuring Pextenement cheese as a part of the vegetarian option in their forthcoming JoinUS4Supper evening in Manchester on 23 February 2012, click here for details, but be quick to book, tickets are going fast.

The Pextenement Cheese Company, Pextenement Farm, Eastwood, Todmorden, West Yorkshire OL14 8RW  Tel: 07725 517934  E-mail: info@pextenement.co.uk Web: www.pextenement.co.uk

In The Guardian today we read, on the face of things, good news about a ‘Sharp rise in sustainable seafood products on sale in UK’. The number of fish and seafood products certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) rose 41% to 988 in 2011, although just five species – cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and prawns – comprise 75% of what we eat. The MSC is not without its critics who say it has expanded too rapidly and, by implication, not properly vetted fisheries before their approval. There are now 13,000 MSC certified products in 80 countries worldwide. All seem to agree, however, that sustainable fish labelling is often confusing and unhelpful and needs to be improved.

ClientEarth, a group of activist lawyers working in defence of the environment, has set up the Sustainable Seafood Coalition which includes 16 of the biggest seafood suppliers and retailers in the UK, including most of the big supermarkets. The Coalition is working to draw up voluntary codes on sustainable seafood sourcing and self-declared sustainability claims, to ensure clear and accurate information is given to consumers. Melissa Pritchard of ClientEarth explains.

Melissa Pritchard of Client Earth on the Sustainable Seafood Coalition

The Coalition is expected to publish and implement its fish and seafood labelling code later this year. Whilst we should wish the Coalition good luck, all attempts to provide clear and consistent food labelling must be applauded, the outcome must not be based on a sustainable fish standard which is the lowest common denominator, that would be a disaster. Every member of the Coalition should be provided with a copy of the PEW report: How Green is Your Eco-label? A Comparison of the Environmental Benefits of Marine Aquaculture Standards as required reading. Get the sustainable fish standard right before the label.

Whether it’s 10, 15 or 30 miles, these are all arbitrary figures. If we agree on 30 miles we are surely not really saying that the farmer who lives 31 miles down the road cannot be local? Food miles matter, but they are not really what we are talking about when it comes to local food, they have a place but are more to do with the mass road and air freighting of out of season produce from far flung corners of the world. What’s more, an arbitrary figure opens the door to the likes of McDonald’s who would not be averse to promoting potato chips as ‘local’ when sourced from the commodity farmer 29 miles down the road. Such ‘farmwashing’, as the practice has been coined, lets industrial food producers hijack ‘local’.

Slow Food Earth Markets promote local food

Slow Food has promoted ‘Earth Markets’. These markets are required to source products that represent a community and come from within a 40 km radius, although 10 per cent may be guest stalls. When we talk of local food we think of geography, but it’s not really distance we see as being important, rather it is a sense of community and the connection we have with the farmer who produced what we are about to enjoy. It is local because we have knowledge of the producer, confidence in the provenance of the food and an appreciation of the journey it took to reach our plate. There is trust which runs, like the proverbial stick of rock, throughout this relationship. In Slow Food terms, the consumer is a co-producer. Local food seen in this way makes an arbitrary distance somewhat redundant as a defining characteristic and ‘local food’ cannot be hijacked.

Jason Foscolo, a thoughtful US attorney specialising in support for small scale farms, proposes the idea of a ‘social distance methodology’:

““Local” should define a relationship, an information loop between a producer who knows her customer and a customer who knows something about how the food is made.”

This approach has more value and meaning to offer. Whether we like it or not, descriptors such as ‘artisan’, ‘natural’, ‘local’ and others we employ are all terms being hijacked by the industrial food processors. We can take ownership of them if we articulate clearly what they really mean and define them on our terms. We can have a rule of thumb about how far food can travel to qualify as local food, but let’s not get hung up about it. It’s not the distance it’s the connection, the human relationship and sense of community that matters. It may be harder to define, but we all recognise it when we see it.

Estabrook’s journey starts with an earlier recollection of driving behind a truck in Florida piled high with green tomatoes and observing that those which fell on the highway suffered hardly a blemish. He goes on to trace the origins of the tomato in Peru and recount the work of the Rick Center at the University of California Davis which holds a library of 3,600 specimens of Solanum chilense.

Estabrook carefully charts the life of the Florida tomato, the source of a third of US fresh tomatoes, grown in a soil devoid of nitrogen, that holds no water, is infested with pests, bacteria and fungal diseases, simply because it is warm enough in Florida at a time of the year when nowhere else in the US can grow tomatoes.

The season starts in April when the land lays fallow, with a little help from the herbicide Roundup, till July. Farmers then ‘inoculate’ the land with a fertiliser containing nitrogen and potassium and tractors carve raised beds in the soil before the remaining fertiliser is applied. The beds are then fumigated with methyl bromide, which kills everything in the soil and can kill people in small concentrations, before being sealed beneath a layer of plastic mulch. The five week old tomato seedlings are then planted by farmworkers sitting six abreast on the rear of another tractor. The regular application of an array of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides comes next, these are commonly found on tomatoes at the point of sale in supermarkets.

The harvest starts 10 or more weeks after planting. Picked while still green and hard the tomatoes are taken to a packinghouse to be washed in a warm chlorine solution to kill bacteria, graded, blow dried and gassed with ethylene to give the appearance of ripeness. “Taste does not enter the equation” says Estabrook.

More compelling are the detailed accounts Estabrook gives of the lives and working conditions of the ordinary farmworkers who scratch a living from this trade. The catalogue of hardship endured is hard to take in: intolerable working conditions and a rate of pay that has not changed in 30 years well below the minimum wage, frequent exposure to high doses of highly toxic chemicals with inadequate training or safety precautions, women workers giving birth to babies with crippling birth defects, dire living conditions with no running water or sanitation, complaints result in being fired and, in one district the local US attorney has up to 12 cases of slavery at any given time. A modest number of significant victories challenging the corporations behind the system give cause for hope, but there is a long way to go.

Estabrook provides a detailed, copiously researched and referenced account, that makes for an authoritative work on the subject. While we may try and content ourselves that Florida tomatoes and the things Estabrook chronicles are far away, we know the practices described are used the world over. There are also plenty of well documented stories about the exploitation of migrant workers across Europe engaged in agriculture. In the UK perhaps the most notorious case was that of the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers in which the lives of 23 migrant workers were lost.

It may be the story of a Florida tomato but I bet you will never pick up another supermarket tomato and see it in quite the same way after reading Estabrook’s account. But rather than make a depressing read, Estabrook highlights the work of some exceptional people, provides some hope and makes for a rousing cry for action!

Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook, published by Andrews McMeel 2011 ISBN: 978-1-4494-0109-2

Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb was sent to London, by a special express train run by the Great Northern Railway, for sale at Spitalfields and Covent Garden in time for Christmas and onward to Paris.  Every weekday night from Christmas until Easter the express carried up to 200 tons of rhubarb. In 1939, the heyday of Yorkshire rhubarb production when 200 growers provided 90% of the world’s forced rhubarb, forcing sheds were to be found over 30 square miles throughout The Rhubarb Triangle. Nowadays only a dozen or so growers remain covering a much reduced area of 9 square miles.

The rhubarb crowns are grown unharvested outside for two years and, having fallen dormant in the autumn, they are lifted, washed clean of soil and packed close together on the surface of the soil in special forcing sheds where they sit in total darkness at a temperature of 13˚C. If you stand still and quiet in the forcing shed and you can literally hear the rhubarb growing, a creak here and there, and every so often a muffled pop as leaves unfurl. Hit the play button below and close your eyes, best with headphones on.

The shoots produced are tender and pale, they are pulled by hand and by candlelight to avoid light that would otherwise spoil the crop. The exhausted rootstock is discarded at the end of the harvest which takes place between late December and March. It is a long, three years from start to harvest, and capital intensive process.

Candlelight in the rhubarb forcing shed

The best quality rhubarb is 40cm to 50cm long and no more than 2cm thick. The skin of the stalk ranges from salmon pink to blood red, but almost white inside. The flavour is sharp yet delicate and considered much finer than the Dutch version. The leaves should be small, bright and pale green but never eaten because while rhubarb is rich in calcium, fibre, magnesium, iron and vitamins C, B2 and B3, rhubarb leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid which is a poison.

The National Rhubarb Collection is, appropriately, held a few miles to the north at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Harlow Carr near Harrogate where you will find over 130 varieties of rhubarb.

You can take a tour of the forcing sheds. Janet Oldroyd, the driving force behind E Oldroyd & Sons, a five generation family business based in Carlton in The Rhubarb Triangle, will provide you with a passionate presentation on the history of rhubarb. She can, as they say, talk the hind legs off a donkey when it comes to rhubarb, what she doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.

Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb

In March 2010, following a campaign spearheaded by Janet Oldroyd, Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb became the 41^st British product to secure Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status within the European Union taking its place alongside Stilton cheese and champagne, in so doing confirming its past status as ‘champagne rhubarb’! Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb is also listed in the Slow Food UK Ark of Taste, a catalogue of exceptional gastronomic products in danger of disappearing due to modern systems of food production and distribution.

The Wakefield Festival of Food, Drink and Rhubarb is one of the earliest annual events in the food calendar which celebrates the traditional links with rhubarb growing in Wakefield alongside other regional produce. This year it takes place on 24 – 26 February.

Recipes for Yorkshire Rhubarb are plentiful, but you could make a start with Rhubarb and Blood Orange Meringue Pie from Eat Like a Girl. You will also find a surfeit of recipes at www.rhubarbrecipes.co.uk.

Details about tours of the rhubarb forcing sheds can be found at www.yorkshirerhubarb.co.uk or simply to listen to the rhubarb growing click here.

“Don’t worry about what you eat between Christmas and New Year,  just care about what you eat between New Year and Christmas.”

Wishing everyone a fantastic 2012!

PEW asks some basic questions. Is fish produced according to a particular standard better than conventionally produced fish? How do different standards compare?  PEW investigated published standards according to their performance on 10 environmental impact categories using a well-established methodology. While four out of the five top performing standards are organic, including that of the Soil Association, the standard used by M&S came bottom, or next to bottom, out of 20 standards on every measure applied.

The early adopters of quality assurance standards would frequently comment that a standard successfully applied guarantees that what you get has been produced to that standard. If the standard is poor in the first place, so is the outcome. Maybe that’s what is happening here?

The Guardian reported on the MCS survey findings highlighting the fact that the Co-op and M&S had been awarded a “gold rating for sourcing and promoting sustainable fish”. The MCS commended M&S for having the best overall seafood policy but it needed to do more work on the provenance labelling of seafood products. The environmental law group Client Earth had previously reported that some retailers, not M&S, showed a blatant disregard to where products came from.

PEW looked at standards of production whilst the MCS surveyed UK supermarkets. According to PEW, the performance of the M&S standard was poor which, if correct and the MCS is right, does not bode well for other UK supermarkets. PEW does conclude that:

“While many eco-labels have won consumer confidence, an alarming number of the standards ignore major environmental impacts or fail to set measurable limits.”

The overall conclusion, that most eco-label standards offer no more than a 10 per cent improvement on the status quo comes as little surprise.

So what is the average consumer to make of it all? Confusion is understandable, but it is impossible to resist the conclusion that standards of sustainable fishing and retailing practice have a long way to go before we can have any confidence in them.

Meanwhile, when you read the label on your next fish purchase don’t swallow the claims it makes hook, line and sinker. If you are satisfied, fine go ahead and enjoy the fish but be sceptical, curious and inquiring so you learn more and make a better choice next time.

The PEW report: How Green is Your Eco-label? A Comparison of the Environmental Benefits of Marine Aquaculture Standards can be found here. You can find the MCS report here, as it was reported in The Guardian here and Client Earth on fish labelling here.