‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’ (see Chapter VI)

Only maybe now the tide is turning with the news that Davidovich Bakery in New York is taking on Dunkin Donuts for the deceptive and misleading use of the descriptor ‘Artisan Bagels’ on their products. Davidovich has filed complaints with the authorities to stop the abuse of the term ‘artisan’ which read:

“For Dunkin Donuts to use the term “Artisan” as the cornerstone of their campaign is patently deceptive and misleading to the public. The term is used to increase the marketability of the product by applying a label to it that does not match the characteristics of the manufacturing of the product. It creates the perception that their products are produced by hand, using traditional methods in small quantities. This is not the case. In addition to deceiving the public, the campaign devalues and dilutes the value of true Artisan products like those produced by our company and thousands of Artisan Bakers around the country. The public, as a result of the campaign, will cease to understand the true meaning of the term and its proper application-this is cause for great confusion and harm.”

It’s only fair to point out that Davidovich itself is no high street bakery, it is a wholesale bakery operating on some scale but does make the claim that “(w)e are the only wholesale bakery left employing Artisan Bakers who still kettle boil bagels and bake them on wooden planks in a rotational shelf oven.” What’s more, when it came to the taste test Dunkin Donuts proved to be no competition, the quality of Davidovich bagels was all too apparent.

Davidovich Bakery – true artisan bagels

Davidovich focuses on process as the defining characteristic of ‘artisan’, but for me it goes much deeper. Lori de Mori captured the essential qualities of being a culinary artisan in her book Beaneaters & Bread Soup:

“A kind of personal integrity that can be confused with eccentricity: ‘however strange it may seem to you, this is the way I do things’.

Pride without arrogance: a sincere belief in the excellence of their work.

Humility and steadfastness: the ability to light the wood stove, milk the ewes, coax the bees out of their hives – quietly, without pretence – day after day, year after year.

The belief that their work is not a means to something else, but one of the ways to give meaning to their lives.

Genius: the brilliance that comes to those driven by their personal vision rather than by a desire for success, money or fame.

Generosity: they have no secrets. If you appreciate what they do, they’ll tell you everything they know … and usually set a place for you at their table.”

That’s a lot to live up to and maybe it’s more aspirational than a standard, but it works for me.

So integrity, pride, humility, belief, genius and generosity. Do Dominos, Dunkin Donuts and the rest make the grade? Silly question of course, they all fall at the first hurdle of ‘integrity’. But ought we not also to hold Dominos et al up to account and ridicule them for passing themselves off as ‘artisan’ under the authority of Humpty Dumpty? It’s unrealistic to expect Davidovich or any true artisan to take on sophisticated well-funded corporate legal departments, but we could all help educate one another as to the true meaning of ‘artisan’ and have a little fun at Domino et al’s expense.

Best of luck to Davidovich, I am right with you, but I can’t help thinking you’ve a mountain to climb.

The tone of the meeting was set when Tim Smith, Chief Executive of the FSA, declared an interest as  CEO of Arla Foods UK plc prior to his appointment at the FSA stating: “(M)y views on the sale and consumption of raw milk are a matter of public record.” He did not say what those views were, I googled them but couldn’t find them, but I can’t help but think it is probably safe to conclude that he is no supporter of the availability of raw milk to say the least. The interest declared, he did not feel it prudent to leave the meeting, as would have happened in most public bodies, which afforded him the opportunity of a light hearted exchange with Jeff Rooker, Chair of the Board, at the end of the discussion.

Alison Gleadle, Director of Food Safety, presented her report and quite fairly  made it clear at the start that there had been “no reported illnesses associated with raw drinking milk or cream in the UK for around 10 years.”

The present system of controls and background to the review were covered by Artisan Food Law in the run-up to the FSA Board meeting. There are two issues in particular that appear to have prompted the review – a raw milk vending machine in Selfridges department store and online internet sales of raw milk. Both are under the control of the farmer producer providing the milk so it is difficult to see what practical issues arise. Certainly no more than those with the milkman who can provide, and for many years in some areas has done so, overnight doorstep deliveries of raw milk.

Steve Hook beside his raw milk vending machine

Against this background, I have rarely observed so many members of a public body come to a conclusion before public consultation has even been launched. A few comments during the discussion:

“(I) made my mind up before reading it (the Director of Food Safety’s report to the meeting) that I was going to go with the idea that pasteurisation was by far the best.”

“I would look for a ban on the sale of raw milk.”

“I totally agree that pasteurisation has to be the way forward.”

Does this sound to you like a group of people intent on meaningful public consultation with an open mind? One member of the Board had even made up his mind before reading the Director’s report, never mind the public consultation! In fairness, the odd comment was made that tried to put things into some sort of more rational perspective:

“I’m not sure we should be overly worried and be bothering because I can’t see there’s a problem.”

One member did also rather tentatively raise an alternative view, pointing out there was nothing about sustainability in the report, which I took to mean diversity in food supply, and another, although somewhat patronisingly, referred to drinking raw milk as a cultural issue for “the farmers on the small farms who have done it for centuries.”

What were frequently referred to as the “inherent risks” of raw milk were never balanced by a single word about the possible benefits. Almost every conceivable activity on the planet carries inherent risks, the responsible way forward is to put in place prudent measures to manage those risks, which is what we have already. Crossing the road carries a risk but we have yet, for very good reason, to ban crossing the road.

The FSA must recognise its responsibility to protect consumer interests outside of the very narrow and blinkered approach it appears to be taking. It must take heed of issues of sustainability, diversity and community in place of the pursuit of sterile purity. If it continues down this road it will end up giving the regulation of food quality the same poor public image that the Health and Safety Executive managed to achieve, resulting in press reports of cutting down conker trees because the conkers may fall on your head and other daft stories. These may, for the most part, have proved to be myths but they reflected a widely held public view. If this happened to the FSA it will only serve to undermine the credibility of an otherwise important and essential body.

Finally, if raw drinking milk is lost, next in the frame will be cheese made from raw milk. Take note of Jeff Rooker, Chair of the FSA, in his closing remarks in the discussion:

“We know to our certain knowledge last year some farmers criminally switched ear tags from TB infected cattle so those cattle continued to put milk into the food chain and they sent other cattle to slaughter. Now I accept that milk in the normal course of events would have been pasteurised, but what if that milk had been had been supplied to cheese makers making cheese from unpasteurised milk?”

The FSA drew attention to this problem in March last year but raw milk production is subject to a much stricter control regime, this connection is misguided, but maybe it’s a case of raw drinking milk in the frame today, raw milk cheese tomorrow?

Some proposed changes may make sense. No one could sensibly argue that raw milk from different species should be treated differently. There ought to be appropriate safeguards in place for all raw milk, and if this is all about goats and sheep then it will prove to be the proverbial storm in a tea cup. The FSA should not, however, use this as an excuse for more far reaching change.

The members who questioned whether this review is a priority should have been heeded, focus on what really matters and makes a difference, harassing a 100 or so farmers trying to preserve a tradition that does no harm does the FSA no credit. How about making a real difference – put energy into addressing something worthwhile like, for example, cutting fat and salt in processed food to save an estimated 40,000 lives. Get the priorities right and use public money wisely.

Regrettably for now, the FSA gives no semblance of a group of people embarking on a public consultation with an open mind, raising fears the consultation will be a sham. It is almost impossible not to reach the conclusion that the FSA is simply trying to cover its back.

Oh yes, the light hearted exchange I mentioned at the outset. Jeff Rooker, Chair, quizzed those present if they knew why the statutory warning for raw milk did not refer to it not being ‘pasteurised’, nobody knew except Tim Smith who chuckled, kept it to himself, but indicated he would tell the Chair later, he had an interest after all, leaving us all to guess again.

It would have been hard to watch a more one-sided discussion, but don’t take it from me, you can watch the discussion for yourself. Meanwhile, drinkers and advocates of raw milk, and those who believe in the consumer’s right to choose should be very concerned.

So many words of which we are fond are being debased. Who really understands that some words are legally defined while others are not? Whilst ‘organic’ is an exception, the rest are not so defined. This leaves an open playing field for industry marketers to exploit our understanding or, on this occasion, more a case of a misunderstanding of the use of ordinary words.

The deceptions practiced by the food industry and retailers become ever more brazen. When I typed ‘Lochmuir’ my spell checker queried whether I had typed a real word. But annoying as spell checkers can be, it did have a point on this occasion. Not long ago consumer champion Which? published the results of some research it had undertaken on food labelling and it turns out that Marks & Spencer sell 11,000 tonnes of Lochmuir salmon each year. It also turns out my spellchecker was right, Lochmuir does not exist.

In fairness Nicola Twilley in Edible Geography highlighted this some months ago. Which? made a half-hearted call for honest labelling but neither seemed really to challenge or question what was happening. There are plenty of other examples. M&S Oakham Chicken, which you could be forgiven for thinking came from Oakham, historic market town in the county of Rutland, but it doesn’t, it comes from various farms in East Anglia, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Tesco’s Willow Farm, like Lochmuir, is a complete invention, it simply doesn’t exist. Does inventing an idyllic place to make us feel better about our purchases sit comfortable with corporate integrity and responsibility?

Marks & Spencer's 'Lochmuir' salmon

The next logical step would be to start renaming towns to take advantage of a familiar product. I’ve not spotted this yet in the UK, but apparently it has happened in China where the town of ‘Parma’ suddenly appeared and it just happens to produce ham? Coincidence? I think not. No doubt foie gras from the factory on the banks of Poyang Lake, Jiangxi Province, in China with a planned 2 million geese and into which US investors have recently ploughed $100m will be called ‘Foie Gras du Compagne’ or some such.

A recent survey reported on the priorities that determined consumer food choices, after price and quality, animal welfare came close behind. This was not so much the case 10 years ago but even then researchers at the University of Reading found that where it was a concern:

“Consumers use animal welfare as an indicator of other, usually more important, product attributes such as food safety, quality and healthiness. Consequently, consumers equate good animal welfare standards with good food standards.”

The food industry clearly understood this all too well at the time and has used it to great advantage in a calculated attempt to present a rosy picture to exploit the consumer’s desire for reassurance on welfare concerns. That manufacturers and retailers invariably feel able to be so open with their deception can only be because they believe somehow we are complicit in it. It seems they help assuage an otherwise guilty conscience to their commercial advantage in a let’s get-away-with-it-for-as-long-as-we-can strategy.

So does any of this matter? Of course it does! It’s utterly dishonest and designed to serve one purpose only, to lead us to believe something is that which it definitively is not in pursuit of the bottom line. Why is there no public outrage? Are we all happy to be treated like a bunch of idiots? Or is ‘provenance’ simply the next word to join the ranks of the abused in our food vocabulary?

A full copy of the Centre for Food Economics Research at the University of Reading can be found here.

Reblogged from saffronbunny:

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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.

Read more… 592 more words

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