Truly Local

Keeping it Truly Local in Budleigh Salterton

The small town of Budleigh Salterton on the coast in southwest England has a growing farmers market that insists on keeping itself truly local. Malcolm Florey, leader of the market project, explained the rules in a story in the North Devon Gazette about the upcoming season opening:

“All traders have to meet the strict criteria as produced by the project working group and agreed by the Chamber of Commerce. In particular the produce and products sold must be grown, reared, caught, or manufactured by the stallholder within the defined local area. In addition the principal producer, or someone directly involved in the production process, must attend each market and be on the stall.”

There's no shortage of local producers who can meet those “strict criteria” and are vying for spaces at the market. Florey had initially hoped to have a dozen producers lined up for the March 28 opening. He has signed up 15, and placed still others on a waiting list. Vendors at the monthly market, held on the last Friday of each month, will offer Red Devon beef, local pork, lamb, free range chicken, trout, venison, cheese, breads, cakes, pies and preserves, vegetables and plants, honey products and other items.

How to Cheat City Slickers Eager for Local Food

Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas and Claire Newell, the London Sunday Times reporters who uncovered a scam in their city’s farmers markets, offered an amusing “farm bluffer’s guide” for peddlers selling wholesale produce at the markets as if they had grown it themselves.  Here are some of their suggestions:

“Roll your vegetables around in the mud to give them an authentic farmers’ market look and you mark up your prices accordingly.

“Tear off any labels saying Spanish or Grown in Argentina or ‘gassed and stored for the best part of a year by Tesco’. Replace sticker giving the name of a quaint sounding farm or Locally Grown.

“Have a rant about modern pesticides. Make it clear to customers that you only use the countryside’s natural fertilisers. You will win their undying loyalty.

“If someone starts asking too many questions, chew some straw.”

Farmers Market Scam Uncovered in London

I just came across this from April: an investigation by the Sunday Times of London into an audacious scam perpetrated against a burgeoning crowd of shoppers in England who are flocking to farmers markets in search of locally grown and produced food. The first of the modern day crop of farmers markets in Britain opened in Bath in the summer of 1997. There are now 550 nationwide, ringing up in excess of an estimated £220 million [$440 million U.S.] a year, the Times reported. They are “widely hyped as a mechanism for bringing back quality, integrity and accountability into Britain’s food chain.” But the “we grow it, we sell it” sales pitch is a lie, in the case of some of the vendors, the paper found:

“Consider, for example, Isle of Wight Tomatoes, one of the most established stallholders at London’s numerous farmers’ markets. It looks like a small, traditional enterprise and claims to sell its own homegrown produce. Think again. Its tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers are bought from a separate company, Wight Salads, the bulk of whose £60 million turnover comes from supplying supermarket chains. Worse, as far as many green consumers may be concerned, many of the tomatoes are actually experimental genetic crossbreeds that Wight Salads is engineering to try to find the ‘next best thing’ for the supermarkets.”

To add injury to the insult inflicted on well meaning farmers market shoppers, the Isle of Wight Tomatoes folks charge at least twice as much as supermarkets for the supermarket tomatoes that they palm off on their customers. Confronted by the Times reporter, an official with the company had the audacity to dismiss concerns by insisting that the vendors at the markets had paid a visit to a farm.

The Times found other offenders:

“Isle of Wight Tomatoes is not the only stallholder jeopardising the reputation and integrity of farmers’ markets. The markets are only supposed to stock 'local produce', but last week we discovered spinach from Portugal and Spain — produced by another supermarket supplier — being sold at a farmers’ market in Kent.

“We also found evidence that even legitimate stallholders are ‘topping up’ their locally grown produce with vegetables bought from Britain’s wholesale markets. One undercover reporter was told that city folk would not know the difference, especially if the produce came with ‘a bit of dirt on’.”

Regulation of farmers markets in the United Kingdom is “piecemeal and confused,” the Times said. The National Farmers’ Retail & Markets Association has tried to bring integrity to the 170 farmers’ markets that it certifies, using an independent inspection body to check its markets.

Defining a 'Farmers Market' in Wales

The "best farmers market in Wales," according to this account in the Western Mail, is "restricted to people who are farmers or of farming origin who derive most of their income from agriculture."

Chepstow's Farmers Market was founded in 2001 by Sarah Stone who, lives with her husband and child on a 300-acre "beef and arable farm" in Newchurch. The market has seen "a phenomenal rise in interest among shoppers" in the last several years, says the Western Mail. Sarah explains:

“We’ve noticed people buying more and more produce. They like it because it has the traceability, they can’t beat it for freshness and they want to support local producers.

“At the end of the day the public can only buy what is on offer and what they can afford, but everyone is becoming more environmentally friendly and aware of how many miles food has to travel to arrive on our doorstep. We’ve noticed that trend and I’m delighted to hear that it’s being seen across Wales.”