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.
Comments