13:07:08 - English Cherries - down but not out.
 Today's edition of BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme was quite fascinating. Cherries, it seems were once grown widely and in vast quantities in Britain. English cherries were apparently the envy of the world. So why does it seem that cherries are an exotic fruit predominantly from the Eastern med?
In truth, in the past cherries would never have been imported to the UK but today only 5% of the cherries on sale are grown here.
Why? Because that is the position that cherries producers and consumers...us...have been pushed into over time by supermarkets.
The buying power of the giant food retailers demands produce to be delivered at an unreasonably low price and an unrealistically uniform size and shape. The fact that fruit like cherries are naturally variable in terms of sweetness and size, dependent upon the weather, doesn't fit with the retailers' specifications that everything should always be the same. Consequently they turn to low cost producers in territories where the volume of water available can be controlled precisely - a good British summer rain shower can cause an entire crop of cherries to split - and who can produce to a price through low labour and land costs.
This is not only bad news in terms of food miles but in terms of biodiversity too. At one time dozens of different varieties of cherry were grown in Britain. Today the supermarkets buy most of their cherries from Turkey where just one solitary, single variety is grown.
That loss of genetic diversity is potentially disastrous for the industry - a single fungus could eliminiate the entire crop at a stroke - but also disastrous for the consumer. Where is the variety? Cherries for cooking, cherries for preserving, cherries for eating, for cakes and tarts and infusions. These should all be different varieties, one size does not fit all.
It does not held that celebrity chefs - with their hands deep in the pockets of the supermarkets - say such things as "Because English cherries are in short supply, however, I am grateful to other European countries and the US for sending us a plentiful stock throughout the summer." That is hardly helpful or even half-way accurate! English cherries are in short supply because of the supermarkets not despite their "gallant" efforts. The supermarkets are the problem, not the solution!
Of course this crisis is in no way limited to the little cherry. We face the same homogenisation of the food we can buy right across the board, from cherries to chicken, from bananas to beef.
What can we do?
Buy local, buy traditional, boycott theses cynical supermarket policies.
We all have to shop in supermarkets sometimes and I am not proposing that we can do otherwise, but we don't have to buy in to everything they do.
So, a simple three step activity for you:
1) Familiarise yourself with what fruit and veg should be grown in your country.
2) Buy those products only if they have been grown in your country
3) When buying imported produce check that it comes from its traditional home. Look for Fair Trade too!
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