Speciality-Food-Magazine-March-2025

specialityfoodmagazine.com 37 Our aim is to get millions of people to visit the farms where their food comes from so they recognise the story of its origin. I believe that if we could scale that, it would deliver the change that’s needed because too few of us know the story behind our food – in fact, very few of us do. Farms and very often the farmers themselves are powerless because they don’t know the customers – there’s very little direct relationship – so retailers are absolutely in a pivotal position, and I would say that supermarkets have not really honoured this fact. Indeed, they have done worse than that. This means that idependent fine food retailers are more vital than ever, because they are the interface between the producer and the public. They could shout about the connection between the locally-produced food they’re selling and the farm it was grown on – they even could ask if the farmer would be open to having customers visit his farm. It’s a question of show, are causing damage for future generations. And, interestingly enough, a few years ago a law was passed in the Welsh Government, the Senedd, around the health and well-being of future generations – the idea that every law that’s passed in the Welsh Government should take that into account. That is not what we’re doing with our current food system. Educate without preaching The key to unlocking the barrier of dishonest pricing and the wrong kind of food – which is what most of us are eating – is a better-informed public, and the best way to achieve that is to get people onto farms. We’ve recently launched the Beacon Farms network, positioning farms as educational platforms with an aim to get every child at an impressionable age – and adults at perhaps a less impressionable age – to have seeing-is-believing experiences. don’t tell. We can educate, but we mustn’t preach. My farmwas part of the ‘great cheese heist’ a fewmonths ago, and I did 20 interviews over 36 hours with media from all over the world – the New York Times as well as publications in Australia and Dubai. It caught the public’s imagination. If you ask yourself why, you’ll find it’s because more and more people are interested in the story behind their food and this rather was cheese with a story. We can be encouraged by that in a way; we can recognise that there’s an underlying interest in where our food comes from. Power to the people The public has the power to change and improve the food systemwe’re currently working and living within. We hold the key for change. It’s no longer a case of ‘them’ fixing this, it’s ‘us’. This is an empowering message and suggests that we don’t need to preach at people about what to buy and how to eat, but make eating well easier and engaging. The large-scale food industry has pulled a veil over the reality of what they do, because in the words of Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation , “If their customers knew the story, they probably wouldn’t want to eat the food”. Don’t forget that a individual person is more powerful than the big companies because once you scale those individuals up, that’s the market. If enough of us buy food with a better story, then those that don’t supply these products will not survive – even the biggest supermarkets. Both consumers and speciality food retailers should feel empowered by this. W hy is it that speciality foods are confined to people who have privileges, who maybe have more income, who have more knowledge, and out of those privileges, want to source food with a better story behind it? This kind of food should be accessible to all and be more normalised. Why hasn’t that happened? I think value is associated with paying the true cost of something, paying for something which is delivering benefits. And I think that speciality foods would deliver benefits to you and to society as a whole. And at the moment, we’re having to pay a lot more for them. Which begs the question, why do we pay so little for so-called normal food which doesn’t deliver those benefits? I think the answer is that we have a distorted economic system where apparently cheap food isn’t really cheap at all, because the costs behind that so-called cheap food include contributing to climate change, destroying nature, having negative effects on river pollution, reducing biodiversity, and also causing social harm including damage to public health. Also reduced cultural cohesion – for example fewer jobs on the land – and none of those costs are attributed to the normal food that most people buy. So this idea of cheap food, which is what most people buy and it’s mostly available in supermarkets, is a delusion. Most of us buy food according to its price and shop at speciality retailers as a treat rather than normal practice, and we need to change that. The first step is to make sure these hidden costs of food are attributed to their creator. In other words, we make the polluter pay. If your farming system or your food system is causing damage, then you should be financially accountable for that damage. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the polluter doesn’t pay, so that’s the first thing we need to put right. The second thing we need to put right is the price gap between quality and cheap food. Our Hafod Cheddar is quite highly priced, which makes it out of reach of a lot of people. If we were to be paid for the social benefits we’re delivering such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving biodiversity, employing local people and making a nutritionally dense food, then the price of it would come down and the price of normal food, which is dishonestly priced, would go up, and that would close the gap. Our current food systems Why is is that speciality food is confined to people with privileges? Connect with the farmers producing your food, educate without preaching, and hopefully one day speciality food will be the emergent future for all “We hold the key for change” Patrick Holden, founder and CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust, believes good food should – and could – be accessible for all