before. There was a public outcry, ‘why do farmers get paid less than the production of milk? Why is a litre of milk cheaper at some supermarkets than a litre of water?’
“The problem lies in a distorted, economic system that promotes globalised, industrialised, commodity style food – we live in an era of artificially cheap food and the role of mass retailers and their failure to act responsibly cannot be underestimated.”
There are government guidelines set down in the production of food and rearing animals which all farmers have to adhere to in order for the public to be protected. But how are they protected? When cheaper produce is continually imported from countries with none of these regulations.
Clare said: “This seems ludicrous to me. Many farming practises and use of hormones were bannned in the UK in Ireland and rightly so but these practises are continued in many countries and they are much worse, enabling them to add greater production and cheaper prices – undercutting our own farmers. Despite all our own regulations we end up eating food pumped full of all the things our own country banned. What’s the sense in that?
“There are no government guidelines on what happens to the minimum cost of food once it enters the supply chain of the supermarket in addition there are other guidelines set in place for national minimum wage but the current pricing practise of the supermarket economy ensures that the whole farming community barely manage to attain that.
“The whole chain is broken.”
Consumers have their part to play too. As Clare explained that making choices based on price alone not only jeopardises the lively hood of people producing and rearing food but it also jeopardises the quality of the future food chain itself.
She said: “Wouldn’t it be better to look at supermarket shelves and know, that producer had been paid a fair days wage for a fair days work and in the process the food was produced in a sustainable way? Fair trade and sustainability are interlinked, it’s about societies, the environment, the economy and health coupled with animal welfare, decent working conditions and fair wages.
“It’s about making governments trade fairly and inspire shoppers to think about their purchases. We also really need to educate people on the variety of what they eat, we need to eat different things that are in season and look at waste.”
“Here is an example,” she added. “People turn their noses up at veal because of poor practises in the past. Recently I was serving milk fed veal in the restaurant, a beautiful product, farmed by a farmer in the Lake District and we had to buy the whole animal to make it sustainable as it’s expensive to produce. I was surprised by people’s ignorance on eating baby cows, they had an opinion that we shouldn’t eat veal and that it was cruel. I asked them if they drank milk and how did they think it was produced? Did they not realise that a lot of calves are just shot at birth – what a waste!”
Clare believes one of the passions of chefs is to help champion quality, smaller, artisan producers that produce sustainably. Chefs pay a fair price for those ingredients but time and time again during talks like Food On The Edge, we go back to the importance of the farmer, the cost of quality produce, the cost of running our restaurants – these are all very real issues.
“Chefs too need to be paid a fair price for their craft,” explained Clare. “The price of food on a plate in a restaurant as opposed to a supermarket shelf needs to be addressed as well. If you called out a plumber to fix a leaking pipe, they charge a call out fee, petrol, parking, the parts used – every single minute they are in the building. Can you imagine if chefs worked like that? If we added up every cost, every hour worked – could you imagine how much food in a high-end restaurant would actually cost?”
She added: “We need to continue to raise awareness, open peoples eye so on a mass scale – cheap, or things that seem to be good value, more often than not means that somewhere along the line someone or something is being exploited. The chef, the farmer, the animal or the environment
“Let’s look at the real cost of food and do something about it – this is the role of the modern chef.”
By Cara Pilkington
@canteencara
