Today our church held it’s Harvest Festival, the first under a new Rector. It was well attended and the flowers decorating the church were beautiful. I was delighted to see a local farmer who I know has ceased to attend for some while. I think all of the farming community present would have felt appreciated, and they were included by sharing how this year’s farming experience had been for them, e.g. What grew well this year? A: Grass, although until we know what the winter weather holds no-one ever feels confident that they have laid down enough. How can people help? A: By shopping wisely.
Within that final answer lies the rub. People want to support British farmers, but shopping wisely is not a simple matter.
You may already have seen Riverford’s campaign asking supermarkets to stop “Farmwashing” Farmers against Farmwashing a practise designed to fool buyers into believing that they are supporting family farms when the reality is that they are being driven out of business and replaced by Mega-farms operating on a scale that we more usually associate with America. Please do take a look at the website and the case-study videos it contains. As you will see 61% of farmers say they are likely to give up their farms in the next 18 months.
Our supermarket food distribution model has certainly been the main factor behind the demise of so many of our traditional foods. Whilst I was responsible for recording these endangered foods for Slow Food, I was all too familiar with the insidious way in which consumers are deceived into believing that the food supermarkets supply is sustainably produced – and tasty. Just this week another marketing con has been revealed as Brian May stepped down from his role as vice president of the RSPCA over what he called “appalling” animal welfare standards in farms certified under the RSPCA Assured label.
As time moves on and we become further and further distanced from our agricultural roots it becomes ever easier to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes. They may well never have known foods as they used to taste. They are woefully ignorant of how food is produced. Unless you are closely involved in farming it is easy for people not to spot the changes and to be clueless about things like how many animals it takes to supply food in quantities sufficient to cover the entire country as most supermarkets do.
In a defeatist way, I have given up trying to point out all the anomalies. Most people have little more than a superficial interest in where their food comes from or how it has been produced. Now I concern myself only with the food I consume, more of which we have to produce ourselves, but at least we have the wherewithal to do that. We have a steadily dwindling pool of known and trusted producers from whom we buy and other smallholders like us with whom we can barter food. But what of the next generation? Heaven help them, but I am at least trying to educate my personal small circle of family and friends.
To return to the Harvest Festival, in common with most nowadays the produce donated is passed on to a Food Bank and excludes fresh produce and, as we were specifically told this year, anything home preserved. So that’s me out then. Homemade preserves, fresh eggs, fruit and vegetables are what I have to offer. I buy as little as possible from supermarkets and certainly don’t intend to line their pockets any further than necessary. Not so long ago these Harvest Festivals were a great opportunity for educating children by harvesting food together and filling an attractive basket to make a (hopefully) welcome gift for someone. I also looked forward to buying produce donated by others that I didn’t grow myself. Now I avoid looking at the sad display of packets and tins, almost entirely containing imported food. This is a huge missed opportunity as far as I am concerned, and worse, I am increasingly coming to the opinion that Food Banks are more part of the problem than the cure. I shall make my Harvest donation to The Country Food Trust which uses the money to process wild game, including wild deer whose numbers are much in need of reduction for their own sakes. Some of the meals produced are offered to food banks, but also used in hospitals, schools, prisons and community cafés.
Buying wisely would certainly help our dwindling number of small farms to survive because the truth is, as you will know if you have been following Clarkson’s Farm, they need to sell food directly to the public, ideally having first “added value” to it, because government financial support is now only available for environmental projects not producing food. So, if you would prefer to look at fields with animals grazing in them rather than banks of solar panels that might be better placed on buildings, you need to put the effort into understanding how and where our food is really being produced.
Recipe
Our Harvest festival took place on Michaelmas Day, which was traditionally celebrated with roast goose. However, this is just one example of our lost culinary heritage. I can no longer find anyone rearing geese in time for Michaelmas, they are now only available for Christmas, so duck it has to be.
I buy mine by mail order from Pipers Farm . I visited the farm many years ago, when they were selling their own Devon Ruby beef and was impressed by their commitment to quality which had led to doing their own butchery. As early pioneers in the mail order meat sector they gradually began to sell the meat of other local farms too, which saves everyone the expense of setting up a direct selling business. All of the farms they use work to Pipers Farm’s own high standards. Pipers Farm are now my preferred supplier for poultry, although I should point out that it arrives frozen, which doesn’t suit everyone. My only gripe with this method is that the giblets are always frozen into the same packaging as the bird, and I might prefer to be able to make liver pâté and stock at a different time. With their goose, which does arrive fresh, I remove and confit the legs then freeze the goose for roasting at New Year.
To roast the duck, remove any fat from inside the cavity and pierce the fatty parts of the exterior to help the fat flow as it cooks. This fat should be strained off regularly and used for roasting the potatoes – duck and goose fat make the best crispy potatoes. I don’t stuff the bird, other than a handful of herbs, otherwise the stuffing absorbs too much fat. Roast at 180˚C for 30 minutes per kg plus 15 minutes resting time. This will give a quite a rare breast, but you may prefer to remove the legs and cook them for a further 30 minutes at 150˚C.
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