FoodLovers Blog

Exclusive to the BBC Good Food Shows, Henrietta Green’s FoodLovers Blog

Widely acknowledged as the leading expert on British local and regional quality food, Henrietta’s enthusiasm coupled with guts, determination and commitment makes her the ideal champion of British regional food. Henrietta has won several awards including a Guild of Food Writers Award for the greatest contribution to British food, BBC Radio 4 Food Programme’s Campaigner and Educator 2000 and The Good Housekeeping Award 2006 for Outstanding Contribution to Food. In her search for the best – whether a Place to Buy, Eat or Learn - Henrietta has criss-crossed Britain several times accompanied by her trusty dog. The results were first published in her award-winning British Food Finds in 1987 and then, during 1993, in her Food Lovers Guide to Britain. Now all Henrietta’s knowledge and expertise will be online, here, for you to enjoy.

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5th June - Home Grown Harvests

Growing your own and keeping your own is where it’s at these days. Open up any newspaper, magazine, even search online and you’ll find endless suggestions, from how to get a few herbs to thrive on a windowsill to starting your own version of Chicken Run. On FoodLoversBritain.com you’ll find our Little Green Book on Home-Grown Harvests – I’m not one to miss out. But the exciting thing is that it’s not all dependent on having the perfect south-facing kitchen garden. In fact, if you want to grow your own, you don’t need to have any space at all. Springing up all over the country are guerrilla gardening and community schemes – the kind of subversive activity that appeals to the rebel in me – where you can fill in any bit of scrub land or wasted kerbsidewith beautiful and often useful plants and vegetables. All kinds of kosher organisations are in on the action too, from Sustain to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recently-launched Landshare scheme, connecting those with land to those who want to do something with it. It’s not a bad idea, considering waiting lists for allotments now run into months, if not years. For my part, I’ll be raking the rows at BBC Summer, scouring for seed growers, growing ideas, equipment – it’s obviously something everyone wants to know more about, me included. What strikes me as particularly great about these schemes is the sense of community they generate. Everyone gets involved, everyone benefits and it seems to me that it’s an all-round Good Idea to get a little closer to nature, be it in our own gardens or someone else’s.

 14th May - Has Local Lost the Way?

What “Local” meant was once perfectly clear. If you shopped locally, you shopped within your community, whether in a village, town or city, from a market, high street or corner shop but the shops were generally locally owned. The ingredients you bought were by and large sourced locally whenever possible -  often from a known farmer or producer.

Since then “Local” has become the zeitgeist, the latest buzzword. Inevitably the supermarkets have recognised this and jumped onto the bandwagon. Well, good for them if – and it is a very big if – they are actually stocking Local producers. But try as hard as I can (I even tried to question Paul Kelly, Asda’s Director of Corporate Affairs at The Real Food Festival last week), I can’t get any of them to actually give me a definition or list the criteria by which they choose their “Local” producers.

Farmers Markets start with a distance criteria – anything between say 12 to 50 miles – and then impose further standards, similar to what I impose on all the Approved businesses on my website www.FoodLoversBritain.com. And that is important because every-one is local to some-one, even Coca Cola – so just to judge a local business by the distance is patently not enough.

Other values such as a commitment to sourcing locally and regionally, offering taste, quality and value, using only “proper” ingredients, farming responsibly with care and consideration for the livestock, environment and season count. So why don’t the supermarkets come clean? They can bang on about ‘food miles’, boast about milk brought to the shelf practically by the cows themselves or source pork from a suitably apple-cheeked farmer on the packaging – but what I really, really want to know is what do they mean when they describe a producer as Local. In other words what do they really mean.