Town & Country Planning, May 2005
There is something compelling about locally-made honey. I’m not quite sure what it is – except that it is the precise opposite of the polyglot indeterminate sweet mush passed off as honey in most supermarkets.
I suppose it is also exciting that it comes from somewhere very particular. The trouble is that it is almost impossible to buy – even health food shops seem to limit their honey to delicacies from even further away: New Zealand or Brazil.
It isn’t that local honey is somehow non-existent. I live in Crystal Palace, about six miles inside London’s urban area, yet there are two or three different kinds of honey made within a mile from my house.
I know this partly through tireless research, though the small shops that used to stock them have mostly disappeared. It is another example of how supermarket monopolies actually undermine consumer choice.
Nor is this unimportant. Local honey is collected by bees from local pollen and eating it can make a major difference to hay fever sufferers. I know: I’ve done it – but there is no point in desensitising yourself against pollen from Brazil.
The scandal of the demise of local food has been brought into sharp relief by Jamie Oliver’s recent TV series on school food – the one where the mothers sneaked in takeaway burgers so their children didn’t have to eat Jamie’s fearsomely healthy strawberries.
There was one particularly disturbing interview with a local doctor in Durham, who described some of her child patients who were so constipated that they were sometimes unable to go to the loo for six weeks at a stretch.
There is no doubt that the real key to healthier school food – or hospital food – is to reconnect with local farmers. The food comes less of a distance, is fresher, is not reconstituted to within an inch of real existence, and it comes from somewhere particular.
It is important to save local farming, not just for romantic reasons, but for health and the environment. We might still have a chance if we start re-connecting now.
My own think-tank has been doing work with Northumberland County Council to do just that.
When they renewed their food supply contracts last year, they organised special seminars for local suppliers, linked hopeful local businesses to business support services, and changed the specifications of the contract – all to help them apply.
As a result, their contracts for meat, milk, bread, fruit and veg all went to local suppliers – worth about £1.5 million a year.
That has to be a good thing, but it has unexpected economic effects. Local suppliers spend more of their income with local people and business – about 40 per cent more – so that money tends to stay circulating in the local economy.
In fact, on the basis of the Northumberland research – and using our local money flow measurement tool LM3 – buying local looks as if it benefits the local economy 400 per cent more than buying outside the area.
All that has important implications for the procurement of local healthy food.
We know that children will benefit – and eating fruit and vegetables now can prevent bowel cancer in later life. We also know the local environment benefits (less trucking).
What this new research shows is that the local agriculture sector is also healthier, and that money stays circulating in the local economy for longer, and that means economic benefits to the council.
Local purchasing can be more expensive, certainly than the pathetic 35p allowed by local authorities for each children’s lunch. But if the extra money can be offset against some of the economic benefits brought by local procurement, maybe the decision is easier.
So if you are one of those officials who puts balance sheets above children’s health, then perhaps it might be possible to set your mind slightly at rest.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea that local food and local agriculture would make any kind of comeback seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. In fact, one of my colleagues was almost jeered off the platform by a representative of Tesco for saying these things a couple of years ago.
But actually, I think that’s wrong. One of the most important fronts where localists are struggling is the business of local food and children’s health, and I believe for that reason that local production for local consumption – not for everyone, but for a growing minority – is the future.
Maybe enough of that idea might filter through that I can buy my Crystal Palace honey easily again in the high street.