Friday, 24 May, 2002

John Sheard ponders on the sad reluctance of the British shopper to pay a little extra for quality food.

THIS WEEK, the Government gave its environmental health inspectors the right to search the baggage of passengers coming through airports and ports looking for illegally imported foodstuffs. Big deal!

Although this is a step in the right direction to stop animal and plant diseases being brought into the country - the suggested cause of last year's foot and mouth crisis - this is merely a drop in the ocean to what is needed (sorry about the mixed metaphor).

Under suspicion for causing the disaster is untreated waste from Chinese restaurants fed to pigs on a farm in the North East, a charge which the local Chinese community hotly deny.

However, even it were true, it is highly unlikely that any restaurant owner would bring in meat in a suitcase. He needs his produce in bulk - and, what the new rules do not say is that foreign meat comes into this country by the thousands of tons every week. Quite legally.

We import mountains of beef from places like Argentina and other countries in South America and Africa where FMD is endemic. We also import pork and poultry and God knows what else from many countries who hygienic practices are, to say the least, questionable and whose ideas of humane husbandry are non-existent.

Much of this meat goes into mass produced foodstuffs like pies, sausages, and frozen or tinned varieties produced by a mass food industry which, many critics say, has far too much influence on the Government, along with their allies in the junk food trade and the big super markets.

In the past few weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people in the Dales who are trying to create a new marketing momentum to sell top quality local produce - mainly lamb - at premium prices by persuading the supermarkets to label local foodstuffs as just that.

The idea is that people will be prepared to pay more out of loyalty and the desire for better quality. I hope they are right. But I have my doubts…

The trouble with most English families these days is that food has become merely fuel, not one of life's great pleasures. Family meals around the dining table are also non-existent, except perhaps at Christmas.

Instead, people grab something from the freezer, pop it into the microwave, and eat it alone, often in front of the TV, a computer screen, or a video game. And what is in those instant meals? The aforesaid imported cheap meats from some pretty nasty places.

Now I sometimes get extremely angry with the French for their regular flouting of EU laws which do not agree with them. But I have over the years spent many months in that country, mainly thanks to the food (and, of course, the wine).

No French housewife, in rural areas like ours at least, goes out food shopping with a list. She often has no idea at all what she will feed her family for dinner than night (around a proper table, of course).

She goes to the local market to see what is fresh and what is cheap on that particular day and buys it. She has in her head, you see, enough culinary knowledge to prepare a menu as she goes along, without sitting down for hours writing one down after watching some celebrity chef on TV.

This, of course, calls for some sophistication, education, and practice. But now that, in Britain, mum never cooks and schools long-since abandoned domestic science lessons, how will we Brits acquire such skills?

The answer, I fear, is never. However, because I would desperately like to see more high quality Dales food on the shelves, this is a rare occasion on which I shall happily eat my words if proved wrong.