English Apples – Supermarket Shame - Slow Life Blog from the Lake District

English Apples – Supermarket Shame

6/9/2010

Anthony Davison is a fifth generation farmer, whose website, Big Barn, promotes farmer’s markets and local suppliers. He has pointed out that English apples are available in 1,050 of his outlets, but haven’t yet made their way into any of the big three supermarkets. Of course, those supermarkets are busy selling apples by the lorry-load, but they are all imported, all absolutely uniform and all suffering the deleterious effects of being stored for far too long.

No doubt the PR departments of the big supermarkets will continue to maintain that they sell local produce, but for the most part that is a lie. Everyone who shops in supermarkets at the expense of local suppliers is helping to support that lie.

Here at Yewbarrow House we have been picking apples for several weeks now and Margaret baked our first blackberry and apple pie on 19th August. Delicious it was too. If we are picking apples so far north, I’m sure that the orchards of Kent will be harvesting theirs too. If supermarkets really did support local producers, they would be selling them.

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About Slow Life

The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food, which are “good, clean and fair”, and extend them to life in general.

Here in the Lake District, the air is clean, the pace is slow and the atmosphere is calm. If we don’t grow food ourselves, we can buy it in friendly small shops, where you know the quality is going to be the best.

This blog is a celebration of the Slow Life, with forays into the world of design, music, the arts, gardens, and my particular weakness, Japan.