Super Market shopping

Being the adventurous sort and always interested in food, a hastily arranged trip in Harrisburg to an upmarket supermarket was gave me plenty to ponder on. Our guide was a lovely working Mum who worked for the Pennsylvania Ag department. During a mad drive to the suburbs, she told us plenty about her life which was pretty much the same as a UK mum's including complicated childcare arrangements. The thing she found extraordinary was the thought that so many young UK Mums do their supermarket shopping online and have it delivered when the children are in bed. In fact she dismissed it as something that would never work in the US.
The supermarket we went to was not Wholefoods, but reasonably top end, probably the equivalent of a better Sainsburys. The scale was vast and the number of SKU's in each range was impressive. The lightening overall was not particularly pleasant and it certainly didn't maximise the ambiance! The fresh meat was a fairly mixed bunch and to mind the packaging was fairly basic, with mostly vac packing and only a few lines that were gas flushed in trays. The labelling was reasonable but a long way from the sophisticated graphics the UK consumer expects.So maybe the Americans are more savy when it comes to eco packaging and minimise waste. the cuts of meat were pretty much the same, but the large joints were very large with 5kg pieces of beef topside and other megga joints. On the Organic product there was quite a lot of choice, especially in milk and dry goods that could be seen as healthy. The most interesting thing with the poultry was the description of Broiler chicken, In the UK we seem to dress up the worst reared broiler as barn reared or select. the other chicken was organic free range and that was it. No freedom foods, farmer reared, free range, woodland or any other marketing nonsense, just Organic and broiler. How much more straight forward things would be if we had that approach and how much easier would it have been for me in the last year when the organic chicken market has been in free fall as people have downgraded to all these other welfare standards.
Always the consumer i came back laden not with chicken but Old Bay seasoning (great sprinkled on spatchcock chicken)Egg decorating kits, coloured popcorn and yet more cupcake cases.
My next trip to the US i am hoping to get some proper shopping in and try some Farmers markets, CSA's (that's community supported agriculture which is similar to a box scheme) and track down a successful Wholefoods market ( i still haven't got the point of the one in London!)

More ramblings from the USA

One of the most interesting things on my visit to the USA was having a look round some of the biggest and best examples of Pennsylvanian agriculture. One fascinating visit was to Mason Dixon Farms, a large dairy herd of 4000 cows. This was very much a family farm, but on a huge scale. The problems for US dairy farmers are the same as in Devon, with falling milk price and volatility of inputs making an industry that no longer can support a secure income. To overcome this Mason Dixon farms had slashed the costs of production and were producing milk at around half the cost of average US dairies. The impressive scale of how they did this was amazing. On arriving we were welcomed into the farm cinema to see a movie of the Dick Wainwright story of success, the key we were told was innovation and adaptability. In summary that innovation was ‘to be big,’ big tractors, mowers, fields and livestock numbers. We were looking at equipment that you would struggle to move down the A30 let alone down some of our Devon farm lanes. We were then given a tour of the farm which meant that we were driven by coach through the cattle housing! Here the cows were kept in groups of 150 cows, in cubicles and milked by robots. They had very little handling by humans which apparently suits the cows better. Welfare was proved to be excellent, with a vet employed on site. The average number of lactations per cow was 3 which I believe was the national average. All the feed was grown by the farm and mainly based round a maize diet and an anaerobic digester provided the electricity to run the farm and export some to the national grid. So a pretty impressive system, but I, along with most of the British definitely did not feel comfortable with that system. The cows never went outside, they were tail docked, the cubicles were smaller than allowed in the UK and the sheer scale just seemed to be the wrong way to produce milk.

Of course this is now being debated in the UK with the plans for the super dairy in Lincolnshire causing a lot of divided opinion. Here in the South West we are good at producing grass and milk. Although many dairy farms have been sold up, there are still some successful businesses that have adapted and innovated. But their way of cutting the costs of production is by utilising what we have got and maximising the milk from grass. Sometimes this is organically but normally this is using organic principles combined with more conventional methods. Often these farms are 150 to 200 cow herds employing 3 or 4 people and being a positive part of the local community. As a consumer I want to be paying enough to ensure that my milk is coming from cows that go outside and I think that is what the debate has to be about, if consumers want a food produced in a certain way they have to be prepared to pay for it. It will be interesting to see how debate progresses!

If anybody recognises this post then you're right, it was first published in Drewsteington Parish post titled View from The Farm. But it was me that wrote that, so now the worst kept secret is out and you all know who I am!