GM-free Scotland

Once upon a time there was a carrot growing happily in a field with lots of other happy carrots. He was a very straight, average sort of carrot, but lots of his friends were much more interesting, quirky and lumpy and all sorts of sizes. The carrot was wrapped in a coat of earthy, rotting plant bits which kept him safe and well fed.

The farmer was very proud of his carrots and took great care of them, until the time came to pull them all out of the earth to send them to market.

The carrot and his friends, all still wearing their cosy coats, found themselves on the back of a truck being unpleasantly rattled and jiggled for a very long time until they were a very long way from home.

Suddenly the rattling and jiggling stopped and was replaced with something much worse. The carrot was plunged into a huge vat where he was bumped around and half-drowned until his earthy coat had quite gone and lots of his friends were broken and bruised.

After this, the carrot lay around for a long, long time. He had nothing to break the monotony except the occasional arrival of another pile of startled, bashed and naked carrots far from home.

The carrot was beginning to feel tired and old, and a light fur of fungus was springing up on this bare skin, when at last something happened.

First, his older, quirky and lumpy friends vanished, followed quickly by the big ones and the small ones, and next he found himself being rubbed so hard he thought he was being skinned alive.

Just when he thought he couldn't take any more, he was crammed into a see-through bag with five other very straight strangers about his own size, and heaped into a box with lots of other identical bags of very straight strangers, to be rattled and jiggled on the back of a truck for many hours until he was almost home again.

Finally, arriving at his destination, on a shop shelf under a light so bright it hurt and surrounded by all manner of other vegetables from all over the world, the carrot had a chance to look around at his companions.

They were all glowing, eerily, bright orange.

Then he noticed to his horror that HE was glowing orange too, and, that some of the 'strangers' were really his friends in disguise, but all much too traumatised to be companionable.

Nearby, the carrot saw some vegetables in see-through bags with neat pictures on the front which looked very like his own little English farm. He called out a friendly greeting to them. From the first, a bag of carrots, he got only a stream of Italian which he couldn't understand. From the second, a bag of watercress, he got only Portuguese which was just as bad. From the third, a bag of parsnips, he was told grumpily in English but with an accent he didn't recognise, that the parsnips weren't sassenachs thank you very much. So the carrot gave up and brooded miserably until the end of his days.

The proud farmer paid the price of producing happy carrots. He made so little money from having too many quirky, lumpy, big and small carrots with earth on them, that he lived in poverty to the end of his days.

The supermarket bosses and shareholders lived happily ever after.

***

If this sounds like a fairy story, sorry, it's not. If you would like to read a more journalistic delivery of the tale, it appeared in the Guardian on 26^th June 2007.

The subject of the original article was that Sainsbury's had cancelled contracts for organic carrots supplied by farms belonging to the director of the Soil Association, Patrick Holden, and to the future King of England. The cancellation was done without notice and, in the case of Patrick Holden, included a fine of £3,380 + VAT. The reason cited was that the quality of the carrots was inferior, but the truth of the events paints a rather different picture.

Although the crops were produced and sold in the same area, in between the two, they were trucked miles to a distribution centre. There, they were washed in a bulk washing machine which damaged 15% of them, left lying around until a large enough batch had mounted up for distribution. To prepare them for sale, they were polished in a 'Vege-Polisher' which removes the surface membrane along with any fungal growth to make them shiny, glowing and fresh-looking, no matter how long they've been lying around. After grading for cosmetic standards which rejected 50% of the crop, they were trucked miles back to the supermarkets to be sold as 'local', 'fresh' produce. The grumpy carrot was pure invention (apologies to all Scottish carrots), but its Scottishness behind an English-suggesting label was real.

Here are some interesting points to ponder:

• Previous suggestions, denied by the supermarkets, that our farmers are suffering in frightened silence while they are exploited by the stranglehold of the supermarkets, seem to be only too true
• The growth of demand for local organic food in Britain has been so ferocious that the industry can't keep up, yet up to 50% of an organic crop can be wasted by supermarket mis-handling and unwarrented cosmetic demands
• Most supermarkets are preaching localism to lure you away from local business and into their stores, but their centralised, large-scale packing and distribution system can give local veg a larger carbon footprint, and make it older, than veg from an unidentifiable source
• Because the supermarkets have invested millions in their current system, they will take a lot of persuasion to change
• Local, organic food is you best way to avoid GM contaminated food.
• Every canny housewife asks for 'dirty carrots' because they last longer and taste better.

And here's some interesting actions to take:

1. Take the trouble to shop where local really means local.
2. Ask for unpolished veg with a bit of inbuilt variety, real freshness and taste
3. Press for all vegetables to be labeled with the date they were removed from the ground.
4. Have some fun in your local supermarket: see if you can spot any 'local'-looking produce from outside Scotland. If you find any, give the store a red face, and tell GM-free Scotland about it.
   

OTHER SOURCE: Observer 1.07.07