Ben Stafford: We can all find a fresh appetite for the great taste of local food

Swaledale cheese and Swaledale ewes’ cheese are also on the list, alongside other well-known British products like Stilton cheese, Melton Mowbray pork pies and Cornish clotted cream.

I promise this mouth-watering list is not intended to make you hungry (or thirsty – you could wash this lot down with Newcastle brown ale, Rutland bitter or Gloucestershire cider, all also on the list, although personally I’ll take a pint of Yorkshire bitter any day).

What it illustrates is the rich and deep-rooted local food and drink traditions we have in Britain, including here in Yorkshire.

Food matters to us – we’re increasingly interested in what we eat, how it’s produced and how best to cook it. We’re glued to Come Dine With Me and Masterchef on the TV, and we make multi-millionaires of Delia Smith, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson in exchange for the secrets of their culinary success.

But the odd paradox is that, even as we shed our image as kitchen also-rans behind the French and Italians, we buy ever more of what we eat from just a few large stores, and the number of independent butchers, bakers, greengrocers and others continues to fall. In consequence, it is often increasingly difficult to find distinctive local varieties of fruit, vegetables and meat in a centralised and standardised food system.

So how can we give better support to local foods, those who sell them and, in turn, the beautiful countryside from which they come?

We’ve been trying to answer some of those questions at the Campaign to Protect Rural England through our Mapping Local Food Webs project.

We’ve been to 19 different locations around England – including Sheffield and Otley – and looked at their local food systems, or “food webs”.

We’ve spoken to businesses and suppliers, and to shoppers about what they buy and why they buy it. Ultimately, we want to be able to offer advice to businesses, local councils and the Government about what they can do to support local food better and ensure that we maintain a beautiful and diverse countryside and a thriving rural economy.

We recently published reports for six locations, Sheffield among them, that show wide benefits of local food webs. Unsurprisingly, local food supports local businesses (and jobs); it is fresh and of high quality, and producing it maintains the character of the countryside around the towns into which it is supplied. Local food shops add character and diversity to our high streets and connect people to their communities and to each other – we came across many examples of where shops support local good causes, or offer much-needed support to elderly and disabled customers.

Sheffield, the largest of the towns and cities we looked at, has a thriving local food web, with over 90 local shops and other outlets selling locally sourced food in our study area (centred on the area south-west of the city centre, although the 30 mile supply chain area extends as far as Leeds, Bradford, Nottingham and Manchester).

Nine in 10 of these outlets supported local good causes, and we found a strong presence of community enterprises supplying local food, including community supported farms, city farms and community-oriented food markets. Our research suggests local food may support more than 800 jobs at outlets and a further 1,400 at more than 130 local suppliers in the study area. And local food sales in the area of Sheffield studied could amount to more than £15.5m annually. So it would seem local foods are thriving, even in big cities like Sheffield. Well, not quite. Our research also suggests that the continuing expansion of big supermarkets threatens both local independent shops and their suppliers.

Many of the smaller retailers we interviewed stocked 50 per cent or more local produce, but for most supermarkets the equivalent is just one or two per cent. Local shops and local suppliers depend on one another, and both struggle against the retail giants.

Of course, I recognise that supermarkets are here to stay, that they make many millions of people’s lives easier, and that some even support local food. But a supermarket monoculture can hollow out our high streets, and in the end it is the character and community of both our towns and countryside that suffer – we need to get the retail balance right. Later this year, we will produce recommendations for the Government on supporting local food, drawing on our findings in all the locations we’ve studied. But we can all play our part now.

Shops and producers need to promote local, seasonal food for its value, taste and environmental benefits. They should market it better so its value is understood, and label clearly so people know when they are buying and supporting local. And each of us can do some of our shopping in places that stock plenty of local food, and ask in shops where the food they sell comes from and how it is produced.

During our Sheffield research, one producer said that people associate their products with Yorkshire identity and Yorkshire values, meaning “straight, honest products”. Amen to that – let’s eat for Yorkshire!

• Ben stafford, from Leeds, is head of campaigns at the Campaign to Protect Rural England. For more information on Mapping Local Food Webs, visit www.cpre.org.uk.