Did you Know?

• The average supermarket chicken contains nearly a pint of bad fat, traces of antibiotics, has hock burns from standing in its own excrement and bones so spongy they can be minced up to make hot dogs.
• Single servings of some ready-made puddings contain the same amount of salt as two packets of crisps
• Milk is cheaper than water in many shops
• Only 20% of apples consumed in the UK are produced here
• One Dairy Lea Lunchable (harvest ham) contains 37% more salt than the recommended maximum daily intake for a 6 year old child
• To fly a Kiwi fruit to the UK takes the same weight in fuel as the fruit
• Up to 30% of road freight is food related
• Robinsons Fruit Shoot Juice Drink contains only 11% juice. You would need to purchase 31 300ml bottles, costing £20.60, before you would get a litre of pure, undiluted fruit juice.
• There is 70g of sugar in a 500ml bottle of ready mixed Ribena. The same amount as seven lollipops and 10g more than a 10 year old child’s recommended maximum sugar intake for a whole day.
• Sugar puffs are 49% sugar.
• Some canned ham may contain just 55% meat padded out with water, pork protein (gelatine), salt, sugar and additives.
• Most hot dogs are made from mechanically separated chicken flesh, mixed with water, a little pork, and a wide range of starches, collagens and additives.
• Supermarket fresh pork chops are often injected with water and salt to make them more succulent.
• On average for every £1 spent on food in the supermarket farmers get 9p
• At a school I visited recently the burgers served, I assumed they were beef, contained: 48% chicken, water, beef fat, beef heart, rusk, starch, onion, salt, spices hydrolysed vegetable protein, etc, etc. (no beef meat)
• Some soups are as salty as seawater. Researchers discovered a chicken soup from the New Covent Garden Food Company had 6.25g of salt per 250g bowl. There are 3.5g of salt in 100g of seawater. The Food Standards Agency recommends adults to consume no more than 6 grams of salt in a day.

These are just a few frightening facts from a food industry obsessed with profit rather than what is good for us. The existing food supply chain allows these facts and other horrors to be hidden or kept secret.
BigBarns mission is to connect consumers with local farmers, exposing production methods and encouraging direct trade and a local food supply chain.

To help this process you can find your local producers at bigbarn and register to help us make buying local more convenient by getting every supermarket to have a local mini Farmer’s Market section, in store, run by local farmers, where the farmer earns 75% of the retail price.
This takes the power away from the supermarket buying department and gives consumers the chance to tell local farmers what they want.
And please tell you friends.
If you know of any other ‘disturbing food facts’ email us here and we will add them to the list.

BigBarn is now 5 years old and is a growing influence on change in the food industry. We believe passionately in local food and we know that the best way to get good, safe food is to buy direct from the producer.
We now have over 6,500 producers on our map and we’re adding more every day. This, coupled with increasing media interest in the subject, means that we’re getting thousands of visitors to this website every day.
As well as putting you in touch with your local food producers, we want to make buying local more convenient by getting every supermarket to have a local mini Farmer’s Market section, in store, run by local farmers, where the farmer earns 75% of the retail price. ( compared to the average 9% they currently get ). This takes the power away from the supermarket buying department and gives consumers the chance to tell local farmers what they want.
Here’s what you can do to help BigBarn today:

Remember, the supermarkets are able to be irresponsible because we let them get away with it. If they see their custom going elsewhere, in search of better-quality, ethically-sourced food, they WILL change.
We stopped GM, we have the power, let’s use it!

I was brought up in a street in Cambridge that was over a mile long. It was almost entirely residential – not one shop punctuated its suburban landscape. Almost every ingredient that passed my lips came from a large (now enlarged) supermarket somewhere on the outskirts of town, somewhere liminal. Individual shops, markets and farms were old-fashioned things I learnt the vocabulary for in compulsory French lessons; after all I was more likely to encounter a boulangerie than a bakery.
When I moved away to university in Norwich, I found myself living in a dilapidated, but weirdly interesting 1960’s block of flats, the ground floor of which was given over to twenty shops, the fronts of which were reflected in the sparkling glass of a Somerfield supermarket. I soon began to wonder how these Davids co-existed under the bemused gaze of Goliath. After all, I reasoned, the supermarket, with its ’saver’ card, sold almost everything the shops did, apart from cruises for the terminally retired. What was it, I asked myself, did those small shops offer that the spacious supermarket only feet away didn’t? Was it overall quality, good value or experienced service? Actually, it was all three. Yet some of them were hitting the wall and I couldn’t figure out why.
After graduating, I found myself again living in my parents house in Cambridge, albeit briefly. I sorely missed the warmth and experience of the shopkeepers and the fresh, seasonal produce. In short, I lost my will to cook.
I had developed a seasonal appetite in Norfolk. In springtime, I craved spring lamb. I wanted asparagus in May. I didn’t want parsnips in August or strawberries in December. I began to take a strong interest in the growing season. One of the main reasons why homegrown produce tastes so great is because it has triumphed against the adversity of our marginal climate. It’s quite simple: plentiful sunshine, irrigation on tap and well-fertilised soil often leads to fat, flavourless fruit and lethargic liquidy vegetables.
I got a summer job at a local vineyard, where this rule proved absolutely true. It was certainly tough work for the winemaker, having to protect his crop against late frosts and a damp autumn, though the vintage tasted more the better for its defiant journey.
I now live just outside Milton Keynes which proudly advertises the fact that it has the longest shopping mall in Europe – great news, perhaps, except that not one of the shops is an independent foodstore. Just outside the centre, however, there are a good number of independent butchers, bakers and even the odd greengrocer. Farm markets are now firmly established in almost every neighbouring town, breathing mouth-watering aromas, banter and families into spaces more usually used as car parks. A wet fish van bearing the number plate ‘JAWS’ spends the week oscillating between MK postcodes. A flag-stoned farm shop has an unconventional stockroom filled with rare breeds. It has no roof because it’s a large green field. The curious have had their curiosity rewarded and are beginning to enjoy meeting those who are responsible for their food.
Yesterday, however, the local rag landed on my doorstep. The headline shouted something about the new Asda in Milton Keynes – the biggest ever in the UK (itself only moments away from a Tesco so large that the staff require roller-skates). Apparently there were 9,000 job applications for 800 jobs, yet the store doesn’t even open until the end of the year.
I spend my life trying to tell people about the benefits of individuality. I’ve made a television programme about how the youth of Milton Keynes are awakening from the corporate dreariness. I’ve made a web site promoting the best shops in my area. I’m writing my experiences here. And now this Asda has come, a product of Archie Norman’s idealisation of America, the Walmart familys apparent indefatigability, and the infatuation with the provision of plenty (as long as it’s cheap) passed down from wartime survivors brought up on rationing, teaching their sons and daughters the same formula.
But do I despair of those members of the British public who will use this store loyally each and every week?
No. Ethics aside, I don’t. I believe in my heart, and my tastebuds, that once people have ventured from their Saturday routines into the local merchants, marketplaces and farm shops, not forgetting the plethora of box schemes so easily shared between families, that they will wonder what all the fuss about perfectly shaped, tasteless produce was all about.

We have had hundreds of emails following Channel 4’s Supermarket Secrets programme, and I have included one of these, Lee’s ‘rant’, below. It seems we are not the only people frustrated by the supermarket’s dominance of the UK food industry.
We have been writing about the wrongs in the food industry for the last 4 years (click on the headlines below to see more). It is great to see TV programmes raising awareness to food but incredibly frustrating to see so little change and to see the supermarkets explain their ‘dodgy’ practices as, ‘that’s what our customers want’. The best example, I thought was, making a pork chop ‘more succulent’ by adding water and preservative. To me, the 20% increase in weight tells the whole story, extra weight, extra money. This proves money is far more important to supermarkets than a sense of responsibility to customers. Value does not necessarily mean low price.
Supermarkets have become complacent about how they can treat, us, their customers. They are not telling us the whole story and are losing our trust.
We want better food and here, as promised is Lee’s rant:
When I lived way, way down in the south of France, there were guys with vans who used to go from village to village to village. The bread guy. The milk and cheese and egg guy. The meat guy. The veggie guy. They’d park up and toot and we’d all wander out and have a chat and buy really good, fresh food for the most part straight from the source. And the veggies on offer at the local Super-U were so much better than anything I’ve found in Britain.
I’m assuming you must have seen the program on 4, ’supermarket Secrets’? The more I learn about food in this country, the more I don’t want to eat it. I did my shop at Somerfield’s this morning, looked at all the hock burns on the chickens and felt ill. The Little Red Tractor doesn’t seem to mean much, so I’m buying organic milk at ten pence more now and trying to see if my milkman who delivers to the door has that option. I looked at the big bright red strawberries, wondered if they would ‘bounce’ if I dropped one, and didn’t bother buying any. I looked at all the perfect fruit and veg and longed for all the ‘ugly veggies’ I loved so much in France.
I grow my own lettuce every summer, along with tomatoes and onions and potatoes and beans, so at least I know that one source of my food is good! ME! But I so resent having to drive miles and burn up so much petrol to find a farmer’s market, or schedule around the few times they’re open. And I wish, so wish, there were a reliable way of knowing just by picking up a package of something where it was grown and how it was marketed. I’m not a vegetarian, don’t want to be a vegetarian, but I want my meat to be raised in healthy conditions and slaughtered humanely, and there’s just no way of being certain without being a research scientist!
My neighbour bought some apples at a farmer’s market the other day that tasted like grapes! Sort of, a grapy-apple taste, very nice. There’s such a huge variety, why can’t I find more and different apples? Why why why is this country so damned difficult?
Rant over, dummy in dishwasher. Please send me any info you might have on box schemes. And thank you.

Cheers,

Lee
So how do we get to this utopia of good food almost delivered to our door by the farmer? Our mission is to reconnect consumers with producers and help rebuild the local food supply chain by;

1. Empowering consumers with the knowledge they need to buy locally.
2. Empowering suppliers by giving them fast, easy access to local customers that want to hear from them.
3. Getting farmers to work together to offer a compelling alternative to the food supply chains that currently serve schools, hospitals, pubs etc.
4. Creating local food sections in supermarkets and insisting on 75% of the retail price being returned to the supplier, instead of the current average of 9%.
5. Using local successes in the above initiatives to form a template for change across the UK, by showing farmers and customers how it is working, and how it can work for them.

We now have 6,000 producers on the BigBarn map and get thousands of visitors every day to this website. What we need to do now is get farmers to work together and tell supermarkets we want a local food section in their store.
Not quite Lee’s dream of the farmer in the little van, but not far off. The farmer will be in store and a wide range of local produce will be there to buy and to criticise. Yes, criticise, but hopefully positive. That’s what farmers want, feedback. Getting 75% of the retail price means a fair price and talking to their customers provides the chance to get higher sales by meeting those customer’s needs.
So many wins, better food, more farm income, more farm jobs, stronger rural economies, and even the supermarkets will get 25% for doing very little and at the same time regaining the trust of their customers.
And how to make it happen. Register with us and tell all your friends to do the same. The more people we have registered the more pressure we can put on supermarkets and the food industry in general, to change. Registering will mean we send you our newsletter, occasional special offers via email and we will NOT pass on your details. Together we have the power, let’s use it.
Articles as promised:
Chicken : The Horror
Cheap meat
The Onion Story. A true reflection of the UK food industry?
Apples. Did you know?
Strawberries; not as good as they used to be.
What price for clean food?
Supermarkets….. very disappointing.
Real fruit juice