More Farmers Markets opening, more farm shops, great meat at your local butcher, or local farm…….. as supermarkets buy up the High street. Can we, ‘the consumer’, influence the food industry to change for the better?

The Food Industry wants to distance producers from consumers to achieve economies of scale and provide us with cheap food. This does not seem to be working, the food available to us is not cheap and in many cases very dodgy. By creating distance however the dodgy tactics can be hidden.

A recent, and classic example of this is the American method of packing fresh meat. If carbon monoxide is added when freshly killed meat is packed, it stays bright pink for longer. The Food Industry loves the long shelf life and tells the consumer that pink meat means fresh and fresh means good. Certainly ‘fresh is good’ is true for vegetables, but is only a small part of the story.

Fortunately the media are now very interested in food, not simply running stories on scares and disasters but now digging deeper, with articles about taste and flavour and even the state of the soil. This is all great news to us as it encourages more consumers to seek out their local farmers and ask questions not only about the crops they grow but how they are produced. Local trade gives farmers a retail price and a return that encourages them to grow a wider range of crops, but more important, helps consumers, like me, learn about proper food.

With our new, media, ‘talking to farmers’, derived knowledge we all know that beef & lamb are much tastier if hung and that pink meat is a sign of mass produced, tough, tasteless meat. And that vegetables may be fresh but not very tasty if the variety of vegetable grown has been specified by the retailer to be a uniform size and last a long time on the shelf.

We want to help you find great food. And help local farmers tell you what they are doing to produce great food. We don’t ‘fight the power’ of the supermarkets as we the consumers have ‘the power’. We just need to rally together, take advantage of the media and tell the industry what we want. More local food in our shops, and preferably with a farmer there to tell us all about it. See our Local food section in a supermarket article by clicking here

If BigBarn can help more people reconnect with local producers and make buying local more convenient then the food available to us should get better.

But can we rally together? Pink beef, mechanically recovered meat, sunny del**t, 49% sugar breakfast cereals, soups as salty as sea water, are just a few of the crap products that have been successfully marketed in recent years. Are we really that gullible? Can what is right win over slick high budget marketing campaigns?

I hope so. If you want to help, register here.

The answer to last months competition was £1.93 for ingredients per person per day for my thrifty, but very filling, menu. Well done Roger with your entry of £1.87. I did eat very well, have not put on weight and have not received any scary messages from nutritionists. If you would like to see the cost of each ingredient and the recipes for most of the dishes please click here .

This shows that to work on the NHS hospital budget of £2 per person per day for 3 meals must be extremely difficult. I tried to save money by either using high quality meats and bulking out the meals with extra ingredients or using cheaper cuts of meat such as ‘lamb breast’. Adding extras such as grated vegetables and lentils to my cottage pie and chopped vegetables to my steak and kidney was very tasty as well as getting my son Alfie to eat a few hidden vegetables. And the lamb breast was sensational.

Not everyone likes liver and kidneys though and cheap cuts are considered ‘cheap and nasty’ and would probably get complaints at the hospital. Never mind, all the more for people like me.

Our competition for this month. If you would like to add to our thrifty menu please email us your recipes. We could even start a ‘delicious meals for 2 for less than £1′ section.