We want to liberate your beetroot soufflés. We want to see your asparagus crumble gambolling like lamb soup through the kitchens of Britain. We want to see your strawberry mash splattered like a poached loaf across the high-chairs of the nation’s toddlers. So come on – if you’ve got a special recipe up your culinary sleeve, send it to us. Provided we aren’t hospitalised by trying it, we’ll publish it on our site with your brilliant name proudly emblazoned along its magnificent crust. We’ll even nominate a winner, right here, every month.

Send your recipe, with your name and the area you live in to ed@bigbarn.co.uk. And remember, the more in-season, the more local, the more magnifimous.

I’m joining BigBarn at what is turning out to be a very exciting time for the local food movement. I’ve just returned from a 6 month trip to find the British media awash with stories about local food, food miles and the general subject of ethical food consumption. It seems to have become the new lifestyle fashion. I have to confess that I’m not a big fan of fashion (as my friends often remind me) because it implies transience – something that comes and goes. What is needed in the case of local food is a gradual building of something sustainable and lasting, which changes the way we do things, rather than a flash in the pan fad that is all anyone talks about one day, and never spoken about the next.
Never the less, the subject is being brought into mainstream public consciousness and that can only be a good thing. Of course whenever a movement like this gets going, it has its detractors. There are those who just don’t like it at all, who think that the world is working perfectly well and that anyone who wants to change it is a muesli-munching eco-nutter. Then there are those who make more specific accusations. Organic food, they quite rightly point out, might have flown half way round the world to get to your plate. Buying local may be depriving a third world farmer of much needed income. And so on.
Firstly, I think we all need to be mature enough to realise that this is not a black and white issue in relation to which we are expected to be on one side or the other. Most of us exist in the middle ground, where our dreams and good intentions are constantly interacting with reality. We want to buy locally, but there’s an awful lot about what the supermarket offers us (think convenience and choice) that we actually rather like. The result, for many of us, is a niggling struggle with our own hypocrisy. But we’re simply a part of the world as it is today and anyone who spends their time pointing fingers in either direction is fooling themselves that they’re not.
However, I believe that we do need to be discerning in the choices we make. Because this is not a black and white issue, because we live in the real world, we have to look at each dilemma as it presents itself and hold it up against our personal values and intentions. To me, it does indeed seem silly to blindly insist on a piece of organic produce despite it having been flown to my plate from another season and another side of the world. But it also seems ridiculous to spit out my cereal in disgust when I find out that one of the ingredients came from the far-flung other side of the village. And yet I fundamentally believe in both organic and local food.
It’s about doing the best that we can because we believe things can be better.
So what is BigBarn’s role in all of this? Well, I believe that BigBarn should play a leading role in helping to build local food supply chains. Note the use of the word ‘build’ here, as opposed to ‘rebuild’. Of course much of what we’re doing is reconstructing something that always used to be there, and not so long ago either. But while there are many lessons to be learned from our immediate past (and we must learn them before another generation passes and more knowledge goes with it), we need to build something for today and for the future, and that means doing many things differently.
I used to live in Putney and found it incredible that at 6.30pm, when all the commuters spilled back on to the high street after a day in the city, the only places open for them to buy food were the supermarkets. It doesn’t matter how beautifully filled with high-quality local produce your shop is, if it insists on closing at 5 o’clock because that’s how things have always been done, then it’s going to lose sales to the supermarket. End of story. The most recent edition of the highly respected IGD food-industry survey showed that 80% of people want to buy local, but only 20% actually do it. How many of them will, tonight, walk past the closed door of a wonderful shop whose owner is at home complaining about supermarket power?
We need to learn from the past and build real solutions for the present and the future.
How is BigBarn going to help? I believe that BigBarn should never be so big-headed as to assume that it is doing anything but help those people that hold the real power to change things, and that’s the people who grow and make food, the people who sell it and the people who buy it. Without producers who have the courage to diversify at grass roots level, small retailers who are prepared to buy responsibly and sell imaginatively and consumers who are hard-working enough to vote with their feet (and it really can be hard work), nothing will change.
But I can’t help feeling that the local food supply chain has been so decimated that producers, retailers and consumers are like shy teenagers at a school disco – eyeing each other up from opposite ends of a room with absolutely no idea how to go about approaching each other. Into which scenario, BigBarn’s job is basically that of the dating service. First and foremost it must show each party that the other IS interested. It must show producers and retailers that there IS a market there (80% wanting, 20% buying) and it must show consumers that there IS someone there who has what they want and wants their business.
The more registered consumers and producer members that we have, the more we can help.
The BigBarn map allows us to, quite literally, put our producer members on the map. We want to make it as easy for consumers to find our members as it is for them to find their nearest supermarket. And by getting consumers to register with BigBarn we’re able to tell our producer members exactly how many people in their specific local area want to buy local. And then the loving begins!
What we want to end up with is a situation for the consumer where the quality of food we would expect from the farm gate is married with the sort of convenience and affordability that supermarkets have built their success on. And for the producers we want a better deal, a better living and the chance to choose a better way of farming.
Please register with BigBarn now to help us achieve that goal.