As many of you are aware we are currently running an offer in
conjunction with the Daily Mail. If you collect the tokens printed in issues of the Daily Mail,
you can redeem them at one of the participating producers that are
shown as red icons on the BigBarn map.

If you are new to BigBarn and found us through the Daily Mail we’d
like to know how you got on with the offer. Hopefully you found a
nice new farm shop or butcher to redeem your coupons, and hopefully
that producer has a new, loyal customer. Maybe you’d like to leave us
a comment about the producer you visited, or maybe you’d like to
revisit their page on BigBarn and give them a rating? If you register
for our fortnightly newsletter you’ll be
sent information about other producers in your area, some of which
you may not yet know about.

The same goes for our regular visitors. You can now rate producers
on a variety of criteria which should hopefully provide some
interesting feedback we can share with producers to try to make the
local food shopping experience even better. You can also leave
comments on our blog posts to let us know what
you think of BigBarn. Please be nice!

If you booked your UK summer holiday back in April, when it looked like we were in for a drier summer than Saudi Arabia, you’re probably feeling a bit miffed now.

You’ll be watching the weather forecast every night, praying for good news, only to see a long queue of large depressions lining up in the Atlantic, waiting to land on Cornwall.

On which basis, our Top 10 reasons to spend your summer holiday in the UK might cheer you up a bit:

1. Beautiful countryside
2. The best beaches in Europe
3. Good local food
4. Good for the environment
5. Less heat/sun for young children
6. No airport queues/lost luggage/cancelled flights
7. Good quality accommodation
8. Excellent visitor attractions
9. Smoke-free pubs, restaurants and cafes
10. Mackerel

That’s right – mackerel. Now, we’re about as handy with a fishing rod as we are with a crochet hook, but we’re told that at this time of year our coastal waters are so full of mackerel that catching them is a breeze, even for lily-livered landlubbers. Indeed in many coastal towns you’ll find mackerel fishing boat trips on offer, to help you do just that. Of course if heading out to sea doesn’t shiver your timbers, then there should be plenty of mackerel available on terra firma, at very reasonable prices. It’s an often under-rated, delicious fish that deserves your attention, and is bound to cheer you up no end when Tropical Drizzle Doris is busy doing her best.

Don’t forget, wherever you’re going in the UK, look up your destination on BigBarn, then print out the map and take it with you.

If this is your first visit to BigBarn then you’re probably wondering what we’re all about. Well, a quick look at the About Us page should tell you all you need to know. Above all else, if you do one thing on this visit to BigBarn, we recommend you register for our newsletter. The fact that you’re here suggests that you’re one of the 80 percent of people that are interested in buying local food. When you register for our newsletter, local food finds you! Sent out every fortnight, it contains information about what’s going with local food producers in your area, as well as a regular ‘in season’ feature and general foody news. Register now: It only takes a minute, there’s nothing to pay and we won’t pass your details on to anyone.

You can’t help wondering if when God was creating the earth, he made a rather curious mistake. As he was working out where to plant his exotic fruits to make sure they grew as well as possible, somebody must have distracted him (probably health and safety, concerned to know if his new species had passed EU inspections), and raspberries, which he was just about to plant in Brazil, ended up somewhere off the M9, just outside Falkirk.

It just doesn’t seem right. Strawberries nestling in sunny Kentish fields are just about believable. Sweet plums dripping off trees in a Dorset orchard you can conceive of. But raspberries, probably the greatest berry there is, sprouting from bushes in rain-drenched Scotland? Surely not.

Of course it turns out that God knew what he was up to. Well, either that or Scotland had a sunny, dry climate allocated to it until he made the raspberry boob and so, rather than move the already germinating raspberries, he gave it rain instead. Because raspberries, as we all know, love nothing more than a dreekie old day.

All of which should be wonderful news for the British raspberry-lover. Unfortunately, the supermarkets seem to think they can get away with pretending that raspberries do come from Brazil after all, and, as a result, charge you more for a special flavour-free punnet than they do for a DVD player.

Raspberry-lovers of Britain unite! Get on to BigBarn, find your nearest PYO and enjoy one of our most remarkable foods without the need to re-mortgage. They’re coming into season now and can’t fail to make the dullest day seem a bit more exotic. Oh, and remember, while you’re at the PYO, don’t forget to pop over to the gooseberries to let them know you love them, too.

We paid a visit to the new Whole Foods Market in Kensington, London, the other day, to see how it measured up to our way of thinking. For those of you who have missed this one, The Whole Foods Market is the first UK branch of a huge retail chain in the US that specialises in high-quality, eco-friendly, farmer-friendly, everything-friendly food. So, what did we think?

Well, the first thing to say is that this is very clearly a slick operation. It runs over 3 floors of prime retail space on Kensington High Street and is as well thought out as you’d expect from an big American retailer. The food is beautifully presented, in a way that even the most reluctant foodie would struggle to resist. Eggs, for instance, aren’t boxed up and out of view, but spread out on a bed of straw. And don’t think we’re just talking about chicken eggs either. There are duck eggs, goose eggs and even, at more than £25 a go, ostrich eggs. In many ways it’s a wonderful example of where supermarket shopping could be, even if ostrich eggs are unlikely to fly off the shelves in Tesco.

But beyond the food itself, the thing that really stands out is the way you’re bombarded, from window display to checkout, with messages about the company’s green, and especially local, credentials. ‘We support local British farmers!’, it screams from the walls. ‘Supporting local growers isn’t something we do, it’s everything we do’ says a bold message scrawled across the front windows. Well, we’ve seen some of their criteria for food production and they’re both exacting and easy to understand – there’s no doubt that, at least compared to supermarkets, these guys are aiming to do things in the best way possible.

It’s just that, well, you can’t help feeling that it’s all a bit skin deep. That it’s not a love for farmers or for high-quality food that gets these people out of bed in the morning. It’s the love of big business, of making money. Supporting local growers, for example, isn’t everything they do. Unless you count local growers from New Zealand, Italy and just about every other country you care to think of. Which is not really what they’re trying to tell you, is it?

You can’t help wondering if they don’t love the ‘local’, fairly sourced, organic products quite as much as they love the obscene mark-ups they manage to persuade Kensington shoppers to bear. We’re perhaps being a bit unfair because compared with what the supermarkets do, this place is an absolute breath of fresh air in food retailing. But compared with shopping directly from real, local producers? It doesn’t even come close. All of which seems to prove to us that, no matter how hard big business tries, it just can’t replicate what proper local food can deliver. Whole Foods Market may have 190 stores in the US already, but we’ve got 7,500 better stores on BigBarn right now.