Tuesday is the morning when I often get woken up at about 6.30 by the sound of the delightful Alan from Dig dropping off the weekly organic vegbox on our doorstep. Since I moved out veg delivery over from another Manchester box scheme, which shall remain nameless, this has been a genuinely exciting event more – although maybe that just says I need to get out more.
In this week's box, we had:
- courgettes from Glebelands, a market garden in Sale which is, I believe, the closest producer of commercial veg to central Manchester;
- romanesco (those mad trippy-looking green cauliflowers), new potatoes (lovely purple ones), tomatoes, broccoli and green chilis from Dunham Massey (in Cheshire, not far from Altrincham);
- French beans with an 'L' mark which means that come from within 50 miles of Manchester;
- apples from Herefordshire;
- some amazing rich purpley-red carrots from Lincolnshire
- beautiful black plums from France
- and, the environmental baddy – but shipped not flown – bananas from Ecador.
Before it just looks like I'm going on some kind of self-indulgent Nigella-style riff about the glories of food, I want to stress that while obviously the object of this lovely box of food is keeping OA and me fed, there are also some major politics going on here.
Firstly, of course, there is the ethical quagmire that is food sourcing, and the need to reduce our carbon footprints versus the necessity of supporting majority world farmers, especially those producing under fair trade conditions.
There is also the issue of the shameful amount of food we waste in this country – an estimated 1/3 of that which we buy – and the amount of land, water, energy, agrochemicals, transport and packaging that is taken up before we even get our hands on that food to leave it in the fridge too long and end up binning it. I find these figures completely shocking because I was brought up with the influence of my grandfather, who had a terrifically poor upbringing in York before WWI and was so obsessive about not wasting food that he once downed a cup of Dettol mix my mum had left on the counter after cleaning off my grazed knee – he'd thought it was milk. But luckily for me, my mum taught me to cook – and I enjoyed and was fascinated by it – so I am confident and happy with food in a way that people who've spent their lives surrounded by ready meals just can't be. And that says a lot about how our society should be addressing cooking and our general relationship with food in school and in supporting families.
The other set of politics that came into my food decision making and led me to Dig are also – quelle surprise – those of the Middle East. I'd already become slightly sceptical of my previous vegbox suppliers when they switched their tofu brand from Clear Spring, a fairly small ethical company, at least last time I checked their credentials, to Cauldron, which is owned by Premier, one of the biggest processed food companies in the UK.
But the final straw was when a former colleague from Ethical Consumer mentioned in passing that her vegbox from the same company had included Tivall sausages. She'd done exactly what I always did, which was just sent an email in requesting 'veggie sausages' without specifying a brand, but assuming it would be the Taifan or organic Cauldron ones usually supplied. But, tracing back from the apologetic email I got from the company when I wrote to tell them they were losing a regular customer, they seem to have a 'special dietary request' from another customer for which they'd sourced Tivall sausages, and then without checking the company's ethics decided for ease to switch more supply over to these.
My objections to Tivall are two-fold. The brand is owned by Osem Industries, an Israeli company which is majority owned by Nestle – the subject of the longest-running consumer boycott in the world over its deeply unethical practices in marketing breast milk substitutes, as well as a despoiler of ecosystems through its bottled water activities in Brazil.
Osem is also a company group which includes a firm in Bet Shean, a town in the Galilee, just north of the string of illegal Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley which grow large quantities of fresh produce for export to Europe, and which use Palestinian labour working under appalling conditions and with risible pay. This company was set up – according to Osem's website – to market the produce from these settlements.
So not only was I fairly disgusted with my original vegbox scheme for selling this stuff, but it also led me to question my trust in the 'UK-only' vegbox which I got from them, which I knew from the fine print was sometimes, in the toughest seasons, topped up with veg from outside the UK – but where?
So I did a bit of a ring-round some other schemes, and found Dig, who very specifically said they know their stuff on the ethics of Israeli produce and don't buy it, and who have good policies on where else they'll source their produce from.
And they also do amazing Cheshire cheese which is so concentrated it's almost like Parmesan – from Leagram's, the nearest organic cheese producer to Manchester, based in Chipping, near Preston. Yummm...
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