How to eat an Elephant…
The answer is, of course, one bite at a time. I took my own tiny bite in the name of sustainable food over the weekend.
After a long time looking for a local, organic vegetable box scheme to reduce our reliance on the evil Tescos I spotted an article in our quarterly village paper promoting a company call Ethical Foods. Although it didn’t do exactly what I was after I was impressed enough with their mission statement of improving food supply that I had a browse through their site.
Although I am a veggie, I nosed through the meat and fish to see what sort of items they stocked as this is one area that I wish folk paid more attention to, in general, when sourcing and buying. All looked in line with their aims until I reached the scallops. Although labelled as “Local & Sustainable” it was apparent from the description given by the fish merchant that they were trawled. Now, no matter to me that they were doing short-term trawling to allow stocks to recover, having dived over an area that has been trawled it is 100% clear to me that it can have no place in any selection of ethical foods. The damage to the seabed is devastating. everything is gone, either trawled up and then discarded, or just destroyed.
So, getting into the comfortable saddle of my high horse I used the “contact us” function and fired off a message outlining why I felt their inclusion was wrong, not expecting to hear back, but if I did to be fobbed off. Blow me if the next day I didn’t get a reply from the owner stating that he was pleased that I had brought it to his attention, and that he had thought he had checked that they weren’t trawled when he included them, but that he was mistaken and when he had contacted the supplier and asked that day, and was told they were trawled, he immediately removed them from his site! What a result!
So, a tiny, tiny, tiny nibble at one corner of one ear of that elephant, but it is a nibble nonetheless.
Oh, and my first veggie box should arrive tomorrow!
