Real Food Festival

On Friday, I went to the Real Food Festival at Earls Court. This is the second year they have run it, and I don’t usually like this sort of thing, but when Riverford endorsed it, I thought it would be worthwhile. Being neither trade nor press, I had to wait until the doors opened to the general public. I and the others keenies were let in on the dot of 4pm. It was a bit like the Primark sale except no-one got trampled to death.

I went straight to the debate about The Future of Food, chaired by Alex Renton with a panel consisting of Patrick Holden, director of The Soil Association, Zac Goldsmith, Raymond Blanc, Marc Barthel from Love Food Hate Waste and Paul Kelly, Corporate Affairs Director at ASDA Wal-Mart. It went on for nearly an hour and a half and, dare I say it, it was a little disappointing. Almost everyone who spoke, from the panel and floor, used it as an opportunity to thrash their own particular hobby horse (including hemp paper, school meals and abuse of the word local) rather than actually engage with each other in any meaningful way.

Things got off to a sticky start when Alex Renton took a few cheap shots at ASDA when he introduced Paul Kelly, which was unnecessary. After all, as Paul Kelly himself acknowledged, it was pretty brave of any supermarket to agree to talk to such a hostile audience, so why should the chairman kick you in the balls before you had even begun?

However, I didn’t like much of what Paul Kelly went on to say. As a ‘passionate advocate of the free market’, he claimed that everything ASDA do is in response to consumer demand, and mums struggling to feed their families (with food inflation running at 18% last year) deserve affordable, accessible, decent food. Surely the point is this: if we carry on as we are, and we can’t feed everyone in the future, it will always be these very people, the poorest, who will suffer most? The rich can usually spend their way out of trouble. For the poor, cheap food today probably means no food tomorrow. To sell artificially cheap food, at the expense of the resources (soil, water) we will need to feed our children and grandchildren, and claim you are doing for the benefit of the poor, doesn’t add up. The wisdom of markets isn’t infallible. We often choose immediate benefits and pleasures (cheap food, cigarettes) over long-term possibilities (exhausted resources, lung cancer); this doesn’t mean they are the best choices. At least, with smoking, you can’t really claim to be ignorant of the risks; price-slashing supermarkets always present cheap food as an unquestionably good thing, with none of the hidden costs and risks mentioned.

Paul Kelly called several times for a national debate and a policy framework, both phrases reeking of inaction, stagnation, bureaucracy and death. I swear I could hear the sound of bucks being passed. Patrick Holden pushed him on whether, at the top levels of supermarket management, there were any strategic discussions about the future of food. Paul Kelly had to admit there weren’t. How about a bit of leadership, ASDA? Wouldn’t that be a nice change?

Patrick Holden was the only one who sounded like he had a coherent plan. His most illuminating analogy was a comparison between the financial crisis and the coming food crisis: that we have been living on capital not income and, like a Ponzi scheme, sooner or later it will collapse. Raymond Blanc was almost inaudible and his jumbled Gallic rant made me wonder whether he had had too much wine at lunch or was a bit past it. But, my God, I saw him do a demonstration a bit later (tomato and mozzarella salad, watercress soup, asparagus with a sort of sabayon sauce – 3 egg yolks, 100ml water and some melted butter) and the minute I saw him chop an onion I knew he was still the real deal.

That really was the highlight. Along with two Jersey calves with huge black eyes and a water buffalo from Laverstock Park called Petal. Did you know that water buffalo can eat straw, unlike cattle and sheep? They alone are able to digest it.

I bought some rapeseed oil from Hampshire, some sausages from Berkshire and entered a competition to win a tropical holiday (what were they doing there?). I changed a few digits in my phone number and put an extra dot in my email to cunningly outwit their direct marketing efforts. But as I walked away I realised that, should I win the holiday, they wouldn’t be able to contact me either. Hmm.

I visited Riverford and bought their cookbook, which I am just getting into. Apart from that, there were an awful lot of coffee, chocolate, juice, curry sauce, ready meal, jam, chutney, olive, olive oil, chorizo etc stands – basically lots of processed foods. I want more raw food – more farmers please next year. The programme is useful for a list of exhibitors, some of whom sell online (eg bakers and flour mills). Everyone said Friday was quite quiet – I hope they did well over the weekend.