Is it time for a concerted campaign to bring back real food?

FOR a short period of my life, in my mid-teens, my mother became the landlady of a sorry little pub in the Midlands. Sorry because it was run down, grubby, unloved and hardly had any customers, the only food it did was very suspect pickled eggs and, last but definitely not least, the beer was shocking.

The basic product delivered from the brewery was okay, but the way it was treated by the previous tenant was sacrilegious. Years of neglect of the beer lines alone meant that the liquid dribbling into the glass bore no resemblance at all to the nectar delivered to the cellar.

But my mum has always been able to perform miracles and within a year the place was heaving and making a healthy profit. She improved everything, especially the beer, and when it came time for us to leave because my dad’s job was moving us out of the area, there were genuine tears from the locals, despite the fact mum had only been in place for 18 months.

Maybe it was quite timely because this was at the time when most of the breweries were rapidly getting rid of the good stuff and replacing their products with pasteurised coloured water and as a brewery tenant, mum wouldn’t have been allowed to go elsewhere to buy a better beer.

But good was about to come and this sorry state of affairs resulted in the rise of the Campaign for Real Ale which, in my humble opinion, has been one of the most successful consumer movements of all time. As a young man I revelled in the education that Camra provided and as a result became, if not a connoisseur, a significant contributor to the share price of enlightened breweries.

Now, don’t you think that much of the food we’re provided with has gone the same way the beer did in my teens? Walking down the aisles of supermarkets can put you in mind of a chemist rather than a food shop when you dare to read the ingredients. Not being confident about the source of your food, how far it’s travelled, what it’s been injected with, what it’s been fed on and how it’s been mucked about all goes to deplete confidence in one of the single most important things in our lives. Shouldn’t we really be asking what goes into what goes into our bodies?

So isn’t it about time we had a campaign for real food? The idea came to me years ago and I foolishly thought that we, at Oldfields, could actually launch such a campaign and make it fly. We even went to so far as to register the web address campaignforrealfood.org and pointed it towards a part of our website dedicated to the subject. But for one reason or another, not least the running of our businesses, over the intervening years we let it go.

But there’s even more reason now in trying to persuade all in the North-East that there’s a better, healthier way for us to eat. Such a campaign could be geared towards encouraging everyone to eat, where possible, identifiable and recognised produce and ingredients; something we’ve continued to do at Oldfields ever since.

Didn’t someone once say that we should never eat anything that we can’t pronounce? It’s worth having a look at the ingredients lists on the side of the food in your kitchen cupboards and seeing if you can comply with the rule. It’s fair to say that you can’t be sure about the freshness of the food if you don’t know where it’s come from, how it’s been grown or reared, how it’s been processed and brought to your plate nor, in fact, how it’s pronounced.

Is it worth resurrecting such a campaign? And what would we call it for short? CAMRF doesn’t have quite the right ring to it, does it?