Philip Lowery, founder and director of the Real Food Festival argues that even in a credit crunched world there is an alternative to the so called convenience and value of supermarket shopping...

“In a world of convenience and rush we have lost sight of the pleasure of food. Its reduction to a mere commodity or simply a fuel means that we are missing out on the delights of sharing with friends and family great ingredients cooked with care and attention. By handing over responsibility for our diets to huge multi-national corporations who peddle ever more processed products with taste and nutritional claims that need massive marketing budgets to support them, we can no longer exploit the power of properly produced food to keep us healthy.

The reality is that these global businesses have created a food system that is solely designed to serve their shareholders, betraying their customers’ trust in the integrity of their products in their desire to deliver shareholder value and large profits. These corporations have been less than honest about the industrialised methods and processes that deliver these nutritionally bereft food-like substances; hiding away the reality of factory farms, the environmental degradation of our soils and the wasting of our once bio-diverse wild-life.

Even worse is the huge investment in spin and lobbying that is then required to persuade everyone that cheap and plentiful food, of whatever quality, is worth achieving at any cost, be it environmental, in woeful animal husbandry standards and the destruction of real food diversity and choice. And, at the end of it all, they walk away with their financial rewards, passing on the very real costs of environmental clean-up and health issues to governments (and therefore us, the taxpayers).

What we can, and will, demonstrate at the Real Food Festival is that there is an alternative to the so-called convenience and value of supermarket shopping. Of course the supermarkets have their place in our 100 mph lives, but even in these financially constrained times, it’s possible to buy quality ingredients from alternative sources and to eat tasty, healthy food without spending a small fortune.

A great illustration of this principle was shown in a recent C4 Dispatches programme. Presenter Jay Rayner was investigating the real costs of cheap food and conducted an experiment with two families in which each was given a budget of £500 to feed themselves for a month. Each family was given the task of saving as much of this budget as possible by changing their existing shopping habits. One made the move to supermarket value ranges, the other shopping direct from producers, independent retailers and markets. While, of course, the family that went to the supermarket value ranges made a more significant saving (some £300 per month in comparison to £150) they declared, once the experiment was over, that they were going to revert back to their previous shopping habits. The other family however was going to continue with their new, tastier and more economic, shopping habits and most tellingly, would recommend it to everyone they knew too.

But this is nothing new to those of us involved in the Real Food Festival. Buying direct from producers or independent retailers will nearly always give you a better quality product, often at the same or better price than its supermarket equivalent. For example, I buy most of my meat from a local producer, Hazeldene Farm. It’s a small 50 acre mixed farm, producing chickens, pigs, lamb and beef and it also happens to be organic (which for me isn’t necessarily a requirement if I know how the food is being produced). I buy my organic eggs from them too, usually laid that morning, they cost £3.60 per dozen compared with £3.85 for organic eggs in Tesco and £4.35 in Waitrose. The lamb steaks I buy here are probably the best I have ever tasted and come in at £12.90 per kilo compared with £14.00 from Tesco (their non-organic is also £12.48!) and at Waitrose a whopping £14.99 per kilo. Liz from Hazeldene Farm will be at the Real Food Festival so you won’t just have to take my word for it.

I’m not suggesting that this way of shopping is the cheapest, but as last night’s ‘Jamie saves our bacon’ show demonstrated, what usually lies behind the very cheapest food is a miserable and unacceptable trail of horrific welfare standards, environmental destruction and inferior quality products.

What’s more, the health benefits of eating properly produced food are becoming more and more compelling as science slowly begins to understand at least a little of what is going on in our soil and our food. Research now tells us that cattle fed on clover-rich pasture (rather than factory farmed on a diet composed mostly of grain and antibiotics) will produce milk and beef richer in health beneficial CLA’s, Omega 3 and other fatty acids.

As well as the taste, potential economic and health benefits of this kind of shopping, your food pounds are also directly supporting your local community. Spending money with supermarkets simply moves the money away, giving it to faceless, institutional shareholders all over the world. And, if you add to these already strong reasons for buying direct, the environmental benefits of eating food produced by sustainable, low carbon, low input methods makes it a pretty compelling argument.

But that’s not what those huge corporations that control and manipulate our current food system would have you believe. They spend billions of pounds developing new ‘value-added’ products that are composed of the cheapest possible ingredients with questionable nutritional value (I was amazed to learn recently that value chicken breasts sold in Asda, Tesco’s and Lidl were only around 85% chicken!) and marketing them under the pretext of delivering a cheap, convenient and healthy lifestyle . Of course there is very little money to be made in selling us raw ingredients, their margins are all in the processed pap.

I firmly believe that you can and should resist their version of culinary utopia. There is no doubt that taking the time to source good quality, sustainably produced food and drink will take more effort and maybe cost you just a little bit more, but the rewards in terms of your quality of life, the daily pleasure you can derive from it, and the potential health, economic and environmental benefits are surely enormous.

We’d love to see you at this year’s Real Food Festival. Every ticket we sell and every item you buy from our producers supports and sustains their desire to build businesses that can produce wonderful food and drink that will open the doors to a wonderful way of life for you and your family”