Latest features Raymond Blanc talks real food

Date Published:

17/03/2009

As consumers struggle to balance finances with food issues, Charlie Cottrell spoke to Raymond Blanc to find out why he's flying a flag for real food

What can restaurants do to help the Real Food movement? How are you embracing it in your restaurants?

At Le Manoir we're making a huge orchard; the idea is to reinvent an Oxfordshire British apple. We are working with the Royal Horticultural Society, the Windsor garden and market hall garden. Before we planted the trees we tasted 120 varieties of apples.

Organic, local, fairtrade, seasonal or food miles - which cause is most important?

Everything is important, but it's so complicated you need to have degree in traceability and a degree in food miles to understand the incredible complexity of the problem.

The government needs to legislate farming and labelling and so on to create a cleaner world.

Is food labelling working?

It is so confusing; there are 10 or 12 labels for organic food. The purest is the Soil Association but every supermarket has their own version with different criteria. Equally we have 17 classes of food labelling schemes which are confusing and misleading; Red Tractor - what the bloody hell does that mean? The government needs to rule to have maybe three or five that are embraced by everyone and we need to look at these criteria on an international level.

How can producers help themselves?

I wish small farmers would create co-operatives. On your own you are too small. Imagine each farmer has 50 acres. If you bring five farmers together you have 250 acres, five times the experience and knowledge and five times the budget. It would allow then to grow at larger level as a team. You can see a lot of that in France.

Organic - love it or hate it?

It's an ideal for me. I don't know if it could work as the only form of food production with a growing population. But I like to start with an ideal and come down if we have to.

Not just the cost of organic, but what about cleaning up of non organic and irresponsible farming? Of course the more we use pesticides and nitrates, the more we put on the soil, the more we deplete the soil and the more we need. It's not sustainable. In the long term organic farming has a mega argument here.

How much more is it going to cost me?

The problem with organic is it only represents about five per cent of the whole food production in Britain. Of course it is costly because the labour cost is high, the transport cost high the production costs are high because too small amounts are produced.

The premium that you are paying is enormous. If you take Austria, where 15 per cent of food there is organic, the premium is only 5 to 7 per cent. Producing it in larger amounts with better techniques means better produce and the cost will come down.

What is the future of food? Vast supermarkets or local specialist shops?

As you know I am very interested politically, I try to follow what's happening with the farming world but I really believe ethics are going to drive our choices again. We've seen ethics in terms of which car to make; how we treat our employees, and I think ethics will influence what kind of farming we will have.

What does an organic cuppa cost?

Read more on Fairtrade - What are you really paying for?