Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Our apples can be the envy of the world again
Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary Steve Barclay it’s time the Government took up the cause of the great English apple
DEAR Steve, Had you been at any one of several dozen locations around the West Country on Wednesday evening you would have had your peace and quiet shattered by the sound of gunfire.
No cause for alarm: it was merely the ancient tradition of wassailing being observed in orchards as a means of ensuring a decent apple crop later in the year.
The process involves firing shotguns through the branches to scare away injurious evil spirits, placing cider-soaked toast on the branches to attract the reputed benign spirits – which manifest themselves in the form of robins – and the lusty singing of one or other versions of the traditional wassail song.
Which to an outsider may appear a slightly arcane method of orchard management, but I am told it works. Indeed there are still many people who believe it does – or that the crop would be jeopardised if wassailing were to stop.
The point of my highlighting this,
Ian
however, is to stress how much the English apple industry currently needs all the help it can get if it is to have any future. Because thanks to the combined efforts of the supermarkets it is teetering rather too close to collapse.
Our apples were once the envy of the world. As befits a country with one of the best climates on the face of the planet for apple growing we can boast at least 2,500 distinct native varieties, many commercialised by highly skilled plantsmen since Victorian times.
You will, however, struggle to find many, if any, in your local supermarket. Because far from encouraging a sector which can offer such a huge diversity of flavours, textures and colours the major retailers have done their very best to put English apple growers out of business – mainly by insisting on total uniformity down to the last millimetre, which is apparently what the consumer wants.
Though as with any pronouncement by a supermarket about the preferences of its customers – usually uttered to support some highly beneficial policy change – I take that with a bucket of salt.
So those growers who have continued to supply large retailers have only been able to send out a proportion of their crop because the rest of the fruit would be classed as noncompliant and rejected. They are also completely in the hands of buyers who at times have displayed astonishing levels of ignorance – such as the one who rejected an entire consignment of Russets “because they had marks on the skin”.
The result has been that for vast tonnages of excellent apples the only market has been the less profitable juice sector while shoppers have instead been offered totally uniform displays of totally uninteresting imported varieties, whose lack of taste and flavour are likely to put many children off the entire idea of eating apples of any sort.
Worse: hundreds of acres of fine, well-tended orchards have been grubbed up, which is nothing short of a tragedy.
A revival of sorts is under way: thanks to the evermore popular farmers’ markets consumers can still buy their James Grieves, their Lord Lambournes and their Laxton’s Superbs. Community orchard groups are rekindling interest in traditional varieties and undertaking new plantings.
But it is as though the clock has been put back hundreds of years and we are starting over again from very close to scratch. And it is worth noting that the biggest and most outspoken champion of English apples is a Frenchman – chef Raymond Blanc, who has created huge orchards of them in Oxfordshire.
I am utterly convinced that if consumers were offered the choice they would opt for English apples over imported ones every time. The problem is most people are not being allowed the opportunity to make that judgment.
We really should be throwing our support behind any campaign which seeks to raise the profile and availability of English apples, with planting grants for traditional varieties and help for the marketing schemes which can be launched as soon as volumes have been built up.
For one thing it will reduce our reliance on imported food and for another orchards are wonderful wildlife havens, partly because they remain undisturbed by any human activity for most of the year. Until people start firing shotguns, of course. I’d be interested to hear your thinking.