Sourcing food locally is fast becoming a mantra for those who care about where what’s on their plate comes from. Yet venture into any supermarket and it’s piled high with produce from all over the world. Fruit, in particular, has often journeyed thousands of miles before it gets to the checkout, much of it grown in South Africa’s Western Cape. Scandalous, you may think, but an environmental audit throws up some surprising results. Rupert Parker sets off to investigate
Many of the farms are huge and have been in the same families for generations, and the farmers themselves are not small men. Good Boer stock, coupled with a healthy life style, means they tower over you and it’s certainly unwise to pick a fight. I did try my best and wondered why, 15 years after the end of apartheid, they still owned most of the land. They told me about well meaning government initiatives that bought up farms and settled them with non-whites, but sadly there’s a failure rate of around 85%. It seems the problem is lack of proper agricultural training – after all it takes special skills to farm on this scale.
What’s certainly true is that fruit farming here is an extraordinary slick operation. Most organisations have their own pack houses and therefore picking to packing often takes only a matter of hours. The fruit is washed and sorted and then bagged before it’s shipped. The labeling room is awash with British supermarket branding and yards and yards of those horrible stickers that every fruit seems to have to wear these days. Sell by dates are also set here, which seems a bit ridiculous for apples that have to travel thousands of miles before they even get to the shelves.
So the big question, what about the food miles? Well first of all, if British consumers are going to demand fresh fruit in the winter, it has to come from the southern hemisphere . South Africa is certainly nearer than Chile, the other big producer of fruit, and most now comes by ship, taking around three weeks to get to us. There’s no excuse for air freight, though, but fortunately that practice seems to be dieing out.
Second, environmental audits show that storing fruit at low temperatures is incredibly energy intensive so producers are encouraged to get the fruit from tree to boat as quickly as possible. If we were only to eat European apples they would have to go into cold storage in the autumn, with a resultant greater carbon total than their South African cousins.
For the moment, though, you pays your money and makes your choice. Ironically, you can tell where someone comes from by the sort of fruit they eat. Asians like things large and sweet, the aptly named Fuji being their apple of choice. Africans go for Golden Delicious whilst the Middle East prefers Royal Gala. In the UK, though, we like to be different – for us it’s small and sour and our favourite apple is Braeburn. So much for the legendary British sweet tooth.