Re: Is Brexit over ??
Regarding earlier comments about eating more of what we produce ourselves or of us growing more of what we eat, there was an interesting piece in The Times this weekend which would suggest agreement.
"It would be feast, not famine, if we learnt to love our own food"
"Seen through an international lens, Britain is one of the luckier countries. Our fertile, well-tended land is capable of producing all manner of wonderful edible things. And yet we suffer from a deep-seated lack of confidence in our ability to feed ourselves well. The notion that, if we were left to our own agricultural and gastronomic devices, our meals would be monotonous and meagre was embedded in the public psyche long before Brexit and Covid-19 entered the lexicon."
"Across these isles, our food supply could be more localised and self-reliant. Why export the good wild stuff and import the inferior farmed equivalent from the other side of the world? “Locavorism”, the practice of eating locally produced food, is too readily dismissed as a niche activity. Successive governments have fixated on exports and delegated responsibility for feeding the population to supermarkets, whose opaque, strung-out, globalised food-procurement methods now look precarious, liable to disruption and bad for the environment.
Of course, if we decided to follow this path, we would hit limits. Citrus fruit, coffee, chocolate, bananas, rice, olive oil — the list of what can’t be grown in the UK is substantial; we will always have to import those items. Yet some surprising things — grapes, melons, apricots and nuts — might be coaxed into commercial production here, albeit in quantities insufficient to meet demand. Happily, the list of foods that we can grow or farm in some quantity is much, much longer."
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i...food-zdtws66sk
Despite what the doom-mongers might insist, there are opportunities to decrease our reliance on foreign-sourced foods.
These things too however take time.
I know The Times is subscription only.
There is however a free trial available for the genuinely interested, otherwise the quotes above give an idea of the reasoning behind this debate.