August Market Booklet

Each month, the Lewes Food Market produces its own booklet as part of Market Year. It contains a ‘producer profile’ and imaginative seasonal recipes based on local produce (we recommend the chilled pea and lettuce soup!).

This month the producer profile is on Graham Love of Greenway Fruit Farm, one of the last of its kind in Sussex.  The challenges Graham faces are not just supermarkets with their pick of international produce, it is also climate change with the constant problems of pest and disease surges, water logging followed by drought. Yet what comes through is not defeatism, but a resilience and determination to adapt. Click here to see and download the August Booklet>>>

We may learn to value local produce more and appreciate just how vital to our wellbeing such local producers are, given  the increasing fragility of global food supply chains.  In a recent article in the Observer dated 21st July, the CEO of Tesco announced that “The era of cheap food is over” and that major price rises are all but inevitable with rising global demand outpacing supply. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation global food prices could rise by as much as 40% over the next decade, as a result of a growing middle class in countries such as China and India.

There is no mention in the article of the impact of climate change and the kind of weather volatility that Graham refers to – but we could well be counting on the innovation and determination of small local farmers to meet our needs, as supermarkets struggle to source and supply the foods we eat at the kind of low prices we are used to paying.