Guest writer, Anna Zuurmond, shares what her experience as a sales rep for organic veg box producer and supplier, Riverford, has taught her about our relationship to food and what people value most when deciding what to eat and where they source it from.
At first, I thought that being a veg box seller might be a little samey, with your daily spiel revolving around nothing but leeks and courgettes. However, I couldn’t have been more wrong about my job, which essentially involves touring around the west of England and encouraging people on the street, in shopping centres and at food festivals to try a Riverford seasonal organic veg box (as well as fruit, dairy, meat and other items).
The wonderful thing about exploring people’s relationships with food is that it quickly leads into conversations around lifestyles – and therefore life.
From new parents to grandparents, to students, full-time workers and retirees, from young couples to widowers to single mothers and fathers, what drives people to stop in the street and say yes (or no!) to trying a box?
The answer, I have found in my many chats, lies somewhere between ‘fear of’ and ‘desire to’.
Fear and desire in food choices
There is a fear of what pesticides and herbicides are doing to our bodies and to nature, a fear of losing local farmers, and a fear of letting big supermarkets win.
Then there is desire: a desire to know how our food is grown and to explore new ways of cooking and eating, a desire to support farmers, a desire to nourish our bodies and to restore nature.
Easily first and foremost in my daily conversations, is the topic of health.
“I didn’t care about me but now I’ve got kids, I feel like I’m poisoning them when I read about some of the chemicals used in food growing,” said a mother of two in Blackwood, Wales, in reference to the many pesticides used in conventional farming. Another professed: “We believe my one-year-old’s eczema is linked to pesticides.”
If it’s not children, it’s often a health scare. “We’re diabetic and have been told to eat more veg,” said an older couple in a Bristol shopping centre, variations of which I’ve heard countless times since starting this job. Meanwhile, a 24-year-old woman in Birmingham told me how she’s changing her diet to see if it helps her chronic fatigue, having tried everything else. Straight after, a new mum shared how she was weening her baby off breastmilk but would only move to organic unhomogenised milk.
Many people, when asked in the street, “Do you like veg?”, answer with a little laugh or a sigh and go “We really should do more”. Often people are trying to break habits or slip healthy options into busy lifestyles whilst navigating fussy children (or themselves).
You then have the pretty serious health fans – including those within the ever-expanding gym and dieting scene – who want to tap into the benefits of fresh organic veg (and usually some milk and meat too).
Next come those with a desire to forget the supermarkets and say I stand with you to UK growers. People I speak with, are making a link between terrible farmer welfare, precarity and pay, and the food supply chain being orchestrated by multinational supermarkets. These people are also realising that much of what they buy from the supermarket is lacking when it comes to both taste and nutrition. They want out.
The environment, you might (or might not) be surprised to hear, tends to feature lower in people’s priorities. There is certainly frustration at supermarkets’ omni-present plastic packaging, and there is an understanding that intense monocultures sprayed with chemicals are wrecking nature and contributing to climate change. However, often fear of bad health is far more tangible to people than a decline in bees or soil degradation. What does that say about how we educate and campaign? That we must better teach the overlap: health and nature benefits are inseparable.
For most people, it’s not some great aggrandising idea of ethical, sustainable food that motivates them to switch to an organic veg box, but the appetite for something healthy and convenient that makes them feel good. Is that combination too much to ask?
Unfortunately, with the way our system currently stands, it can be.
The affordability question
So, let’s look at what stops people from switching to better veg. And I don’t just mean what stops people buying, but also what stops them even coming over and looking at a farm veg stand.
“I would love to, but I’ve got a family of five; I couldn’t afford to feed them this,” or “It’s just fancy veg, I go to Lidl”, are things I unsurprisingly hear on a regular basis. Comments along the lines of “That’s the expensive veg, isn’t it?” are frequently the first reaction before you even begin a conversation.
This response is entirely understandable – whatever way you look at it, and despite variations across products, fresh organic produce is often considerably more expensive than non-organic supermarket veg.
“Why is it cheaper for me to buy a crap ultra-processed meal than it is to buy this good quality fruit and veg?” exasperatedly asked a woman at the Cardiff Foodies festival. Her indignation at this imbalanced pricing is something we should all share.
As Patrick Holden, founder and CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust, has said, “We need to put right the price gap between quality and cheap food. We have a distorted economic system where apparently cheap food isn’t really cheap at all, because the costs behind it include contributing to climate change, destroying nature, negative effects on river pollution, reduced biodiversity and damage to public health.”
“Money is the only metric they accept, never mind the costs to our environment, wildlife, health and wider society,” says Riverford founder Guy Watson, in reference to supermarkets during the #GetFairAboutFarming campaign. These costs are not factored into price. Meanwhile, the benefits that healthy food delivers, are not renumerated.
Whilst this distorted pricing continues, for many people, the difference in cost remains prohibitive. Even for those that can afford organic veg, they don’t necessarily feel inclined to pay the extra money.
Bridging the knowledge gap
Last week, I had a previously homeless woman who had just been housed and set up with a bank card, who emphatically came over and wanted to try a small box every two weeks, telling me this was her first step in getting her life back on track.
These are the dreamy stories you want to be hearing, but they are often few and far between – and, to be quite frank, would take a great stretch of desire and finances for a lot of people.
For it’s not as simple as being literally unable to afford a £15, £18 or £25 seasonal organic veg box, but it’s a) thinking it’s worth it, and b) having the time, knowledge and skill base to know what to do with what’s inside it – which can include veg that’s less commonly seen on supermarket shelves.
“My kids just wouldn’t eat any of that, I’d end up chucking it,” families say to me daily, perfectly illustrating that scary possibility for many of throwing veg – and so money – away. Meanwhile, “How would you cook that?” is not uncommon when looking at a celeriac or a cardoon, or even things like broad beans or kale.
This ties into time. People get home late, work hectic jobs, some do shift work, and many have a busy home and family life when they get through the front door. Feeling confident and/or organised in your cooking, so that you can whip up something quick and healthy with what you’ve got, is not something everybody feels able to do. To tackle this, remember that you do have a lot of choice in what box you want, and in your first order with Riverford, you get a book full of simple seasonal recipes – and sometimes that’s enough to take a leap.
But the answers to making this widespread is of course a deeper-rooted education. Many I speak with are really keen to learn about how produce is farmed. They’re trying to dabble in a bit of growing, and kids will excitedly tell me how they’ve got some tomatoes or beans on the go in their back garden or at school. There are many working to bridge this knowledge gap, including the Sustainable Food Trust through its Beacon Farms programme, the Harmony Project through its work in schools, and Riverford through things like free recipes and newsletters.
If knowledge of growing and cooking can be expanded, alongside closing the price gap between low- and high-quality food, healthy organic produce could reach far more people while providing better returns for growers.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy the many anecdotes that the day job delivers. “Are artichokes anti-choke?” No, please don’t use it medically! “Is lamb’s lettuce vegan?” Yes…no lamb’s ears included! Keep them coming.
