Adam Bedford: It’s more than just Jam and Jerusalem
I have to go and speak in front of groups of people fairly regularly. More often than not things go to plan just so long as I have enough good answers lined up for the person who invariably asks a tricky question.
Speaking at a couple of meetings recently, though, I found myself pacing around in trepidation outside the hall prior to being called in.
Over and over in my head was a tune I had been humming and struggling to remember all the way to the meeting. “Da da da daaaah,” it went, “dee dee de-de deeeeee, walk upon England’s mountains green, dum dum dum dummmmmmm…” And that, embarrassingly, was about as far as I got.
Yes, I was speaking for the first time at a meeting of the Women’s Institute. Remembering with a chuckle the joy of watching Tony Blair get stitched up with the slow hand-clap when he did a similar, but rather more auspicious, gig, I soon stopped laughing. I crossed everything and hoped that it wouldn’t happen to me.
I didn’t need to worry. The WI meeting was firmly onside, and certainly made me think a bit, too.
Having mistakenly run along with the stereotype in my own mind that the WI was largely about jam, chutney and taking your clothes off for charity calendars, I was informed that the WI has 205,000 members in 6500 WI meetings.
Those are some big numbers, and I hadn’t realised the extent of the campaigning the WI does. If its recent resolution is anything to go by, it seems the WI’s work is right back at the heart of what the organisation was traditionally all about.
There has been a long running industry campaign for clearer country-of-origin labelling on food products and the WI has got involved. I was booked to talk to them about food labelling. The issue is extremely topical and by the time you read this there will have been a vote on it in Brussels.
The added success of such campaigns lies in representing the voice of the consumer, and as the WI says: “Food is not something produced in a factory. It is produced from ingredients grown and reared in fields and shoppers want information that reflects a product’s true providence from field to fork.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
It is a timely campaign as supermarkets talk of being led by consumer choice – and, indeed, we as an industry also speak of consumer choice, highlighting how farmers should produce what the consumer demands and is prepared to pay for.
Without clear labelling, however, it is very difficult for those consumers to make an informed decision.
Having a label that makes the providence unclear probably makes the public think that there is something to hide. Farmers realised a while ago that opening farms up to the public is overwhelmingly beneficial – witness the almost exponential rise in the number of Open Farm Sunday visitors – but there are problems in the food system if the transparency the public see on farms is lacking at the other end.
Consumers are on side with farmers – they like them. They will not be taken for a ride, though, when being told all about the processes and places that their food products have come through.
As for the Women’s Institute, it should be applauded for their campaigning and support for farming.
If the excessive number of biscuits I ate at the end of the meeting is a barometer of quality, they should continue to be applauded for their baking too.