A taste for change

The National Trust is cooking up a real food revolution. Mike Collins reports.

Think National Trust, and grand stately homes, fantastic gardens and afternoon tea probably spring to mind. So it might come as a surprise that the organisation has a stake in the food chain right from the plot to the plate.

Some 2,000 farmers are based on National Trust land, the Trust runs three whole farms, and has numerous kitchen gardens. As the largest visitor attraction caterer in the UK, it make sense for us to close the loop and get as much of this tasty local and seasonal food as possible into our hundreds of restaurants and tearooms.

We’ve been doing it for a while at Souter Lighthouse on the Tyneside coast, where visitors to the tearooms have been getting a taste of the beetroot, onions and leeks grown in the restored lighthouse keepers’ gardens. And we’ve been encouraging NT visitors to find out more about the food journey in our From Plot to Plate initiative, through taste testing and food festivals at our properties.

But it’s time to take this focus on food further, which is why we’re creating 14 exemplar properties, where we’ve forged pioneering links with quality local suppliers. At Blicking Hall, in Norfolk, the new head chef has introduced local crab on to the menu, brought in fresh that day by his fisherman father. Then there’s the Stourhead beef that literally comes from the other side of the fence on the estate.

It’s not a new idea to serve up local food in these large country estates, for if we turn back time, many of them produced much of their food in a home farm, onsite kitchen garden, brewery and bakery. That’s not to say that recreating this low-food-mile system today hasn’t been a challenge. The Stourhead cattle, for example, only needed to travel a short distance from the field to the restaurant. In practice, though, it meant arranging transport to the local abattoir and back. In the end our catering supplier Brakes came to the rescue, who is now delivering the meat to six National Trust properties in Wessex.

We want our tenant farmers to get a foothold in the wider UK market, too. Which is where the Fine Farm Produce Award comes in. Launched this autumn, it recognises individual products that are not only locally distinct, meet high environmental standards (produced under an accredited scheme such as organic, Freedom Food or LEAF), but taste good too. Judges carried out blind tastings, comparing them with a mystery ‘high class’ supermarket’s own brand.

Nine producers walked off with the logo that they can display on 13 products, including the “mouth watering” Wimpole Rare Breed Sausages; Killerton Orchard Honey, which has a “fragrant aroma and light flavour with floral notes”; and Brockhampton Damson Jam, that “just screams fruit!” according to one of the judges.

Authenticity and traceability is at the heart of the award, because shoppers - at the farms, farm shops, National Trust outlets and other shops - can find out more about where their food comes from by following weblinks to the specific National Trust estates. We hope to extend the award to products like charcoal and timber, and we could end up seeing a comprehensive NT product directory…

But we want to improve our food procurement policy in all our properties. At the moment we source all our meat from within the UK, but wouldn’t it be great if all of it had the Freedom Food standard? And we should not only be buying tea and coffee ethically, but extending this to products like hot chocolate and the ingredients for our cakes. Changes like these will take several years, but we aim to eventually run a catering business in which all elements of the process are greener, from the cleaning materials through to the waste.

Food matters to the National Trust. Millions of people eat in our properties every year, and we spend £7.5 million a year on ingredients alone. We want to make sure we’re using this leverage to bring about a real food revolution.

8 November 2006