Still on my mission to Help promote the Skye Social network site www.newskyes.com and just today i got another reminder of why i’m doing it.
A couple of friends came over today to just visit because they had been gone over Christmas and new-year and during the conversation the topic turned to supermarkets and how they effect the use of produce, and the way that Supermarket force UK growers to throw away vast quantity’s of their produce is quite frankly criminal.
I have seen several programs detailing such things as the machines designed to scan apples for example and make sure they have no bruises or colour differences and those that do are just chucked, only the ‘perfect’ ones go through resulting in Mountains of apples going to waste and the customers being left with the plastic blandness of usual supermarket items,
and it’s the same with vegetables such as broccoli being plowed back into the field just because it’s stalk was too thick or a bit of dirt was on it.
European shoppers would just plain refuse to eat what we in the UK think of as ‘normal’ vegetables and you can tell the difference if you grow your own, even something like lettuce, taste some home grown and suddenly you find that it actually HAS flavour not just this strange watery green stuff, packed in it’s ‘artificial gas’ environment.
There are so many farmers who are living with the frustration of having to jump through ludicrous hoops to satisfy the supermarkets crazy demands, and we as customers just think “well thats the way it is, what can we do?”
well i know one thing we can do and that is come together to at the very least grow our own real food, it’ll taset better be better for us and prove to the supermarkets that we don’t need their plastic food to live or their monopoly.
If places on the net can be created with an eye to bringing together community and areas to support local initiatives then we have a real chance for change, especially here on the Isle of Skye that at the moment would just collapse if the supermarket lorries stopped coming.
It doesn’t have to be this way centralization works for a few things but if you can get lots of self supporting and co-operative small groups the flexibility and power is way beyond a more cumbersome centralized system.
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