The second Leicestershire Food Summit will be taking place on Monday 19 June at Loughborough University.
Sign up details to follow.
Real Bread Week in Leicestershire
Farmer Tom Duffin grows ancient organic wheat that's baked into bread at the on-farm bakery and sold a few feet away in the farm shop and café.
“We’ve got the whole picture,” he says, “we grow the grain, use the flour and sell the bread. It completes the cycle.”
For Real Bread Week, Tom very kindly gave Good Food Leicestershire (GFL) a quick heads up at Stonehurst Farm in Mountsorrel, the Duffin family’s base since the 1950s.
Among their fields, they grow 50 acres of older wheat varieties with wonderful names such as Squareheads Master and Maris Widgeon. The grain is milled and added to Wildfarmed bread flour, which is commercially available, and turned into fresh loaves on the farm. The flour also goes to a much larger county bakery, who send their Wildfarmed bread to the shelves of Marks and Spencer.
Wildfarmed is the brainchild of Andy Cato, the Groove Armada musician turned farmer who spent 10 years developing a low to no-input growing system that uses old and ancient grains to regenerate the soil.
Andy, it turns out, is Tom’s cousin.
Some of the Duffin wheat originates from the opposite side of the Soar Valley where they used to grow thatching straw. They found the seeds, cleaned them up, grew them at volume, and now they’re in the mix.
Older wheat has much deeper roots to modern varieties that get their fix from synthetic nitrogen. The older grains evolved to dig deeper for their nutrients and as such have greater resilience, more nutrition and a richer flavour. Without synthetics, the plants and soil life work in unison, capture more carbon and enhance biodiversity. Which means Stonehurst’s breadflour has a better nutritional profile and is kinder to the environment.
Free school meals
On average, eight children in every school classroom in England are living in poverty. Despite this, many won’t qualify for free school meals and, as a result, they’ll go hungry, which will affect their health and development for the rest of their lives.
Barnardo’s is running a petition to make free school meals available to all primary-aged children in England - and you can add your voice, too.
A new study into UK grown beans has found they are nutritionally superior to ones imported for our two million cans a day baked bean habit.
What's more, our magic beans – specially adapted for the UK and grown conventionally in Warwickshire - are now being served at six schools in Leicester and Leicestershire. Beans were also grown regeneratively amid wheat and herbal leys at Stanford Hall CSA, near Lutterworth, but these weren’t tested.
The lab tests at Campden BRI measured the nutrients of four dry UK beans, the work of Professor Eric Holub and colleagues at the University of Warwick, and compared them, per 100g, with cannellini, pinto, black turtle, kidney, yellow peas, pea protein, fava bean, chickpea, green lentils, British quinoa and oats from the likes of Tesco, Waitrose, Hodmedods and Simpleas. Yes, that’s a graph with lots of columns and decimal numbers.
For crude protein, fibre and carbohydrates, our beans knocked the others out of the park. What’s more, the high level of essential amino acids (the proteins the body can’t make), were also really promising. So too the amount of magnesium, potassium and resistant carbohydrate or ‘complex sugars.’
“Resistant carbohydrate is also known as a prebiotic,” explains Prof Holub, “and it supplies food for beneficial bacteria in our lower gut. This is, actually, one of the best reasons to eat beans. The gut bacteria do the digesting for us, to release nutrients that we need to protect our gut lining, and to send signals to our brain that we’re satisfied, no longer hungry.”
After BeanMeals’ food trials with city and county school cooks, the Capulet and Godiva beans made their debut in warming Leicestershire Traded Services’ vegetable lasagnes in early March, with positive feedback from both cooks and diners.
*BeanMeals is a partnership project led by the University of Oxford, involving Leicestershire County Council, the Soil Association, and many notable others, and aims to bring UK beans into public procurement, to make the shipping of 50,000 tonnes of raw Canadian beans a thing of the past.
Leicestershire is a beautiful *squirrel-shaped county full of beautiful people. We know this because there are volunteer-led community fridges in all our corners – Hinckley, Wigston, Coalville, Loughborough and Market Harborough.
The community fridge volunteers stop surplus food from going to the dump and instead give it away for free to people who balk at the idea of good food going to waste.
If you like the sound of feeding people and not climate change (uneaten food breaks down to create greenhouse gases), have a look at the links below.
When Julian Rees was tending to Corner Garden last year, a girl and boy walked past with their mum. The girl was intrigued by the ‘free food’ signs and so all three followed him to a clutch of potato plants and, with a spade in hand, he gently dug into the soil.
“As the potatoes came to the surface, like eggs in a nest, she went “Ooh!” and that, to me, was a wonderful moment,” smiles Julian, “to me that made it all worthwhile.”
Fast forward to spring 2023 and 70 people are at Fearon Hall for the official launch of Incredible Edible Loughborough, where Corner Garden and a greenhouse will be growing no dig pesticide-free food for the public.
Loughborough's new community food scheme comes at a time of salad shortages, cost of living increases, climate change and 4.2 million in UK food poverty.
Incredible Edible is a national vision to create kind, confident and connected communities through the power of food.
During Food Waste Action Week, we shared on our Facebook page how a Loughborough University bid to use AI to reduce domestic food waste has been submitted for UK innovation funding.
Dr Elliot Woolley, bid author and lecturer in sustainable manufacturing, will be leading an engineering-led look at efforts to tackle the 6.6 million tonnes of UK annual household food waste.
His team will learn by early April whether the ‘behaviour nudger’ has been approved.
Gold standard
Huge congratulations to the staff and children of Thorpe Acre Infant School in Loughborough for achieving Gold Food for Life standard.
The highly sought-after Soil Association accolade recognises the school’s commitment to cooking good quality UK food in its kitchen, and teaching their children how to grow food in their new growing area. The bonus is that pupils now get to eat what they’ve grown served in their school lunches.
Lunchtime help
Do you go out for lunch at least once a week to Greggs, Pret a Manger, Subway, Itsu, Wasabi, M&S Simply Food, or The Co-operative?
If so, there’s a Loughborough Uni student you could help with their engineering PhD that’s looking into ‘food to go’ packaging.
Leicestershire is a proud farming county and famed for its Stilton, so we were delighted to be invited to see Long Clawson Dairy in action and learn more about their farmers and their on-farm sustainability measures.
We had a tour of their dairy from Kim Kettle, their Farm Liaison Director, and learned how it was started by Vale of Belvoir dairy farmers in 1911, and the challenges facing the industry day. We also tasted a lot of delicious cheese.
Good Food Leicestershire will be returning to the vale in the summer to see and report on how their farmers do their four Fs: feed, fertiliser, fuel and future.
*You can find much bigger reads of these articles at @GoodFoodLeics on Facebook*
Next time around
In the next issue we’ll be reporting on a GFL-funded consultation into local sustainable food procurement, our visit to Taste the Place tourism event in Melton and how things are shaping up for the second Leicestershire Food Summit.
