The amount of noise being generated over dairy production might suggest otherwise, but Brits don’t care about where their food comes from. That’s the finding, anyway, of a recent report for the European Commission on attitudes towards “food security, food quality and the countryside”.
Brits rank roughly in the middle for several of the key questions. As you might expect, we spend less time fretting about whether our country produces enough food than, say, the Greeks. We spend rather more time worrying about it than the Danes, Germans and Dutch.
More interesting are the findings on our attitudes’ towards provenance. Again, Brits ranked roughly halfway in terms of the emphasis they put on quality and price. But when asked about the importance of where food comes from, Britain ranked almost last. Only the laid-back Dutch were less bothered about provenance - and judging by this report they aren’t generally worried about much. (You might have your own theories about why that is.)
The finding is eye-catching considering how often we’re told that provenance is increasingly key for many shoppers. Are we not as proud of our home-grown food and drink as our European cousins? Or maybe we just take a more global view. For example, recognition of the Fairtrade label was far higher in the UK than anywhere else.
Either way, it wouldn’t hurt shoppers to pay a bit more attention to where their food comes from. Separate research from the Economist Intelligence Unit this week placed the UK flat last among countries in Western Europe for food security, giving those apocalyptic warnings from dairy farmers about production disappearing overseas a little more ballast.
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