Twelve Locally Grown Foods That Londoner’s Should Be Eating, But Can’t (Until Now)

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food

With the recent boom in popularity of fresh, local food, it’s still proving very difficult for Londonders to be able to find a range of wonderful groceries, unfortunately due to Supermarket supply chains (still making up for 95% of our grocery shopping) being unable to cope with their fragility.

However, it seems that Farmdrop may have found a resolution to such a problem. Set up as an online market place that’s committed to delivering local, farm-fresh produce to your doorstep, cutting out unnecessary middlemen to provide a much better deal for producers and the environment. The service’s mission is a simple one; to make food local again, as well as bringing back foods grown for flavour, juxtaposed to their ability to travel, also allowing farmers and food makers to profit more fairly for their hard work, receiving up to 80%, compared to the average 25%-50% that most retailers offer.

So in an attempt to avoid these fragile goods from disappearing from our diets, completely, Farmdrop deliver fresh local produce from more than forty suppliers on the same day that it leaves the farm. Having already been set up in London, the company also plans to expand into other towns and cities within the next few years.

What’s more, they’ve provided a list of twelve foods that are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain within the Country’s big cities. Speaking about such ingredients, Farmdrop co-founder Ben Patten has said:

“This list is just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of what is wrong with the supermarket system. These are great examples of fresh local produce that are denied to the majority of people because of the way supermarkets operate.”

“The irony is that supermarkets spend a fortune on advertising freshness, when the reality is the fruit and vegetables that they are selling are chosen and even designed to survive long and challenging journeys.  They’ve lost touch with the most important journey, which should be a short distance from the field to fork. And we are paying for those long journeys and advertising campaigns and not the quality of the food.”

Here’s Farmdrop’s list of twelve fragile locally produced foods currently missing from our diets:

1. Red Flash Strawberries
2. Wild Garlic leaves
3. Nasturtium flowers
4. Winter Purslane
5. Borage flowers
6. Ping Tung Aubergines
7. Crystal Lemon Cucumbers
8. Courgette flowers
9. Dandelion leaves
10. Pullet Eggs
11. Chegworth Beauty Apples
12. Marigold flowers

For more information, and to shop with Farmdrop visit www.farmdrop.co.uk.