THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

mardatha

Oh my god the jellybaby thing has scared me silly. I need a VERY BIG STASH.
About the size of the Buckingham Palace might do .......

[Deleted User]

We have nice food produced in the UK too y'know, we'll possibly have slightly less choice and it may be more expensive until the production levels here are larger but we'll still be able to get nice things. Stilton cheese, local cider, Hereford beef, welsh lamb, Kentish cherries and apples, hops for beer, English wines even champagne style sparkling, good locally caught fish, many good things and the government will HAVE to start supporting the farming community so they can actually make a living by selling what they so diligently grow/rear/produce on their farms and perhaps address the monopoly that supermarket chains seem to have over pricing. We'll maybe see all the crop being used including the wonky ones for feeding the nation and common sense may just creep back into food production. Nice things from Europe are not the be all and end all and if we're lucky enough to holiday there we'll still be able to enjoy the goodies won't we?

jk0

I don't think we'll have a problem, will we?

If the EU are going to be bloody-minded at customs, their producers have far more to lose than ours.

Karmacat

In reality, I'm sure it will be fine. And its not the quality goods that are at issue, it's the staples - wheat and the other cereals, apart from Canadian - and niche products - like nuts and seeds for me, as a vegetarian. Just need a few extra stocks to get over the initial discombobulation. Ordinary shoppers will, anyway - I have a 2 drawers of my freezer full of seeds and nuts, as well as other supplies.

maryb

I prefer non Danish butter and bacon anyway tbh. The butter is so pale because the cows are mainly stall fed and I like grass fed wherever possible. I buy Kerrygold butter because one thing the rainy and mild climate in Ireland does well is grow grass and the cows are out in the fields for longer than anywhere else. Also grass fed butter is softer and easier to spread

maryb

Should have said - I buy British butter in summer when most cows are grazed. Supporting our own farmers etc. Though it's worrying to hear about the rise of superdairies where the cows are kept inside all year round. I heard a producer on Farming Today (shows what time I wake up!) say it had to be all right because the cows were perfectly happy with a constant supply of food laid on and no need to stir

I thought that would also describe the average teenager and we all know it's not good for them to be allowed to fester in their rooms!

[Deleted User]

I went to the farm shop this morning and found not much variety of fruits there, talked to the manager and this hard winter has set things back 6 or so weeks across the continent. There were very few fruits that had been imported that were ripe enough to buy, rock hard nectarines, plums, peaches but South African and New Zealand apples and pears that were fine. What I did find though were really good local swedes, cabbages, carrots (stored and new season bunches), cauliflowers, parsnips and beetroot too and some really fresh bunches of local watercress that would all do a lot to fill tums and give the nutrients to keep us well and healthy. Nice still good local potatoes are available too along with imports from Cyprus, Jersey and Egypt but the stored onions are going soft and squashy however it won't be too long before spring sown spring onions will be in the shops and sprig sown radishes and lettuces too so we don't have to go without fresh produce, we grow fine enough stuff here already.

culpepper

So if we import 1/4 of our food and we also export food TO the EU, wont some of that be offset by our NOT exporting to them?
Im thinking things like potatoes which I can remember reading were both exported to and imported from Germany.
However did we manage to be exporting so little and importing so much?
Then again , does anyone remember new zealand lamb?
Wont thse counries who are not EU members be falling over themselves to export food to us? I know I would if I were them.

LOL sorry to sound like the Spanish inquisition.

GreyQueen

I buy grass-fed butter, too; Anchor or Kerrygold. if Eire were being bliddy with the UK post-brexit, I'd stick with Anchor. And, if we can't import as much foriegn dairy, our own producers will get a look-in.

A lot of the stuff we get from the continent doesn't need to come from there, there's a fairly equal quantity of many staple foodstuffs being imported and exported, so a little tweaking could see UK produce sold into the UK market and continental produce stay over there. It's poor use of oil-derived fuels to ship fresh foods around willy-nilly in refridgerated trucks, anyway.

If you've ever landed at the Hook of Holland and driven down to Amsterdam, you'll note that you're initially in a landscape almost entirely under glass/ plastic, with the odd house roof poking out like a raft on an ocean. A lot of veggies are grown in there hydroponically. Plus, if you're in the mountains of Andalucia and look down towards the coast, you will see an awful lot of greenhouses, and some of those crops are coming here.

If you're a continental producer of veggies and fruits which you are selling into the UK market, you have a lot of capital tied up in your infrastructure and in fruit-bearing trees. You can decide not to sow so many salad crops but you can't turn orange trees, grape vines and olive trees on and off like you can annual crops. Not to mention the truckloads of fresh flowers coming over from the Nederlands every single day.

My take on it is that the EU bureacracies are going to have to answer to their own countries' companies about exports to the UK and that it'll be very unpopular if they try to restrict sales or impose tariffs which prejudice their own producers' economic viability.

I've just come back from a few days up on Hadrian's Wall. 1,800 years ago, you could live in what is now Northumberland and enjoy white olives in boiled wine from Gaul, olive oil, fish pickle and wine from Hispania and white wine from the Rhineland, as well as things from as far afield as modern Syria and Libya. They've got the containers with customs' marks and exporters' names and the receipts and the notes of the prices up there to prove it!

They did have local beer, tho; 50 pints for 8 asses (chump change). I expect they were pished as pished things most of the time. :rotfl:

[Deleted User]

Maybe there will be changes in 'what' is actually grown here in the future. We've just had the Edwardian Farm programme running in the background on the TV while I did the ironing and even back then farmers had to stop growing so much wheat due to an influx of cheap imports from elsewhere in the world and their answer was to grow oats which fed the horses that were the transport system in those days and I suspect fed a lot of the population too as porridge. If oats were affordable than I wonder if as was the norm in Scandinavian countries that not only was there porridge for breakfast but often porridge as well as bread was a warming, filling and sustaining supper too and cold porridge was let to set solid and as in Scotland poured into a 'porridge drawer' and sliced to fit a pocket for a snack in the working day. It's all about adaption isn't it?