Spring chickens, strawberry pickers and Swaziland sugar cane.

Exploring food from farm to fork - discover the findings of a unique National Life Stories project which explores the changing face of British food culture over the last century.

Press launch: Tuesday 5 June 2007, 11am - 1pm

5 June 2007 marks the completion of Food: From Source to Salespoint, a National Life Stories/British Library Sound Archive project which brings together nearly 300 interviews with people in the food industry to chart the revolutionary changes that have occurred in Britain's food culture within living memory. The project has culminated in Food Stories, an innovative oral history resource which aims to educate young people about food and farming: www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/foodstories.

Since the Food: From Source to Salespoint project began in 1997, British Library researchers have carried out hundreds of life history interviews with farmers, large retailers, cooks, food campaigners and consumers. From a vivid account of the first UK Chinese restaurants, to a supermarket buyer reflecting on the ethics of eating meat, to a description by food writer Claudia Roden about the importance of maintaining food traditions for immigrant communities, the archive contains a wealth of first-hand descriptions of UK food culture from the 1920s to the present day.

The interviews highlight a number of topical issues relating to food production, from spring chickens to strawberry pickers to Swaziland sugar cane:

• How old is your chicken when it reaches the supermarket?
  Most consumers will be surprised to discover that it takes less than six weeks - around 40 days - to grow the average chicken to its full slaughter weight. Over the last 20 years, the growth cycle of intensive chickens has been reduced by one day a year through improvements in breed and diet. Interviews in the Food: From Source to Salespoint archive document these changes and explore the limits to further intensification.
• Who picks your strawberries?
  Up until the 1970s seasonal labour on farms like fruit picking was carried out by a workforce of local women, often with their children and babies in tow. Increasingly, seasonal labour is carried out by migrant workers, from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, many of whom are students who come to the UK through the Student Agricultural Workers Scheme. Few people born in Britain know much about Polish food but it's likely that within the next few generations Polish delicacies will become part of the British culinary map -the recent introduction of 'Polish' foods into some major UK supermarkets is a response to the 600,000 or so Polish people who now live in the UK. Food: From Source to Salespoint is rich with material about changing farming practices and changing eating habits in the UK within living memory.
• Does the sugar in your tea come from Suffolk or Swaziland?
  Britain has been importing sugar cane for nearly 500 years but we've also been growing sugar beet in East Anglia for almost 100 years. Most British consumers don't know where their sugar comes from. The recent reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy's Sugar Regime signal a move away from protecting the domestic sugar beet industry. Interviews in the archive describe British beet farming and processing, just before the reforms begin to erode the British sugar industry.

The Food: From Source to Salespoint project involved collaboration with a four year academic research project, 'Manufacturing Meaning Along the Food Chain', which was funded under the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption programme. This led to the development of Food Stories, an educational website which explores the changing face of British food culture. Aimed primarily at 12-18 year olds, the animated website features over 40 audio extracts taken from Food: From Source to Salespoint interviews. The extracts are fully annotated to enable young people to investigate the social history of food, and to examine the ways in which food consumption and production is linked to political, economic, cultural and technological change. Ultimately, Food Stories aims to connect young people with the realities and complexities of food and food production.

Dr Polly Russell, British Library Food Researcher commented: "Food Stories is a timely resource, responding to current concerns about food. Within living memory food production and consumption have changed dramatically. Food today is central to key debates about public health, the environment, animal welfare, ethical sourcing and cultural identity. Through the voices of food consumers, entrepreneurs, chefs, cookery writers, and food industry workers, Food Stories engages directly with these live issues. The Food Stories website and Food: From Source to Salespoint archive will be vital resources for anyone wanting to know about how their food gets from farm to fork."

For further information, interview requests, and broadcast MP3 audio extracts contact Ruth Howlett at the British Library Press Office on +44 (0)20 7412 7112 or email ruth.howlett@bl.uk.

NOTES FOR EDITORS

Food: From Source to Salespoint is a National Life Stories project spanning 10 years (1997 – 2007). The project charts the revolutionary technical and social changes which occurred within Britain’s food industry in the twentieth century and beyond. Production, distribution and retailing of food are explored through recordings with those working at every level of the sector, including life stories with those in the ready-meal, poultry, sugar, meat and fish sectors; employees of Northern Foods, Nestle, Sainsbury and Safeway; and key cookery writers and restaurateurs. This project encompasses Tesco: An Oral History and An Oral History of the Wine Trade.Food: From Source to Salespoint Advisory Committee: Bob Boas, Sir Dominic Cadbury (chair), Bill Mason CBE, Jonathan Taylor, Caroline Waldegrave, David Webster.

Food Stories is an educational website hosted by the British Library in partnership with a four year academic research project, ‘Manufacturing Meaning Along the Food Chain’, which was funded under the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption programme. It is aimed at school and university students and anyone with an interest in food and food production. The website provides audio resources, interpretation and learning packages relating to food and food production. To supplement the audio extracts, Food Stories offers extensive background information, including transcripts, interpretation, commentary and suggestions for potential research projects. The website is divided into seven key themes: Food Nation and Cultural Identity, Ritual and Tradition, Consumer Knowledge and Power, Changes in Eating Habits, Food and Regulation and Technology and Change. The Food Stories website launches on Tuesday 5 June 2007. www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/foodstories.

Audio extracts on the Food Stories website include:

• Consumer Knowledge and Power – Kath Dalmeny of Sustain, describes why she believes the current food system is in crisis and Barbara Crowther of the Fairtrade Foundation talks about Fairtrade food. Catherine Lee, a supermarket poultry buyer, talks about the average customer’s attitude towards meat – “They don’t want to know that that’s a dead body sitting in front of them…. they’ve become squeamish… and they’ve become disassociated with it.”
• Food, Nation and Cultural Identity – Asian food entrepreneur Wing Yip talks about 1950s Chinese restaurants in the UK, and the incongruous dishes on the menu: sweet and sour, chips and bread and butter. Food writer Claudia Roden remembers how British people prejudged Middle Eastern food as “disgusting”, all “eyeballs and testicles”, and Rosamund Grant discusses the politics of Caribbean food.
• Ritual and Tradition – John Lowery (born 1931) describes the ‘traditional’ English food cooked by his mother during World War II and explains why he thinks people were healthier back then than they are today. Teenager Bianca talks about school dinners, while cookery writer Shezad Hussain describes the food eaten by her family on the morning of Muslim festival Eid.
• Retail Experience – David Gregory offers his memory of one of the earliest UK supermarkets and Delia Green (born 1938) remembers her mother’s corner shop. A supermarket employee talks about club cards.
• Changes in Eating Habits – George Herbert (born 1916) describes food being cooked on the fire and Christmas dinner at the communal bakehouse. He also explains his mother’s method of using her stocking to cook spotted dick. Colin Lighten describes a typical weekly rota of meals during the 1950s.
• Food and Regulation – Cereal farmer Oliver Walston discusses government subsidies for farmers, David Gregory, Technical Director at a major supermarket reflects on the range of issues that concern consumers and Paul Wilgos, a Senior Agricultural Technologist, talks about the differences between intensive, free-range and organic farming systems.
• Technology and Change – Oliver Walston talks about how farming has changed over the last 50 years, Peter Vinson recalls local women picking strawberries for ‘pin money’ before the 1980s, while Hugh Lowe describes how his strawberry farm depends on Eastern European workers during the summer months. Andrew Mackenzie, a supermarket Category Manager, discusses why he thinks “people’s aspirations and expectations of chicken have lowered” and reflects on his own feelings about meat and poultry production – how “we have exploited it and moved it to such a clinical and efficient way of doing things”.

Manufacturing Meaning Along the Food Chain was led by Professor Peter Jackson at the Department for Geography, University of Sheffield, Professor Neil Ward at the Centre for Rural Economy at Newcastle University and Dr Rob Perks and Dr Polly Russell from the British Library’s National Life Stories. The project examines the politics and culture of food production in Britain. This research was funded via the ESRC/AHRC’s Cultures of Consumption research programme (www.consume.bbk.ac.uk).

National Life Stories was established in 1987 to ‘record first-hand experiences of as wide a cross-section of present day society as possible’. As an independent charitable trust within the Oral History Section of the British Library Sound Archive, NLS’s key focus and expertise has been oral history fieldwork. Over the past two decades it has initiated a series of innovative interviewing programmes funded almost entirely from sponsorship, charitable and individual donations and voluntary effort.

The British Library Sound Archive holds over a million discs, 200,000 tapes, and many other sound and video recordings. The collections come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature, to oral history and wildlife sounds. For more information visit the British Library Sound Archive.

The British Library Learning programme aims to support formal and informal learning in the UK and make physical and virtual access to the British Library exciting and inspiring for students, educators and lifelong learners. A wide range of activities and resources are available for learners of all ages including free workshops, projects and online resources. The programme helps build skills in research, critical thinking and source-based learning and supports the curriculum in key subject areas.