Local food, farmed well with Ed Johnstone: "Get closer to your food"
We’ve become good at eating without seeing. Food arrives washed, wrapped and uniform, with little sense of the field, orchard, animal or person behind it. Convenience has given us plenty, but it has also allowed a distance to grow between what we eat and how it reaches us.
That distance matters. When food becomes anonymous, it’s easier to waste, easier to judge by price and harder to understand the pressures facing the people who produce it. A wonky carrot is rejected; a loaf is just another loaf. The skill, weather, risk and time behind the produce disappears from view.
One of the reasons I started The Sussex Peasant was to shorten that distance. We collect directly from Sussex farms and producers and bring their food into local communities through our markets. But the most important connection is not measured only in miles. It comes through conversation: knowing who grew the apples, where the beef was raised, why one crop is late or why another is unusually abundant.
Shared meals can deepen that connection. Next week on Tuesday 29 September, we’re holding our Autumn Supper at Poynings Grange, bringing together guests, friends, customers and producers.
There’ll be a walk through the vines before everyone sits down to eat. The point isn’t simply to serve a good dinner. It’s to experience food in the place it comes from and to hear the stories behind it. Our customers and friends seem to absolutely love it, it feels like a real moment in the calendar where everything comes together and we can stop and enjoy a seasonal moment with our community.
You do not need to attend an event to create that feeling. Visit a farm shop, talk to a market trader, ask your butcher where the meat came from, or cook one meal around ingredients grown close to home. Invite people to share it and tell them what you know about the food on your table.
Something changes when a producer is no longer an abstract figure. You begin to understand why seasons matter, why prices fluctuate and what it actually takes to produce food.
This is not nostalgia for a lost rural past. Most of us need convenience, and modern supply chains will remain part of how we eat. But having a human connection to the people and places where our food comes from – and the actual season – is healthy and efficiency should not be at the price of complete disconnection.
Bringing people closer to their food creates respect: for the land, for skilled work and for the meal itself. Around a shared table, those connections become tangible. We eat, we talk and the landscape outside no longer feels quite so far away.
To find a weekly Sussex Peasant farmers market close to you in Brighton, Hove, Ditchling, Lewes, Newick, Danehill or Cuckfield visit www.thesussexpeasant.co.uk
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