With concerns over health of our nation growing (i'm actually talking about the UK here, although it could apply to a number of other countries, not least the US), there is a slowly-growing number of people (here in the Uk at least) waking up to the fact that maybe, just maybe, the supermarket way of "doing food" isn't actually the best way.
Sure, it gets food to the masses more conveniently than when you had to a market, and when most food didn't last all that long. But at a cost; the amount of processing that most of the food you can buy in a supermarket goes through before it hits the shelves is, well, it's unnatural. As with so many things in science these days, opinion is divided as to whether such heavy processing of the food really is bad for us, but even if it doesn't actively bad for us, there *is* evidence that it reduces, often significantly, the nutritional value of the food.
So what's the other option? farm shops. Shops that sell produce from nearby farms, straight to you. Food that's had the minimum processing needed to be legally sold. Fair enough, it works out a little more expensive (technically, the prices I've seen are generally on a par with supermarket prices, but of course supermarkets almost always have offers on all over the place). But believe me, it tastes better. The best way I can describe this is: the first thing I tried from a farm shop was a peppered beef steak. I live in Nottinghamshire, and this beef was "reared in fields in the Trent valley" - another thing my local farm shops pride themselves on is the "traceability" of all their produce. If you want, you can go take a look at the farm your food comes from - now, I slightly overcooked it, but not by much, so I wasn't expecting it to be much better than supermarket-bought beef. How wrong I was; it was like eating supermarket beef is the equivalent of eating diluted beef (this probably isn't far from the truth, from what I hear of their increasing the weight of meat by adding water) and the farm shop beef was REAL beef, unwatered down. Real nice.
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