Food for thought

Messing about in the countryside with chums who lived on farms helped Dartford-born Tim Read feel an early connection with the land, a connection that has grown even stronger since he took on the role of chief executive at Produced in Kent last November.
It is a challenging time for the food group, which was originally part of Kent County Council, but is now trying to survive as an organisation in its own right, so that it can trade separately and exist on its own independently in terms of KCC funding.
Tim explains: “EU state aid law says that government, whether regional or local, shouldn’t interfere in the free market, and what that means for food is that if government, ie county councils, are promoting their own produce, they are distorting the market and it’s not then fair trade.
“If Produced in Kent as a company can trade separately and independently and locally, then we can do whatever we like in the promotion of local produce.”
And the way to achieve this independence is to persuade the current 600-odd ‘members’ of the advantages of now paying for their membership, as from March 2008 the County Council money runs out.

Genuine benefits
“Members will be paying for something they previously enjoyed for nothing, which they won’t be too keen on,” admits Tim, “but I think many fully expect to pay, and if we give them back genuine benefits and in a slightly different way, I am sure they will understand the reasons why.
“Nearly all the other food groups in the country charge their members to join and give them a whole load of brilliant benefits back – and that’s where we need to get to with Produced in Kent, to get to a point where we have a paying membership, because at the moment it’s all a bit like a loosely associated club.”
If anyone can sort it out, it’s Tim Read, whose background may be in transport planning, but whose private passion – especially since marriage to his ex-wine buyer wife Alison 11 years ago and the birth of their two children – is locally grown food.
A Kentish Man, Tim was educated by Carmelite nuns at St Joseph’s Convent School Preparatory for Boys and Girls in Hartley, so up to the age of 11 endured a very strict and old-fashioned Catholic discipline.

I’m not some sort of food militant who’s going to firebomb Tescos

He reports, however, being “less than angelic” at both Longfield secondary modern and Gravesend Grammar and cheerfully admits to initially picking quite the wrong subject (and university), before settling on the London School of Economics, where he read human geography and found himself a great deal happier.
Tim was headhunted straight from university by KCC and joined the Highways department in 1988, where he worked on development planning. A Masters degree in transport planning followed by three or four internal jobs within Highways led to him being put in charge of the Local Transport Plan.
Projects he was involved in ranged from Fast Track to the Leybourne-West Malling bypass, and setting up an Olympic Transport Strategy for Kent.
So what led the transport man to a small office at Produced in Kent HQ, based at Hadlow College? “I decided to move jobs because I was becoming more and more worried about where we get our food from and what we will have left of our agriculture sector if we don’t do something about it sooner rather than later,” he explains.
“We’ve done away with all our manufacturing and most of our industry in this country, and if we keep going the way we are at the moment, we won’t have any agriculture left either. We are entirely at the mercy of two or three of the largest supermarkets in terms of them influencing where our food comes from and what we eat; what I’m worried about in the future is that we’ll end up importing almost everything and not be able to produce anything of our own.”
Tim is also concerned about the environmental implications (for example, a quarter of all HGVs on the road at any one time are transporting food) and the social implications, too: “We’re breeding generations of children who are overfed and malnourished at the same time and we’ll end up outliving our own kids at this rate,” he warns.

The idea that we import apples into Kent is appalling

“I’m not some sort of food militant who’s going to firebomb Tesco, but I do feel quite strongly that we need to maintain some degree of choice. I don’t want us to wake up in 30 or 40 years and find that all our beef is frozen and from Brazil and our vegetables are coming from all the way round the world.
“And of course food is such a strong part of our identity – it is about who we are, and I don’t want to lose sight of that. The idea that we import apples into Kent is appalling, and very soon if we’re not careful, this country will be importing milk.”

Strong brand
The way forward, he believes, is to have a strong and growing food group and a strong brand that is immediately identified with quality – like the Taste of Kent Awards, Tim’s first public engagement last year. He was most impressed by how highly regarded the awards are, telling me that one member since winning has reported a 20 per cent increase in trade, and vows to work with Kent Life to make them bigger and better for 2007.
He is also bemused by how food tourism is still largely untapped in Kent. “People travel to different areas because of the food there and nowhere is that stronger in this country than in the Garden of England. We have fantastic countryside, wonderful vineyards, a great coast, but we need to do a lot more work to promote ourselves.”
One way forward, he feels, could be organising a number of food and drink festivals in Kent to rival major national events such as the ones held at Ludlow and Abergavenny.
So does Tim practise what he preaches, and is he any good in the kitchen? Well, getting his wife an Aga for Christmas sounds like a good start, and although he doesn’t cook as much as he would like or should, Tim admits to always asking where the food is from when they eat out.
“Food is such a huge part of everyone’s life,” he says. “We could throw this entire country’s identity away in the next 30 years if we aren’t careful. I’d hate for us to become entirely at the mercy of a globalised economy where food has been turned into a commodity, because that is what is happening in our supermarkets.
“You’ve only go to taste the difference between something that’s come 20 miles and is fresh and something that’s flown halfway round the world. Young’s, the biggest seafood production company in the UK, take Scottish prawns and salmon 12,000 miles to Thailand to be processed and then flown back to the UK to be sold in our supermarkets. We cannot continue to carry the burden of the social and environmental cost of that.”
With so much passion and organisational experience at the helm, it’s safe to say Produced in Kent is definitely sailing into calmer waters.

Words by Sarah Sturt, pictures by Dave Cosens

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