The mystery of the Oakham chicken

chicken. A few days before, my family and I had tucked into one of Marks &
Spencer’s Oakham chickens. It was delicious and, at little over £5, very
good value.

But something caught my eye on the label. There was a little e_STmk trademark
symbol after the name Oakham. Is it really possible to trademark a town?

Well, no according to one of the butchers on Oakham high street. “They’ve
just come in and nicked our name,” says John Cork, who runs Nelson’s.

“I’ve had people coming up the A1, and they see the Oakham sign and they
come into the town and say, ‘Can I have an Oakham chicken?’ And I have to
tell them there is no such thing.”

It turns out that M&S, a supermarket that quite rightly prides itself on
the quality of its food, has branded a whole line of its chicken as Oakham.
They come from farms as far apart as Northern Ireland and the Suffolk coast,
but none is in Oakham.

This is not the only example of supermarkets’ sense of geography being a
little off-kilter. Tesco has a line of chicken called Willow Farm. Where is
this charming, thatched-cottage place, where the chooks run free?
Shropshire? Devon?

Tesco explains: “There are two suppliers of Willow Farm chicken with 42
farms across the South-West and Northern Ireland growing these birds.”

Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Mey Selection beef and lamb has a label
showing a picture of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s favourite Scottish
retreat and the words: “Castle of Mey, from the walled garden.”
Only in smaller letters do you get the crucial words: “Inspired by His
Royal Highness The Prince Charles, Duke of Rothesay” and the caveat
that the food comes from within 100 miles of the castle. That’s a big walled
garden, even for a royal residence.

M&S has even gone as far as to invent a place called Lochmuir (again,
e_STmk), which a glance at the label’s picture suggests is a wild,
wind-swept part of coastal Scotland, where burly fishermen land their catch.
It is, in fact, “a brand name chosen by M&S for all of the Scottish
salmon grown to the M&S specification” produced on multiple farms
in various locations around Scottish waters.

Does any of this matter? After all, these brand names – even if they bear no
relation to a specific place – guarantee a certain quality and do not
technically break any labelling laws.

Yes, say food experts, it matters very much. That’s because the most important
food trend of recent years has been “local” food, produce with a
guaranteed provenance. Sales of local food have grown much faster than sales
of other premium categories, such as organic or Fairtrade, according to IGD,
the industry research body. It was the one type of food that flourished
during the recession, as shoppers chose to support their local shops and
suppliers.

Rob Ward, the founder of the Food Marketing Network, which advises both
supermarkets and farm shops on their strategy, says: “Foot and mouth in
2001 was the real catalyst. Before then we had just 250 farm shops, and a
handful of farmers’ markets in Britain.

“Foot and mouth made shoppers question what they were eating and where it
had come from. Only then did millions realise for the first time that their
steak could have been trucked 400 miles across the country to be
slaughtered, before being trucked 400 miles back to the supermarket.

“We now have 1,100 farm shops and over 600 farmers’ markets. And the big
retailers know this is what consumers want. They have realised they need to
go from being high‑tech to high-touch. That’s why they’ve jumped on the
bandwagon and started putting pictures of farmers on their labels.”

Mr Cork, too – during his 43 years as a butcher – has noticed a substantial
change in what his customers ask for. “In the old days they just asked
for a chop or pie. Now they ask where it’s from, who the farmer is, is the
pie a proper Melton Mowbray?”

And, of course, his pork pies always are, with thick pastry, proper chopped
meat, and generous amounts of jelly.

An increasing number of areas in Britain have won Protected Designation of
Origin, the European benchmark that ensures only champagne comes from
Champagne, stilton comes from Stilton and Cornish clotted cream really does
come from England’s most westerly county.

Melton Mowbray won its special status after an expensive and often bitter
series of court battles against a supermarket supplier that wanted to use
the Melton name on pies made outside of the area.

This desire for ever more authentic food has led to an increasing number of
cases of not just questionable but downright dishonest food labelling.

Over the weekend, trading standards officers in Hampshire published findings
that showed a quarter of all food sold as “local” in the county
could not be verified as being so.

A restaurant in Fareham was selling “Hampshire spring lamb”, which
was from New Zealand, and a pub in Romsey was selling pork advertised with
the specific name of a local farm that does not even rear pigs.

And the problems extended well beyond Hampshire. A “home assured apple pie”
sold by a restaurant in Fylde was actually bought from a supermarket.

Possibly the most outrageous was “local samphire”, an ingredient so
quintessentially British that it merits a mention in King Lear, on
sale in Lancashire but imported from Israel.

Food fraud is nothing new. But while our Georgian forebears railed against
chalk being used to bulk up bread flour, we have more subtle concerns about
the authenticity of certain products.

Can we really trust what is on the label? Especially when there are more than
30 separate and often conflicting ethical food emblems that can be used to
satisfy insatiable shoppers’ appetites for yet more detail: free range,
organic, Red Tractor, Freedom Food, the Leaf scheme, dolphin safe,
Rainforest Alliance. The list goes on.

“It’s become absolutely crazy,” says Mr Ward. “Most sensible
people look at the labels but they are bombarded with information. They
don’t know what to trust. It is all so confusing.

“So when a supermarket or manufacturer jumps on the ‘local food’
bandwagon and oversells the product, either by making up a name or making
exaggerated claims, it causes the consumer just to switch off.”

And it would be a shame if that happened. Of all the manufacturing sectors in
Britain, food production is arguably one of the most successful.

Food exports are booming and set to hit a record £10 billion this year – in
part because the rest of the world’s consumers have fallen in love with
Stilton and Wensleydale cheeses, our Welsh lamb and Highland shortbread.

The good work of these manufacturers is undermined by the cavalier approach of
the others.

Harry Wallop reports on food provenance for ‘Food: What Goes In Your
Basket?’ on Channel 4 tomorrow at 8pm