Every month or so I normally spend a week eating food sourced entirely from the UK. This is partly motivated out of a desire to see how easy it is to do during the different seasons and partly as a conscious effort to reduce food miles. It isn’t as easy as it sounds but I’d got down to a pretty fine art so, on Wednesday of this week, I decided I would spend a week only eating and drinking produce sourced from within East Anglia. I gave myself two rules: 1) that I won’t make any extra effort to drive to find the food – it will have to be purchased on normal shopping trips or already planned journeys and 2) it isn’t enough for it to be produced locally – all the major ingredients of a product will need to be sourced from East Anglia.

Wednesday, I thought, would be a good day to start and I began in a positive frame of mind. Initially I tackled Bury St Edmunds market and came away with:

Eggs
Sausages
Mushrooms
Rabbit
Crab

Ryne Park Farm's stall provided the main ingredients for a couple of meals

It was immediately clear, however, that fruit and vegetables would be a problem. I asked at each market stall and either got confused looks or was told that they ‘sometimes’ had local strawberries and raspberries in season. Meat and fish were easier to find – Ryne Park Farm’s stall outside Palmers had a fantastic selection of rare breed pork and lamb while Mummery Brother’s stall had plenty of North Sea sourced fish for sale. The difficulty was everything came loose, not sealed in packaging, which meant it wouldn’t last as long as supermarket sourced food. I quickly decided that I would return for more provisions on Saturday rather than get lots of things that would go off.

My next stop was Barwells, here I thought I would find the majority of food to see me through the week. I was wrong. It is a fantastic shop with helpful staff, quality food and a strong emphasis on local produce. Unfortunately, I had shot myself in the foot with my strict rules; while there was plenty of food made in East Anglia, many of the ingredients were not from our area. It was here that I spotted some ‘Suffolk Tea’ and , after a second contemplating where in our county might be suitable for growing tea, quickly realised that this was going to be much harder than I had hoped. After a lengthy discussion with the staff (during which they very politely called me insane) I left with a few products that I could be sure were sourced entirely from East Anglia:

Suffolk Gold Cheese
Manard House Orchards Apple Juice
St Peter’s Suffolk Gold Beer
Suffolk Honey
Blackcurrant Ice Cream

I then walked to Waitrose, stopping off at Viv’s Patisserie to get a loaf of bread, wondering if I could survive a week on what I had obtained so far. Waitrose has an East Anglian section so this was fairly easy. I was able to buy:

Potatoes
Tomatoes
Carrots
Onions

Viv's Patisserie had a good selection of bread but I forgot to ask if the ingredients were sourced locally...I may have failed already

Fruit remained a problem – it’s not that British fruit isn’t available, there were apples, rhubarb and strawberries, but none were grown in the region. Later in the afternoon I made my way to Tesco and came home with some East Anglian Milk. To their credit they had pretty much the same selection of East Anglian vegetables as Waitrose.

This is the first day of this experiment and, after an evening meal of sausages, mashed potato and mushrooms, I’m feeling fairly positive that it will be a success. The main problem, aside from the lack of fruit, is that I fear I will die of caffeine withdrawal before the week is out. My other gripe is that I’ve had to give up on my philosophy of only eating organic/free range produce, if I had continued with this it would have been nigh on impossible. I'm visiting my mother, who lives near Ipswich, on Thursday evening and may have to drop in at Jimmy's Farm Shop. My wish list, if anyone has any suggestions, is for the following East Anglian sourced produce:

1. Free Range Chicken (I’m refusing to give in and eat battery farmed meat)
2. Butter (I’ve found milk, cheese and ice cream so butter can’t be too far away)
3. Cooking oil (rapeseed perhaps?)
4. Fruit

Farmers' markets are getting more and more popular and I would love to see one come to Bury’s Market from time to time. We have a continental market so why not one celebrating the food from our own region? It is clear that people in the town care passionately about the environment; Zero Waste Week was a resounding success and I am certain that given the availability, and publicity, locally sourced produce would have the success it deserves.