Food group to sell fruits of its labour

SHANDON jam could soon be among the local produce on the shelves of city grocers with the launch of a new campaign urging people to shop local.

The Shandon Local Food Group will launch the initiative on Monday, and hopes to encourage shoppers to buy groceries at local businesses, as well as reducing their food miles by picking up produce grown close to home.

They plan to produce special labels indicating food that has been grown in the Lothians, as well as selling surplus from their community garden in local shops.

The group's Gavin Corbett said: "The shopkeepers have said that they're happy to trial some local produce. We're going to provide labels and we'll make an assessment of what's going to work. One idea is to have produce from local suppliers in the Lothians, the second idea is taking produce from our community garden - there's a lot of potatoes this year which the shops said they'd be happy to sell as Shandon potatoes.

"From Monday we're going to get people's feedback as to the kind of things they'd like to see and we'll start getting things on the shelves in February or March.

"We'll use 'Shop local Shandon' as a slogan. The labelling of food is quite complicated and sensitive - we don't obviously have the Soil Association's authority or anything like that, so we're doing something that's really light-hearted."

The group's community garden, in the grounds of the Royal Edinburgh hospital, opened last year, giving local people the chance to help grow fresh fruit and vegetables.

Mr Corbett said he would be keen to invite other local producers to take part in the scheme, perhaps including goods grown at places such as Gorgie City Farm.

He added: "People might be surprised by how much stuff is available locally, for example jams, honey, seasonal produce, various types of meat.

"The other thing is that we think people will be a bit surprised at how much the local shops stock already.

"A lot of people use local shops for bread and milk, and when we had an audit of the local shops, we were surprised how much they had."

Green party councillor Alison Johnstone gave her backing to the project. She said: "It's an absolutely fantastic initiative. There's so many benefits - you're looking at reducing carbon, producing local food, getting local people and families involved.

"How nice to be able to buy some fresh produce, no food miles, there's no need to be flying mange tout from Kenya when you could be buying great local vegetables produced along the road in Edinburgh."