Four strawberries, picked an hour earlier, sit on a saucer on the dining-room table of Lindsey Lodge Farm, a 40-acre farm growing fruit and vegetables in Suffolk. It is June and these strawberries are the first of the English season. Andrew Sturgeon, a farmer for 30 years, smiles, certain of the quality. The aroma is heady, the taste is of strawberries as they ought to be, naturally sweet.

Sturgeon delivers to 45 stores belonging to the East of England Co-operative, owned by its members. It is independent from the Co-operative Group chain and has more than 200 shops in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. Ninety per cent of Sturgeon’s fruit is delivered straight to stores within 36 hours of being picked. They sell at £2.25 a punnet, compared with under £2 elsewhere. “Customers know what they are buying when they ask for our strawberries,” he says.

According to a recent YouGov poll, 71% of UK shoppers say that buying local produce is important, yet it makes up only a fraction of the retail efforts of the four major supermarkets – Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s, which dominate 75% of the market, providing ever cheaper food to more than 25 million households.

In Felixstowe, in a supermarket converted from a Victorian railway station, Roger Grosvenor, the East of England Co-op’s joint chief executive, explains how the locally sourced drive began nine years ago. “I was driving past fields of asparagus on a visit to a farmer near Aldeburgh when it hit me,” he says. “Why are we importing asparagus from Peru, when it’s all here?” Sourced Locally was born.

It still makes up only 6% of sales, but £45m has been ploughed back into the local economy, creating more than 400 jobs. Labels on products show images of real farmers and producers; provenance is detailed. The food is “honest”. Thousands of locally sourced products come from more than 100 suppliers, including exotic items: Suffolk chorizo and chilli sauce from Colchester.

Sales have risen 15% in the last financial year. “We don’t have contracts, everything is on a handshake,” Sourced Locally manager Kevin Warden says.

“When Kevin first came to see me,” Sturgeon recalls, “he said, ‘What price do you want for your strawberries?’ Nobody had asked me that in 20 years supplying fruit. Other retailers say, “This is the price we are prepared to pay and then they announce they want double on a promotion at the end of a season when little is left.”

Locally sourced food, like Fair Trade or organic produce, is a small but fast growing market. Its popularity flags up that some consumers want to know more about what they buy and the terms on which those goods are delivered to the shelves of their supermarket –store or farm shop including distance travelled, freshness, animal welfare and pricing. It’s a simple story, but increasingly hard to unearth.

The major supermarkets serve 25 million households (and are chafing because their profits have faltered recently as discounters Aldi and Lidl continue to thrive). We customers expect cheap food. But cheap food is often heavily processed, full of sugar and fat that plays its part in the obesity crisis we face; it requires animals permanently indoors, “no grazing” eating grain that produces nutritionally poorer meat; and it means the major chains source their produce from around the world, branding products to keep the memory of the British countryside alive, no matter how many air miles are involved. Cheap food also results in British farmers, bruised by the full force of a competitive global market, being increasingly squeezed by the demands of major suppliers for the perfect product and ever lower prices.

At the same time, more and more intensive methods are being devised to extract crops from exhausted soil. These are not the ingredients that ensure sustainable, honest food.

“Cheaper food is obviously welcome but there has to be a balance,” says Matthew Rymer, who comes from seven generations of Gloucestershire farmers. “What’s not currently calculated is the hidden cost of what’s on our plates. Too often, major retailers create the price storms that drown the smaller farmers and leave the others floating on subsidies. We are also losing our independent local food processing infrastructure as large retailers and processors contort the food chain and gain more and more retail power.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matthew Rymer of #namethefarm campaign with pedigree Gloucester cattle. Photograph: Tomas Matousek

Sunday, 2 October is the final day of British Food Fortnight (BFF). At the beginning of the year, the government set up a Great British Food Unit to increase exports of food and drink, and announced that this would be the Year of Great British Food. Stinking Bishop cheese and Rutland bitter are among many examples of British food at its best, but they are on offer alongside intensively reared chicken that is three times higher in fat, and a third lower in protein and valuable omega-3 fatty acids, than in the 1970s.

Brexit adds urgency to finding solutions that work not just for the supermarkets but for our health, the public purse (it costs the NHS £16bn a year to treat obesity-induced diabetes), the environment, consumers, farmers and the countryside. As BFF founder Alexia Robinson says: “This is a watershed moment for British food. Subsidised and regulated for 40 years by Europe, our farmers will now be competing in a global market place … we need … a robust supply of quality domestic food.” So what’s to be done?

The “agri-food” sector in the UK was worth £109bn in 2014, employing one in eight of the national workforce. “Agri-food” includes manufacturing, wholesaling, retailing and catering: only 10% comes from farming.

In three years, 1,000 dairy farms have gone, beaten by cheap milk. The income of pig farmers fell by 46% last year and the income of cereal farmers has declined 24%. British farmers receive 60% of their income from EU Common Agricultural Policy payments given, for instance, for improvements to the environment. The government has pledged to continue to pay £3bn a year provided under CAP until 2020, but what then?

Until the early 1960s the farmer dictated what was on offer, according to the seasons. Now, while some relationships between retailers and suppliers are long and mutually beneficial, more negative examples are not hard to find.

One apple farmer says he was encouraged to grow more and more apples, “then the supermarkets refused to pay what we needed to survive People rightly talk about food waste but we had to destroy apple trees that were five and six years old with plenty of life.”. Another says he supplied green beans to a high-end retailer which were sent more than 100 miles away for packing, ignoring the environmental cost,while a third of the crop would be rejected in the name of perfection, supposedly demanded by the customer but in practice demanded by supermarket buyers.

Last year the National Farmers’ Union set up a Fruit and Veg Pledge to encourage supermarkets to treat growers and packers across the UK equally and fairly. The increasingly powerful discounter Aldi was the first to sign, followed by Lidl and this month the Co-op – and so far that’s it.

Lidl makes 'fruit and veg pledge' to back British farmers Read more

A survey last year of 1,141 suppliers revealed that 70% had at least one problem under the Groceries Supply Code of Practice with the supermarket chains. These included such issues as charging for shelf space, short-term contracts and delaying payments. At the same time, the power of the supermarkets, as well as food processors and big agri-business (companies producing grain, chemicals and hi-tech equipment to try to correct the wrongs imposed by intensive farming), is changing the shape of farming.

For instance, “bed and breakfast farms” are growing in number – where a farmer owns the buildings and provides water, straw, machinery etc, and the major producer provides the rest, including livestock, feed and veterinary services. A fee is paid to the farmer for looking after the pig or “finishing” the cow in its last few weeks.

Again, the supermarkets are centralising processing and slaughtering systems on an industrial scale. In recent years 75% of abattoirs have closed, replaced, for instance, by Waitrose’s use of a central slaughterhouse at Dovecote Park, Yorkshire. These are changes that are bound to entail a big increase in animals transported long distances at an environmental cost. The RSPCA believes all animals should be slaughtered close to the point of production to minimise stress (which also affects the quality of meat).

All the big supermarkets insisted they had good relations with suppliers and strongly supported British produce. “Our aim is to offer customers great quality and value … and we are continuing to do this by working well with our partners,” a Sainsbury’s spokesman said. A spokesperson for Aldi said: “Unlike other retailers, once we have agreed terms with suppliers we do not change them midway through the agreement or ask for additional monies to support better positioning of goods or increased shelf space … Aldi is a privately owned company and therefore not beholden to City shareholders… We do not need to generate the same gross margin as others in the sector to deliver strong and stable profits.”

Supermarket clout is one issue: what is being done to our animals to get fatter livestock, ever quicker, is another. Graham Harvey, an agricultural adviser to The Archers, and author of Grass-Fed Nation: Getting Back the Food We Deserve, is an advocate of the grass-fed movement. Animals, many of them ruminant, spend their lives “non-grazing” indoors, fed on grain that would be better used in human diets. Harvey argues that if ruminants returned to grass, instead of grain there would be more than enough food for a global population predicted to reach 8.5 billion by 2030.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Only 1.5% of pigs in the UK live outdoors for their entire lives. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

He says “poor science”, “corporate ruthlessness” and our own lack of interest means that more than half of EU cereals that could provide food for growing populations are fed to animals producing less nutritional meat. This requires intensive crop production, GM crops and chemicals, insecticides, pesticides, plant growth hormones and “agri-tech” to coax exhausted land to produce, all of which leads to water pollution, soil degradation and biodiversity loss. In 2013 the government announced a programme in collaboration with one of the three major global agri-chemical companies, Syngenta, to lift average wheat yield from the current 8 tonnes a hectare to 20 tonnes in two decades. Harvey says: “If we didn’t have such a distorted economy, and agri-business had to pay for the soil degradation and pollution it causes, good food would be cheaper. Supermarkets are not going to change until consumers insist on change. In the meantime, government should be tackling the shareholder power invested in keeping the system that we have.”

In June, a respected international thinktank, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), said in a major report that two billion people suffer micronutrient deficiencies because food systems produce an abundance of energy-rich but nutrient-poor crops. Olivier de Schutter, co-chair said, “Many of the problems in food systems are linked specifically to the uniformity at the heart of industrial agriculture and its reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides.”

In the same month, international researchers from Food Research Collaboration, a body connecting academics to civil society, called on EU states to review its food system. Professor Tim Lang, a senior adviser to FRC, said: “Policymakers are either too hesitant or too dazzled by a belief that technology will resolve future food problems. They cannot. Food culture also needs to change.”

There is no easy way to make that happen. One tool would be to increase transparency in the food chain by making labels count for more – but that would need customers to read the small print, make choices and pay a little extra. While some logos such as the Soil Association and RSPCA’s Freedom Foods have higher standards, the largest food assurance scheme in the UK, Red Tractor (RT), is staffed and funded by the industry. The label tells you where the food is farmed, processed and packed – but is that enough?

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In 2012 Sainsbury’s dropped the RT label. Asked why, then chief executive Justin King said: “Red Tractor does not tell the customer anything special about the product … it doesn’t add any value.” Sturgeon in Suffolk disagrees. “Red Tractor has been very effective in raising the standards of both food production and food safety,” he says.

RT employs 450 independent inspectors to regulate 50,000 farms. Chief executive David Clarke says very few fail to comply with standards. Asked if consumers should have more precise information on labels, he said: “That may be true of a small subset of shoppers, but generally [customers] are content to know the country of origin.”

If “British” is on the label, the implication is that it signals quality and high animal welfare – but is that always the case? Several months ago Viva!, a vegan animal welfare organisation, published a gruelling report into pig farming, the New Big Pig Report. Three pigs are slaughtered every second in the UK. Only 1.5% are organic and live outdoors for their entire lives; 80% of pigs, which are highly intelligent animals, have their tails docked without anaesthetic, the report says. A high percentage of piglets have their teeth clipped so they don’t bite the nipple; 60% of breeding sows give birth in crates in which they cannot turn around, and remain in the crates until the piglets are weaned. All of this is legal.

Ninety per cent of British pigs are reared on farms that take part in the RT scheme. In 2015 there were only 35 prosecutions over “welfare on farms”; the vast majority of the convictions involved animals reared outdoors and visible to the public, according to Viva!.

Assurance schemes obviously require decent standards of welfare, clear information, rigour in policing and independence. When standards are poor, the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) is responsible for investigating complaints on farms and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) looks at food fraud and mislabelling. Both are much depleted, another cause for concern about what we are swallowing. Defra is said to be suffering cuts of almost 60% and the FSA is finding £22m in savings.

In February, checks on hundreds of samples in West Yorkshire revealed more than a third were not what they claimed to be – beef mince adulterated with pork, “ham” made from poultry. West Yorkshire’s public health analyst said at the time: “We are routinely finding problems with more than a third of samples, which is disturbing at a time when the budget … is being cut.” If the odds are increasing that you can’t always believe what you read on the label, how else can credibility be restored to promises of “local”, “farm fresh” and “premium”?

Matthew Rymer and his business partner, Clifford Freeman, have launched a campaign, #NametheFarm, to encourage consumers to exercise their power and challenge restaurants, butchers and retailers to be transparent about what’s on offer. (Supermarkets have begun using fictional British farm names to brand produce flown in from all over the world.)

Rymer and Freeman breed pedigree Gloucester beef, “grass fed, taken in our transport to a local abattoir all within sight of Gloucester cathedral”. Their new campaign is part of their scheme called Happerley Passports (the name taken from Apperley, their nearest village) designed to establish traceability across the food chain. “Provenance should not be the preserve of the rich,” Rymer says. “Even if it’s a £3.99 battery chicken, why shouldn’t the customer know its story?” The passport is free to farmers and a small levy is charged to restaurants and retailers. By way of a mobile phone or the Happerley website, it gives the life story of a product – in beef, for instance, the breed, age when slaughtered, distance travelled to abattoir, farm of origin, and so on.

But do consumers really want such granular detail about the ingredient in their casseroles? “By linking the food on our plates and in packaging back to the farmer we could create the most connected and transparent food industry with huge export potential,” Rymer says. “Brexit gives an opportunity to rewrite the rules. More information for consumers, whether they access it or not, has to mean better scrutiny and improved animal welfare.” It reduces the room for fraud. It also has the potential to put pressure on supermarkets to change some of their methods.

The idea of transparency in the food chain to encourage a change in the culture is gaining ground. For instance, the Pasture Fed Livestock Association, five years old, has 250 members, mostly farmers, who sell either direct or via butchers and farm shops. Its livestock is reared only on grass in summer and silage in winter, offering meat that – according to research – is higher in vitamins E and B and beta-carotene. A shopper scans the QR code on the meat’s label or enters the label’s number on the PFLA website to receive detailed information(Defra, however, defines “pasture fed” as 51% fed on grass, which further confuses consumers.)

“We are not organic,” says Dr John Medley, chair of the PFLA, “But like the organic sector we raise questions in the minds of consumers about the provenance of their food.”

Last month the British Veterinary Association called for mandatory animal welfare labels on meat in an attempt to stamp out cruel practices. Labelling Matters, a campaign set up by Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA among others, is calling for labels that discard euphemisms in favour, for instance, of “intensive indoor” for pork from pigs that never go outside and “permanently housed” for dairy cows that never graze in fields.

The Co-op is funding a 12-week pilot with a social enterprise, Provenance, to see how it can increase transparency on labelling “to provide a digital history so every product tells a story”. Catherine Higgs of the Co-op says labelling has clout: “We are proud to have been the first to label eggs intensively produced, a technically illegal step but which directly led to the law changing to allow eggs to be labelled ‘From caged hens’.” (Tesco plans to end the sale of eggs from caged hens – 1.4bn eggs a year – by 2025.)

So where do we go from here? In 2001, following the foot-and-mouth disaster, the government commissioned a report on the future of farming. It concluded: “England’s farming and food industry is unsustainable in every sense of that term. It is serving nobody well. Farming has become detached from the rest of the economy and the environment … the key objective from public policy should be to reconnect farming with its market and the rest of the food chain; to reconnect the food chain with the countryside; and reconnect consumers with what they eat and how it is produced.” It’s food for thought that, 15 years on, none of those reconnections have been realised.

How we create a more honest food chain is complicated and contradictory. Food is cheap, but still people in this country go hungry. While “ethical” food including organic and Fair Trade has steadily increased in popularity, in 2015 it made up only 8.5% of the market. Locally sourced produce and pasture-fed livestock widen consumer choice and offer healthier alternatives, but can’t yet meet the scale of supply supermarket chains demand. So, greater education about what constitutes a healthy diet, the learning beginning at school-age plus good information conveyed on labelling, monitored by bodies independent from industry, are vital – as is willingness to exercise our consumer muscle.

Three men, Andronicos Sideras, Ulrik Nielsen from Denmark and Alex Ostler-Beech, appeared in court in late September accused of arranging beef and horsemeat to be combined and sold as beef in the UK in 2012 in supermarkets including Tesco and Aldi. It shouldn’t take another horsemeat scandal or outbreak of foot-and-mouth – or report of yet more damage to the environment – to encourage us to restrain the accelerating power of the major supermarkets and put a proper value on provenance.