The packhouse problem
Britain lost two thirds of its regional pack and grade capacity in twenty years. Nobody decided to.
Not the farms you are picturing. We followed every tonne of vegetables that entered one British city for a week, and almost none of it came from anywhere near it.
The lorry arrives at the wholesale market at ten past four in the morning, and the driver has been awake since Rotterdam. Inside are courgettes that were cut in Almería four days ago, sorted in Murcia, and are now going to a greengrocer eleven miles from a Yorkshire field that grows courgettes.
This is not a story about food miles, which turn out to be a poor proxy for almost everything, including carbon. It is a story about who holds the contracts. Over one week in September we stood in fourteen depots, read the paperwork on every pallet of vegetables that came through, and traced each one back as far as the documents allowed. The picture that came out of it was not the one anybody we spoke to expected, including the growers.
Within fifty kilometres of the city centre there are roughly four hundred hectares of commercial vegetable production. They supply 3.1% of what the city eats. The growers are not idle and the land is not fallow: almost all of that produce leaves the region on the same motorway the Spanish courgettes arrive on, bound for two national distribution centres, one of which is 190 miles away.
A cabbage grown eleven miles from the market can travel four hundred miles to reach it, and every step of that is somebody behaving rationally.
Nobody in this chain is being foolish. The distribution centre pays on thirty days and takes the whole crop; the local wholesaler pays on sixty and takes what it can sell. A grower with a harvest window of nine days and a bank covenant does not agonise over that choice. The infrastructure that would let them do otherwise, a packhouse within an hour's drive, was sold for housing in 2011.
The most uncomfortable number in Figure 1 is the one with no bar. Just over a quarter of everything we logged could not be assigned an origin at all: the paperwork stopped at a repacker, and the repacker was under no obligation to say more. When we asked, four of six declined, politely, on commercial grounds.
This matters more than the percentages either side of it. A city cannot plan a food system it cannot see, and every serious proposal we have read for regional food resilience assumes a level of visibility that does not currently exist anywhere in the chain.
Methodology: pallet-level audit, 14 depots, 6-12 September. Weights from delivery notes, not estimates. Full dataset and the four refusals are published alongside this piece.
3.1%
Of the city's vegetables grown within 50 km of it
27.2%
Whose origin could not be established at all
14
Depots audited, pallet by pallet
2011
Year the last regional packhouse was sold
Britain lost two thirds of its regional pack and grade capacity in twenty years. Nobody decided to.
Payment terms shape what a country grows more directly than subsidy does, and they are barely regulated.
The province that feeds a continent, reported from inside the greenhouses rather than from above them.
Reported, sourced, and free. We publish the dataset with every issue, including the parts that undercut our own argument.