Another Wimbledon season is over
Jul 20, 2023
It’s always a joyous time watching all the celebrities and Royals enjoy the tennis in their finery (and hopefully under some British sunshine).
These sorts of large events should be taking the opportunity to showcase what is grown and produced by our British Isles. It was incredibly sad to hear that Wimbledon was serving plant-based cream made from soy cream, coconut creamand cashew cream this year (alongside dairy cream). Plant cream is an imitation of dairy cream that is made without any dairy products in it. It’s typically produced by grinding plant material into a thick liquid into which gums are added to imitate the viscosity of real cream. Now you might think there’s nothing wrong with this, and there’s not if you would like to eat this sort of thing or have an intolerance, however I do think it’s a shame to be using ingredients that we don’t grow in this country for the base of these sort of products.
Here in Dorset we grow oats that are then turned into oat milk and made intoproducts like a custard cream that can be used as a substitute for the real deal. Wimbledon is famous for strawberries & cream and a glass of Pimms, almost as famous as the tennis itself. A quintessentially British event like this should be supporting our British farmers. Making a cream from imported plants that have travelled many hundreds of miles makes zero sense and is not complimentary to a British institution.
Did you know that in the USA they are not allowed to call it cream? All plant- based products have to be labelled as a beverage instead and quite rightly so in my opinion. Farmers are working hard to combat climate change and carbon emissions,and it’s important that events like Wimbledon should be helping spread awareness of climate change and the importance of using home grown products that are being produced right here on our doorstep by our local British farmers.
Being in hospitality myself, I know the importance of catering for everyone with their dietary requirements and choices. However, we all have to be on the same page, we can’t be putting all these restrictions on our British farmers, fishermen and all food industries to reduce their carbon emissions and then be flying in so much from abroad to make up for the shortfall.
On the 6th July this year it was the busiest day ever for commercial aviation with 134,386 commercial flights tracked by flighttradar. On top of that there would have been thousands more that were not counted into these numbers. These airborne vehicles are like small cities in the sky so just remember there are an awful lot of carbon emissions that you can’t blame the poor cows for.
Support your local farmers, stop this nonsense and please buy British wherever possible.
