The Truffler: fair trade, cool coffee, leeks, more Mjus
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Your support makes all the difference.Nobody can argue that fair trade isn't a good thing. Which is why in the UK we spend around £30m a year on fairly traded products. That's 50 per cent more than in the previous 12 months. The Fairtrade Mark, awarded by the Fairtrade Foundation, guarantees that producers receive a fair price, long-term security and decent working conditions. Look out for it on teas, coffees, chocolate, bananas, and, next month, on mangoes from Mexico.
The big "F" will be much in evidence from Monday, when Fairtrade Fortnight starts. The Co-op is spreading the word by reducing the price of all its Fairtrade marked products by 20 per cent from Monday for the duration of the fortnight.
The Day Chocolate Company produces only fairly traded chocolate – it's partly owned by the Ghanaian cocoa farmers – and is heavily involved in the fortnight. To the Divine milk chocolate and crunchy Dubble bars it makes, it has added Darkly Divine, a 70 per cent cocoa bar that's being sold in Waitrose and Co-op stores.
While this commitment to fair trade is total, others are making a token effort. Starbucks has introduced a Fairtrade coffee to its UK shops. By the summer you'll be able to buy Fairtrade certified coffee either as the coffee of the day or as whole beans to take away and brew at home.
* Two of the coolest names in coffee are back after their brush with Starbucks. Jeremy Torz and Steven Macatonia got into coffee in San Francisco in the 1990s before they came over here and set up Torz & Macatonia, roasting coffee and supplying mail-order customers, top restaurants and the Seattle Coffee Company, which took them over as its dedicated coffee roaster. When Seattle sold out to Starbucks, Torz and Macatonia was taken over, too, and the partners went off to explore parts of the world where coffee is produced. Last year, they returned and set up Union Coffee Roasters. Their coffee is available by mail order (020-7474 8990, www.unionroasters.com), from delis and in some Sainsbury's and Waitrose branches. UCR policy is to source ethically, working closely with coffee growers who pay decent wages, look after their work force, and farm sustainably. The coffees include a dazzling line up of espresso blends, organic coffees, and single estate coffees. Prices start at around £2.99, with the estates at £3.35 and organic coffees £3.40 all for 227g bags.
* The tang of leeks is still in the air from yesterday (St David's Day, of course), and whatever some people say, good food is growing all over Wales. It was recently sprinkled with an unprecedented number of new Michelin stars in the new edition of the Red Guide to Great Britain & Ireland 2002, and there are cheese producers, fantastic lamb and beef, smokeries, fishmongers, brewers and butchers and much more in South Wales alone. The Brecon Beacons has a particular concentration of good pubs and restaurants (see www.silurian-retreats.com), and now the area has its own Slow Food branch, or "Convivium", the first in Wales (01874 623185). Slow Food is the international organisation dedicated to celebrating, nurturing and preserving the diversity of local and artisan foods within the communities in which they belong.
* There are more Mjus in the pipeline. If it wasn't so posh they might talk about rolling out the brand, but Mju – pronounced "mew" – is celebrated Australian chef Tetsuya Wakuda's restaurant in London's Millennium Hotel, Knightsbridge. Wakuda comes once a month to give it the once over. The hotel group says it's embarking on a global expansion of the "restaurant concept". There'll be Mjus in Singapore, US cities, Paris and in the Middle East. Wakuda will play an advisory role, presumably spreading himself thinner and further with each new branch. So more Mjus must mean less.
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