Diary of a Shopkeeper, 13th October 2024

I had a lunch fit for a king today: a tomato sandwich.

Here’s the recipe: slice Orkney tomatoes from Shearers and bread from the Orkney Sourdough Company. Add a scrape of Orkney butter. Assemble and season well. (The Malden salt and Parameswaran pepper weren’t produced here, but at least they were bought in a local shop: mine.) Finally, scatter on a few basil leaves from the plant on the windowsill. Perfection!

As I happily munched away, I read the report in last week’s paper about the Taste of Orkney Food and Drink Awards. It was momentarily disappointing to find that the award we sponsored, for Best Drink Producer, has accidentally been left out of the report. The Orkney Gin Company were well deserved winners. Hopefully they’ll get a mention in this week’s paper. Overall, my feeling on reading about the awards was one of delight that our small community can produce such a range of excellent dining out experiences, from À La Carte to Café to Takeaway, and also such a range of outstanding produce, from Bakery to Dairy to Meat.

If there’d been an award for best tomato, then whoever grew the one in this sandwich should have won. Interestingly, it would never have made it onto a supermarket shelf. Its skin was slightly cracked around the stem, and the colour faded from ruby-red to orange rather than being a uniform scarlet. Such cosmetic details are irrelevant. The flesh was firm and meaty, and tasted of tomato – which most supermarket tomatoes don’t.

Orkney’s food scene is like that tomato: excellent in some ways, imperfect in others. A few days before the Food and Drink Awards, it was announced that Orkney Crab were closing their fish shop in Stromness. Apparently it was just not financially viable. So we West Mainlanders are reduced to having no dedicated fish shop in our town. Very sad. Thank goodness for a couple of local retailers in Stromness who sell vacuum packed Pierowall fish, though that’s not as good as having a selection of freshly prepared fish and someone knowledgeable to talk you through it. (As Kirkwall does have, I’m happy to say.)

The greatest food loss of the year was the closure of cheesemakers Wilsons of Westray. I should have mentioned this in the spring when it was announced, and paid tribute to Jason and Nina, but I was too upset to do so. Westray Wife was one of Scotland’s finest hard cheeses, and we sold all their products enthusiastically in our shop, to both locals and visitors. Not a day goes by that I don’t look in our fridge and wish that Westray Wife and Cannonball were still there. The closure of Hume’s smokery was another big loss this year: their plain and whisky-smoked cheddars were perennial best sellers in our fridge.

It’s not easy being a food producer in Orkney. The local market is small, and the city markets are far away and expensive to reach. Health and safety regulations are as onerous for small companies as big ones, and cost proportionately more. Our booming tourism sector means that demand leaps sky-high in the summer, then drops dramatically at the end of September. I admire anyone who has the vision to set up a food business here, and I celebrate every year they survive. The businesses that continue to innovate in their product range, and strive to improve quality, are truly food heroes.

Reasons for small food businesses folding are usually a mix of financial pressure and personal exhaustion. They’re regrettable but understandable. There are no magic solutions to make life easier for small producers who work like the devil and make a subsistence wage. We live in an age of mass food production and mass retailing. Smaller businesses have their work cut out to compete with that global trend, especially if they come from a small community a long way from large population centres.

The one thing we can do to help is appreciate what we have locally, and make the most of it. We should also benchmark Orkney’s food and drink against the best that the rest of the world produces: that’s the way to learn about possibilities for improvement and expansion. As restaurant critic Jay Rayner wrote in The Observer today, ‘Smart, creative people tend towards the ambitious. They know what they’re doing right now is good, but hope that at some point in the future they will do it better.’ 

We can all do better, always. But when local foodstuffs are already good we should support their producers, and the – overwhelmingly local – retailers who sell them. How do we support them? It’s simple and enjoyable: by eating!

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 16th October 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.