Image by Alan Parkinson... of broccoli (couldn't find a mange tout picture in my Flickr account...)An interesting story via @HodderGeography on Twitter
Back in the days when you closed the curtains and showed a 40 minute video as your lesson plan ... I know... there was an excellent video to stimulate discussion on the role of large companies in the developing world, and the sourcing of our food...
The programme looked at the supply of mange tout to Tesco, from farms in Zimbabwe. This was memorable because of the songs that the workers sang when "the man from Tesco" arrived... and also for the harshness of the quality control and the small amounts of money that the growers earned...
If you search online you can find some (sometimes trenchant) views on the programme.
This story from the Guardian website has the tale of British grown mange tout being sold in supermarkets for the first time...
It's not the first time that mange tout has been grown in the UK of course (I used to grow it in my back garden...) but the first time that a supermarket has sourced and sold it...
Useful for those exercises looking at FOOD MILES (but remember to be critical about the idea of 'far' being necessarily 'bad'....)
There was also that story of a staff meal, Mr. Francis, a bottle of red wine and the mange tout, but I won't go into that here... it's a family blog...
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