While the rest of us were stowing the Christmas decorations into the loft in January, a strange time-honoured ritual was going on in a farm in Rothwell, near Wakefield. Lighting their way with candles, Neil and Janet Oldroyd, spent the beginning of 2009 plucking lurid pink stems of forced rhubarb out of the earth in their cosy century-old sheds.
Listen carefully and you can hear the shocking pink vegetable popping and squeaking its way out of the earth as it grapples its way heavenwards. In the flickering light the place looks like the hallowed heart of some sacred temple where age-old secrets are being guarded. The spectacle is breathtaking.
The family has been forcing rhubarb for five generations, ever since Janet’s great grandfather John Richard Oldroyd moved up to Wakefield in the 1930s. He picked up the tricks of the trade from farmers who have been cultivating forced rhubarb in what’s known as the Rhubarb Triangle between Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield, since 1877. The practice started by accident in the 1800s, when a London gardener left a pile of soil over a plant and found that by keeping the rhubarb in the dark, the stems shot upwards in search of light.
Forced rhubarb thrived in the local conditions. This area, in the shadow of the Pennines, has plenty of frost and rain, which the crown requires to grow. Soils were heavy with industrial and domestic soot, which the rhubarb loved, and the sheds were heated with readily available coal. Lastly, the roots were covered with shoddy, the waste wool product from the Rhubarb Triangle’s other industry, sheep farming. “The beauty of shoddy is that it’s high in nitrogen, which it releases slowly as the fibres break down,” says Janet, who runs tours of the sheds during forcing season.
The region’s forced rhubarb became so popular that growers sent their crop on the Rhubarb Express to Covent Garden market in London, where it was sold on into Europe and to stores like Selfridges. Queen Victoria was such an ardent fan she had a variety named after her.

National treasure
In its heyday there were around 200 growers in the Triangle. But after the Second World War and the advent of refrigerated transport, imported exotic fruits started to flood the market, and demand for rhubarb declined. Today there are just 12 growers left, most of them small-scale.
Cultivating forced rhubarb is an expensive and time-consuming business, as the roots have to be left outside for two years to build up energy stores, before being moved to the forcing sheds. But Janet is adamant that it is a tradition that must not be lost.
Like many producers of foods particular to a region, such as Parma ham from Parma in Italy and champagne from France’s Champagne region, Janet is seeking to get the name of Yorkshire forced rhubarb given protected status. This means no one else can call their crops Yorkshire forced rhubarb, and shoppers can be sure where their pink fronds were born.
“Yorkshire’s rhubarb is a national treasure, a British institution,” says Janet, whose produce has won more awards than you can shake a stick of rhubarb at. “Sadly, many supermarkets don’t say whether their rhubarb is forced or not, or where it’s from. Now customers want to know these things.”
Yorkshire forced rhubarb’s main rival, Dutch forced rhubarb, is grown much faster. It is sprayed with plant hormone gibberellic acid to trigger growth artificially, as Holland lacks the frosts necessary to break dormancy. The Oldroyds hope a protected name will safeguard the future of their industry and restore growers’ pride. “We have a product that’s different, so we need to shout about it,” says Janet. Their application has already got British government approval and now rests with Brussels, but with luck it should get through by the summer.

Gastronomic heritage
While Yorkshire tries to put its rhubarb on the food map of Britain, producers across our land are fighting similar battles to restore pride in our gastronomic heritage by applying to the EU for protected status. The system offers three levels of protection, Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) and Traditional Speciality Guaranteed (TSG). The first two relate to where a food is made or where the ingredients come, while TSG is more about how the product is produced (see the map key on page 60 for complete definitions).
The idea is not new, of course. The French have been labelling their wines with Appellation d’Origine Controlee (AOC) tickets for decades. But since the EU formally introduced the scheme in 1993, Europeans have been busily applying to protect their Parmas and Parmigianos. France and Italy each have more than 150 protected foods. Britain, by contrast, has a mere 37. We’ve been notoriously slow, it seems, to appreciate the goodies on our doorstep and far too ready to accept mass-produced imitations just as long as the price is right. But that is gradually changing with our rediscovered interest in where our food comes from and what’s in it. There are currently around 35 products in the queue for protected status, from Cumberland sausages to Cornish pasties.
One of the first British foods to gain protection was Arbroath smokies, haddock that has been smoked over hardwood fires in Arbroath, on the east coast of Scotland, since the 1800s. Robert Spink, whose son Iain is one of 12 producers still smoking in Arbroath, applied for PGI status after he found fish posing as Arbroath smokies on sale in a major national supermarket. “The fish had obviously been smoked in an electric kiln as you could see the grill lines and the quality was shocking – they weren’t fit for the dog,” says Iain. “We were worried that people buying them would think that that’s what an Arbroath smokie was, which would do the real thing serious harm.”

Stamp of approval
It’s not been an easy process. Consumers are still not familiar with the EU stamps and until now producers have not been obliged to show them on packaging (although from May it will be obligatory). British consumers also tend to be wary of anything that comes out of Europe and may view food labels with as much mistrust as former EU rules on knobbly vegetables.
At the producer end, us Brits are more reluctant than Europeans to cooperate with other producers, whom we tend to see as competitors. “In Italy cheesemakers in a particular town would gather in a consorzio. This acts as a watchdog, and celebrates the region too,” says Italian-born Irene Boccetta, who vets British applications for the government. “In Britain we’re not very good at doing that. We tend to be individualists, and rarely club together to celebrate the food of the region we live in.”
There’s also been criticism of the criteria used to protect a name. In the case of Stilton blue cheese, for example, the dairies who applied for its PDO specified that it had to be made with pasteurised milk. So when a cheesemaker called Joe Schneider started making it using raw milk he was barred from calling it Stilton. “Given that the original Stilton was made with raw milk, and PDOs are intended to protect our traditions, this seems strange,” says Joe. “The big dairies argue that since they applied for a PDO on the basis of pasteurised milk, this can’t be changed.”

Commercial boost
Stilton has not been the only contentious cheese. Many will remember the furore when a Yorkshire cheesemaker named her cheese Yorkshire feta. The Greeks claimed the name feta as their own, so the Yorkshire maker was forced to change her cheese’s name to Fine Fettle Yorkshire Cheese.
In the case of Britain’s cheddar, though, it was too late to protect the name, as cheddar of varying quality was being made commercially in places as far away as Australia and the US. So cheddar makers in the West Country, where the cheese originated, registered their product as West Country Farmhouse Cheddar. The PDO specified that it must be made on West Country farms with milk from local cows using specific traditional techniques.
Producers are hoping a stamp of approval will bring commercial benefits, especially in Europe. Beef exports, for example, are still scarred by the BSE outbreak of the 1990s, so producers are hoping a stamp of approval will boost exports and at the same time protect jobs in rural areas.
We consumers also seem ready to give pride of place to our regional delicacies.
Fed up with flabby pies passed off as Cornish pasties, or bundles of watery gristle sold as Cumberland sausages, we are increasingly asking for the real thing. If we value our food heritage, the power is in our hands. It is up to us to put traditional regional foods at the top of our shopping lists if we want future generations to enjoy them too.