A few weeks ago Miles wrote a section of the newsletter on a Winter Salad that he had been working on.

Since then we have taken the idea up to a few of our customers when making our weekly visits and armed with a bunch of our hardy winter leaves we've converted a few of the nation's palates and they have found their way onto menus. This Tuesday I was up in London making the visits and found myself extending the theme slightly.

There are a couple of concepts which are fundamentally important to me when I eat. The main one is that I want to ingest and digest my landscape, for me that is what seasonality translates to. I want to bring the outside in and I want my plate to be a snapshot of what is happening in my environment. The child in me likes this because there is something really fun and playful about having a miniature landscape on the plate but then I'm also aware that doing this has much wider and more serious implications in terms of my relationship to my surroundings and our relationship with the natural environment. In a sense I'm talking about blurring boundaries. What I started writing about was a Winter Salad but in fact what we showed our customers was a salad from that particular week in Winter and what I'm really keen on is a salad that continues to move and evolve with the season, a salad which is representative of where we are in the current season. It might seem like rather an obvious thing to say but Seasons don't have clearly defined beginnings and endings. What we have is a gradual shifting from early to mid to late Winter and then a blurry transition into early Spring, for me one of the most exciting things about what we are doing is to try and capture that and bring it onto our plates.

What I would really like to offer to you all on a practical level is a salad mix which performs this function. So if the sentiments I've expressed here strike a chord with any of you then please let either myself or one of the sales team know and we would be extremely happy to put together a salad for you which captures the moment, an 'Outside-In Salad'. That might mean that the salad you get on Friday is slightly different to the salad you received on Tuesday but it will also mean that you and your customers will be very directly connected to the moment. We've all long heard and used the phrase 'you are what you eat' and by bringing the outside into our bodies we become very deeply connected to the world. I don't think that it would be an overstatement to say that how and what we eat defines the kind of world that we have. You only have to look at the dominance of wheat, soya, etc. in both our diets and our landscape to realise this.