Unless your ham has been specially selected from a pig just 30km down the road, your cream clotted at the local dairy or your apples hand-picked by a 100-year-old farmer who has been in the business “man and boy”, it seems that nowadays your shopping bag simply doesn’t cut it with the upper crust.

Local sourcing is the recent trend taking the world’s foodies by storm, from the UK to continental Europe and the US. As the issue of food miles receives more and more press attention, and farmers’ markets and organic stores increase in popularity all over the globe in a bid to boost local, small-scale businesses, retailers are having to take a more eco-friendly, socially responsible stance.

And so when products are in season, retailers are now running huge promotions to boost sales of local goods, such as the UK asparagus campaign featured on page 100 of this month’s magazine.

The irony of course is that those consumers jumping on the local sourcing bandwagon are probably the very same complaining about the effects that production is having on their surrounding environment. The polytunnel debate raging in the UK as a result of increased strawberry plantings is just one example – if customers want fresh UK-grown strawberries, they will have to learn to put up with the technology needed to produce them. If not, then we will be back to higher levels of imports during the summer months.

Which raises the question: is this foodie trend a short-lived one? Or is the demand for local sourcing here to stay?