Locavore Glasgow, for your local organic veg

We’ve discovered Locavore in Glasgow.

More accurately, we discovered some pigs rummaging around near Queen’s park, thought this slightly odd, and subsequently discovered Locavore after a bit of Googling.

a locavore pig
Handsome chap isn’t he?

Apparently locavore was the Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year in 2007, meaning someone who tries to eat food grown vaguely nearby rather than shipped halfway around the world. This is always a bonus given how well we’ve been pumping out greenhouse gases recently.

Locavore Glasgow is a south-side shop which owns a bit of land to grow its own stuff, as well as reselling on behalf of others growing nearby. Most of its produce also tends to be organic (allotment gardens presumably struggle to get hold of large volumes to poisons without attracting unwanted attention from the police). They’re not really a normal business, being instead a community interest company (which is an easy-to-start company that strips away loads of red tape, providing you agree to use your profits and assets for ‘the public good’).

A locavore goat!
They’ve got goats too! As well as bees, as of a few days ago. (The goat isn’t stuck, in case you’re wondering. He was just desperate to give me a hug.)

It’s not somewhere you could get all your weekly groceries, but there’s a healthy variety (ha!) of fruit and veg; some meats and cheeses; a selection of jams, pickles and oils; some hoppers of pulses, grains and other dried things; and a few other bits and pieces (detergent refills, etc). There’s also a library of cookery books, although I think they’re intended more for leafing through whilst you wait than for borrowing.

(Borrowed from the Locavore Facebook page—click the image to go there)
(Borrowed from the Locavore Facebook page—click the image to go there)

Ooh, and there was some tasty looking bread last time I went in.

Anyway, Locavore also run a subscription-based veggie bag service. £5, £10 or £15 a week gets you a small, medium or large bag of fresh local goodies, available each Friday from about 11ish. For an extra fee, they’ll deliver it to your door (by bicycle, no less).

Back end of a bike trailer
These trailers are pretty agricultural jobs, but they’ve also got a tricycle cargo bike which looks much sexier. Still, big thumbs up for delivering by bike.

Last week’s tenner paid for:

  • Some chunky spuds
  • A bunch of carrots
  • Onions
  • A pair of leeks
  • A cucumber
  • Some radishes
  • A never-ending cabbage (seriously. It’s done two meals now and doesn’t appear to be any smaller)
  • A massive swede.
  • A baggie of kale.

Not a bad deal, in my mind. Top marks for packaging as well; apart from the paper bag it all came in, the only other waste was the plastic around the kale. Which I suppose you could reuse, if you were desperate to skip the landfill completely.

A variety of locavore veg

As someone who is pretty cowardly when it comes to varieties of veg (it’s not that I don’t like it, I’m just lazy and lack inspiration when staring dull-eyed at supermarket shelves), picking up a random sack full of stuff once a week appeals.

It’s not a hugely slick operation—service in the shop can be slow and the signup sheet for weekly bags is a handwritten thing pinned to a shelf—but it seems to trundle along. It’d be nice if Locavore pushed out a weekly blog post saying where the stuff in the bags had come from (and, for idiots like me, exactly what some of it is…), and maybe some ‘meet the grower’ articles as well. Possibly my idea of showing Owen exactly where his dinner was pulled from the ground is a little romantic.

Still, based on a single week’s worth of stuff, I can highly recommend it—tasty stuff and a decent price. You can get them at their shop (66 Nithsdale Road, opposite Bungo), their website, Twitter (@GlasgowLocavore), Facebook, or email.

More of this sort of thing please!

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I saw this myself and wondered what will happen with the pigs and goats? It’s a great idea to be eating locally and I would like to encourage this in my area, mainly because I have learned about companies such as Monsanto and the process they use to farm.

Regards,
Mr. Slade

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