With marmalade being usurped from British supermarket shelves by American peanut butter, we felt Paddington Bear's favourite spread could do with a bit of a boost, particularly as last weekend was the World's Original Marmalade Awards & Festival. This month we profile Jane Maggs, a marmalade and preserve producer from Cumbria.

Wild & Fruitful began a decade ago, when Jane Maggs decided to leave her career as a landscape architect and began to produce jams and other preserves. The Wild & Fruitful ideology has always been to use only local ingredients, mainly handpicked from the fields, forests and gardens of the Cumbria region. Some of these are grown by Jane, while the rest come from both private gardens and orchards of the local farmers and growers, all of whom are friends. The preserves are then made in Jane's cottage kitchen, using traditional methods which maintain the best flavour.

Picking the fruit by hand is labour-intensive and Jane knows it would be cheaper to import ready-picked fruit from Poland and Turkey but claims that this would undermine the traditional aspect of her jams. She believes that the ethos of jam-making is in reserving a bit of English summer for the winter.  She is passionate about old varieties such as Medlars, which she picks from the National Trust garden at Acorn Bank, near Penrith. She makes it into a jelly to be served with game.

• Why do you do what you do?
  My whole ethos is that food and landscape are intertwined and I would not be making preserves were I not using local produce. I want to show that it is possible to pay a fair price for local produce, to forage for and use wild foods, prepare everything by hand at home and make a business out of it - just.  I know marmalade is different in that the fruit is imported-we just seem to be quite good at making it and the rest of the process is identical, in that it is all made by hand in my house. I also love inventing recipes.


• What achievement are you most proud of?
  I'm most proud of being stroke of the Oxford eight which won the 1976 Oxford v. Cambridge ladies' boat race.  It's not food and it shows my age, but you did ask.


• What is your most memorable moment?
  My most memorable moment food-wise is probably last year when we won the double gold for best Artisan marmalade at the Dalemain Marmalade Festival.  We also won a silver.  I was running the 'how to make marmalade' workshops and was worried that I would not be taken seriously.  Then the result was announced half way through the first workshop.  Both marmalades were stocked by Fortnum & Mason. Emily – does she mean ' are now stocked by F&M or 'were' stocked…?


• If you were Prime Minister, what one thing would you do to encourage more people to eat British food?
  I would provide incentives to recreate thriving small town centres where people can shop properly in proper shops near to their homes.  Small, local shops are much more likely to stock local produce.  It needs to be easy and cheap to get into and park, if necessary, in small town centres.  People need to perceive the experience to be as quick as, yet much more pleasant than, shopping in a supermarket.  At the same time the whole range of food shops has to be there.  I would place a cap on rates and rents for food shops - and book shops come to that - in town centres.  I would subsidise home delivery services so that people could walk, take the bus or cycle to the shops, secure in the knowledge that they could get their purchases home.  We have been very fortunate in Wigton to have an excellent range of local food shops.  They may not look fancy, but you can get pretty well anything you need - harissa is there if you want it - without going to a supermarket. For example, we have not one, but three fabulous and extremely reasonably-priced butchers who have always sold local meat, a greengrocer, a whole-food shop run by a charity, several bakers and a recently-opened delicatessen. We have a local produce and W.I. market once a week and a big outdoor market, also weekly.  Up until now they have operated in tandem with two small supermarkets.  Two more supermarkets are planned, both multinational. We'll see what happens then.  As an extra, I would cut the red tape surrounding abattoirs, so that more small, local abattoirs may once again thrive.


• What is your favourite food and why?
  Custard, in all its guises, is the food of the gods.


• What are your predictions for the future of British food?
  The future economic scenario does appear bleak, but curiously I think that is a positive force in favour of British food.  I believe we have come to the end of this era of cheap imported food.  I also believe there are going to be energy shortages.  There will be power cuts and systems will break down for varying periods.  There will be times when supermarket shelves are all but empty.
  
  Electricity cuts means electrical appliances will cease to work all the time.  Although this is a ghastly scenario, I think great good will come out of it in the way we eat and what we eat.  It will mean that local, British food may not only appear relatively less expensive, but might actually be all there is to eat.  It will also mean that reliance on pre-prepared food will decrease.  People will have to re-learn how to make things at home, from scratch, using low-technology appliances.  It sounds awful, but if people are unemployed or working shorter hours it does mean there is more time to prepare food from scratch and to prepare things which take time to cook, but are cheap, such as bread or cheaper cuts of meat.  Home vegetable growing, bee-keeping and other backyard food production will continue to expand and all in all I think we'll end up somewhere near where we were in the late fifties or early sixties but with infinitely more flair to our cooking.


• If you were an advertising executive what slogan would you use to promote British food?
  Look around and see your food growing.


• Beat the Recession tip?
  Buy second-hand or get off your granny a 1950's cookbook by publishers such as 'Belling' or 'Radiation'.  Cook from scratch; waste nothing; shop at your local butcher and greengrocer and stay out of supermarkets.


• What's on the menu this evening?
  Jerusalem artichoke soup (artichokes dug straight from the garden) with a crusty baguette and gooseberry upside-down pudding (home-grown gooseberries and a good excuse for custard).


• How can people get hold of your produce?
  Look at my website for mail order.  For outlets look in the main farm shops and delicatessens in Cumbria including Westmorland Services on the M6 or give me a call or email - details are on the website.