Short supply chains – the antidote to food scandals?

Chain Consumers are increasingly interested in where there food comes from and how it arrives on their plate. Campaigning organisations have for years argued that food chains are too complex and too long, meaning that consumers are ‘disconnected’ from knowing about their food and its origins. ‘Reconnecting’ consumers with their food has been up and down political agendas for governments and food agencies ever since the ‘Mad Cow’ scare of the late 1980s and the ‘Foot and Mouth’ crisis of 2001. One way of achieving this reconnection is to ‘shorten’ food chains, and this has recently been the topic of a study carried out by Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology and Food Security (CAFS).