Breakfast has long been recognised as the most important meal of the day - but it can also be the most interesting.

This is due to the incredible and diverse choice of breakfast foods available in Britain such as Newcastle Brown Ale bread, Suffolk Boozy' bacon (dry cured using local ale and treacle) or black pepper and celery oatcakes from Ireland.

Locally-produced breakfast foods are becoming much easier to find, with farmers' markets, farm shops and speciality food shops offering a host of high quality regional foods. These can range from unusual breads to hand-made sausages, distinctive dry-cured bacons and locally-produced cereal foods. Many producers have also made their products available nationally through mail order and internet shopping.

To commemorate our unique British breakfast tradition, breakfast will be top of the menu during Farmhouse Breakfast Week (January 19-25), when regional and national breakfast producers will be celebrated for their skills in producing a wide range of high quality breakfast foods. This year's theme is reasons to be cheerful' and it's easy to see why when you check out our diverse range of regional foods.

Each area of the country has its own distinct breakfast flavours and types of breakfast, from Staffordshire oatcakes to Suffolk ham, Irish soda bread and Welsh pancakes as well as a range of more than 400 different varieties of sausage produced in the British Isles.

Some of the most exotic sausages include a pork, champagne and strawberry Jubilee sausage, a wild garlic and nettle sausage and a Father's Day sausage which contains beef, ale and herbs!

Rebecca Geraghty, from the Home Grown Cereals Authority (HGCA), which is behind the Farmhouse Breakfast campaign, said: "Over the last few years people have become much more interested in wanting to know where their food has come from and how it has been produced, which has in turn led to an increase in demand for locally-grown foods.

"Farmhouse Breakfast Week is the ideal time to celebrate and tuck into the phenomenal range of breakfast foods we offer in this country and the traditional skills that have gone into making them."

Farmhouse Breakfast Week is sponsored by HGCA, Food from Britain, the Meat and Livestock Commission (MLC) and Lion Quality Eggs and it is supported by the National Farmer's Union and the Women's Food and Farming Union (WFU).

January 16, 2003 09:00