Samhain blessings

With November 1st we reach one of the pagan quarter days of the year. These have all survived the advent of Christianity in various guises - in this case the festival of halloween. Behind the tawdry pumpkin balloons and plastic tridents, what can we grasp of the deeper meaning of this commemoration of one aspect of our relationship with the earth?

In spite of the cold and the falling of leaves, this is a time of abundance on our community farm. Plants and animals are storing up energy for the winter - the period of rest that our restless economic system no longer allows us. In Celtic tradition, this time of year saw the slaughter of animals that could not be fed through the winter. This meat and the abundant vegetables were preserved for the times when the earth could not provide.

In the pagan system this is the festival of new year. The cycle of the year was seen as symbolic of the life cycle, from birth through flourishing to death and decay. And as the earth came back to life in the spring, so there was promise of reuniting with the earth mother in death. The fading of nature's life in the autumn leads to the dark thoughts of mortality that we now make fun of by dressing up as ghosts.

The failure of our culture to accept the rhythm of life is at the heart of our unsustainable exploitation of resources. Without any sense of connection with the earth we fear death as our final annihilation and struggle to make our material presence felt. Samhain is the best time to re-examine our attitude to death - and to life. Tweet

Food: A Matter of Life and Death

After a week of argumentation about the rights and wrongs of the £1.99 chicken I finally entered the fray - indirectly, as it happens, when a very personable journalist from The Sunday Times asked me what I thought about it. My quotation is phrased in terms of knickers rather than chickens, but that appears to be my lot. He did call Market, Schmarket 'brilliantly provocative' which is going to keep me smiling for weeks. Until I saw that written down I hadn't realised how precisely it sums up what I was hoping to achieve.

Enough of me and my ego - let's get back to chickens. As it happens I got to know some local chickens fairly well over Christmas and I can tell you that looking after them is a deeply responsible business. You just worry all the time about foxes and badgers. It is considerably worse than caring for children, who could easily see off small furry mammals whereas in the henhouse they can cause the avian equivalent of Apocalipto.

I also didn't benefit from the eggs, since I found the warmth and taste of them just too alive somehow to really be food. This pins me down as not only a townie but also a child of the sixties. Yes, I know food is part of the mysterious web of life but I prefer its life to have been removed sufficiently distantly before it arrives on my plate. And this is to say nothing of blood-spots which, since the hens enjoyed the company of a cock, could potentially have turned into chicks at any moment.

I had a similar experience while trying to eat a sea bass a former partner had proudly served up after catching it himself during a manly angling trip. It wasn't the strange muddy flavour, nor the fact that it had turned up in some rather dirty newspaper. It was the fact that I could still taste life in the fish that made me want to heave.

Perhaps I should conclude that my fate is to become a vegetarian. There certainly is something rather Buddhist about all these experiences. Yet I don't think - and my herbalist is with me here! - I'm quite ready for that yet. I tend to agree rather with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's approach of forcing meat eaters to encounter the reality of the death that fills their nightly plates. I have an oustanding offer of killing my own chicken on our community farm and am thinking long and hard about it.

Life is what food is about. There is something seriously wrong with anybody who prefers dead food to living food. Since I've been eating organic I have struggled to find the word to describe the non-organic food that I, my partner, and even my daughter in school just can't stomach any more. It's just dead isn't it? Tweet

Habitat and yoghurt culture

In the ethereal realms of academic discussion the buzzphrase of the moment is ‘ecological modernisation’. This phrase relates to the idea that, now that we have won the argument that the ecological crisis is real, there is a struggle going on about how to respond to it. This struggle boils down to a choice between business-as-usual with a few green tweaks, or a wholesale reorganization of society and economy. The question being asked is whether it is possible to have a sustainable world without fundamental social and economic change.

In the field of habitat the ecological modernizers would like to expropriate and commodify the learning that has been developed in low-impact communities, wipe it clean of its radical overtones, and make it profitable business. They are seeking to divorce the technological wisdom from the social wisdom that gave it birth. They are ignoring the lessons of holism that are the most important lessons of the sustainable vision. Knowledge based on practical experience cannot be reduced to information to be written into technical manuals.

Much of the knowledge about how sustainable communities might look has been garnered within the Ecovillages network, co-ordinated by Jonathan Dawson of the Findhorn Foundation. He recently published a book sharing some of this experience. The communities he studied are found in rich and poor societies and offer an experience of creative living. He likes to think of them as ‘yoghurt culture . . . small, dense and rich concentrations of activity whose aim is to transform the nature of that which surrounds them’.

Most of the ecovillages are success stories, but many ‘collapse’ because of the difficulty of building new relationships and social structures. It is vital that we do not see these shorter-lived projects as ‘failures’. The learning and positive experiences generated by experimental living are not lost when the people move on and the structures decay. Learning to live experimentally requires learning to accept that the natural life-span of some of these ventures may be short.

Is it possible to build sustainable communities without asking questions about ownership, equality and hierarchy? In my view, not only can we not ‘solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’; we also cannot save the planet without asking questions about who owns it. The message of ecovillages the world over is that these issues are intrinsically linked to the building, physically and metaphorically, of a sustainable future. Tweet

Globalisation comes home to roost

Poor old Bernard Matthews. Not so bootiful as he used to be. First Jamie Oliver decimates his profits by exposing his turkey twizzlers as deep-fried guts and gizzards and now his loathsome farming practices are coming home to roost--oh go on! Forgive me a few bad puns. We gave up eating all so-called food proceeding from the Bernard Matthews empire a few years ago when, as I opened a packet claiming to be filled with Bernard Matthews wafer-thin turkey ham slices, my son asked 'who farted?'

I had difficulty following events this morning as the news bulletins jumped about between Hungary and Turkey. I was feeling hungry myself and blame the shortage of blood sugar in the brain for my lack of lucidity, but I really did begin to wonder whether Bernard also has a production facility in Turkey. Well in this era of globalisation where nobody knows where anything is and companies count for more than countries you can hardly blame me for the confusion.

This is only one of my many struggles with the food distribution system globalisation has bequeathed us. Following the appalling episode of foot-and-mouth it was clear that transporting animals around the world just to kill and eat them is not only cruel but also dangerous to public health. It has always amazed me that friends and family find it more shocking that I know the source of my meat by name than that they cannot even tell me which country theirs was produced in. Dulcie has been slaughtered recently and should be turning up in sausages soon.

The shame around the factory production and slaughter of sentient creatures is made evident by the use of the euphemism 'cull' when what is meant is kill. Not to mention the curious public outcry about the deaths of the innocents from the latest factory-farming disease and the pseudo-ritualistic pyres, when these animals were created in factories only because they were going to be killed to be eaten. Where is the moral difference between killing and cremating them en masse, and killing and roasting them in our individual ovens?

This is to say nothing of the wasteful production of unnecessary carbon dioxide our food distribution system brings with it. For an excellent critique of that you can read Caroline Lucas and Colin Hines's most recent report. Caroline's adage on the transport of biscuits from Germany to the UK and back again is the best indictment of the global food system. Watching the lorries moving past each other on a European motorway she asked 'Why don't they just swap recipes'?

Like the guy who enjoyed shaving so much he bought the company, such strong identification between an individual and a brand, the corporate cult of personality, brings its own dangers. Bernard was never as bootiful as he thought, and now his face and the festering turkeys he is still selling as safe to eat are forever melded, leaving a most unpleasant taste. Tweet