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

Filthy rich

I have long cherished a vision of how a caring, sustainable economy will replace corporate capitalism. I imagine a hacienda set deep in the South American jungle. It is covered with graffiti and has broken windows--markers of previous violent attacks which failed. But the jungle is more persistent and powerful than the colonial power and green tendrils creep around the building and through the windows until it is completely overwhelmed by nature.

I was reminded of this vision when I first heard Rob Hopkins talking about bringing productive trees and plants into the city. Why shouldn't our verges and parks throng with whortleberries and wild strawberries? Here in Stroud the town council has agreed that in future trees planted in the town should be fruit-bearing. We already have one of our main cycleways planted as a linear orchard, preserving local apple species and providing fruit and conviviality in the autumn

Shortly after I read about Havana's organiponicos, or urban gardens, often roof gardens, I gave a talk in Birmingham called 'Who Will Feed the Cities?'. Walking back to the station through the urban moonscape that is central Brum I began to imagine the car parks filled with productive raised beds, and vines and fruit trees trained along the brick facades.

It has cheered me no end to see a similar vision being shared by advertising creatives. I first noticed the Baxters Farmers' Market soup advert, where the urban cat is replaced by a piglet and a bride's bouquet is made of carrots. This was followed by an advert for E-On where giraffes invade the office and a beaver is found in the water-cooler.

It seems to me that this is the opposite impulse to that which continues to drive well-paid executives into the countryside, which they immediately neutralise and suffocate with their 'city ways'. How welcome to see an invasion of the city by revolting peasants and their filth. Tweet

Going with the Grain

We have ignored the warnings about climate change in spite of floods, the total dislocation of our seasons, and undeniable impacts on familiar wildlife species. This autumn we are, for the first time, seeing major increases in prices of the very staple foods we rely on to exist. Will this persuade us to change our lifestyles?

It is a curious fact of life that the staple starchy foods of the most developed societies are grains. And an increasingly important one, as many of these grains are now being used to produce biofuels. As Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Towns movement in the UK said recently at a conference I was at, biofuels offer us the unattractive future of starving to death in a traffic jam. This future may be closer than we thought.

The first nation to experience a threat to their national staple have been the Italians, facing 30 per cent increases in the price of pasta as a result of an international shortage of the durum wheat used to make it, 40 per cent of which is imported. Italians have relied on imports from overseas, especially Canada, but the Canadians are putting their own needs first, or selling grain to the North American biofuels industry instead.

Last year the price of our national staple, bread, rose as a result of drought in Australia. This year's bizarre weather patterns have also affected wheat harvests. The National Association of British and Irish Millers (yes there is such a thing!) documents increases in wheat prices and predicts further increases this autumn. An all-time high of £190 per tonne was reached in August, with increases to £192 predicted for next month, some £90 per tonne higher than the equivalent period last year.

I'd like to feel smug about this and say that relying on my local community-supported agriculture farm, which is a short walk away, has insulated me against the vagaries of the global capitalist food distribution system. The problem is that while the theory of that is fine--closed loops, self-provisioning, minimal foods miles and so on--virtue is no insurance against climate change. First we had drought, then we had floods and all year we have had a plague of slugs. The potato blight has been something biblical.

In terms of national policy I would still feel considerably more confident if we were not so reliant on one foreign breadbasket or another to dispatch laden trucks over increasingly long distances to provide us with the staff of life. I wonder how long we will be waiting for a national Food Czar to be appointed. Tweet