Incredible Edible

In another quirky twist it turns out that the first identified source of horseflesh in the UK is in the Yorkshire town of Todmorden, which has thus far been famous for the community food growing project known as Incredible Edible Todmorden. Since the relevations that the FSA have found horse meat on the premises of a local abattoir there has been another round of reflection on how to inspect an regulate and increasingly complex food supply chain.

Since the BSA and salmonella scandals in the 1990s there have been periodic kerfuffles about where on earth our food comes from. In the academic literature the word most often used is that of 'provenance', which led to the food of origin appearing on the food label. But labelling is an inadequate response to consumers who wish to understand the provenance of their food, and not only because an abattoir that is capable of passing of horse as cow is hardly likely to be concerned about which farm the horses came from. To understand the deeper level of our connection with food we may need the French word terroir, a sense of the cultural connection with local soil expressed through food as well as other forms of folk culture.

Here is how I describe this connection in my book, The Bioregional Economy:

'The Gloucestershire love of apples is an example of what the French would call an attachment to terroir, the sense of pride in your local place and its specialities that could be taken as constitutive of a bioregional approach to provisioning. The contrast with a globalised market approach to provisioning is instructive. While the market economy needs global uniformity and standardisation, the bioregional economy revels in difference and local distinctiveness. The word ‘terroir’ comes, of course, from the word terre meaning land and it is this attachment to land, your local land, as expressed in the particular products it is suited to producing that lies at the heart of the ability of a bioregional economy to enable a process of environmental re-embedding.'

Of course buying local from farmers you know and, if you are not a vegetarian, eating animals that you have seen grazing in local fields, also offers immediate practical reassurance that you know what you are eating in a way a labelling system never can. For more on the delights of local provisioning in the Stroud Valleys please visit the beautiful blog Let Them Eat Hay by doyenne of the local food movement Helen Pitel.

So why have we moved from this satisfying local provisioning to a world of complex supply chains where regulation is virtually impossible? The answer is obvious: it increases the ability to extract value for the food corporations, which has also undermined the livelihoods of farmers. In a report from Green House thinktank published today, commodities expert Thomas Lines describes a world crisis for farming, a crisis of reduced agricultural incomes, and an ageing farming population. The author argues that a new approach is needed, building on known methods – a greater variety of staple crops, traditional farming techniques and agro ecology – to create a food system which is economically as well as ecologically more resilient and sustainable. His recommendation to farmers and growers north and south is that they should get themselves out of the market system and focus on providing good quality food for local markets.

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Not Earning but Owning

There are two important questions that keep recurring in current debates about the resilience of our economy: 'Can Britain Feed Itself?' and 'Who Owns Britain?'. The first is the title of an excellent study by Simon Fairlie in The Land, which reported his back-of-an-envelope calculations about how we might survive if our post-colonial trading links with the rest of the world were suddenly cut.

As I consider these two questions I am developing a particular fondness for the word 'requisition'. Like the landless peasants of Brazil, we should use the concept of usufruct to prevent the rentier landlords from depriving us of land for homes, growing plots, and useful wastes. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Landshare idea is all well and good, but, as an old Etonian, he is unlikely to challenge the ruling class and - as ever - access to land is not the point. It is ownership that really matters.

Here we come to Kevin Cahill, whose weighty but fascinating book Who Owns Britain?, first published in 2001, is the product of another man's healthy obsession. It is the best account we have of how the land that should be our common treasury is actually parcelled out between us - well between very few of us as it turns out. It is a fairly patchy account, since 1066 and 1872 are the last two dates when a proper cadastral survey of the country was undertaken.

My own county of Gloucestershire is dominated by large estates. I've been somewhat distracted by Cahill's excellent book and have checked out that of Lord Sudeley (Merlin Charles Sainthill Hanbury-Tracy), who I once shared a platform with at the House of Lords. His wikipedia entry fills me with a combination of hilarity and rage. His pedigree truly is Eton, Oxford and the Guards. I can't be sure whether I am pleased or not that he has now had to sell the family seat to Damien Hirst.

Sudeley's peerage arose from the political activities of plain John Hanbury (he adopted the 'Tracy' suffix as his career developed), whose father made his money in the Pontypool Ironworks. My great-grandfather was just down the road in Merthyr, but on the other end of the class system. Hanbury became MP for Tewkesbury and was later given a hereditary seat in the Lords. This is how power, wealth and most importantly land are allocated in our far from meritocratic society.

We don't know what we could grow on our land and we don't know who owns it. These two issues are obviously closely connected. Before the enclosures or 'lowland clearances' as we should really call them took place in the 17th and 18th centuries (these are profiled in depth in the latest issue of The Land), whether or not we could feed ourselves was a question we had it in our power to answer, both as individuals and as communities who shared common land. This made us free in a sense that most of us today cannot even imagine; and that explains why the question about who owns our land today is so difficult to answer. Tweet

Green New Deal: What's the Deal? And How Green Is It?

Chatter about this mind-catching proposal is everywhere in green circles. My hearty congratulations to the authors who have managed to capture the imagination and direct it towards economics. I've been trying to do that for some time and know how challenging it can be.

It is fairly inevitable in a recession that the government will become a more significant part of our economy. If nothing else, as the economy as a whole shrinks, the public sector grows relative to the private sector, where jobs are dependent on immediate spending. Add to this that, in a civilised society, we pay something to those who are out of work and the balance is bound to shift towards government spending.

This means our money - either now or in the future - and therefore we have a democratic right to decide how it is spent. Some of the proposals for this spending from Labour and the Tories are very far from green - such as the building of more roads and other vast infrastructure projects. We need to think big but also think local: this would be the heart of a truly green new deal.

For me the priorities for spending would be local green banks, preferably organised as mutuals, which could lend money to small, local businesses according to strict criteria about their sustainability. This would underpin the growth of the local green economy and ensure that we emerged from the recession with a much greener economy.

And more important than money, we should be thinking about food and energy. As the pound sinks on the foreign exchanges we will realise the foolishness of government statements that food security is of no strategic importance. As we negotiate in international markets from a position of weakness we will regret the fact that our main export is financial services. Who will buy? Hardly anybody at all I would have thought. Tweet

Time to Get Growing

There is a lot of noise these days about the importance of food security - even the government have jumped on this bandwaggon, following after Jamie Oliver and the legion TV chefs. Suddenly, everybody is growing their own. Most of the chat in the media around the importance of locally grown food focuses on the climate impact of food shipments and transshipments - of the absurd, global conveyor belt of food that ensures we can have strawberries at Christmas and rambutan with our cheesecake.

I recently had the pleasure of hearing Paul Mobbs give his Less is a Four Letter Word presentation, which makes clear that eating from our local soil could eliminate getting on for one-third of all our carbon dioxide emissions. Growing your own food can make a more significant impact on climate change than any decisions you make about personal transport, assuming you have already given up flying.

And if you're wondering what to grow, it might be best to avoid the exotic salads and weirdly coloured beets and go for the humble potato. 2008 is the year of the potato and in an era of concern for food security I can really see why. The humble tuber is the vegetable equivalent of the downtrodden housewife - year after year it can keep us alive, healthy and happy and yet is never accorded love or respect. It is also uncomplaining about soil, although we have not been wise about breeding to deter blight.

While researching FAO statistics yesterday (the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) I realised just how serious our food deficit really is. The difference between food imports and exports in this country is around the same, in terms of magnitude, as that in China. Both France and the USA - countries that we have harangued at trade negotiations for protecting their farmers - still have healthy trade surpluses in food. The map shows that some of our fellow EU members are just as vulnerable, although few have the density of population that we do.

As the global food market grows more competitive what do we have to trade in return for the staples of our existence? Those famous 'services' that now make up 73% of our economy. I wonder how many customers we will have for our financial services over the next year or two. Will we soon be asking how many investment analysts it takes to grow a carrot, rather than to change a light bulb? Tweet

Gambling while others starve

Whatever explanation you've heard for why food prices are rising it probably isn't the real one. Now that the housing market is staggering to a standstill it appears that those who have been using to making easy money from speculating in a fundamental human need for shelter have now moved on to playing the same sordid game with our even more basic need for food.

Testimony recently given to the US Senate Homeland Security Committee came from a former Wall Street investor who decided to blow the whistle. Here is a brief extract:

You have asked the question 'Are Institutional Investors contributing to food and energy price inflation?' And my unequivocal answer is 'Yes'. In this testimony I will explain that Institutional Investors are one of, if not the primary, factors affecting commodities prices today. Clearly, there are many factors that contribute to price determination in the commodities markets; I am here to expose a fast-growing yet virtually unnoticed factor, and one that presents a problem that can be expediently corrected through legislative policy action.

The news of famine in Ethiopia, again, more than 20 years after Bob Geldof blasphemed to no purpose on national TV is, again, being blamed on bad governance or the weather. The usual distractions offered us to avoid the obvious conclusion that 'It's the exploitative, capitalist, post-coloniast, globalised economy - stupid!'.

And what about the row over crop-based biofuels? Competition for land is a significant and growing concern for anybody interested in green economics. But can we be sure that what is being knowingly explained in terms of the competition within free markets isn't actually a commodity price bubble being manipulated by those who will profit from it? Tweet

Vegetable virgins

There is a line in Look Back in Anger where anti-hero Jimmy Porter tells somebody that, having never seen a dead body, they are suffering from a rather serious case of virginity. I share that virginity - as I've blogged elsewhere, watching the death throes of chickens was the closest I've come and that was horrifying enough.

It seems to me that a more serious case of virginity is being suffered by those who have never grown a vegetable. And a much more dangerous one too. As food prices rise around the world, the rush to get hold of an allotment has turned into a stampede. But the consequences of always buying your food in a plastic bag may run deeper than having to tolerate the vagaries of the global marketplace.


A dear friend I've met through the Transition process here in Stroud, Helen Pitel, works at a closed hospital for the criminally insane. She is a permaculture gardener, a pioneer of the Centre for Alternative Technology, and she is employed to share her love of growing living things with the inmates. I was concerned that they may be mad, bad and dangerous to know but Helen says that are rather torpid and hard to raise from their chairs to lure into the garden.

She told me of the amazement many of them have when they first understand that a small seed, placed in dirt, will produce a lettuce, cabbage or carrot. This complete dislocation from their natural environment seems to go a long way to explain their mental disorientation - a total lacking of grounding must surely lead to madness as well as badness.

I have a soft spot for Jimmy Porter, odious and self-pitying though he is, because it was via him that I learned what is still my favourite word: pusillanimous. I wonder whether he might have been a little bit less angry if, instead of going to grammar school, he had spent more time with his father on the allotment? Tweet