Leaving aside the questions of soil, seed and pests for a minute, there is one element of farming that is often overlooked: energy. Energy, in the end, is what food is, and in order to produce it, we need the help of our greatest energy source, the sun. Photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen, depends on it, as does the ‘fixing’ of atmospheric nitrogen necessary for plant growth. Until about 1850, harnessing solar energy in edible form is basically what farmers did; and it is more or less what they have done ever since, except that from around that date, they have supplemented the process with the use of fossil fuels. From the earliest experiments with powered farm machinery and fertiliser to modern combine harvesters and food processing, fossil fuels have transformed farming from a thankless, back-breaking task (the punishment of the gods) into something really quite rewarding. Today, almost every aspect of industrial farming involves the use of oil in some way, from running machinery to making fertilisers and pesticides to the transport, processing and preservation of produce. Around four barrels of the stuff go into feeding each of us in Britain every year; nearly double that amount is used for every American.77 We are effectively eating oil.
The problem with that, as the German economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher pointed out as early as 1973 in his book Small is Beautiful, is that fossil fuels are no more than the sun’s energy, captured millions of years ago and packaged in a readily available form. ‘One of the most fateful errors of our age,’ he wrote, ‘is the belief that “the problem of production” has been solved.’ The confusion arises, argued Schumacher, because we fail to distinguish between ‘income’ and ‘capital’ from the natural world: ‘Every economist and businessman is familiar with the distinction, and applies it conscientiously … except where it really matters: namely, the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, and about which he can do nothing.’78
For the past 150 years, we have been living in the ‘oil age’: an era of unprecedented cheap energy that has allowed us to drive cars, fly planes, wage wars and wander around our homes in winter wearing nothing but a T-shirt, munching a sausage roll that cost us next to nothing. But our gas-guzzling lifestyles are about to run out of guzzle. Opinions differ over quite when it will happen, but most agree that ‘Peak Oil’ – the moment when the rate of oil production from known global reserves will reach its peak – is coming sooner rather than later, with some experts predicting it within the next five years.79
While driving and flying are useful, neither is strictly necessary for survival. Food is a different matter. Whether we do it by growing crops, foraging for berries or hunting rabbits, we have to feed ourselves, and we must expend energy in order to do so. We face what the carbon educator Richard Heinberg calls the ‘net energy principle’: a nutritional version of Mr Micawber’s famous dictum that human happiness rests on making sure one’s income exceeds one’s expenditure. Which is far from what modern agribusiness is doing at present. For every calorie of food it produces, it is burning an estimated 10 in the form of fossil fuels.80 Modern farming might like to call itself efficient, but with outputs like that, it is a strange kind of efficiency.
A Third Way
Rome versus Germania; lord versus peasant; Young versus Cobbett – farming has always divided opinions, and things are no different now. As far as the question of how we are going to feed the world goes, the jury is out. Even those in the best position to know, professional farmers, cannot agree. While the organic movement argues passionately for an approach that harnesses natural biosystems, the industrialists insist that only modern techniques can feed the planet. The latter have some impressive statistics to back them up: according to the geographer Vaclav Smil – not himself an industrial lobbyist – were it not for the Haber-Bosch process (a method of artificially ‘fixing’ atmospheric nitrogen so that it can be absorbed by plants), two out of every five people in the world would not be alive today.81 But, counter the organic lobby, commercial farming is killing the planet, and its results, which look so impressive now, won’t last. Not only could we feed the world organically, it is the only sustainable option. So, what is the truth?
Polarised debates often frame the wrong questions. Rather than asking how we’re going to feed ourselves in the future, we ought to be questioning the way we eat now. Food is the most devalued commodity in the industrialised West, because we have lost touch with what it means. Living in cities, we have learnt to behave as if we did not belong to the natural world; as if we were somehow distinct from ‘the environment’. Rather than see ourselves as part of it, we see it as something to exploit or control from the outside, or (once we have messed it up enough) to try and save. We forget that we are animals bound to the land; that the food we eat links us directly to nature. We stuff ourselves with chicken without a second thought, but if we were locked in a room with a live hen and a sharp knife, most of us would probably starve. We have forgotten the ancient lesson of sacrifice: that life is part of a cycle, and that effort and, ultimately, death are necessary in order to renew it.
All of which brings us back, more or less, to those two very different Christmas dinners that popped up recently on British television screens. In the end, the difference between them is cost: you get the food and the countryside you pay for. Two pounds won’t buy you a happy chicken or a beautiful landscape; 10 pounds might. But to express it like that – as an either/or dilemma – is to fall into the classic polar trap. There is another way. If more of us were prepared to pay just a little bit more for food, the operational costs of producing whatever it was – free-range chicken, organic lettuce – would start to fall. More importantly, if food were a bit more expensive, we might start to pay more attention to what is, after all, the most important thing in our lives. We might, for example, start to eat less meat, which would be no bad thing, for us, our planet or the animals we breed to eat.
Although perceptions about food in Britain are beginning to shift, the ‘foodie revolution’ remains a predominantly middle-class phenomenon; farmers’ markets and organic box schemes are tiny countermovements against a general trend.82 How to scale them up is the challenge – and that, as a quick bit of turkey-maths makes clear, is no small task. The real barrier to changing the way we eat, however, does not lie in practicalities, but in our minds. ‘Third way’ methods, such as the farming of salmon in large pens in the open sea, or chickens in open sheds with access to the outdoors, already exist in Britain. In the absence of a magic fix along the lines of someone inventing a miracle pill or manna descending from heaven, those sorts of responsible, middle-scale farms are probably the closest thing we are going to get to a way of feeding ourselves without destroying the planet in the process.
What would a Lorenzetti fresco look like today? It is hard to imagine how a painter could represent city and country on the same wall, let alone the effects of good or bad government on either. Feeding cities has become rather more complicated than it was in the fourteenth century. But one thing is certain: however much we look the other way, our rural hinterland will always mirror the way we live. Ancient cities were run on slave labour; so were the farms that fed them. Medieval cities thrived on trade; so did their hinterlands. Modern cities, like their industrialised hinterlands, have little respect for nature. If we don’t like what’s happening out there in the landscape, we had better rethink how we eat, because one will never change without the other.
Chapter 2
Supplying the City
It is no coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers …
George Orwell1
Animals were a common sight in British cities until relatively recently.
Apple Day, Brogdale, Kent
Ever since I first heard about it, I have wanted to go to Brogdale. Brogdale is the home of the Nat
ional Fruit Collections, where every known variety of pear, apple and soft fruit in the land is nurtured, alongside new varieties which are being bred all the time to see if any of them has what it takes to make it in the cut-throat world of modern food production. Throughout the summer and autumn, Brogdale holds festivals in honour of its various fruit species, and I have come to the biggest daddy of them all: Apple Day on 21 October, the British fruit equivalent of the Oscars.
Apart from its all-important tree collections, Brogdale consists essentially of a group of unprepossessing sheds; but on this, its grandest day of the year, it exudes the atmosphere of a village fête. There are tractor rides, a miniature train, stalls selling home-made chutneys and jams, and last but not least, a pig roast. Resisting them all, I head straight for what will surely be the crowning glory of the day: a large barn where this year’s apple harvest is on display. I am expecting this to be something extraordinary: a Busby Berkeleyesque piece of bravura along the lines of a prize-winning roundabout using apples instead of geraniums. Yet when I enter the shed, it is so dark and echoingly empty that at first I can’t make out any apples at all. Then I spot them in the gloom, snaking around the walls on a low plywood plinth, each variety represented by four perfect specimens next to an identifying label. People in rustling waterproofs file past the apples, peering down at them and murmuring to each other in low, appreciative voices. ‘It’s a bit like a fruit version of the Crown Jewels,’ I mutter to myself before realising that, actually, that is precisely what it is.
I fall in behind the queue and begin my dutiful scrutiny of the collection. As the apple trail unfolds beneath my gaze, I begin to realise its modesty is misleading. There is a staggering number of varieties here. Every few yards, they change from big to small, shiny to rough, red to yellow, green to brown and back again. I find myself becoming transfixed by them. Apple varieties are like languages, I decide. There are some 2,300 of them in Brogdale alone, each representing a tiny universe; a culture rooted in time and place, unique and irreplaceable. And just like languages, apple varieties are dying out all over the world. There is no place for them, it seems, in the global food economy. As I peer down at the distant cousins of Cox and Bramley, I marvel at each family’s survival. All of them have a story, a provenance, a legacy – and a taste. Hmm, yes … taste: that’s the one thing that’s missing here. Realising that for the past half-hour I have been fighting the urge to pick up one of the apples and take a large bite out of it, I can’t trust myself in here any longer. I’ve got to get out and find something to eat.
Back in the daylight, the harvest festival mood is in full swing. Children run about laughing and squealing, tractor rides come and go, and there is a heartening whiff of roast pork in the air. But there is a long queue for the pig, and I see there is a walking tour of the orchards just about to start. My excitement returns: perhaps now I will finally get to discover the true Brogdale. I join the group, and we set off with our anonymous guide (a compact, weatherbeaten type somewhere between a mountain explorer and a Boy Scout) in search of fruity enlightenment.
A short walk past some poplar trees and a near-miss with a tractor later, we arrive in the orchard, and for the second time today my illusions are shattered. In place of the majestic Elysium of my imagination, we are in a flat rectangular field the size of a couple of football pitches, full of shrubs no higher than my head. Is this just the nursery? I wonder. But no: it seems that modern fruit trees are all grafted on to special rootstocks so that they only grow to six foot or so, making it easier to pick the fruit.2 Our guide, possibly sensing our disappointment, produces a worrying-looking knife and plucks one of the few remaining pears off a nearby tree, slicing it expertly into portions for us all to try. The pear is a Comice: sharp and sweet, dripping with juice and absurdly delicious. My first bite elicits an immediate flood of emotion: gratitude and pleasure, but also puzzlement. How is it possible that I can walk past a bowl of these very pears at home for days on end and never be tempted to try even one? Here, plucked straight from the tree, they are pure ambrosia. The undramatic surroundings are forgotten once again – I am a townie on a voyage of discovery, and life is good.
We weave our way up and down a few times, tasting more pears as we go (like echoes of a first love, none quite matches up to the Comice), before filing round a tall hedge and past a field of brassicas into the heart of the collection, the apple orchard. There are some 4,600 apple trees here (two for every variety), and it looks like it. Lilliputian shrubs drip with edible baubles as far as the eye can see. ‘Does anyone have any apples they particularly want to visit?’ asks our guide. ‘Cox!’ pipes up a little girl, only to be swiftly reprimanded by her mother. ‘Ashmead’s Kernel?’ drawls a bespectacled know-all, easily trumping the little girl, and making me suspect he’s been swotting up his name-tags on the way in. ‘Excellent choice!’ says our guide, and off we tramp.
Since our quest involves travelling to some far-flung corner of the orchard, our guide inducts us into Apple World as we go. First he gives us a Linda to try (which is light and fragrant); a Lynn’s Pippin (sweet, but lacking lift); an Elstar (an in-your-face, Barbra Streisandish sort of fruit). We learn about russeting, the deliberate cultivation of rough or reddened skin to improve sweetness and richness of flavour, and why so many English varieties have failed in the face of competition from easier-cropping ones like Golden Delicious. We snub the latter when we come to it, although, to be fair, most of us are rather appled out by now. At last, after what feels like several hundred samplings, we track down Ashmead’s Kernel, which turns out to be rather a fine specimen: Cox-like in colour, texture and taste, with just a hint of additional fragrance. It’s a good way to end our tour. As we trudge back to the centre, I catch sight of all the apple-related products I swept past on the way in. They make me realise I’m not going to be able to eat another apple again for weeks.
Brogdale is an amazing place, but it only exists by the skin of its teeth. The original collections were set up in Chiswick by the newly formed Horticultural Society in the early 1800s, where they remained until 1921, before being moved first to Surrey, and finally to Kent in the 1950s, when they were taken over by Defra’s predecessor, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). But in 1990, MAFF decided Britain didn’t need National Fruit Collections any longer, and the orchards, the result of two centuries’ worth of continuous research and breeding, were threatened with destruction. Prince Charles intervened, helping to broker a deal in which the site was sold to the newly formed Brogdale Horticultural Trust, with the government maintaining ownership of the trees. However, funding levels were so minimal that seven years later, the Trust decided to sell the land and lease it back, and in 2005 did another dodgy deal, this time with Tesco, who are now principal sponsors of the site. Although Defra claims it remains committed to preserving the collections, it has a strange way of showing it. Brogdale faces an uncertain future – so if you fancy a walking tour of a Very Large Orchard (and possibly a pork roast) any time between May and October, you had better hurry along while you still have the chance.
In its quirky, British, miniature-steam-trainy sort of way, Brogdale is the kind of place that gets you thinking. Why did the government think it so important to have National Fruit Collections in 1921, yet so unnecessary in 1990? How did we manage to acquire 2,300 varieties of apple in this country anyhow? And now that we’ve got them, what are we going to do with them? Supermarkets typically stock fewer than eight varieties, of which only two – Cox and Bramley – are indigenous, so what about the rest? The answers all come down to a question of scale. Apple varieties (and all other food varieties, for that matter) are the result of local cultures: the product of generations of farmers struggling to get the best out of the land, and the accumulated knowledge of how to do just that. It’s what the French call terroir: a term originally used to describe the effects of local climate and geography on the quality of a particular wine – right down to the angle of the hillside where the vine
s are grown – and that now encompasses not just the physical terrain, but the traditional know-how that goes into producing any local food.
Local food, however, is not the sort that keeps vast, throbbing metropolises going. Modern city-dwellers demand constant supplies of cheap, predictable food, and agribusiness has evolved to produce just that. The food we eat today is driven not by local cultures, but by economies of scale, and those economies apply to every stage of the food supply chain. In order to feature in the urban diet nowadays, produce not only has to be bigger, better and breastier than ever before; it also has to be capable of withstanding the rigours of a global distribution system the aim of which is to deliver fewer and fewer products to more and more of us – that’s how economies of scale work. Wheeling your trolley down a supermarket aisle, it might be tempting to think that we have never had a greater choice of things to eat. But that is not quite true. Yes, you can now eat strawberries at Christmas if you really want to; but if you want to choose the variety, forget it. Three quarters of all the strawberries sold in the UK today are of just one kind, Elsanta (which, oddly, even sounds a bit Christmassy). If you want to eat another sort, you will probably have to pick it yourself. Strawberries these days are a commodified product; the result of a food industry geared less towards the niceties of terroir than to the principles of car assembly pioneered by Henry Ford. Its success lies in its ability to reduce a highly complex process (food production) to an operation so streamlined that its very product (food) is now subservient to it. As Henry Ford is once supposed to have said, ‘You can have your Ford any colour you like – as long as it’s black.’
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives Page 7
