When cheap food becomes costly

My sister is sat working out which vegetables she will plant for the winter. Beds are now becoming clear and the prospect of rain next week brings an opportunity to sow root vegetables for winter harvest.

Having been in Somerset for the past seven weeks, it has not been hard to notice when vegetables from the garden have been part of the dinner, the taste is altogether better.

The omens for the winter in England are not good. The government is forecasting inflation at 13%. If newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express are to be believed energy costs are going to be twice or three times what they were last winter. Food prices are already rising.

There can be no controlling the international prices of oil or gas, but where the government could have been more pro-active is in looking at the price of food. In times past, the cost of food constituted around one-third of a family’s weekly budget, that proportion has fallen to around one-seventh. People have become used to cheap food. What response can be made when that cheap food suddenly becomes costly?

Oddly, the answer lies not in measures like the wartime Dig for Victory campaign. In 1939, Britain was importing two-thirds of its foodstuffs, some fifty-five million tons a year. The Dig for Victory campaign was a major propaganda success and was significant in reducing the need for imported food, dependency on imports fell from two-thirds to one-third.  However, that level of dependency was still comparable with the level of imports at the current time.

According to figures from the National Farmers Union, Britain currently produces around 64% of its food. The current situation is an improvement from the point where that figure had fallen to 61%. The NFU points out that in 1984 Britain was producing 78% of the food it needed, which is a proportion that exceeds the wartime levels.

The answer seems to lie in a coherent agricultural policy on the part of the government. Now the Common Agricultural Policy has gone (a good intentioned post-war measure that became an opportunity for massive exploitation), there is an opportunity to reorient policy to promote one of the chief objectives of the original 1957 CAP – food security.

The government could declare that self-sufficiency should be an aspiration, that, at the very least, there should be a return to the level of the 1980s. Of course, it would mean an increase in some prices, but they would be stabilised, and there would be a reduction in the availability of such products a sugar snap peas, but it would mean that there could be an elimination of uncertainty and fear.

Posted in This sceptred isle | 4 Comments

Voices in the morning

Before six o’clock on an August morning and there is the sound of children’s voices coming down the road. Perhaps it is the warm weather prompting people to venture out early. With the windows open, the morning news is audible from the next door neighbour’s radio. Looking across toward Dorset, the lack of rain has turned the landscape more gold than green.

It was such mornings as this which seemed special in my childhood years, the times when the world was occupied only by the early risers and when the sights and sounds of workaday life were yet to appear.

Perhaps it was growing up in this rural village distant from large towns or cities that helped preserve the quietness of the hours before 7 o’clock. The village still remains too distant for its tranquility to be broken by commuters setting out on their daily journeys, instead the earliness is the space of farmers embarking upon their day’s work, and children enjoying the days of their summer holidays.

In childhood days, on some farms, cattle would have been inside after the milking of the night before. Once morning milking was complete, they would have been turned out to pasture for the day. If meadows were not contiguous to the farm, they would have been moved sedately along the road, always a source of frustration for the odd person who might have wished to be going somewhere.

Traffic in those times would have chiefly been farm vehicles, grey Massey Ferguson tractors, or perhaps blue Fords with cabs. Land Rovers were battered, canvas-roofed, with little by way of comfort in the cab, ventilation might have required opening vents at the front. The single windscreen wiper had an electric motor, but a small arm projecting from the motor allowed the driver to operate the wiper by hand. The indicators were of the semaphore variety, offering little warning to any car driver who might have been following.

The beauty of those early mornings was the sense of there being ample time, no matter what might need to be done in the day ahead, there were many hours in which to achieve it. Time before seven o’clock in the morning seemed to move much more slowly, there was less requirement to rush, less stress in completing task. Once the clock moved towards eight, the movement of the hands began to accelerate.

There were people in those mornings who became invisible in later hours. Perhaps once the tasks demanding movement beyond their own farm were completed, they stayed within their own yard. Perhaps encountering no-one and being expected to speak to no-one suited their inclination. Perhaps such people would have enjoyed the sound of voices in the morning.

 

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Whale meat again

The parody of Vera Lynn’s lyric expressed the feeling of many of those whose meat ration during the Second World war included whale meat. My father, a child in London during the war years, remembered it as tough and tasteless.

An Internet search suggests that the meat reached people’s kitchen tables in cans. It would seem logical that it would arrive processed and preserved, stacked in boxes on freighters bringing supplies. Probably it would have come from North American sources, whaling fleets would not have been able to operate in European waters. The brand name under which it was sold seems to have been Whacon, although information seems sparse. It seems to have been unrationed so was presumably more easily obtained than traditional meat which had become scarce with the drive to grow grain and vegetables. Perhaps it was its availability which made it memorable..

Having one uncle who farms beef cattle and another who raises pigs, I have no problem with people eating meat and happily do so when visiting my Aberdeen Angus eating uncle. For health and economy’s sake, I eat vegetarian meals, but that’s more a matter of inclination than conviction.

I think, however, I would draw a line at eating whalemeat. They seem too intelligent creatures to deserve such a fate as ending up on a dinner table.

I had assumed that most Europeans shared a similar view of eating whales. I had assumed that the vast mysterious mammals had attained a place in the natural hierarchy where they ranked alongside cats and dogs in commanding human respect.

While watching the BBC 4 Scandi-crime series Trom, it was a surprise to discover that whalemeat was still on the menu for families. The fact that some eight hundred pilot whales are caught for meat each year was an unexpected discovery.

While some among the Faroese hunt whales, in France there has been great concern about a beluga whale that had swum up the Seine. There seems to have been widespread media interest in the operation to try to persuade the whale to return to cold salt water.

In contrast with the more abstemious Danes, France has seemed more often a place where animals of all shapes and sizes have ended up on the dinner table. Snails, horse, and each September the shooting down of all sorts of birds, not to mention the bullfighting popular from the Basque coast to Provence.

From a purely rational viewpoint, the resources expended on attempts to save a single whale seem irrational, but rationality has never formed part of our attitudes to animals.

Posted in The stuff of daily life | 2 Comments

The end of the weekend

Sunday evening – once it would have seemed a moment of disappointment.

Weekends in Somerset in my teenage years had a format.  It was a format that cannot have been prolonged or frequent, but which seemed to have a quality never recaptured in later years.

Perhaps it was the second half of 1978, for it could have been neither much earlier nor much later.  There was a routine, a pattern, a sequence that shaped the hours from Friday until Sunday evening.

Sixth form college discos and birthday parties were always on a Thursday, perhaps the venues were cheaper, so there would be no going out at the weekends.

Friday night was spent listening to Tommy Vance’s Rock Show on BBC Radio 1, ‘TV on the radio’, declared the slogan. It was ostensibly a time spent working on ‘A’ level studies, though examiners would later agree that more time had been spent listening to music than on reading books.

Saturday mornings were a lazy time.

At two o’clock the radio would be retuned to BBC Radio 2 for the sports coverage, real attention being paid from four o’clock onwards when there would be live commentary from the second half of a featured Division 1 match.

In an age of constant live football coverage, it is hard to imagine it then being such a rarity. At five o’clock, the kitchen would be filled with the sound of the theme tune of Sports Report and the unmistakable voice of James Alexander Gordon would read the classified football results. Even if one missed an actual score, the inflection of his voice would indicate how the match had finished.

Saturday evening television was from a time when BBC programmes might attract tens of millions of viewers. There was The Generation Game, and Parkinson and Match of the Day.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine why so many watched The Generation Game, even Bruce, the ever cheerful presenter must have felt frequent cringe moments. But when there are only three television channels, only one television in the house, and there is not much money to go out  do anything else, there was little alternative.

Late on Saturday night, there would be the Hammer House of Horror or Westerns where the bad guys would commit some heinous crime and would be tracked down and shot by the good guys. There was something unsatisfactory in the films where the bad guys did not get shot.

Sunday morning was a time for sleeping. Turning on the radio at midday, the Old Record Club would challenge the recall of songs and artists while the Sunday lunch was being cooked. At two o’clock, the music of Annie Nightingale’s programme  accompanied the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon. By evening time, there was a realisation that the work attempted while listening to Tommy Vance was still unfinished.

It would be difficult to pretend that there was much by the way of ‘enjoyment’ in such weekends; there was never anything remarkable, never anything exciting, never anything that might have made one say on Monday morning, ‘do you know where I went?’

Yet, in the nothingness, there was a contentment.

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Blotting out a judge

Walking through Dorchester yesterday, I passed a pub named after the judge responsible for the 1685 Bloody Assizes.

Looking up at the pub sign, that reputedly reproduces the judge’s image, I metaphorically spat at him and said out loud the words of the Jewish curse, the Yimakh Shemo, ‘May his name be blotted out’.

Perhaps my words were a retreat into a way of thinking that Nietzsche would have regarded as a mark of weakness, a seeking of refuge in some religious abstraction.

The wish that someone will be forgotten forever, the definitive curse in the Jewish tradition, might bring a monetary sense of satisfaction, but it does nothing to change the actual reality. It does not remove them from history.

The hanging judge is too much remembered. He will have fulfilled what is perhaps an irrational desire, irrational for we shall never know if it has been fulfilled. He will have fulfilled a wish to be remembered after he was dead, a wish that is deep-rooted in our human psyche. Even if it were only on a single pub sign in an English county town, he is remembered.

Turning the corner and walking down the main street of Dorset’s county town, I came to Barclay’s Bank. A blue plaque on the wall declares, ‘This house is reputed to have been lived in by the MAYOR of CASTERBRIDGE in THOMAS HARDY’S story of that name.’

Of course, the Mayor of Casterbridge never existed, and if he had, would he have wished for a plaque to remember him?

Michael Henchard, Hardy’s fictional character, ends his self-destructive life rebuffed by his daughter and alone.  He pronounces a Yimakh Shemo upon himself. Few people would ever write a will like that of Michael Henchard:

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.
& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.
& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
& that no flours be planted on my grave.
& that no man remember me.
To this I put my name.
Michael Henchard

Meeting a Jewish friend this afternoon, I recounted my use of the Yimakh Shemo when encountering the picture of the judge.

‘I don’t think his name would be respected by anyone’, he responded.

‘I would rather he wasn’t remembered by anyone’. .

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