Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
rats, were left in the woods to feed the burgeoning population of badgers who carried out
daring raids upon our gardens, chicken-house and a highly fortified kitchen. The problem
was eventually solved by siting the chickens right next to the house - in what the French
call the
basse cour
- and feeding them a proportion of the waste.
But what I found most difficult of all was the food which was bought in to replace the
pork, beef and the dairy that various members of Happy Valley wouldn't eat. My under-
standing of a subsistence-based rural community is that, by and large, you eat what you
produce; and failing that, you eat what can be sourced in your locality or region. The food
our community produced - vegetables, fruits, apple juice, potatoes, milk, yoghurt, cheese,
butter, pork, beef, eggs, dripping and lard - together with other local or UK produce such
as honey and mackerel, and staples such as wheat, oats, beet sugar and salt, was sufficient
to provide a wholesome and varied diet, not that different from the one I was brought up
on in the 1950s.
Others did not feel the same, because every two or three weeks the community ordered
a consignment of food to the value of at least £200 from a wholefood wholesaler in
Bristol which trades under the misnomer Essential Foods. The majority of foods delivered
were foreign imports, usually of high nutritional value, and often from Third World coun-
tries. Chick peas, various kinds of beans and dals, soya milk, soya yogurt and other soya
products, margarine, vegetable oil, olive oil, brazil nuts, peanut butter, tahini, coconut,
molasses, dried fruits, canned tomatoes, rice, quinoa, hot chocolate and coffee were typical
foreign products, and the most common source countries were the Indian subcontinent, Ch-
ina, Turkey and the USA.
I dare say these comments appear impertinent or censorious. People make personal de-
cisions about what they eat: criticizing someone's diet is almost as offensive as criticizing
their religion. Besides, I consume a number of foreign imports myself, mostly coffee and
spices and citrus marmalade, for which there is no locally grown substitute. But it is in-
structive to compare Happy Valley's home produced fare with its imported food, because
it provides a demonstration of the limitations of vegan and vegetarian diets in a northern
country.
Particularly noticeable in the list of foods bought in by the community are fat products.
All communal cooking at Happy Valley requires imported fat or oil because there aren't
any edible vegetable oils grown in this country on any scale, aside from rape oil, which
walnut oil are sometimes advanced as alternatives, but nobody is yet producing these at a
price that is remotely competitive with rape oil, beef dripping or butter. For the time being,
if a Northern country such as the UK stopped eating meat it would either have to consume
prodigious amounts of rape oil, or else import virtually all its fat - and indeed the current
prejudice against animal fats, particularly lard, suet and dripping, but also butter, full cream
