Food is in the headlines again. "No more cheap food" exclaims the boss of Tesco, although for him a heaped dish of the finest caviar served with thinly sliced exquisite Kobe beef would cost him the amount he earned whilst making that statement. It's all cheap for him. Nevertheless over the last few decades we have all become accustomed to spending less and less as a proportion of average income on what we stuff down our colllective gullet. Back in the 1950's the average family in Britain used to spend a third of their income on it; these days it's more like 15%. Now it seems, at just the wrong time when money is tighter than ever and many are finding it hard to put food on the table, it's going to be costlier to do just that.
Why is this happening? There must be many and complex factors at play but surely one of the main reasons is the fact that food, like almost everything this planet has to offer us, has been turned into a commodity to be gambled with on the global money markets. This causes the price of all the basic ingredients for the goods on our shelves to be dependent to an ever greater extent on the vagaries and whims of wealthy investors and hedge funds rather than being based on actual supply and demand. Unlike other globally traded goods, we need food to stay alive so this trend is reducing the ability of the world's poorest to feed themselves, to say nothing of struggling households in the UK.
On the bright side, this is one more reason to seek out locally-grown produce which should be immune from the rapacities of globalised economics. Is there a veg box scheme operating locally? Time to sign up. A farmer's market? Pop down to support it. A cafe that prides itself on sourcing many of its ingredients from the surrounding area? Choose it for your hot date instead of McDonalds. Own a garden? Dig up the turf and grow your own vegetables - if I've learned to do it, and I never thought my fingers were green, then anyone can.
In Machynlleth, the town closest to me, there is a fledgling Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project in which signed-up members not only pay a tenner for their weekly veg but also volunteer a few hours a month to work in the vegetable gardens, which not only helps to make the project economically and practically viable but also brings customers face to face with the reality of where their food comes from. Maybe there's one in your town too.
I met one of the two directors of this CSA this week, Katie Hastings, an articulate and energetic woman in her twenties who also runs a project called Dyfi Land Share which seeks to link those with spare land with those who want to grow food. She was keen to find ways to support me in my land-based endeavours and suggested organising a volunteer day sometime, shipping willing recruits up to my plot to help me rip out bracken roots or some such, which sounds good to me.
Somehow she also squeezes in time to arrange the occasional course for food-growers, so last Saturday morning I attended one of these sessions on 'Organic Pest Control', taught by Ann Owen who has decades of horticultural experience, and it shows. Now I'm up to speed on how to encourage the natural predators of the garden to take care of those problem creatures which love nothing better but to eat or otherwise destroy your crops. I'll round off with a pop quiz to test how green-fingered your credentials are : which is the garden pest, centipede or millipede? To be answered in next week's blogpost...
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