It's now mid-January 2006 and I hope that Charlie and I have signed the last cheque for capital costs for the farm. We've rented an extra five acres on which we plan to grow just vegetables. No animals, no plants, just rows and rows of sprouts, carrots, onions, cabbages, cauliflowers, courgettes, beans, peas, beets, turnips, swedes and spinach. There seems to be no feasible way of fulfilling our contract with Dillington House unless we do. But the new field has meant new fences, new gates and the purchase of fifty poplar trees to provide shelter from the north wind along one side of the field. I walk across it on a bitingly cold day, crunching through the stubble left over from last year's crop and shiver. Just this time a year ago, we were still hauling old fridges out of the area where the chickens now live. I know how much work it has been and how much it has cost, but although I can see that, on paper at least, we need to expand in order to produce enough to supply not only Dillington but everything that the Popp Inn (with which we have arranged a small, regular supply contract) needs, as well as some other local restaurants. I'm worried. Bob, who used to be a council worker in Yeovil, mowing the roundabouts and tidying up the town's public spaces, is now with us full-time. Clearly we needed an extra pair of hands, but that means another salary to pay.
The original budget is way out of kilter. Last night Charlie and I decided that we needed to have a serious financial conversation with David, but we're both rather dreading it. The farm has grown in lopsided ways with little formal structure and hope has generally triumphed over more serious considerations of profit and loss. Charlie is good with figures: his VAT returns go in on time and he compiles them himself. I bundle all my receipts, bills, invoices and cheque stubs into an envelope and send them to my accountant with only days to go before the quarterly deadlines. In our marriage, Charlie looks after our joint finances, but I'm meant to be in charge of the farm business and I've been ducking the need to sit down with David to hammer out just where our investments are going and, more importantly, when and what money will be coming in. But I'm cheered when David tells me that the chickens laid seventy-five eggs yesterday, 17 January, their record production to date. We've laid four-inch-wide bendy blue plastic perforated pipes through their run and the ground is now dry, despite the heavy rains. It may be fanciful, but I think they look happier, standing around in peaceful groups and pecking the ground for grubs, their eyes bright, their feathers glossy.
Since we started the farm, I've been reading copiously about food, farming, the countryside, the environment and animals. One of the best books I've read is Felicity Lawrence's Not on the Label. This searing indictment of supermarket practices lifts the lid on chicken production, food miles, additives and more. I met Felicity at the beginning of January at the Soil Association's annual conference in London. When she learned that our smallholding was just outside Ilminster, she told me she'd recently written about the situation in Chard, a small Somerset town five miles away, where Portuguese immigrants have been brought in to work for Oscar Mayer, a firm which manufactures ready meals for Sainsbury's.
There are, she told me, enormous problems with the Portuguese immigrants and they are directly linked to the cheap food available in our supermarkets. Oscar Mayer, which employs 900 people, was also once the owner of Hygrade Meats, where David spent his dismal years processing pork into ham and stuffing it into packets. Supermarkets keep firms such as Oscar Mayer on a tight financial string. Their contracts are never assured and can be cancelled at a moment's notice. Like many companies that have contributed to the UK's economic success in the last decade, Oscar Mayer has invested in all the latest technology to keep up with the demands of the supermarkets, their main employers. When Tesco opened up their 'metro' stores in the middle of busy high streets, they ripped out the storerooms in the back to create extra retail space. Computers linked to cash registers signal when supplies of product are running low; these messages are fed to trucks which restock the shelves, sometimes several times a day. This technique, where nothing is kept in stock and food is constantly on the move in trucks, is known as 'just in time'. For the supermarkets, it means prices are kept down because food is never idling in storage, but supplying this market means that firms like Oscar Mayer have to cope with huge and often last-minute fluctuations in orders. The retailer's risk of under- or over-supplying is kept to a minimum by transferring the risks down the line. Meeting this unpredictable demand requires plenty of casual labour, which firms like these achieve by hiring workers from countries with high unemployment and rudimentary labour rights. Between 2000 and 200I, Oscar Mayer in Chard found itself unable to recruit a sufficiently large, flexible workforce locally. So they looked abroad, especially to some of Europe's poorer countries.
Employment agencies were quick to exploit the need, placing advertisements in newspapers in European countries with areas of high unemployment, offering jobs in Great Britain. In the case of Oscar Mayer's Chard operation, the spotlight fell on Portugal. In return for employment, migrant Portuguese toiling on the conveyer belts in Oscar Mayer's chilly factory in Chard receive the minimum wage of £5.05. While in the UK, the foreign workers are the sole responsibility of the employment agencies. This means that though the workers' wages are indirectly paid by supermarkets, they can conveniently distance themselves from the realities through this complex chain of out-sourcing.
I tracked down the local boss of the GMB for the West Country, Tony Dowling, who had been agitating on behalf of the Portuguese, and we arranged to meet in the Phoenix pub in Chard's once-grand high street, which now looks down-atheel and scruffy, with charity shops vying for space next to cheap clothes shops. Chard was once a town of some significance, a major cloth-making centre in the Middle Ages and a prosperous lace-making town until the early 1900s. Set in the heart of rich farmland, it was a centre for small farmers until the post-war years, when farms consolidated and smaller players were forced out of business. Ilminster folk visit Chard to shop in Tesco or Lidl, the German supermarket chain which sells products in bulk for very low prices.
Tony is a friendly, engaging man with a black beard and bright, humorous eyes. In the late 1980s he worked at the Oscar Mayer factory on the spice machines. His job was to assemble the specific bags of spices that were needed in each ready meal. He'd weigh and measure, weigh and measure for eight long hours, day in, day out. To preserve the food, the temperature in the factory is kept very low, making the air chilly and damp, like living in the cold food section of a supermarket freezer. Over a pint of West Country bitter, Tony explains how the system works.
The Portuguese workers arrive in Chard unable to speak English; most have no money to their name. They live eight to ten in small, rented two- and three-bedroom houses and are picked up by truck each day for their twelve-hour factory shifts. The agency extracts rent, the cost of cleaning, transport, laundry directly from their pay packets. Tony suggested that there were some migrant workers who pay £65 a week in rent alone, which, as the houses themselves rent out at only about £450 a month, means hefty profits for the agencies. Added into their profit is the charge to Oscar Mayer: for each worker they claim just over £7 per hour, so earning themselves a tidy £2 every hour, right round the clock, as Oscar Mayer operates twenty-four hours a day.
Broke and unable to speak the language, the Portuguese are dependent on the agencies for their wellbeing. But their presence effects the town. Locals who find themselves living next to a house full of disgruntled foreign workers with whom they can't communicate turn into low-level racists. For Oscar Mayer, the immigrant workers are the perfect employees: they can't complain, they don't belong to unions and they can be chucked out whenever the bosses want. And because the agencies don't subscribe to British union rules, they don't have to pay overtime rates. The Portuguese put in extra hours, all on the minimum wage, so the local employees no longer get the right to do extra hours at time-and-a-half when they need extra cash. Tony sees the treatment of immigrant labour as an assault on all workers' rights. 'If you can employ th
em and pay them the minimum then why bother to employ English people who demand more?'
I used to think that it was only the chickens and livestock who suffered in our never-ending quest for cheaper food, but it is people too. The carpets in the Phoenix are frayed and there are cigarette marks on the wooden table we're sitting round. At night the pub employs bouncers to kick out troublemakers. Chard isn't a wealthy town and Oscar Mayer is its largest employer; the firm's continued success is crucial to the town's economic prosperity. Tony points out that the supermarkets operate by comparing profits, and thus fixing prices among each other, not by considering what is fair and reasonable. Our cash-rich, time-poor society has provided the platform on which the supermarkets have built the business of ready meals and convenience foods.
Thirty-five years ago, all you could buy in the ready-meals line were Vesta curries, a dried concoction sold in an exotic looking box which, every so often, my mother would dish up for dinner. I remember always being delighted by Vesta suppers, particularly because we often ate them in front of the television. They were an alternative to my mother's rather monotonous meals. She didn't like to cook, and I don't think she much enjoyed the business of eating. Her portions were always small, she didn't like meat and she hated encountering something new and possibly strange. I have a vivid memory of my mother, father and me going out to lunch in Denmark with some friends of my sister Collette's new Danish husband. The meal was long and lots of small courses were served: cold pork, salamis, liver paste, stuffed rolled beef and at least five varieties of pickled herring. Not a vegetable in sight. My mother kept refusing the various plates as they were offered. Then came a large flat dish on which were arranged what looked like two or three packets of Birds Eye fish fingers, deep fried, golden coloured breaded rectangles, garnished with lemon wedges and crisp lettuce leaves. She brightened and helped herself to three. I watched my mother trying to cut off a bite sized piece, her enthusiasm giving way to horror as she realised that these breaded rectangles weren't the same as those she so often dished up to her children, accompanied by frozen green peas and a dollop of ketchup. Our host spotted her consternation. 'Fried whale skin, a great delicacy,' he said, smiling happily as he speared a hefty chunk on to his fork. I could see her glancing around, clearly wondering where she might hide these fishy horrors. As our host launched into an involved story about whale hunting in Greenland, I watched her slide two of the breaded rectangles off the plate, into her hand, and from there into the leather bag at her feet.
I don't remember her ever saying that something was delicious, or licking her fingers after scraping something tasty from the bottom of the pan. No effort was made to teach my sister or me to cook. Maybe she thought that school would take care of such matters, but all the domestic science I learned at Cheltenham Ladies' College involved making a blue-andwhite shift dress and a grey shirt for my boyfriend when I was fourteen. At home we ate our way through a limited repertoire of dishes: chops with two veg, baked fillets of sole smothered in breadcrumbs and Heinz tomato ketchup, the occasional roast chicken. For dinner parties she became more adventurous: an egg mousse with a brilliant tomato-based hot sauce, a delicious coffee meringue pudding and, for the main course, a boned shoulder of lamb in garlic, red wine and coriander, which she served with green beans and mashed potato. It proved that Mum could cook and cook well when occasion demanded. This meal was a big hit with Dad and their friends and in my memory it seemed that she always produced it whenever we had guests.
Over the winter months, Oscar Mayer manufactures 900,000 ready meals a week, and I think my mother would have loved them: chicken ala king, beef bourguignon, Lancashire hotpot. They would have expanded her repertoire without the bother and mess of handling raw meat. My mother was unusual among her peers in her dislike of things domestic, though in 1956, when Constance Spry published her 1,200page magnum opus of recipes and cooking tips, she noted that: 'Since it would seem to be the simple duty of any woman with a home to run, of those with any civic conscience, to understand about food and cooking, it is strange how low the subject ranks in the estimation of many academically minded people. The influence of good food in the bringing up of children, its importance in the building-up of a strong people, the contribution it may make to the harmonious running of a home, may be acknowledged theoretically, but there is still a tendency to consider the subject suitable primarily either for girls who cannot make the grade for a university or for those who intend to become teachers.'
My mother, university-educated but frustrated by her subsequent life as a housewife, was clearly one of those who ranked cooking as a lowly pursuit and she passed her lack of interest on to me. In my turn, I furthered the belief that cooking was a demeaning pursuit for women who wanted to get on in a man's world. In 1972, when I was twenty-one, I co-founded Spare Rib magazine with an Australian friend, Marsha Rowe. The newly emerging feminist movement wanted to get women out of the typing pools and away from the kitchen sinks and into the boardrooms of the land. I remember being particularly adamant in my belief that the way to get ahead was to refuse to learn to type and to spend as little time as possible in the kitchen. As a subscription offer for the magazine we printed a purple dishcloth, which, though tattered and a bit torn, is still in use in our home today. Written on it are the words: 'First you sink into his arms, then your arms end up in his sink.'
By the mid-1970's, when Spare Rib was three years old, more than half of all UK households were equipped with the first wave of labour-saving electrical appliances: fridgefreezers, Kenwood mixers, non-stick pans and dishwashers. Ours was an exception: till the end of her life my mother always refused to have a dishwasher on the grounds that it was a waste of money. She would often start washing up a meal before everyone had finished eating, a habit which I sadly, on occasion, find myself repeating.
Supermarkets such as Sainsbury's, with their efficient coldstorage distribution, fulfilled the demand for convenience frozen foods, peas, pastry, pies and complete packaged meals. Liberated from domestic slavery by these modern miracles, women were, in theory, no longer required to devote all their time to household chores. My generation of women wholeheartedly embraced the workplace and it was just as well, since when it came to generating the necessary purchasing power to keep up with the technological revolution, two incomes were certainly better than one. Influenced by American prosperity, the boom in advertising, the arrival of credit cards (Barclaycard arrived in the UK in 1966) and built-in obsolescence in the gadgetry, the latest fashionable must-haves were essential to maintain and improve a rising standard of living. With no one at home in the kitchen, modern families willingly embraced the cultural revolution of oven-ready preprepared meals eaten not in the kitchen but in the sittingroom, in front of the TV. By the 1980s - the decade of the super-woman who could work full-time, bring up children, run a home and knock up a mid-week dinner party for eightabout a third of households owned microwaves, the ultimate gadget to minimise cooking time. Kitchens equipped with a large fridge-freezer as well as a microwave ushered in the era of the true 'ready meal', and the untimely demise of the great tradition of domestic cookery in British homes. Sales of convenience foods ballooned to til billion in 2001, and are projected to grow by 33 percent over the next ten years. In 2005, the Guardian analysed the contents of some of Britain's best-selling ready meals: Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Luxury Shepherd's Pie, 'based on the Ivy restaurant's recipe', and sold to the public as a healthy meal that you could have made at home if you'd only had the time, contained sixtynine separate ingredients, including a large range of chemical flavourings, preservatives, hardened fats and laboratory-made additions like wheat gluten and dextrin. When I make shepherd's pie, I use just six: mince, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, Worcester sauce and beef stock. Britain has the uneasy distinction of eating 49 percent of all the ready meals consumed in Europe. For companies like Oscar Mayer, this trend is nothing less than a licence to make ever-increasing profits.
We
didn't devote much space in Spare Rib to food, although in the first year we ran articles entitled 'Greedy Picnics' and 'Edible Presents'. Neither involved cooking and we certainly never thought that it was important to tell women how to feed their families. Within a year of its birth, food vanished entirely from the magazine's pages. Today, cook books dominate the best-seller lists: in 2005 their sales grew by 22 percent, while fiction increased by 5 percent. When Charlie and I merged our respective households in 1999, we ended up with well over a hundred cook books between us. We actually use fewer than ten of them. They're a kind of harmless porn, allowing you to fantasise about what you might, one day, get round to cooking. Of the two of us, Charlie is by far the better cook, and at weekends he dishes up an endlessly varied selection of meals, made, whenever possible, from the contents of our garden. So far we haven't eaten any of our own meat, but our eggs have yellow yolks the colour of sunflowers and taste delicious.
Just after Christmas 2005 two new characters joined our bird flock: the turkeys, George and Mildred. George is unpleasant, though very exotic. If >I'd met him in a swamp in Botswana I'd have immediately started taking photos of this mad-looking creature. He's huge, heavy, with scrappy feathers and a piece of blue and red flesh that hangs down from his nose, completely covering his beak, a fleshy extension so long that it swings to and fro when he walks. Round his neck there's an ungainly pile of folded layers of red skin which he can puff up to emit furious gobbling noises. Even the wonderful Galapagos frigate birds, their red necks blown up and out into huge balloons as they soar above the drabber females, hoping that their colours will prove the most attractive, have nothing on George's tools of attraction. When he's sexually excited his neck swells up to the size of a large grapefruit, a bright, pillarbox red which contrasts weirdly with the blue of the skin on his head. The fleshy tube that hangs down from his beak swells and stiffens, like a virtual reality erection. His big, round body, perched atop sturdy legs with big-clawed feet, is covered in long feathers, black, brown, grey, yellowish, lots of shades of colour, which shimmer in the sunlight, turning shades of green and orange. Mildred, by contrast, is a sad, dull-looking creature. She is almost bald, her small head covered with very short, grey hairs, as though she's had a bad haircut. Her feathers are grey and brown, not that short, not that long, just boring. She always seems to be looking down at the ground, as though life has defeated her.
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 8