by Jay Rayner
It took me a while, but I finally found what it was that had me chucking the book against the wall. It was in the chapter on agriculture. I can’t pretend. Part of the problem is God. You know the chap: white robes, big beard, omniscient. Despite having started life as an atheist, Schumacher ended it as a Bible-quoting Catholic. I, however, have undergone no such conversion and don’t see one popping along any day soon. As far as I’m concerned I might as well believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden as take my lead from an all-powerful deity of whose existence I have no proof.
We were, I know, raised as children to believe in tolerance and respect for the views and opinions of others. That’s how you play nice. The older I get the harder I find it to muster both bits of that lesson. I can do tolerance. I’m excellent at tolerance. I tolerate lots of things that annoy me hugely: right-wing politicians, people who like their steaks served well done, homeopaths, Dick Cheney.
I find the respect bit much, much tougher. I don’t understand why theists think there is some higher power. It’s as simple as that. To me it seems deranged. But as long as you aren’t using that belief system as an excuse for abusing kids, as a way to stop people having sex with whomsoever they want, or as grounds for mounting military interventions, then go right ahead. Worship Bart Simpson as your god, for all I care. I’ll happily tolerate you. But if you start using the existence of God as a way to support your argument, well then, we’re never really going to be friends. You will end up having to do a little more than tolerate me.
Schumacher uses the existence of God as a way to support his argument. He even quotes the Pope (a slightly dodgy one back then, Pope Paul VI, who went out of his way to defend his predecessor for staying silent throughout the Holocaust, during a trip to Israel). He also quotes that bit from Genesis about us having dominion over the fish in the sea and the fowl in the air and so on, before announcing that ‘Man, the highest of his creatures, was given “dominion”, not the right to tyrannize.’ I’m with the sentiment. I make a point of never tyrannizing fish. It’s bad manners.
But if you start quoting from a big book of made-up stories to make your point I am going to become deeply suspicious of your motives. Schumacher also argues that more of us need to live and work on the land to be happy; that living in cities is an unnatural thing for people to do. Or, as he puts it, we must work on the land to keep humanity ‘in touch with living nature’. We must, he says, ‘become reconciled with the natural world’.
Really? I’m not at all convinced by the natural world, or at least not the one he’s describing. I like cities. I like the noise and the clutter, the buzz and the speed and the rush and the tumble of cities. I like the crush of humanity. I think human beings are essentially sociable animals, which is why more and more of us now live in urban areas than outside of them. I don’t mind visiting the countryside now and then. My wife used to make me go hill walking in Yorkshire. When I asked her why we couldn’t get a cab instead of walking over the hills, I was only joking. I didn’t mind walking up and down hills. But cities do make more sense. They’re the environmentally sound way to go. People in cities share resources in a way those in the countryside do not. We get around on public transport. We use less land by living in homes piled one on top of the other. We reduce the distances we have to travel to reach the resources we need. It’s the country dwellers with their two-car households driving the kids ten miles to school and back every day, and living on huge plots of land, who are swallowing the resources.
But it’s the notion that small is beautiful which troubles me. To be fair, Schumacher was suspicious of the book’s title, and had it thrust upon him. He feared it would reduce his theories to a soundbite, and his fears were well founded. In the book he does recognize the need for certain types of large-scale organization. Nevertheless, agriculture isn’t among them. Schumacher insists that small units of production are the way to go with farming, and in a modern context this seems peculiar to me. Surely we need to pool resources, just as city dwellers do? Surely, if we are worried about the way we are using and abusing our natural capital, it makes sense for us to use it in a way that gains the greatest outputs from the smallest of inputs? Or, to put it another way, a ten-acre farm could manage on one tractor. But so, for that matter, could a twenty-acre farm. Or a thirty-acre farm. Lots of small farms means lots of doubling up on equipment and labour. That can’t be right.
We have an awful lot of people to feed. We can have a debate about the imperative of family planning, which makes a huge amount of sense and must be a long-term goal (though it risks over-simplifying things: families in the developing world will only start reducing their family size when health and nutrition have improved to such a degree that parents know the smaller number of kids they are having will survive into adulthood).
For now, though, we have a population of over seven billion to feed, which is projected to rise by another couple of billion by mid-century. Surely this is not the moment for us all to go running back to the land, farming it as the Rwandans do? Schumacher also has a way of making statements as though they were facts, when they are just a bit of subjective babble. Among the things agriculture must do, he says, is ‘humanize and ennoble man’s wider habitat’, without for a moment explaining what any of this means save to say that he doesn’t think modern agriculture is especially good at humanizing and ennobling anything.
What troubles me most, though, is the way Schumacher appears to believe there is this thing called ‘the natural world’ which humanity floats above; that modern agriculture makes it impossible to ‘keep man in real touch with living nature’. It’s a view shared by many, many critics of modern agriculture, the ones who bellow at us that we need to re-engineer our food production system so that it is small-scale and local to us. Huge, industrial-scale farming, they say, is just unnatural.
It’s the ‘n’ word, you see: nature, and more particularly the idea that we and it are completely separate. I have a real problem with that.
WHATEVER COMES NATURALLY
Ideas of what constitutes natural human behaviour are a little more fluid when you’ve grown up with an agony aunt as a mother. Claire’s postbag, which contained around a thousand letters a week, was a primer on what human beings could get up to with each other given half a chance, and none of it was a secret. She didn’t believe in those. She worked from home, with my dad as her manager, a team of secretaries as support, and us kids as backstop to stuff envelopes with leaflets when the need arose. The sorting out of other people’s pain, trouble and neuroses was therefore the family business. As a 10-year-old boy I knew things: what the symptoms of the menopause are, how a tub of natural yoghurt can be used to soothe thrush, how a ‘loving massage’ can be used to get the long-marrieds shagging again. You know; all the things a 10-year-old boy really needs to know.
The contents of that postbag could quite as easily be discussed at the breakfast table as in the office, and it often was. Much of it was mundane and obvious: the teenage girl being pressured by a boyfriend to go to bed with him; the son arguing with his parents as he fights for independence; the married man who is considering having an affair and wants to know whether it’s OK. And then, inevitably, there were the enquiries about the odd, weird and wonderful but very human sexual behaviour that people seemed to indulge in. They knew they liked the way it made them feel. They just needed to know whether nice was the same as good. Some of them were heartbreaking: the gay teenagers who knew what they wanted but feared (often correctly) that they would be abandoned by their family and friends if they came out, the elderly widower who missed his wife of fifty years, craved the physical contact of sex, and wanted to know whether it could ever be OK to pay for it.
Others were just plain funny. One morning my mother opened the post at the breakfast table to reveal a life-size wooden carving of an erect cock, the glans painted a delicate shade of purple over the wood’s natural grain. The sender was concerned about the shape of his erection – it leaned a litt
le to the left, Tower of Pisa style – and had therefore ‘decided’ that the best way to get the issue sorted was to spend months carving a version of it out of wood, because sending a photo might have been deemed impolite. (Yeah, right.) There was the other chap who phoned Claire up at her desk one morning and asked whether she’d mind having a listen ‘while I have a wank’.
‘Well, if you must,’ my mother replied. She placed the receiver down on the desk, got on with her work, and picked it up again a few minutes later to check he’d finished.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Jolly good. Take care.’
From decades of this sort of stuff, my mother fashioned a philosophy: that defining what was ‘natural’ human behaviour was akin to counting the grains of sand on a beach. It was one of the glorious things about being human. Some people liked to be spanked. Some were foot fetishists or had a thing about earlobes. Others could only do it outside, a few needed cuddly toys nearby, or for almost all clothes to be in place, or for The Muppet Show to be on telly at the time. I may be making some of these things up, but only because she is no longer around for me to check with, which means I’m only leaving out far weirder fetishes than the ones I have described. Her view came down to this: as long as nobody was being coerced, as long as nobody was at risk of being seriously hurt, as long as everybody involved was of sound mind, as long as it didn’t involve children or animals and doing it didn’t make you anxious and uptight, it was fine. (Although I do recall a letter from a quite elderly and obviously lonely lady who had somehow trained her dog – an Alsatian, I believe – to perform cunnilingus upon her and wanted to know whether this was OK. Claire concluded that as long as the dog didn’t mind it seemed pretty harmless.)
Certainly, when challenged on TV and radio about the naturalness of a certain type of behaviour, she would demand a definition of natural. At best the opposition would resort to something from the Bible, because it was always the Christian right who found her most obnoxious. At which point she would know she had won. There are passages in Leviticus which say it’s OK to own slaves, as long as they come from neighbouring nations, though I suspect if I tried to place my mates from Cardiff into bondage they might be a bit cross about it. Leviticus also says that it is a sin punishable by death to cut the hair around your temples. I’m obviously in the clear, but I do worry about my sons, who like to keep their hair short. Exodus insists that anybody who works on the Sabbath should be put to death, which seems a bit unfair on the lovely Kurdish family who run the convenience store at the end of our street. When it comes to defining what’s natural the Bible isn’t really the best of primers. If it proposes execution for a bit of Sunday trading, what in God’s name – and I mean that literally for once – will it come up with for a bit of innocent foot fetishism?
One afternoon a year or two back I had a cup of tea with Vivian Moses, Visiting Professor of Biotechnology at King’s College London. It turned out he and my mother had similar views, even though his didn’t encompass the general fetishisms of bondage, flagellation or enemas. We were discussing the science behind genetically modified foods, and the arguments made against them by opponents. These included the fact that it wasn’t ‘natural’.
Professor Moses sighed, shook his head, and said, ‘Are humans natural?’
I hesitated. I sensed a trick question. Plus I’d always hated philosophy seminars when I was at university. Suddenly I was back in one, and the passage of time had done nothing to make me feel more comfortable with the game of sparring that such things demand.
‘Well, I …’
‘It’s not a complicated question. Is humanity a natural phenomenon?’
‘Well, yes, of course. Humans evolved naturally.’
‘Right. So it follows that anything humans do is their natural behaviour?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Then the idea that the use of biotechnology is unnatural is rubbish because it is an example of natural human behaviour.’
I stirred my lemon tea. It was one of those light-bulb moments, the argument so simple and so obvious, and yet it had never occurred to me in that way before. So when the great Ernst Schumacher started quoting ecologists as saying there are natural laws in relation to the environment that man cannot break, he is talking cobblers. The idea that there is a natural world and that mankind is crawling about upon it, like some grubby, disease-ridden unnatural parasite, is, to use the sort of language Professor Moses might find unseemly, also total bollocks. From the moment we cross-bred grasses on the banks of the River Nile over 5,000 years ago to produce the first arable crops we were impressing ourselves upon the life cycle of plants. Undomesticated cattle do not produce milk all year round. We made them (and continue to make them) do that. Apart from a few rare places – the Arctic, say, or bits of desert – humanity has shaped almost every bit of the landscape upon which we work, because that’s what we do. That’s what we are. It’s only natural.
So trying to argue against certain types of agriculture because they are unnatural or because they violate rules of nature just isn’t going to work. It’s not just a flimsy argument. In terms of classical logic, it’s not even an argument. It’s just a bunch of non sequiturs. It is the logic of the placard and slogan. It’s lazy. That’s not to excuse everything humanity does. On this planet, as far as we know, we are uniquely blessed with a conscience. We are responsible for our actions. But if you are intent on criticizing the way we interact with that planet, and the many and various things that we have done to it, you are going to have to come up with something far better than notions of what is natural and what is unnatural. There is no such thing as unnatural. There are, however, such things as good practice and bad practice.
As a result, when we come to think about farming and whether small really is the way to go, we have to be a bit more sophisticated about it. Without some blunt, specious rule to fall back on – it’s against NATURE! – we have to look at things in the round. We have to weigh up all parts of the equation. We have to understand what benefits big might bring.
To which end, anybody fancy an apple?
High on a hill to the west of Canterbury, on a plot that looks out over the Stour valley, there is a grave. Six lines of old Bramley apple trees have been grubbed out from the middle of a sloping orchard to make way for it, leaving scars of dark, tilled earth, so that it sits surrounded by an open garland of further trees which have just come into confetti-white blossom.
‘It’s the right place for him to be,’ says Chris Lynch, general manager of Mansfield’s, the biggest grower of apples in Britain. He has taken me up there in a muddied 4x4 to have a look at the grave, and we sit now studying the cleft and heave of the Kentish hills, dressed with neat rows of burgeoning fruit trees that march away from us in all directions. The company was founded in the sixties by a one-time greengrocer from London’s East Ham called Buddy Mansfield. He died in September 2011 aged 88, and he lies now in the grave I’m looking at. Despite my best efforts, this is as close as I’ve managed to get to a Mansfield by blood all morning.
Things are not going to plan.
People had been talking to me for a while about Mansfield’s, but always in hushed tones. They had told me the company was the future of food production in Britain, that it was run by an extraordinarily astute man from London’s East End – Buddy’s son, Paul – who was almost single-handedly revolutionizing the shape of fruit production in Britain. I was told it grew 17 per cent of all the apples produced in Britain and packed 25 per cent of them, that it was constantly expanding, adding massive acreage to the 3,500 it already owned. Paul Mansfield was eating up Kent. If I wanted to get a sense of what farming in Britain might look like in the future, Mansfield’s was where I had to go.
‘But he can be a little tricky,’ one contact said to me. ‘He’s very, very careful about what he says and who he talks to.’ Or, as someone else put it to me, ‘He doesn’t do much talking at all.’
I imagined he didn’t need
to. The numbers did all the talking for him.
Paul Mansfield began to sound like the Blofeld of the apple business. I imagined him in some rough-hewn lair of the sort designed by Ken Adams for the Bond movies, sitting in a black leather chair, stroking a white cat while instructing minions to take control of the global apple crop. Today the wealds of Kent. Tomorrow the world! To the left of him, Everests of Braeburn; to the right, Mont Blancs of Jazz. There would be perfect, shiny, grade-A uniform apples as far as the eye could see. Not that I really need to over-work this dusty old imagery because that’s pretty much how many opponents of ‘Big Agriculture’ see it.
‘In its short shameless history,’ the highly regarded American journalist Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote on the Environment360 website in April 2012, ‘big agriculture has had only one idea: uniformity.’ Action Aid has talked about how agricultural behemoths ‘are draining wealth from rural communities, marginalizing small-scale farming, and infringing people’s rights’. Food and Water Watch, a US-based lobby group, has talked about ‘a tiny cabal of agri-businesses and food manufacturers’ which has ‘a stranglehold on every link of the food chain’. It’s all about dominating the landscape, bending nature to its will, asserting human superiority over the resources provided to us and putting the demands of big business first. If small is beautiful, then it would stand to reason that big would be ugly.