A Greedy Man in a Hungry World

by Jay Rayner

  I asked Roger what he thought of the conditions in which the animals would be kept at the super dairy.

  He surprised me. There was, he said, nothing especially wrong with it. ‘People like to see cows in fields, but they don’t need to be there,’ he told me. ‘Ours aren’t out in the fields all year round. For up to six months of the winter they’ll be inside too.’ The charity Compassion in World Farming, perhaps unsurprisingly, disagreed. CIWF gets rather soppy over cows. I should say that I find the name ‘Compassion in World Farming’ exceptionally irritating. It suggests that they think they have a monopoly on compassion; that they are the only people in the world of farming who actually give a damn. For the record, in all the time I have met livestock farmers, be they dairy or meat – and I have met an awful lot – I have not encountered one who did not care very deeply about their animals. They may not have been sentimental. They may not have talked in greetings-card slogans. But they really did give a damn. Anyone who argues otherwise simply hasn’t spent enough time with them.

  CIWF set up a website to challenge the Nocton super dairy plans entitled ‘Cows belong in fields’ – or, more precisely, ‘COWS BELONG IN FIELDS’ – even though there was no particular evidence that it was the case.

  Cows are, Roger my traditional farmer told me, sociable animals, who would be quite happy bedding down on sand, as long as they were together. And, he added, ‘unhappy cows don’t produce good-quality milk, not in the long term’. Keeping the cows in conditions which would make them unhappy was not in any farmer’s interests. It went further. He told me that the cows at the back of his herd could take ninety minutes to two hours to get through the whole milking process, a lot of which time would be spent standing on the concrete milking parlour floors awaiting their turn, a stressful experience. At the proposed super dairy the whole process would take around forty minutes, meaning far less stress for the animals. What’s more, the super dairy would have a veterinary unit on site, able to deal with any problems as they arose, and a dedicated maternity unit; traditional farmers had no such luxuries. Their vets had to get to them when they could. And there was one more intriguing thing about the super dairy plan: it was proposed eventually to build massive anaerobic digesters which would use the huge volumes of cow crap – 400,000 litres a day – to generate electricity. The plan, I was told, was for a dairy that was as close to carbon neutral as possible.

  All that said, I was not surprised the Nocton plans were eventually withdrawn. During a question and answer session at the NFU’s 2011 conference, before the developers threw in the towel, I said that there were local issues around the site which could well make it very difficult to approve the plan. It had become clear that there were problems to do with ground-water systems at the proposed site. But that didn’t mean the notion of the super dairy was a bad one in principle. If we want milk at an affordable price, radical solutions like that may well be the way forward. It was clear to me, though, that the opposition really was to do with what it looked like, and what it sounded like, rather than what it was.

  It was the same with Thanet Earth, a massive greenhouse complex in Kent the size of eighty football pitches, using hydroponics which, when fully up and running, could supply 15 per cent of all of Britain’s salad vegetable needs. The growing methods were not new. They’ve been around for decades. As far as Britain was concerned, though, the scale was. Yes, it was an odd place: an enormous amount of it was automated. Driverless trolleys moved almost soundlessly up and down the aisles collecting crates of picked vegetables. Nutrients were fed into the plants according to computerized schedules. The vegetables grew in packages of stuff that looked nothing like good old-fashioned mud. It felt like something out of the classic seventies sci-fi movie Silent Running.

  But this unit was taking vast numbers of trucks off the roads from the Netherlands to the UK. It too was almost carbon neutral. There was a gas-burning power plant on site, used to produce electricity, most of which Thanet Earth didn’t want. It took the heat and the CO2; the power went back into the national grid. ‘The closer we get to a carbon-neutral model,’ one of the executives of the company behind it told me, ‘the better our bottom line is. Being carbon neutral makes sound business sense.’

  As unfashionable as it may be to admit it, I found the whole environment rather thrilling. It had something of the modernist secular cathedral about it: the acres of glass, the vaulting, brightly lit spaces, the thick green fronds reaching graspingly for the sky. I understand, of course, that lots of people won’t feel this way. They think of growing stuff to eat as an expression of the natural world and regard the way it is being managed at Thanet Earth in such an apparently hard-nosed way, using so many hard-edged, man-made materials, as somehow wrong. These are, incidentally, exactly the same people who are taken in by all the clever marketing on food packaging, the stuff with the ears of corn and ruddy-faced farmers leaning over five-bar gates, and images of deliriously happy pigs flogging themselves unto slaughter, like the talking cow in Douglas Adams’s book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe which had been genetically bred to sell itself to diners at the table. They’re the deluded consumers who are more than gagging to be fed a total fiction about our food supply chain, courtesy of the ad men.

  They are also the ones who will react with the most outrage when food prices go bashing through the roof because we failed to invest in enough large-scale domestic agriculture to increase our self-sufficiency, and are instead being held to ransom by the international markets.

  Of course, they will tell you, there is another way. It is exactly the opposite of large scale. It is small scale. It is ultra-small scale. It is teeny-weeny, touchy-feely scale. It is grow-your-own. If we all just grew exactly what we need, surely we’d all be fine.

  It’s a thought. It’s an interesting thought, albeit one that dredges up terrifying memories. Come with me, then, back to the long, hot summer of 1976 and meet my culinary nemesis: the spaghetti marrow.

  7.

  THE CURSE OF THE SPAGHETTI MARROW

  I don’t think my mother ever meant to be cruel. Then again, life is full of unintended consequences, even if they are not all necessarily unforeseeable. In 1974, when Claire agreed to become a TV chef, I imagine she saw it as an opportunity. Everything in her career to date had been an accident and it all seemed to have worked out nicely enough. Good work had been done. Money had been earned. Nobody had died. Why shouldn’t she be paid to put on an apron and teach the nation how to cook produce from a kitchen garden?

  Perhaps because the nation included her own family?

  Perhaps because, if she hadn’t said yes, we wouldn’t have been tortured by the produce of our own vegetable plot?

  In the early seventies food television was still in its relative infancy. Fanny Craddock was still hectoring the nation, assisted by her husband Jonny. (Did he really once finish a show by saying, ‘And I hope your doughnuts end up looking like Fanny’s’? I do hope so.) Graham Kerr’s achingly camp series The Galloping Gourmet, in which he dragged women up from the audience to dine with him, intimately, just the two of them and the millions watching, continued to be shown on a loop, even after he’d left TV to find God. Otherwise, it was mostly cooking slots on general-interest magazine programmes of the sort fronted by a young woman with a charisma bypass called Delia Smith, part of the BBC’s local show Look East. It was about experts leading the viewers by the hand.

  ITV’s Kitchen Garden would be different, mostly because it involved non-experts or, at the very least, people who were known for other things. In the first half a DJ called Keith Fordyce would show people how to grow vegetables; in the second half an agony aunt called Claire Rayner would show people how to cook them. And only them. Because Kitchen Garden had another ace up its sleeve. If Keith couldn’t grow it, Claire couldn’t cook it. As a result the show would be entirely vegetarian, and for a while so would we. Not that it was ever explained to us in this way. On the level of the family it was simply a matter of
expediency. Today TV cooking shows are overrun with home economists and nutritional advisers and food stylists. In 1974 there was none of that. Instead there was just my mother and a box of vegetables delivered to the doorstep with a note from the producer which said something along the lines of ‘see what you can do with this’, the ‘this’ being sticks of salsify, or curly greens with the texture of canvas but none of the nutritional value, which she had never cooked before.

  That is how I came to meet the spaghetti marrow, a tough-skinned, oval vegetable the colour of an anaemic lemon and the size of a fat baby’s head. It simply turned up at the house one day, uninvited. Its Latin name is Curcubita pepo; in Japanese it’s kinshi uri. As an 8-year-old boy I would have called it cruel and unusual punishment, had I been well enough versed in the law. To prepare the marrow it has to be boiled for a good half hour. Very little good can come from any food that must first be boiled for half an hour. It then had to be split open and the flesh scraped out, whereupon it would form into long strands of empty, vapid, cucumber-like … stuff. That’s the only word I can use for it. Stuff. Even from a distance of nearly forty years, the only word that seems to do it justice is ‘stuff’. Claire would smother this stuff with a tomato sauce and tell us that it was just like pasta. Eat up.

  And it was just like pasta. In the same way that nuclear war is just like peace, and Wales is just like somewhere dry. Which is to say, not at all. As a fat, greedy 8-year-old, dinner mattered to me. My mum was a good cook, and did great things with whole chickens and oven bricks, which was about as cutting-edge as it got in north-west London in the seventies. I liked curry night. I liked the little bowls she put out with the over-sweetened chicken curry containing chutneys and chopped-up bits of banana and that crumbly material called Bombay Duck which smelt of old men’s armpits and wasn’t duck at all but salted, dehydrated fish. I loved it when she cooked chops, or when she made shepherd’s pie or roasted sheets of lamb ribs.

  But this?

  This was a betrayal. It was claiming to be one thing when really it was another. Sure, it was filling. And, of course, it was good for me. Perhaps if I’d eaten a lot more of that as a kid and a lot less of the lamb ribs and the McDonald’s burgers and the Dayville ice cream I might not have been the last one chosen for football by team captains. Except I didn’t (and don’t) care about football. I just didn’t give a damn. But dinner: that mattered. It was a serious business, and spaghetti marrow with tomato sauce was a mealtime wasted. Still, I thought to myself, it won’t haunt me for long. She’s just testing the dish out. Once she gets it right, once she’s certain she knows how to cook it, she’ll turn instead to torturing the British public with it and leave those she loves in peace.

  How wrong I was. Some time in the mid-seventies an area at the back of our garden next to the garage was dug up. It was almost precisely as a comedy series called The Good Life was launching on the BBC, in which suburbanites Tom and Barbara Good attempted to live off their own Surbiton garden. To be fair, my mother was not at all interested in self-sufficiency. She had shown absolutely no interest in hippie chic; she was far too radical for that sort of posturing. I think she just thought that it would be a good idea, what with Kitchen Garden getting a second (and then a third) series on ITV. There were now vegetarian cookbooks to write. What had started as a simple job of work had spread like melting ice cream across a warm plate, to fill up significant parts of our lives.

  Of course, one of the first things to go in to the ground were Curcubita pepo seeds. And the bastards grew. The spaghetti marrow bloomed like an outbreak of chlamydia in a student house. Nothing would stop them. They were like Audrey, the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors, their thick tendrils ending in yellow blooms which would soon wither and die to reveal the marrows. Some things are hard to grow on private vegetable patches. Spaghetti marrows are not one of them. I would watch with undisguised horror as the damn things flourished. Alongside them were rickety frames of green beans which always seemed to be woodier and harder than the green beans we bought from the greengrocer, and tomatoes which always seemed to be less sweet. This, it has to be said, was one of the oddities of our vegetable patch. We now had a garden which was filling the kitchen with a limited range of edible things on a daily basis and yet the size of our weekly vegetable order from Robert the Greengrocers did not diminish. I think my mother felt responsible to him, and didn’t want to do him out of income just because of her hobby. That, or she didn’t much like what she was growing either.

  And so this verdant plot, this endless suburban fecundity, this wretched, festering scab of green, came to mock me, not least when the violently hot summer of 1976 arrived and I was tasked with keeping it all watered. I couldn’t refuse or do it badly. She checked up on me. Plus I had standards. So now I was utterly complicit in the too, too dismal nature of certain mealtimes. Most afternoons after school I would float around the kitchen while my mother was there, as fat boys are wont to do, trying to work out what was for dinner. Catching sight of the heavy, yellow curve of yet another bloody spaghetti marrow, I would retreat wounded and bitter. When we went on holiday, at the height of the drought, I secretly hoped that the arid conditions and hosepipe bans would finally do for our vegetable plot, but narratives rarely work out the way you imagine them. The rest of Britain’s vegetation may have been dying in the heat; London’s parks may have become patchworks of rust and russet and beige rather than anything approaching green. But in our garden everything lived on and, more than that, burgeoned. We came back to a huge and healthy crop of spaghetti marrows.

  In the spring of 1977 we finally departed the cherry-blossomed and privet-fringed avenues of that part of North Wembley for a much larger, grander house in Harrow. The vegetable patch did not come with us. Many years before, amateur gardeners who once owned our new home had planted it with a bounty of fruit. There were half a dozen different types of pear and apple. There were plum trees and red and white and black currants; raspberries, strawberries, loganberries, and, scampering up a wall as if it were heading for the roof, a quince tree that each year risked falling to the ground, so heavy was the fruit. Perhaps this was why Claire decided not to bring the spaghetti marrow plants with her. A professional job had already been done on the garden. It did not need an intervention from her. In any case the third and last series of Kitchen Garden had come to an end, and she had moved on to other things. She was banning butter from the house in favour of polyunsaturated fats. She was designing a high-fibre diet (long before the success of the F-Plan) which involved putting a horse pill of bran into her orange juice every morning whereupon it dissolved to look like something a baby with a digestive problem might expel. She tried to get us all to try it, but we were wise to her by then. We knew where politeness could lead us. We said no.

  I have told this story before and had it thrown back at me as the explanation for why I sigh deeply whenever I am told that growing your own is a vital part of a re-engineering of our food system. And people do tell me this. Whenever a piece of mine about the pros and cons of the industrial food process turns up online, the comments extolling the virtues of home growing pile up underneath it like so much leaf fall in autumn. I just sigh, roll my eyes, and carry on. Apparently I do this because I was traumatized as a child; I had an unfortunate experience with home-grown vegetables.

  Ergo.

  I admit I am not very outdoorsy. I know where the outdoors is, much as I know where Droitwich is; that doesn’t mean I necessarily want to go there. I would call myself very much an ‘indoorsie-prop-me-up-at-the-cocktail-bar-and-mix-me-an-old-fashioned’ sort of chap. I could make gags here about it being something buried deep in the Jewish DNA; that my people spent so many tedious centuries tilling the dank soil of that part of Poland, Ukraine and Russia known as the Pale of Settlement that we have won the right to do desk jobs, wear loafers and laugh at Jackie Mason gags about how Jews don’t do gardens. And even if it’s not genetic it’s certainly cultural. I am a little suspicious of plants. I s
uspect plants are plotting to get me. That’s why I married a shiksa. I needed a non-Jew around the place to look after the garden.

  But jokes like that would be cheap. Let’s bury them with a trowel (assuming someone can be bothered to show me which end of the trowel to hold). Only an idiot would be anti the idea of growing your own fruit and vegetables, and, as we’ve already ascertained, I try desperately hard not to be one of those. It is a brilliant thing, for lots of reasons. It’s a superb way to get exercise. It is an excellent way to bring communities together: there are few shared endeavours better than the turning of a piece of forgotten hard-scrabble inner-city land into a garden producing good things to eat. And, of course, it’s a marvellous way to educate people. The playground of my son’s primary school, like so many other primary schools across the land, is fringed with planters, heavy with cucumber and marrow, green bean and tomato. It’s so obvious why this is a good thing – helping the children to understand the link between the things they eat and the way it is made, enthusiasm for fresh rather than processed food, the value of a non-screen-based activity – that I barely believe I just wasted the energy typing out those sub-clauses. It is blindingly, staggeringly, hit-me-over-the-head-with-a-mallet obvious that growing your own fruit and veg is a good thing.

  But that’s not the same as it making any hard economic sense (beyond the economic value of people being more contented). And in no way can it be the route to breaking the so-called stranglehold of the industrial food process (if such a thing exists) and supplying the masses with cheap food. Indeed, it’s exactly the opposite. Even if we assume that you have the spare land – and many people do not, being forced instead to rent an allotment, if they can get one – you are then faced with a series of costs, be they plants or seeds, tools and fertilizers. Even Jane Perrone, author of The Allotment Keeper’s Handbook and therefore rather a big fan of people growing stuff themselves, says, ‘You should see it as a hobby that might occasionally get you something nice, not as a money-saving exercise.’ Hillary Osborne, who edits the money pages of the guardian.co.uk website and who is pretty keen on a bargain, gave it a go. ‘Several months of toil produced a handful of carrots, strawberries that were around twice as expensive as those on the menu at Wimbledon and a pile of shrivelled apples that weren’t even good for cooking,’ she wrote rather forlornly. ‘The only successes were the cherry tomatoes and rosemary, but taking the cost of seeds, equipment and compost into account these were more delicious than cost-effective.’ The UK government’s website promoting growing your own hardly goes out of its way to big up the economic advantages. Among the seven reasons given for doing it – educational value, sense of achievement, exercise, increased smugness quotient (I made the last one up) – only one mentions hard cash, and even then rather limply. ‘It could save you money on expensive items like salad leaves.’