by Jay Rayner
Aha! It’s brilliant for self-absorbed foodies. In 2011 Steve Mercer, resident vegetable expert for the magazine Which? Gardening, published by the Consumers’ Association, ran a year-long trial on a one-metre by two-metre plot. His harvests only supplemented one or two family meals a week and then, obviously, only in the growing season. Another trial of ‘Gourmet Veg’ in 2010 ‘showed that you could save pounds by growing Jerusalem artichokes, kale, Florence fennel, tenderstem broccoli, pattypan squash, banana shallots, watercress and spinach,’ the magazine wrote, ‘but arguably these veg, while tasty, are probably best considered “treats” – they’re not family staples’. Quite.
Let’s try to put some hard numbers on this by looking at something that’s increasingly popular: keeping chickens for eggs. It’s a lovely image, isn’t it? Sweet, plump, feathery things, strutting about the place, pecking at the earth, filling the air with the soft hum and chuckle of their calls. I do not doubt that it’s a hugely rewarding thing to do, and that you can become attached to them as pets. If you can afford it. Obviously you will have to buy a hutch. The Eglu Classic, one of the most popular modern-style hutches, will cost you £425. There are cheaper options, but not much cheaper. At best you’ll be paying around £300 and it can go up to as much as £600. There will be the fencing for the run to think about (which, if you live in an urban area, will have to be completely fox-proofed). There’s the cost of the chickens themselves, say two at anywhere from £20 to £40 each. You’ve got the running costs of feed – the general consensus is that, if you care about the bird’s welfare, formulated feeds really are the way to go – and, of course, various running medical treatments to keep them healthy, not to mention the terrifying prospect of vets’ fees if things go wrong. It is hard to see how you could keep the basic set-up costs of a couple of chickens and the facilities to house them in below £500. Of course, they should produce around a dozen eggs a week for you. At the supermarket twelve free-range eggs will cost you around £2.50, or £130 a year.
You do the maths. Go on. I’ve got time.
Oh all right. I’ll do it for you. It’s a minimum of four years to almost break even on those start-up costs, though, as I say, that doesn’t include the long-term running costs. Nor does it include the fact that by the time those four years are up you’ll probably need to have replaced the fencing or the chickens or both. Or, more likely, got completely bored with the damn chickens and the mess they are making of your garden, and taken up macramé or the tango or dogging. Leo Hickman tried raising hens for the Guardian (they’re very keen on these kinds of larks at the Guardian). He fell in love with his birds. Well, of course he did. For it’s obviously a delightful thing to do. ‘I sometimes pull up a garden chair and just watch them scratching around,’ he wrote. ‘And the fresh produce it provides. There’s just no going back once you’ve tasted those sunset-coloured yolks.’ But cost-effective? No. ‘It is,’ he declared, ‘a complete fallacy that keeping hens saves you money.’ Even Jane Howorth, founder of the British Hen Welfare Trust, which rehouses battery chickens, agreed with him.
Am I being horribly cynical? I don’t think so. It’s simple economics. Not long ago I visited a bunch of nuns who live in the Monastery of the Visitation in East Sussex. A nice group of women. Difficult to tell them apart, but nice all the same. They were getting on a bit, but still they were up and at it every day, working their fingers to the bone in their kitchen garden. That was why I went to see them. As a community they were attempting to be self-sufficient, at least in vegetables and fruit. They owned an enormous plot of walled land, at the back of their glowering red-brick home, which had been ploughed up to make beds. Being nuns, they weren’t exactly short on time. Apart from regular outbreaks of praying they could dedicate themselves to the business of growing food. Even they admitted they had to go to Tesco for top-ups. And they were supposed to have God on their side.
The issue here is the one thing nobody considers when calculating the cost of home-grown food: your labour. When farms work out how much they need to charge for their produce to make a profit they include the wages they are paying their staff. Not to do so with the things we grow at home is to give it a false value. Of course, we have to be realistic. You may be a highly paid lawyer or accountant, earning £175 an hour (you bastard), but that’s for skilled work. So let’s agree that when you are heaving away at the dark earth in your back garden you are essentially an unskilled labourer likely to receive little more than the minimum wage, which stands, at the time of writing, at £6.19 an hour. It’s both not very much and, in terms of the vegetables you are growing, an awful lot. If you add all the hours worked together and then divide it by, say, the number of carrots grown in that time, the results can be startling. The food you have spent all that time growing is suddenly going to be costing you an awful lot more than its equivalent in the supermarkets. (And while we’re at it, if you are renting an allotment a mile or two from your house, which you have to drive to, so as to carry tools there and produce back, you will quickly bestow upon your food a carbon footprint of the size that would embarrass a multinational oil company.)
Ah, but what if you are unemployed? What of it? That doesn’t make growing your own the systemic solution to the problem of food supply. It makes it at best a stopgap for you, which will become redundant the moment you find a job.
Because this is how it works. Over the centuries we have continually delegated responsibility for certain industries to smaller and smaller numbers of people, as a result of growing efficiencies. In 1900, 40 per cent of the US workforce was involved in agriculture, which was almost half the proportion of the country’s workforce so employed thirty years before. By 2008 it was just 1.7 per cent. We are happy for other people to grow our food for us, so that we can get on with doing more economically viable things, like pursuing careers in management consultancy or posting those pictures of kittens sleeping in hats on the internet. The romantics, like Ernst Schumacher, who have bought into every sweet mythology about rural life, would regard this as a disaster; they would say that it has broken mankind’s link with the natural world. But that notion is loose and fanciful. Allowing for the fact that the planet is grossly over-populated, it makes sense for more of us to live in cities and let other people grow our food for us outside of them, while we do things that are more fulfilling.
I fully recognize that there are a lot of people who will still disagree with me; who will still say that growing our own food makes economic sense. I also understand why this is. Facts are great and sturdy things. So are statistics, and properly mustered arguments. But they are as nothing in the face of emotion. Food is very, very emotional. It’s about how we feel about ourselves. What we eat and how we eat is a reflection of our world view, the sort of person that we like to think we are. Which is why it’s so hard to challenge so many of our assumptions about food. Which, in turn, is why my views on farmers’ markets have also brought me so much abuse. People feel very emotional about them too. They bloody love farmers’ markets, just as they love their hens and their vegetable patches. And I love them too. The difference is that many people believe they are the way forward for food retailing, and I don’t. Let me explain why. And let me do so by taking you back to preparations for my wedding over twenty years ago. I promise not to get slushy.
A cool spring morning in 1992 and I am striding down the same street in London’s Soho where my dad was called a black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard almost thirty years before. I am on Berwick Street, looking for a tailor. Obviously Savile Row is only a ten-minute walk away on the other side of Regent Street but, while the suit I want is for a special occasion, the prices there are too rich for my blood. And anyway, I wouldn’t feel comfortable over there. These are much more my people, the grafting Jewish tailors who get much of their trade from the film, television and theatre businesses that operate around here. The wedding isn’t going to be that traditional. The ceremony will be at the high-columned registry office on Marylebone Road; the party w
ill be at the Eagle on Farringdon Road, which will eventually become regarded as Britain’s first gastropub. For the moment it just happens to be a rather nice pub that’s opened near the offices of the newspaper where I work. It has an open kitchen and serves big-flavoured Mediterranean food. Certainly it’s not the place for a man in a monkey suit, though in a way that’s what I’ll end up with: a suit made by a man who makes suits for monkeys.
I want something simple and classic in a hard-wearing material. I am a big man, and we do strange things to suits. We stress and strain cloth in the way skinny men do not. We are an engineering challenge. So far none of the tailors I have talked to seems up to it. They offer me inappropriate bolts of woollens and silks or shrug their shoulders when I ask them if they regularly make suits for people of my shape, as if to say, ‘Does anybody?’ So I have pushed on and found myself standing in the deserted workshop of Paul the Tailor. I look around. There are, as there often are on the walls of these places, a number of those cheesy showbiz pics with a white space beneath the image for a signature, sellotaped up because this was the studio responsible for making their stage suits. Here on Berwick Street the walls are a collage of Bernie Clifton, Bobby Davro, Mike and Bernie Winters, and Alan de Courcy. And if those names mean nothing to you, what a golden age of light entertainment you have missed. Those were the good years, my friends, when a working-class lad from St Helens could go all the way to The Royal Variety Show by putting his legs into an ostrich suit.
Here in Paul’s I notice a set of pictures I have not seen before. They are of chimpanzees. In suits. Big, bright, wide-shouldered suits in blisteringly saturated colours. Each of the chimps is grinning towards the camera and holding up a mug of tea. I look around this simple, unprepossessing room. It may not look like much but I am clearly somewhere very special. I have come to the tailor who made suits for the PG Tips chimps, which featured in the adverts for the tea company from 1956 (and would go on doing so until 2002). Suddenly the tailor is at my side. He is a slender man, with a row of bright-white teeth, an eighties mop of greying, curly hair and something of the game show host about him. I point at the photographs.
‘Did you make suits for the PG Tips chimps?’
He gives me a twinkly game show host wink. ‘I did indeed.’
‘Right then,’ I say. ‘You’re the man to make my wedding suit.’
He was, and he did. It was a simple and elegant affair in surprisingly hard-wearing black linen. It was perfect and it cost me around £500. (Come inside these parentheses for a moment. A year or two later I bumped into a friend who was wearing a fantastic suit. I asked him where he got it from. It’s a funny story, he said. It’s made by the man who makes suits for the PG Tips Chimps. Really, I say. Paul the Taylor? He looks baffled. It’s another tailor on Berwick Street. Clearly there were a whole bunch of them dressing chimpanzees.)
Two decades later and I am getting another suit made, again on Berwick Street. There is no special occasion. It is just something I want and which I am lucky enough finally to be able to afford. I think I have reached the sort of age when a chap should have a bespoke suit for everyday wear rather than just to get married in. This time a friend who is a very highly regarded wardrobe consultant for British film and television has directed me to a man called Chris Kerr.
‘He makes the suits for Phill Jupitus,’ she says, referencing the not-small comedian. I like Phill Jupitus and I recognize him as a kindred spirit. His suits will also be an engineering challenge. He is my modern version of the PG Tips chimp. If Kerr can make a suit for Jupitus he can make one for me. It will not cost me £500. It will cost me a lot more than that, but I can afford it.
Of course, I don’t need to spend this money. I could go to M&S and buy something adequate off the peg for £160, or perhaps £250 if I really wanted to push the boat out. It would be eminently wearable and would doubtless look fine. Nobody would ever comment on the detail: the golden lining or the matching rust-coloured button holes or the half-velvet collar, because it would have none of that. It might not last for ever but it would do the job. However, I am not doing that. I want something much more exclusive, and much more special. Let me be shameless and admit I like the fact that it will be something nobody else has. Plus there is the rosy glow that comes from knowing I will be supporting true craftsmanship. Chris Kerr is an expert. He is an artisan. That has to be worth supporting.
It’s not for everybody, but it is for me.
Which is where farmers’ markets come in. I adore good produce, always have done. More than that, I love produce with a story. When Borough Market, down by London Bridge, first began to emerge around the turn of the millennium as a Mecca for obsessive greedy people like me, I would try to go every Saturday. I was convinced that by shopping there and talking to the people who raised the food I was buying I would make myself a better cook. I think it probably did work like that, and unsurprisingly so. When you think about nothing else except your dinner for the whole morning, it’s bound to make a difference. I knew it was expensive. I used to joke that I’d only go there with cash rather than plastic, to stop me spending the mortgage money on a leg of Herdwick mutton, some artichokes and a bag of salted Marcona almonds. The point is, I always knew why I went there. It was the same reason I commissioned a tailor to make me a suit: it was purely to do with the aesthetics I was lucky enough to be able to afford.
When I reference Borough Market today, advocates for farmers’ markets get cross. It is not representative of the movement, they say. And I see their point. Today there are still a few very good retailers there, but there are also too many stands flogging ready-to-eat food and pointless fripperies. The fact is, however, that Borough Market isn’t an aberration: it’s merely an exaggerated example of the problem with the movement in general, or at least the problem as defined by its own supporters. Farmers’ markets, we are told, are a clean form of vertical retailing in which the filthy middleman, the supermarkets, is cut out, thus bringing food consumer and food maker closer together. And that does go on. Small-scale farmers have found a new and lucrative route to market which helps them to bypass the leviathans of the industry. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a good thing.
But this can only be promoted as a true social good if the consumers benefiting are the ones who can’t afford the prices being offered by the supermarkets. And yes, occasionally you will find a fruit stall selling its premium produce at a lower price than you would find the equivalent in the chilled fresh produce section of your local supermarket.
However, when you look at farmers’ markets generally, you find expensive, bespoke produce aimed at the affluent who have the wherewithal to afford to indulge themselves in this way. They convince themselves that by shopping there they are doing something to revolutionize the food supply chain. They aren’t. It is a lifestyle statement, just as buying a Chanel handbag is a lifestyle statement or buying a pair of Manolo Blahniks is a lifestyle statement or getting the bloke who dresses Phill Jupitus to make me a suit is a lifestyle statement. Only this lifestyle statement now comes with a greasy veneer of false self-righteousness. Paying £12 for a chicken from your lovely poultry producer is no more a challenge to the meat counters of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda or Morrison’s than buying that bespoke suit is a challenge to M&S.
It goes further. It is in the nature of farmers’ markets that the produce they sell is biased towards the premium end of the market. Even on the very rare occasions when the prices charged for that organic chicken or those free-range eggs are slightly lower than those available in supermarkets, the exercise is still exclusive because there is little or no budget choice for shoppers with less money. The market traders, not unreasonably, guard their competitive advantage fiercely; generally they get guarantees from those running the market that theirs will be the only stall selling their kind of produce. Unlike in a standard street market, nobody is ever allowed to undercut anyone else on price. They are merely allowed to offer points of gastronomic difference. And a
gain, that is all about aesthetics. It’s nice if you can afford aesthetics. It’s bloody lovely. But not everybody can.
Still, let’s look at the idea that farmers’ markets are a genuine alternative to the supermarkets; that, in an ideal world, they could come to offer a different model if only we shopped at them more and they became more widespread.
Oh dear. That is to completely underestimate the scale of the food retail sector in a developed and industrialized nation like Britain. Think about pork for a moment (as I often do). There are currently about 750 farmers’ markets trading in Britain today, most of them on just one or two days a week. Let’s be generous and say that each one of those sells the meat of a whole pig every day. Actually let’s be more generous than that. How about we quadruple it? How about we imagine that the volume of pig being sold by farmers’ markets in Britain has increased by 400 per cent. Not optimistic enough? Fine. Let’s say there’s a tenfold increase in the number of farmers’ markets trading in Britain. That’s 7,500 pigs sold a week.