home and local food

‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’

These are the concluding words of Voltaire’s brilliant satire, Candide ou l’optimisme (Le Livre de Poche, 1983), p.125. The idea of universal obligation in the French ‘Il faut’ is somewhat lost in the English translation: ‘We must go and work in the garden,’ but one can find it in the concluding page, where ‘we’ surely means everyone in the world – so the conclusion is that everyone must garden, and grow their own food where they live:

   ‘We must work without arguing,’ said Martin; ‘that is the only way to make life bearable.’

   The entire household agreed to this admirable plan, and each began to exercise his talents. Small as the estate was, it bore heavy crops. There was no denying that Cunégonde was decidedly ugly, but she soon made excellent pastry. Pacquette was clever at embroidery , and the old woman took care of the linen. No one refused to work, not even Brother Giroflée, who was a good carpenter, and thus became an honest man. From time to time Pangloss would say to Candide:

   ‘There is a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds; for if you had not been turned out of a beautiful mansion at the point of a jackboot for the love of Lady Cunégonde, and if you had not been involved in the Inquisition, and had not wandered over America on foot, and had not struck the Baron with your sword, and lost all those sheep you brought from Eldorado, you would not be here eating candied fruit and pistachio nuts.’

   ‘That’s true enough,’ said Candide; ‘but we must go and work in the garden.’

(Voltaire, Candide or Optimism, trans by John Butt (Penguin, 1947), p.144)

The idea of us all getting back to the gardening, having gone out into the world and encountering all its absurd horrors, makes me think of the hobbits in Lord of the Rings who go into the world to deal with the evil powers, such that all the benign powers wither away too, and then the hobbits have to go home to the Shire, sort things out there and then get back to their gardening. But in Lord of the Rings one is also reminded of the needs of the wild world, and its right to coexist in harmony with the domesticated one. This is well illustrated by the story of the ents, told by the oldest of them all, Treebeard.

But moving on from literary inspiration, let’s get down to practicalities.

A Practical Project

Could the people of Britain grow all the food we need:

1. on the total land of Britain, or even

2. on the land we currently occupy: our home gardens?

1. On the land of Britain:

Given that there are 60 million acres of land in Britain and 60 million people, there is no question but that we could feed ourselves. But Britain is not currently self-sufficient in food: according to DEFRA, in 2005 we produced 60% of all our food, and 73% of the indigenous type food that we consume (see Excel download). One reason for that is that self-sufficiency is not the aim of food growing in this country; the aim is to make profit and receive subsidies. Another reason is that the methods used for cultivation are not very productive in yield per acre because the aim has been profitability and reducing labour costs. A further reason is that there is a rather contrived ‘consumer demand’ for non-indigenous food, and for out-of-season indigenous food. But this would change if people were made aware of the potential of indigenous crops, particularly in the unused and so rapidly disappearing diversity of varieties of such foods as apples and tomatoes. Another issue is that of staples: grains and potatoes, it may be necessary to re-think the types of grains and the varieties of roots and tubers we consume as the bulk of our diet. Plus, of course, there is the issue of our meat and dairy consumption, which has a severe impact on land here and elsewhere in the world where feed crops are grown, and probably should be curtailed, and that would have health benefits anyhow.

2. On the land we currently occupy:

The overall urban plot, which covers all the built environment, is 7.1% of the UK, which is about 4.2 million acres out of the 60 million. If we suppose half of that is gardens, allotments, parks, verges and other commons, we’ve got about 2 million acres we could potentially grow food on – although its use is currently mainly recreational: lawn and decorative planting. With 60 million people, that means 0.033 acres each, which doesn’t seem much. But that is 160 square yards, and on a plot half that size it has been shown that 250 kilos per annum can be grown, using methods such as intercropping and stacking. This is over five times the yield typical of Standard Farm Practice. (Sorry about the mixed imperial and metric units, I will tackle that, but imperial tons seem to have gone out of fashion, so it would have to be all metric.)

Is that enough to feed someone? Well, people consume roughly ten times their body weight per annum, so if we take an average body weight of 10 stone or 64 kilos, 640 kilos of food is required. But given that about a third of people in this country are children, 500 kilos would do it!

Note: I have sources for the above figures, which I need to double-check before citing them here, and I realise that the mixed units are confusing. But this is very much work in progress. Any comments, corrections with suggested sources, plus questions or challenges, will be very welcome and will be addressed.

Anyone reading this may well ask, ‘Is this really practical? And why try to achieve it, given that the country’s not under siege or anything?’

The answer is complicated. Partly it is in response to some activists’ belief that it is necessary to reclaim the land taken from the people over the centuries, and so to challenge planning rules which disallow eco-building on rural plots. I don’t disagree with them, but that is soul-destroyingly difficult to bring off, so isn’t it worth looking at what could be done on the land which people are allowed to cultivate? A prime justification for the latter approach would be if a lot of food could be grown – in contrast to the confront-the-planning-rules approach which is marginal and would make a tiny difference to how much nutritious food is available. That leads on to another justification, which is that home and local food is so much more nutritious than the supermarket stuff. Vitamin content, especially, reduces the longer food is in transit or stored. And, of course, flavour is spoilt too. (Personally, I’d prefer not to get into ‘food miles’ and climate change issues, mainly because ‘doom and gloom’ is off-putting to many people – having said which, transporting food to and from Eastern Europe (say) for sorting and packing is ridiculous, as is sending the same food product, say biscuits, up and down the country – especially as factory biscuits are nasty, taste-engineered commodities.) I am, though, very much against supermarkets, and not really interested in so-called ‘organic’ produce, or Soil Association certification. There is little evidence that traces of agrochemicals in food are harmful, and why be paranoid about avoiding such things as slug pellets, if they seem necessary to delicate seedlings’ survival, or to get a decent crop? No, home and local is what matters.

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