Ilive on a small farm called Perch Hill in the Sussex Weald. It has small and dribbly streams running through it. There are some narrow pieces of woodland on the very worst ground, stands of hornbeam (which burns hot in the winter) and ash (starts a fire, even when just felled) and large numbers of big oaks, some of which I have my eye on for the frame of a new cart and tractor shed. I look at it and see it for what it is: the landscape of luck.
Beyond the woods, where the bluebells, anemones, archangel and early purple orchids all grow in the springtime, the views drop away for 12 or 15 miles to the coast near Rye or over the tops of the trees of the medieval Dallington Forest, in which Saxon kings hunted deer. Between those woods are our 14 fields, all except one of them down to pasture. On them we keep a small herd of Sussex cattle, eight chestnut-coloured cows, their daughters and their daughters’ sons and daughters, as well as a flock of 50 ewes and their lambs, mostly South Down-Texel crosses, the Sussex strain providing hardiness and excellent mothering, the foreign blood making big lambs with large family-feeding legs. (If that sounds too perfect, it is not. This warm, damp year, along with every one of our neighbours, we have been plagued with the disgusting sheep affliction known as “fly strike” in which maggots infest the wool and skin of the ewes. Sorting that out, clipping away the wriggling, maggot-populated wool and exposing the underlying sores to the air is, I can tell you, no kind of Arcadian delight.)
The one field on which the animals do not graze is largely turned over to vegetable and fruit production – all kinds of salads and roots, peas, beans and chards, potatoes and herbs, gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries and redcurrants, and the dozen or so apple trees that have survived from the 60 I planted 10 years ago and which now bear more fruit than we know what to do with. Some pigs rootle about on the well-drained ground at the top of the hill. Chickens (currently dead and absent after a fox killed them all) usually have their run under the apple trees. In the middle of all this are some rather ragged buildings. Every roof needs sorting out. There is no lovely gravel sweep around an oval of perfect lawn. There is too much concrete and corrugated plastic, particularly over the barns that hold the freezers in which much of this produce is stored for the winter. It would not look good – except in the most ingeniously angled publicity shot – on the For Sale pages of Country Life.
This is the place we, largely, rely on for food. It was a conscious choice. For it, 13 years ago, we swapped a semi-detached house on the fringes of Hammersmith and Acton in west London. The decision was fuelled by this simple idea: rich, various, fertile, productive and beautiful places feed not primarily the body but the soul. Nothing has been better designed for human happiness, in other words, than being close to the physical and vegetable things that sustain you. Urban and industrial settlement is alienating. Connection with the vivid realities of farmed life, not as a player in the market (we don’t sell much) but as a kind of part-time engagement with some biological realities, is the foundation of well-being.
The source of that sense of rightness is neither mystical nor mysterious. The mixed farm, which this to some extent is, looks like the sort of place that would do you good. Its balance is in its variety. What you might need is quite apparently to hand. None of the distortions of singularity – the giant battery-chicken-rearing shed, the huge feed lot, the vast storage hoppers or truck-turning areas – are here. There is a human scale, even in the fields, which over the last decade of so we have been gradually dividing up with new hedges, to provide separate, clean grazing compartments on to which the stock can steadily move. It is not designed to feed any market and is not dependent on market vagaries. It costs about £9,000 a year to run and, with the sales of lambs and bullocks, it just fails to break even. You couldn’t run this farm as a job but that is not what it is. The place looks like an instrument designed for well-being, and that is what I consider it to be.
The idea that a beautiful and balanced landscape is a means to happiness is as old as they come. It is anti-Romantic, not about wildness but completeness and not about self-fulfilment but communal integration. This idea was there in Homer, flowered in the hands of Horace and Virgil during the difficult years of the Roman Republic and Empire and almost disappeared during the Middle Ages, only to re-erupt with renewed vigour in Renaissance Europe, since when it has enjoyed an almost unbroken run as one of the fixed counterpoints of western culture. You don’t have to look far to explain that history. The dream of the beautiful, integrated and productive farm is an act of longing indulged in by expansive, tense, urban civilisations. The greater the tension, the deeper the longing.
This is the pattern in which to understand the modern and extraordinary hunger for the one version of the good landscape that the urban consumer can acquire on a daily basis: really good food. A passion for what is thought to be authentic food (whether organic or local) from what are thought to be authentic places (whether pesticide free or reliably near) is gripping the western world. Food is taking up the role that landscapes used to play in the national imagination. Food is consumable goodness. Posters urging an intensification of the war effort against the Nazis used to show the South Downs above Firle glimmering in their everlasting beauty and purity. Now it would be photographs of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall braising the shin of one of his pigs. The idea of a National Food Hero would have been thought ludicrous even 10 or 15 years ago. Now it has become a fixed part of the landscape. Sheherazade Goldsmith and others urge us in a new book to take up A Slice of Organic Life. John Seymour’s classic The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency is now being republished after his death in various updated, revised and compact editions. Amazon lists more than 16,000 titles under the word “organic”, including one on “Humanure”, with tips on how to use one’s own waste products in the production of one’s own food. We have entered the era in which Real Food has come to look like the commodity that most nearly satisfies the hunger for the authentic that our alienated culture has created.
It’s no different in the US. Big-name writers have turned to this particular version of the Arcadian as an escape from the pressures of an industrial food supply and of the ills of industrial civilisation as a whole. Eric Schlosser, Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, the Kentucky poet, farmer and sage Wendell Berry and now the novelist Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, have all turned to real food as the medium in which to berate the capitalist conspiracy and champion a different, localist, Arcadian and intensely moralised alternative. For McKibben, the way in which global culture uses oil to manufacture artificial fertilisers and establish global distribution networks is strikingly similar to the way in which the pre 19th-century world used slave labour: careless, exploitative, dehumanising, denatured and wrong. For Berry, both deeply Christian and highly patriotic, “Eating is an agricultural act” and the basis of the agriculture he champions is an antipathy to the market. He urges us all “every day [to] do something
that won’t compute.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.”
This may be the high rhetoric of Horatian otium but it has become mainstream in America. Bill McKibben’s new bestselling book Deep Economy, passionately advocating the virtues of localism, credits Wendell Berry as his inspiration as does Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the story of her year becoming what she calls a “locavore” — someone who insists that she and her family will eat only what her locality can provide. The book entered the New York Times bestseller list as soon as it was published and has stayed there for the past eight weeks. It is now at number 10. She has been voted Bon Appetit Magazine Food Writer of the Year, at which she says she is as amazed as anyone else. It should come as no surprise. Food has become the medium for a moral vision.
I too (along with any number people you care to mention – Rosie Boycott, Monty Don, Roger Scruton, Richard Mabey all spring to mind) have written at length about the land we live on and the food it grows, in newspapers over many years and in a book that emerged from those columns entitled Perch Hill: A New Life. I can scarcely get on a very high horse about middle class people preaching their own self-sufficiency gospel to the benighted. It is in fact no coincidence that people who grow their own food also write about it. On the whole they have time on their hands and, as Scruton has said quite explicitly, the words he writes about his farm are easily the most valuable crop it yields. He calls it “meta-farming”.
That was one of the things I wanted to ask Kingsolver when she came to London this week. She is a tall and elegant woman, in her early 50s, poised and very upright. She often laughs but has some kind of underlying severity and rigour in her. She would, I am sure, be rather frightening if angry.
Was her book a symptom of affluence, I asked, a search for authenticity by the very well-heeled, with the welcome safety net of a book contract behind it? Was it as much a written thing as a lived thing?
No, she insisted, the experiment was more positive than that. Certainly writing a book about it “gave it a shape” but this wasn’t “a flight from affluence”. Nor was it “an exercise in deprivation but in gratitude and literally becoming a place. When you eat from a place, you become biologically of that place, even in terms of its molecules.” If you eat from where you are – and that term extends from your garden to your local community; hers is the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia — you acquire what Kingsolver calls in a very tight encapsulation of these ideas, “a flavour of being”. It runs both ways. If you are what you eat and you want to be good, what you eat obviously has to be good too. And if you ask for good food, good places, good communities and good people will emerge from that demand. The tightness of the circle matters. The longer you stretch the chains of supply and demand, the less potent these connections become. The moral dimension has a scientific gloss. “I look at the world as a set of laws that apply to all living things and I am amused by the way we walk around much of the time thinking we are immune. But we are not. We, like everything else, are embedded in our food chain and our habitat. We can be no healthier than those things and we ignore them at our peril. And this peril has now come.”
That is the peculiarly modern twist to this new Arcadianism. This is certainly not a Romantic return to wildness but a Horatian return to wholeness. But the return to wholeness is conveyed with a kind of millenarian urgency: the world is going to hell in handcart, the vast majority of western industrialised mankind are en route to perdition and what is needed is not universal war but some asparagus freshly picked and lightly steamed.
Kingsolver speaks in the proverbs of the activist. “Food is the one consumer choice we have to make every day. It is an obligatory, participatory democracy. You have to put your food dollars here or there, so why not here?” Food is “one of the few moral arenas in which the right thing to do for the environment and for the local tax base and so on is also good on your table. Why not embrace this battle? It’s a pleasure.”
But the American and British take on this issue is different. The UK has been urbanised so heavily and for so long that the urban elite has been casually romanticising rural life since the 16th century, oscillating between town and country in balanced recognition that each has something to offer. In the US, for people such as Kingsolver brought up in the tobacco country of rural Kentucky, that process is nothing like so evolved. Kingsolver says she was “raised to get away from the land, having dirt under your fingernails was bad, menial, something to be disdained. My grandfather would laugh at the idea of my writing an entire book about where food came from. Everyone in his family had where their food comes from on their clothes. They couldn’t have predicted what would happen in the next 50 years, that any animal could become so alienated from their food chain that they would happily relinquish control to companies which didn’t care about anything except their own bottom line.”
That air of desperation, of an eviction from Eden, fuels the Americans’ sense of a paradise lost. I said to Kingsolver that the new American food movement was in danger of fetishising food, of making it far more important than it was. “You say ‘fetishism’, I say a new preoccupation is a normal thing which happens when you realise, ‘Oh my God I left the door unlocked for a whole week.’ You are going to run in and look around, put your hands on everything and check it’s all there.”
That sounded like a desperate, panicked population of little creatures scrabbling to get back into their home.
“Yes,” she said, “It is normal for an animal to have a feeling of panic when we realise we have done something stupid. Do you realise this is the first generation of children in the US with a shorter life expectancy than their parents? And why is that? Because we have been feeding them the wrong things, coming down an industrial food pipeline, actually reducing their prospects of life. We need to change that whole relationship – and a reliance on the local – recreating a wholeness and a connectedness in the landscape is the way to bring about that change.”
‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber £16.99) is out now
A brief history of green publishing
The current popularity of books about going green represents a new spin on an old preoccupation, says Elizabeth Bury, features editor of The Bookseller magazine.
Although there have always been celebrations of the countryside, green publishing tends to trace its origins back to Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s 1962 exposé of the effects of pesticides on the environment. Part polemic, part investigative reporting, Silent Spring sold half a million copies in its first six months, earned the wrath of the chemical industry, prompted significant restrictions on the use of DDT and sparked a widespread public debate about environmental issues.
Despite its success, however, it was 10 years before the publishing world had another environmental hit on its hands. Published in 1972, Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows and Jurgen Randers was a timely warning of the dangers posed by the earth’s increasing population and limited resources. Despite its relatively dry style and reliance on some fairly arcane mathematical formulae, it sold 12m copies and was translated into 27 languages.
Limits to Growth took a global view but was followed by two books that focused environmental responsibility firmly on the individual. A Blueprint for Survival, published in 1972 by Teddy Goldsmith (uncle of Zac), and Small is Beautiful (1973) by E.F. Schumacher sowed the seeds for a decade of self-help and self-sufficiency bibles, mostly from the US but including Briton John Seymour’s The Complete Book Of Self Sufficiency (1978), which used his own family’s experience to show city dwellers how to downsize and move to the country. A year later James Lovelock published his best-seller Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth that proposed that the earth was itself a living organism and that humans were in danger of harming it irrevocably.
The 1980s was a lean time in the UK for green publishing – the population was more concerned with privatisations and “greed is good” – but, perhaps inevitably, out of the rise of consumerism came green consumerism and The Green Consumer Guide (by John Elkington and Julia Hailes, published in 1988), which launched a green movement based on individual actions that is still active today.
“The timing was just right,” says Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson, managing director of eco publisher Earthscan. “There had been an explosion of headlines about global warming and deforestation in the late 1980s and The Green Consumer Guide managed to harness such global issues with personal ones.”
A downturn in the economy (Black Wednesday was in 1992) and a pre-millennial interest in more esoteric matters saw “mind-body-spirit” books elbowing green publications off booksellers’ shelves. And it was only on the back of the Slow Food movement and celebrity downsizers such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who moved to River Cottage in 1997, that today’s personality-driven books again came to the fore.
“It’s too early yet to see if they will really succeed in sales terms,” says Bury, “but they do have a lighter, more magaziney feel now. We have come a long way from the days of the sandal-wearing, tree-hugging hippy.”
David Baker
