When I was in my mid-teens, the staff at my school kitchens would hand over 25 gallons of food to me each day. They set aside peelings and uneaten dishes – all the non-meat scraps – which I would pick up every afternoon and feed to my pigs. I had bought a Gloucester Old Spot sow, Gudrun, to breed from, and I wanted to raise the piglets in the most environmentally friendly and traditional way – by feeding them on waste food. The kitchen staff were paid back with a few cuts of pork at the end of the season. In the meantime, my pigs lived on mixed salads, roast potatoes, macaroni cheese, sponge cake, rice pudding and a variety of other canteen-cuisine delights.

In addition to the school swill, I began collecting a weekly vanload of cauliflower leaves from the town market and several sacks of organic bread from the baker, which helped feed my flock of laying hens. Outsized potatoes came in from a deer farmer who picked them up by the tonne for next to nothing and swapped sackloads for my hens’ eggs.