Hugh Fearnley Bloody Whittingstall. You can’t move without bumping into him, cheerfully telling us all that we should aspire to live the life of a 18th century subsistence farmer. His cheeks always ruddy and his dell forever bosky.
Horseshit.
My ancestors were all 18th century subsistence farmers. They found the idea to be so shit that as soon as someone got around to inventing steam they fucked off sharpish to live in Wakefield and descend hundreds of feet underground to look for highly compressed leaves and putting their lives in the hands of a bloody canary in return for 2 and 6 a week and a box room in a house with a hole in the garden for a bog instead.
So quite why that man thinks that in 2010 donning wellies and clambering through the seaweed, risking life and limb to gather a paltry bucket of tiny mussels that you then have to spend a further 8 hours scraping barnacles and stringy oceanic flora from is better than just going to Tesco is anyone’s guess.
It’s part of this general trend towards making food a stand-in for morality. Now everyone sensible agrees that taking your moral compass from one of a selection of books written by desert mystics thousands of years ago is a silly idea. Especially when those books are rewritten, re-translated, reinterpreted and repurposed every few decades to fit prevailing political needs. One minute you’re stoning the gays, next minute you’re making them bishops! And it’s all consistent with God’s will!
So there is no proper according-to-some-saint-or-other morality left. Instead, we’ve just decided that it’s much easier to pick on fat people. Even better if they’re poor. They commit any number of the modern ages unwritten seven deadly sins:
- Eating too much
- Not doing enough
- Watching too much telly
- Reading tabloid newspapers
- Wearing tracksuits
- Smoking
- Swearing at their kids in the playground
Ghastly!
Food is a handy way to beat these people. They are ignorant because they buy cheap food full of transfats and the blood of orphans. They are slovenly because they don’t cook anything ‘proper’. They are degenerate because they pass all this on to their kids.
Man… aren’t poor people a waste of time? Wouldn’t it be easier to round them up and dump them on go-nowhere, awful run-down estates? Oh. Hang on…
So Fearnley Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver are part of the vanguard of this attack. Never mind the weird factor that even though the modern lifestyle is apparently so unremittingly vile and degraded and rotten and unhealthy that we now live longer, healthier and more active lives than EVER before. It’s not enough! We must kill Captain Birdseye, burn down Lidl and tear up our decking to install a miniature cattle byre.
I hate that guff. Things are better now. Accept it.
BUT! Here’s the thing. My dad grew his own veg in a corner of the garden. Knowing him, it was rooted in his deeply-held belief that cheaper is always better. I can almost see him now in a garden centre in the mid seventies, thoughtfully weighing up the cost of a cauliflower as compared to a packet of cauliflower seeds, and turning to my mum to say “we could grow 150 cauliflowers for the price of one you know” and my mum nodding eagerly while putting a £60 stone plant pot in the trolley and thus negating the whole fucking enterprise.
My summers were thus full of picking through the cabbages, removing the caterpillars to keep in a jar and eating runner beans fresh from the garden. There was always something to help my dad with – goodness knows how that man survived me flailing around his feet with a plastic spade and wrecking his seed beds. In short, there was something blissful about having a little corner of the world where things grew and then got eaten.
In honour of that tradition, I have a small corner of my garden dedicated to such matters. Regular readers (all 6 of you!) will know that I am widely renowned as one of Britain’s Shittest People, so here’s a selection of results – and proof positive that whatever Hugh (or my mate the Bloggy Mum) might tell you you will never live from stuff you can grow in your garden.
A world first - bonsai beetroot!
Home grown strawberry!
A gooseberry "bush". Destroyed by caterpillars.
Feeling slightly inspired to attempt my own small garden of England at the bottom of my garden, but I’d have to clear out the monsterous overgrown nettles and all the birdseed that had descended on the flower beds and turned into barley and wheat first.
I hope the strawberry was divine!
You know what? The strawberry was unbelievably sweet and gorgeous! Just very very small. There were 2 strawberries at one time, but some creature made off with one of them. It’ll be about 200 years before I’m in a position to make any jam!
It is a nice thing to do though… pottering about killing slugs and eating fresh mange tout