I really want to get into bed with a hot water bottle and 'The Now Show' on listen again, but I feel bound to have another 'ethical-food' bore moment beforehand. Inspired by hazily listening to the CEO of Sainsbury's arguing with some person-who-did-something-supporting-farmers one morning (that classic 'Today Programme' trick of picking two people with polar opposite view and getting them to shout unconstructively at each other for a few minutes until John Humphries tells them they've run out of time), I bought some milk at the farmer's market. I did balk at the price, but kept staunchly reminding myself that milk is pretty much the absolute worst culprit as far as unsound products go, and shelled out for some yoghurt as well, cos I bought some earlier this term and it was divine. Anyway, to cut this (extremely dull) long story short, the milk, too, was excellent: I just made some sinful hot chocolate with it and sneaked a gulp before microwaving it, and this is what milk has always really tasted like all along!!! Just, you sort of forget. It's all creamy, and doesn't taste all watery, and it's a totally different colour, and... Ack! It's amazing. Reminds me of when we used to get it on the doorstep in glass bottles. And when it used to go warm in the summer, and the birds used to peck through the foil tops. Ooh, and collecting all the tops for school... Can't remember why that was.
I like 'rediscovering' food. I've been doing it steadily since starting weaning myself off supermarkets over the summer. Like the first time I had chicken and avocadoes from the market. All the debate about local vs organic vs mass-produced (and hence efficient) food that that Economist article* sparked off has ignored the vitally important fact that food produced in small quantities and not transported halfway across the country and back often tastes better. Supermarket food is designed to look uniform and hence pretty on the shelves, to not get bruised during transit, to be easy to pick, to last for a long time after it's been picked... Consquently, it tastes, well, bland and I defy anyone to eat a home-grown tomato and not agree with me. Food production involves lots of complex economics that I don't understand. (Climate change involves lots of complex science that I don't understand either, yet I still feel entitled to an opinion on it, but I'll talk about that another time.) I can't say whether FairTrade is really helping poor farmers or in fact taking trade away from the very poorest countries and into those whose governments the West approves of. It may well be more cost- and energy-efficient to transport food in big trucks and have people make one weekly trip to the supermarket, rather than have lots of individual farmers driving around in four wheel drives and lots of well-meaning leftie shoppers making lots more trips to lots of different shops. Intensive farming could be a better use of limited space and the best way to feed a growing population. I'm not even entirely convinced by organic food. However, none of this can change the fact that local food is nicer to eat (and, if this is to be believed, good-tasting food is better for us) and, more wishy-washy liberally, that we as a society are extremely alienated from our food and how it is produced, and this can only be a bad thing, given the rising obesity rates, yadda, yadda...
Incidentally, look up 'balk' on oed.com. It's got so many different meanings!
I keep being tempted to write incessantly about food and the environment and stuff on here. In fact I keep doing so. I've been spending hours recently reading about such things online. Mostly cos the books I've been battling with have been gung-ho militaristic isn't-the-mission-civilatrice-great tracts which are making me jump up and down with rage.
I suppose if I really cared, I'd go out and plant some trees rather than sitting with my computer on all day.
I did spend rather a lot of time when I was about 17 reading all this eco stuff and crusading passionately for the environment, which meant moaning at my beleaguered parents for choosing to live in the middle of nowhere because it meant I was miles away from my friends and H&M... I mean, because it made us dependent on our car, and haranguing them to go back to using the milkman and not getting the milk from Tesco. That one always baffled me, as in Oxford you could easily forget that food and where it comes from is important, but when you've got a prize winning herd of dairy cows less than a mile from your fridge, you'd think people would care more... Anyway, when I was a bookish, unsociable teenager, I used to spend hours angsting over how we were destroying the planet, but this was rather a peculiar thing to bang on about (unless you were preparing for a Modern Languages oral), so I suppressed the Swampy side of me, and spent first year eating Tesco Value Wheat Biscuits for breakfast and lunch so I'd have enough money to spend on 3 for £10 wines at the weekend, and suchlike.
And now, suddenly, the environment debate has exploded into the British media! It's become a trendy, acceptable thing to talk about, and, dear Lord, I'm revelling in it. I'm sure the pain of limiting my facebook time to when I'm in my pyjamas has been made much easier by the fact that I can tell myself it's okay, nay, good, to 'stay in touch with the world' by reading the papers and then channel all my internet time-wasting time into that, when really, I'm smugly massaging my own ego, knowing I've been saying all this for years and everyone else is only just beginning to catch on...
However, this blog is supposed to be for keeping in touch with friends, and, much as I'd love for everybody to think the same as me, this is rather selfish and unfair. I don't want to alienate everyone I know by turning into some mad holier-than-thou hippy; nor, if I want to share my eco-ranting with other mad hippies, do I want them, as relative strangers, to be able to read all the personal (or frivolous) things I write on here. Therefore, I shall start a new blog for talking about food and things, so anyone who's interested can read it, but that those who aren't won't have to be bored by it! Details to follow...
And now, to bed with 'The Now Show'!
*which I can't link to cos it's subscriber-only
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