The difference in the taste of various honeys is truly astonishing. Eating honey is like experiencing the place that it came from. It’s like being their with the bee as it bimbles from flower to flower. Let me introduce you to a few of the friends I have made these past seven months. The first one has to be my staple, honey from the allotment. It’s made by Shaun, the guy who has the allotment behind my friend’s and who once gave me a bag full of camomile flowers. Now, allotment honey isn’t going to win any awards for showiness. It’s rough and ready – clearly the product of a mix of different pollens. Because it doesn’t undergo any heat treatment, it crystalises almost immediately. However, it’s like an old friend and I eat at least two jars of it a week.

When I can’t get any allotment honey (either from the allotment shop or from the corner shop near where I used to live which is cunningly on the way to work) I turn to Paynes bee farm to supply me with my fix. Payne’s is clearly a classier product, sweeter, more uniform – the set variety a delightful fudgy consistency. It’s good – but there isn’t a story there. I can’t taste anything in it? When I eat it, it doesn’t immediately transport me somewhere. The few spoonfuls of honey that I had from the Chelsea Physics Garden, on the other hand, take me there immediately – though I have never actually visited. My housemate Loo was in possession of one of just a few jars of honey through her mother who is well connected in the land of the medicinal garden. This honey was utterly delicate and tasted of honeysuckle and summer and quiet moments in a beautiful English garden.

While I was away in Brittany in the summer I had some local honey which blew my socks off. It has a deep, deep floral taste that was almost difficult to eat. It tasted like it should be the product of lavender or violet pollen or something else equally as strong smelling but after doing some internet research, I find that it is probably buckwheat that gives it its distinctive taste. Finally there is the Lancashire honey that my mum has found for me to eat since I have been home for Christmas. It’s heather honey and has a bitter toffee taste – it’s sparser, less rosy and fecund, more complicated – and reminds me how I feel about the north compared to the south.

Honey got serious a few weeks ago when I went into a shop that I know sells local honey and they didn’t have any. I asked why and they told me that none of their suppliers had any – it has been a terrible year for the bees. My blood sugar fell through the floor at that moment and I left the shop shaking. As I cycled home (pushing my bike part of the way up the hill because of my hypoglycemic weakness) I thought about how terrible it would be to have to live for four more months without sweetner. Then my thoughts turned to darker subjects – beemagedon and the prediction that the human race could last four years without bees. I determined to become a beekeeper as soon as possible and to do my best to encourage other people to keep bees too. Some friends and I are going to form a beekeeping working group and learn all that we can about care of the wee critters. Join us!

I’ve learnt too that it’s not about denying yourself.  When I started I was totally hardcore about the tiny ingredients that went into the food I ate and the drink I drank (yeast, sulphites, salt, rennet).  I ended up making myself a little bit miserable and in the end developed the ‘booze clause’ so that I could drink local ales despite the yeast etc.  Now guys, I have to admit, I have developed a salt and rennet clause meaning that I can have local cheeses too.  I’m going to keep these to a minimum as I don’t think they’re good to eat all the time, but it’s nice to know they are there.  I’ll also stick to goats and sheep cheeses.  In fact, all of these rules are ones that Alisa and James had from the beginning.  They also had an eating out with friends clause and a travelling clause.  I’m not going to cave on the first one, my friends have dealt with me for six months and they can deal  with me for another six.  Plus I have found that the best meal I have had this year was with friends when they ate entirely local with me.  It was joyful.  The travelling clause might make an appearance if I take a new year’s trip mainly by train.  I’ll try and keep it to the minimum though.

The snooziness of the season has also led me to give myself a time out from feeling guilty that I have not done anything to preserve any of the foods that flutter by.  No jam, no canned tomatoes, no dried apples.  I’m too sleepy to beat myself up about this so I have decided to count this as my training year.  This is the year that I learn about seasons and micro-seasons, that I learn when there will be a glut of rhubarb and when there will be more strawberries than I can handle.  Next year, when I know what’s coming, I can plan ahead and be ready for the bounty when it comes.  Ah ha! Inspiration has just struck.  The foraging group I set up clearly needs a preserving and fermenting group to work alongside it.  I have a big kitchen, all I need now is people.  Form an orderly queue!

One person who has been preserving is my friend Caroline.  She came into some medlars from a friend of hers and spent the best part of the day turning them into medlar jelly.  Before this gift, medlars had been a bit of a mythic fruit to my friends and I.  They’re one of the few fruits that require you to wait until they are slightly rotten (bletted) before you can eat them.  They’re also very rare and have gained the aura of antiquated Englishness because of this.  Caroline’s medlar jelly rather overshot the jelly mark and turned itself into toffee.  It was delicious medlar flavoured toffee though and it solved a problem I have been pondering for a while…  Can you make toffee from honey?  Yes you can is the answer.  I have spent a good few days heating up said jar of jelly in a pan water and then spooning the slightly less hard jelly into my mouth.  It is delicious and has the consistency of Turkish delight.  I can inform you that half a jar of this substance will make you feel very sick though.

In other news, the allotment is coming together, at least in my head.  Onions, garlic and broad beans are in and that’s more or less all you can grow at this time of year.  I’m starting to really know what I’d like it to look like and what I’d like to grow on it.  My aim for next year (and it’s an ambitious aim) is to cut down/cut out my veg box and get my veg largely from the allotment.  Some very very hard work needs to go in before then though!  Luckily, my friend Will and I have started doing reciprocal work at each other’s allotments.  About every three weeks we go to one or other of our allotments and put in a day’s proper work.  It’s amazing how much you can get done when there are two of you working hard.  It’s also amazing how much nicer and less overwhelming it is to work with someone else rather than on your own.  Last time we did this we went to Will’s allotment and built a deck.  This time it’s my turn and we are going to tidy up my allotment.  It’s a shit tip.  And I’m not very good at tidying up on my own.

The other reason that I am starting to feel less stressed about what I need to do at the allotment is that I am up there three days a week.  Since I moved, I am no longer close enough to home to go home at lunchtime so I go up to the allotment with my packed lunch.  It is wonderful and as much as possible I get out in the sun to allow my body to make vitamin D.  And I haven’t forgotten my lunch once!  In a world where you can’t buy a sandwich, that would be miserable…

Next week I move house to a place which has a range.  Read it and weep, foodies – seven burners, two ovens, a grill and some kind of warming device that I don’t understand.  I have a fantasy of filling the cupboards and shelves with the preserved bounty of the earth –jars of dried mushrooms (currently in season but so very very difficult to identify), pots of horse radish sauce, cider turning itself slowly into vinegar, sauerkraut.  My fantasy is of being organised enough to take advantage of the masses of food available to me.  Then, instead of throwing myself solely upon the mercy of the season I could be tucking into cookies made with my home-dried currants, or spring omelettes made with last autumn’s mushrooms.  At least one of my new housemates is of a similar fermenty bent to me so I will have an ally when the smell of the sauerkraut gets too much.  I think this will make a big difference.  Making ten jars of sauerkraut on your own is a hassle, when you do it with someone else, it becomes an event.  Soon, Beth and Kat’s canning evenings will be a bigger social draw than the best nightclub down on the seafront.

Speaking of social events, my monthly foraging trips are gaining momentum.  We have around 15 people on the list and 2-8 people come out every month.  It is becoming a movement – although it’s not quite as successful as the vermicomposting (composting with worms) mailing list I set up which now has 88 members.  It just shows that if you pull your finger out of your arse to get something set up, people will join you.  Last month our focus was mushrooms and, despite significant over-indulgence the night before, I still made it into the woods at Stanmer Park by around midday.  My friend Jay, who had left husband and children to enjoy Apple Day celebrations being held in the park, was like some kind of mushroom bloodhound, dashing around finding specimens everywhere.  I stumbled after her, groaning and wearing dark glasses.  We found some edible mushrooms – the name of which I forget – but most interesting to me were fungi you can use for things other than eating.  There were some hard black fungi called King Alfred’s cakes that can be used for starting fires.  They take sparks very easily and burn slowly.  Apparently people used to wrap them in leather and carry fire from place to place.  The other kind of fungi was one which, when dried, can be used as a strop for sharpening things.  Brilliant! 

One interesting development of the past month is that meat is crooning to me in a way that it never has before.  This has happened to more or less all of the people who have done this kind of diet – Barbara Kingsolver gave up vegetarianism when spending a year being self-sufficient, Alisa Smith and J.B. McKinnon, the Canadians who made the 100 mile diet famous, drifted from near veganism to eating some meat and fish.  I think that I am going that way too.  The desire to feast on something’s flesh has come after a month of being more or less vegan.  My source of unsalted butter has dried up so I am using oil for all of the things I used to use butter for.  I decided that I was only using milk for my breakfast and that it was going off too quickly, so I stopped getting that.  Cheese I haven’t eaten for five months because of the non-local salt.  My only dairy staple is eggs, eggs and more eggs. 

Now I have ousted ‘cow-food’ from my diet I really, really feel like filling in the gaps with dead animal. After years of thinking that eating what is essentially the muscles of another being was just plain weird, I now have no problem with that side of things.  What I do object to is industrialised farming.  I am currently in a debate with myself about whether it’s ok to eat rabbits.  This isn’t just a theoretical debate, I have actually have been offered rabbits – a friend’s friend’s boyfriend works on a farm and shoots them.  What a conundrum!   To eat bunny or to not eat bunny.  They’re not being farmed and they’re not being killed for food, but then they are being killed so that said farming can go on.  I better stay away from them until my morals have come to some sort of truce.  I think what I really need to do is get the lovely Fergus Drennan to teach me the dark art of finding and cooking roadkill.  Then I can eat meat while simultaneously feeling morally superior to the bastards who ran it over in the first place.  Everyone’s happy (except the badger).

Other people are more enthusiastic.  I have had people come up to me and say, “Oh my God, that’s so BRILLIANT.”  Last night I had dinner at my friend Tom’s house with another friend called Alice.  Strictly speaking, we were there to do funding applications for Cranks - the bicycle workshop that I volunteer at.  Actually it turned out we were there to cook food, drink wine and chat (amazingly about things other than bicycles).  “We’re going for full solidarity,” said Tom when I arrived and put his gin and tonic away to share some of the local wine I had brought.  “Full?” I asked.  “Wow.”  It’s really unusual that people want to go the whole hog.  When it comes to dinner parties, I usually have to take my own dinner.  We had possibly the best meal I have had in the nearly four months that I have been doing this.  I made chappattis (I have more or less stopped making sourdough as chappattis take half an hour vs two days for the sourdough) and we roasted some potatoes and a sweet potato (a sweet potato!!!!) from Alice’s friend’s allotment.  We made salsa from a giant green tomato from the same allotment and chillis that I grew in the kitchen (plus some that Alice brought).  It was an altogether astounding meal made so much better by the fact that so many of the ingredients were grown by us or people we know.  I left with a bagful of pears courtesy of Tom, a chiropractor, who said that there’s an abandoned peartree near the car park of his clinic.  He related the story of how he would annually get up on the roof of his car in smart workday clothes and throw pears down to his colleague. 

Receipt of this letter then sent me into a tailspin of indecision.  There was a plot that I wanted very much…  cast your mind back to raspberry season and the overgrown allotment with rampant fruit canes and greenhouses overflowing with vines…  however, as far as I knew, this was still in the hands of a friend’s friend’s friend.  Perhaps I could contact him and get him to hand it over to me, as he wasn’t doing anything with it?  I tried to get in touch for a week with little success (you try getting in touch with someone three degrees of separation away from you), so on Saturday I trailed glumly up to the allotment site at 9am, ready to take whatever bramble-ridden offering I was given.  The gate was closed until 11am so, fuming, I trudged back home again chanting, “you’re angry because you’re hung over, you’re angry because you’re hung over” (damn you 9% Kentish cider).  Back I went at 11am and talked to some lovely old geezers in the allotment shop (open 11am-1pm Saturdays and Sundays).  “I’m one of the people you sent a letter to,” I announced.

“We like promptness,” said one of the guys (it was 11am exactly)

“I came up at nine,” I said, “but you were closed.”  Since school, I have never been able to rid myself of the habit of ingratiating myself with people in authority.

They showed me a map of all the plots that were free and I could hardly contain my excitement as they circled what looked to be the aforementioned allotment of my dreams.  I walked down to the plot, and with help from another guy working on a neighbouring allotment, we worked out that the grapes and raspberries and acres and acres of bindweed could indeed be mine.  I skipped back to the shop and told them which one I wanted.  The guy smirked and said, “I thought you might want that one, well done for being here first.”  As I was leaving (actually peeking in my new sheds and greenhouses), some other allotment hopefuls came wandering around with a map.  I did my best supportive voice as I helped them to work out which plot was which.  I’ve annotated our conversation with my real feelings…  

“You’re looking for plot 39-1, are you [you tardy suckers.  If you’d gotten out of bed earlier all these greenhouses and fruit trees and shonky wooden structures could have been yours].  I think it’s that one over there.  This one here [with all the COOL SHIT on it] I just got [because I was here earlier than you].  You don’t know whether to get a half plot or a whole plot?  I’d go for a half plot, it’s hard work [but clearly I can cope with it because I’m a superb gardener and also because I have a cunning plan to give part of it to my work colleague].  Good luck with your endeavours [you poor, poor, late fools].

My plans for my patch include planting unusual fruit trees such as medlars, and using the shed to store homebrew and some of my ever-increasing collection of bikes (I should start another blog about my many bikes).  I also intend to keep bees, something that I’m not sure my vegan friends will be too happy about, but I’ll do it in the most compassionate way possible – not replacing the honey with sugar and only taking part of it etc.  I’ll probably also read them bedtime stories and provide them with a little disinfecting footbath that they have to walk through to get in (I jest not, someone told me that this has been set up at some hives to protect against either varroa mite or colony collapse disorder).  I need to do a whole load more research into the various ways that bees can get sick and die but I’m very excited about becoming an urban beekeeper.  I somehow knew that I would be a beekeeper this year.

Marvellous occurrence number two was the appearance of oats in my diet.  I got an email from Sarah Dixon of Pickle My Fancy  blog.  Sarah and her partner did a hundred mile diet for three months in 2007 in Richmond (not too far away from here) and turned me on to a number of different foods that I didn’t yet have in my repertoire.  The most amazing of these was Pertwood Farm Organic Porridge Oats.  Oh dear god, if you have had to live an oat-free life for three months, making pancakes for breakfast from a mixture that sometimes explodes (I had bad luck with fermenting pancake batter and hot water - more on this later*), you too would be on your knees with gratitude at the slow release energy dispatched by this hard-to-find cereal.  A quick call to my insider friend at Infinity Foods and a pack of six boxes of oats were on order for me.  I picked them up on Saturday and hugged them all the way home.  When I got home I had a bowl of oats with honey , and raw milk and savoured their chewy  golden flavour.  I realised as I was eating that I had a person connection to all of the food.  The honey was produced by the man on the allotment behind me (well, strictly it was produced by the bees on the allotment behind me, unless Shaun is a really special kinda guy…), the milk was from cows I saw once a week when I went to Middle Farm, and the oats were from Pertwood where a friend of mine goes to do maintenance at the kids’ camp.  

It felt so wholesome to be eating this interconnected food that that’s all I did for a week.  Oats, milk and honey for breakfast and dinner (I skipped lunch).  Give me a break, eh - I got busy, my friend was in hospital and people were visiting from Australia and err.. Blackburn.  I started worrying on Wednesday that I was feeling dizzy while lying in bed (quite an experience, let me tell you).  That would be because I hadn’t had any protein for a number of days.  Ooops.   I’ve always been an over-eater so experiencing a lack of essential nutrients has been a new experience for me.  When I don’t eat properly these days, I don’t make up the deficit in biscuits, as I used to.  I just don’t eat!  I’ve all but stopped snacking, as to snack, you have to make the snack from scratch which kind of removes the pleasure you might get in, say, inhaling a Kitkat.  After the strange week of being dizzy, I’ve decided to mend my ways and make doubly sure that all the major food groups, vitamins and nutrients make an appearance in my diet (with the possible exception of vitamin B12, but I haven’t got a tingly tongue so I don’t think that any harm has been done yet).  

Last week apart, I’ve never felt healthier than I do at the moment.  I’ve lost nearly two stone since I started and really feel all glowy and positive.  I’ve started calculating how much energy I am going to need to do a particular activity and adjusting my diet as required.  It’s all very different to how I was say, a couple of years ago when I was doing my PGCE.  I would come in exhausted, take five minutes to cook some stuffed pasta and then crash out still exhausted on the sofa before dragging myself upstairs to plan lessons.  One other thing that I have noticed is that you don’t realise how much food you require for a day until you have to take the whole lot with you.  I recently went on an overnight bike adventure and at least a third of my panniers were filled with food.  I’ve discovered that boiled eggs are brilliant cycle adventure food – they’re not going to get squashed and go slimy, they’re full of protein and they’re quite small.  Unfortunately, there’s a limit to the amount of boiled eggs you want to eat.

Eating like this has become second nature to me now.  I’ve devised my self-deprecating way of telling people what I am doing, heard all the jokes, said no to all the offers of crisps and chocolate.  I don’t even think about it anymore.  That said, I do have to make a confession.  I did slightly bend the rules the other day.  It’s not as bad as you might think from this sheepish confession.  I drank Harvey’s Best Bitter (many pints of) in the pub.  This might not seem such a terrible thing – Harvey’s  is in Lewes (the next town along), they use 100 mile ingredients…  but they also use yeast and probably other things (sulphites?) in their brew.  I have to admit that this is the lunatic edge of the project that has always made me crazy.  There are lots of nice local wines and ciders and beers, but brewing requires all sorts of non-local ‘catalyst’ additives like the ever present yeast and sulphites. 

James and Alisa – from 100milediet.org – have always included such foods as allowed, but I wanted to be 100% down the line.  I would eat nothing that wasn’t totally local.  This hasn’t really been a problem until it came to booze.  Booze almost always has such things added.  The only stuff with nothing added was very few types of cider and perry.  I’m REALLY bloody bored of those few types of cider and perry!  Also, sitting in the pub drinking pints of water one after the other was starting to affect my social life (though it was probably doing some good to my liver and kidneys).  I wanted to do this project to bring me closer to people, not to distance myself from them.  Thus, from now on (or at least from the first, illicit, pint of Harvey’s on) I’m now allowing yeast and sulphites.  This will make a great difference to my ability to get rolling drunk and it’ll mean that I can drink wine in France when I go there next week.  I justify my actions by saying that it’s ridiculous to have such amazing local products and to not be able to enjoy them. 

 * At a recent stay at my friend Oliver’s, I took some pancake batter in a jar to have for breakfast.  Unfortunately it was quite hot and I didn’t refridgerate it, so it may have fermented slightly.  I couldn’t get the top of the jar off (because it was filled with gas) and Ollie suggested pouring hot water on it to remove the lid.  I duly did this and the whole damn thing exploded.  The glass didn’t break, but pancake mixture went everywhere - up the walls, on my face, in my hair, in the sink, in the kettle.  Ollie just stood there with a gleeful look on his face saying, “your food is always so exciting!”.  I wish I was better at physics (and possibly chemistry).

Though my diet harks back to pre-medieval times, my lifestyle certainly doesn’t.  I sit in front of a computer for three days a week at work and often for a further two days working on my own projects.  I’m a videoblogger, I run conferences on social and digital media.  The phrase ‘Web 2.0’ makes me feel all funny inside.  On top of this, I do a lot of non-tech stuff – from learning to mend bikes to organising clothing swaps.  In short, I haven’t got time.  Internet research is the easiest available option.

It’s starting to strike me that this isn’t really the point.  This project is scaffolded by the internet – I use it to find suppliers, to find recipes (it isn’t unusual for me to be looking at my computer while cooking), to communicate about what I am doing and to connect with others, but I think that I could be doing so much more. 

I could, for example, be using this project as an excuse to explore the 100 miles in which I live.  Unfortunately for me, a good portion of the aforementioned 100 miles is in the English Channel.  I have made tentative plans to get an unsuspecting yachtsperson at the Marina to teach me how to crew a boat but as I don’t eat fish, this won’t do me much good nutritionally.  Luckily, there is plenty of land left to explore and as of now I vow to explore it.  Yes, alright, I’ll go to the next farmer’s market, and if you insist, I’ll visit some pick-your-own farms.  What, you want me to talk to people while I’m there?  Well, ok.

As I write this, I have cunningly used the internet to find a directory of PYO establishments in the vicinity - http://www.pickyourown.org/uks2y.htm.  Later, I’ll spend a couple of glorious hours with an Ordnance Survey map, plotting the routes between them so that I can visit more than one in a day.  Then I’ll have to turn my brain to the tricky problem of how to transport soft fruits on a bicycle.  My life has become more adventurous and innovative since I started this project!    

I spent last week at my parent’s house in Lancashire celebrating my mum’s birthday.   Actually, I spent last week doing the aforementioned walking and reading, but told her that these were valuable ways of celebrating 60 years of someone’s life.  This was the longest time that I had spent away from home since the project started and I was expecting it to be more of a challenge than it turned out to be.  The rules that I have set myself state that I can take food from Brighton with me if I travel somewhere, but that I should try to source food from within 100 miles of where I’m going whenever possible.   Obviously, I had big plans to scour the internet for sources of Lancashire food, but time – my nemesis – galloped away from me and I found myself on the eve of my departure with little idea of what I was going to eat while I was up there.

Luckily, my mother had not been so indolent.  She had been to a local farm shop and found me honey, flour, and cheese (which I didn’t eat for reasons I’ll discuss in another post).  The dairy farm at the back of the house (literally at the back.  As a child, I would go to school with clothes that stunk of cow shit from being on the line on the wrong day) provided milk and eggs.  The rest of my diet was not so much 100 mile as 10 metre – veg from my mum’s garden.  I brought butter up from Brighton though it went rancid before I could eat it.  It usually does this and I usually eat it, but somehow, in my parent’s house, without the funny smells and fruit flies that I am used to, it seemed gross.  

My mum’s new hobby also provided some sustenance.  She’s volunteering for the BTCV at Haigh Hall near Wigan.  They’re getting the old walled kitchen garden productive again.  It provided me with both a pocket full of raspberries and a fix for my secret garden fetish.   I was pleased to note that they had planted a medlar tree.  As well as secret gardens, I have also become fixated on medlars despite not having ever tried one.   I was also pleased to note that I knew the difference between borage and comfrey when my mum didn’t.  Competitive?  Moi?

It’s a good job that my parents like me as I spent my week filling their house with strange smells and unknown substances.  They weren’t pleased when I dribbled sourdough starter all over the kitchen, despite me protesting that it was a joyful union of wild yeasts and bacteria.  It’s a good job that I didn’t take my ‘vinegar’ with me.   This vinegar is cider that I left for a month on the window ledge in a bottle.  At first all that happened was that it attracted suicidal fruit flies and I had to scoop them out and attach a tissue to the top of the bottle with an elastic band.  After that problem was solved, a thick gloopy goo started forming inside the bottle.  It looked utterly gross and I started to think that I was going to have to throw it away.  Instead of doing that, I swallowed down the bit of sick that was rising in my throat and sieved the goop out of it.  When I tasted what was left I had, would you believe it, vinegar!  A little research on the internet has told me that the gross gloop is in fact called ‘mother of vinegar’ and is a ‘form of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria that develops on fermenting alcoholic liquids’ (thanks wikipedia!).   I did it!  I am a successful vinegar maker.  Now all that I need to do is read the book I have just inherited called ‘Vinegar: Nature’s Secret Weapon’.  It also features two other chapters entitled, ‘Honey: Nature’s secret weapon II’ and ‘Garlic: Nature’s secret weapon III’.   Oh, and I also need to use the bumper crop of apples I am expecting this autumn to create more than a teacupful of this elixir.  Salad dressings, you are now within my reach…

So, no strawberries, and to add insult to injury my clandestine redcurrant and raspberry stash has been rumbled too.  I was, oh-so-secretly, harvesting fruit from my friend’s abandoned allotment.  Abandoned in the sense that they moved to Bristol, leaving the allotment in the care of someone who didn’t (care that is).  The grass was chest height and hid my furtive doings well from view, but now it seems the allotment has been commandeered and handed to someone else, or at least the one next to it has.  I shall keep a weather-eye on it and see what’s going on.  I really hope that the allotment hasn’t been given to someone else yet because there are vines in their shed and greenhouse which are just about to spew forth pounds and pounds of grapes.  These too I was planning to dry in my not yet existent solar dryer and possibly make some wine from them.  I was planning to bathe in grape juice and make shoes from the skin.  I was planning to…

No strawberries, no grapes.  Looking at my meagre harvest of 20 blackcurrents, five redcurrants and six raspberries, I felt very sorry for myself.  Chris – housemate and fellow allotmenteer - suggested in no uncertain terms that I stopped sulking, but what does he know, Mr Cocoa and Sugar (I’m such a bitter person).  Sulk.  Sulk.  Sulk.  There is a silver lining to this very dark cloud, however, as I have just found some cherry trees on waste-ground near where I work.  I picked some yesterday, wearing office lady attire, going through my innocent foraging story in my head should some thick-necked security guard come along and ask me what I was doing.

There’s more on foraging to come, as I have started a foraging group (we go out on the last Sunday of the month for people who are interested) and we had our inaugural trip on Sunday.  I won’t say too much about it as I’ll be posting a video (this was supposed to be a videoblog, but video is way more time consuming than text to produce and I refuse to let blogging get in the way of eating). 

Don’t worry about me too much.  Though there’s a dearth of soft fruits in my life, there’s always, always rhubarb.  

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 10th June 2008

I suggest you sit down before you read this. Robert Mugabe is right. At last week’s global food summit he was the only leader to speak of “the importance … of land in agricultural production and food security”.(1) Countries should follow Zimbabwe’s lead, he said, in democratising ownership.

Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.

But he is right in theory. Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen(2), and has since been confirmed by dozens of further studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.

In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares(3). Sen’s observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Phillippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold almost everywhere.

The finding would be surprising in any industry, as we have come to associate efficiency with scale. In farming, it seems particularly odd, because small producers are less likely to own machinery, less likely to have capital or access to credit, and less likely to know about the latest techniques.

There’s a good deal of controversy about why this relationship exists. Some researchers argued that it was the result of a statistical artefact: fertile soils support higher populations than barren lands, so farm size could be a result of productivity, rather than the other way around. But further studies have shown that the inverse relationship holds across an area of fertile land. Moreover, it works even in countries like Brazil, where the biggest farmers have grabbed the best land(4).

The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per hectare than big farmers(5). Their workforce largely consists of members of their own families, which means that labour costs are lower than on large farms (they don’t have to spend money recruiting or supervising workers), while the quality of the work is higher. With more labour, farmers can cultivate their land more intensively: they spend more time terracing and building irrigation systems; they sow again immediately after the harvest; they might grow several different crops in the same field.

In the early days of the Green Revolution, this relationship seemed to go into reverse: the bigger farms, with access to credit, were able to invest in new varieties and boost their yields. But as the new varieties have spread to smaller farmers, the inverse relationship has reasserted itself(6). If governments are serious about feeding the world, they should be breaking up large landholdings, redistributing them to the poor and concentrating their research and their funding on supporting small farms.

There are plenty of other reasons for defending small farmers in poor countries. The economic miracles in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan arose from their land reform programmes. Peasant farmers used the cash they made to build small businesses. The same thing seems to have happened in China, though it was delayed for 40 years by collectivisation and the Great Leap Backwards: the economic benefits of the redistribution that began in 1949 were not felt until the early 80s(7). Growth based on small farms tends to be more equitable than growth built around capital-intensive industries(8). Though their land is used intensively, the total ecological impact of smallholdings is lower. When small farms are bought up by big ones, the displaced workers move into new land to try to scratch out a living. I once followed evicted peasants from the Brazilian state of Maranhao 2000 miles across the Amazon to the land of the Yanomami Indians, then watched them rip it apart.

But the prejudice against small farmers is unshakeable. It gives rise to the oddest insult in the English language: when you call someone a peasant, you are accusing them of being self-reliant and productive. Peasants are detested by capitalists and communists alike. Both have sought to seize their land, and have a powerful vested interest in demeaning and demonising them. In its profile of Turkey, the country whose small farmers are 20 times more productive than its large ones, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation states that, as a result of small landholdings, “farm output … remains low.”(9) The OECD states that “stopping land fragmentation” in Turkey “and consolidating the highly fragmented land is indispensable for raising agricultural productivity.”(10) Neither body provides any supporting evidence. A rootless, half-starved labouring class suits capital very well.

Like Mugabe, the donor countries and the big international bodies loudly demand that small farmers be supported, while quietly shafting them. Last week’s food summit agreed “to help farmers, particularly small-scale producers, increase production and integrate with local, regional, and international markets.”(11) But when, earlier this year, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge proposed a means of doing just this, the US, Australia and Canada refused to endorse it as it offended big business(12), while the United Kingdom remains the only country that won’t reveal whether or not it supports the study(13).

Big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual property rights over every aspect of production; by developing plants which either won’t breed true or which don’t reproduce at all(14), it ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate. As it captures both the wholesale and retail markets, it seeks to reduce its transaction costs by engaging only with major sellers. If you think that supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing countries sweep away street markets and hawkers’ stalls and replace them with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own, large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world.

This leads to an interesting conclusion. For many years, well-meaning liberals have supported the fair trade movement because of the benefits it delivers directly to the people it buys from. But the structure of the global food market is changing so rapidly that fair trade is now becoming one of the few means by which small farmers in poor nations might survive. A shift from small to large farms will cause a major decline in global production, just as food supplies become tight. Fair trade might now be necessary not only as a means of redistributing income, but also to feed the world.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/foodclimate/statements/zwe_mugabe.pdf

2. Amartya Sen, 1962. An Aspect of Indian Agriculture. Economic Weekly, Vol. 14.

3. Fatma Gül Ünal, October 2006. Small Is Beautiful: Evidence Of Inverse Size Yield
Relationship In Rural Turkey. Policy Innovations. http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01382

4. Giovanni Cornia, 1985. Farm Size, Land Yields and the Agricultural Production function: an
analysis for fifteen Developing Countries. World Development. Vol. 13, pp. 513-34.

5. Eg Peter Hazell, January 2005. Is there a future for small farms? Agricultural Economics, Vol. 32, pp93-101. doi:10.1111/j.0169-5150.2004.00016.x

6. Rasmus Heltberg, October 1998. Rural market imperfections and the farm size— productivity relationship: Evidence from Pakistan. World Development. Vol 26, pp 1807-1826. doi:10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00084-9

7. See Shenggen Fan and Connie Chan-Kang , 2005. Is Small Beautiful?: Farm Size, Productivity and Poverty in Asian Agriculture. Agricultural Economics, Vol. 32, pp135-146.

8. Peter Hazell, ibid.

9. http://www.new-agri.co.uk/00-3/countryp.html

10. OECD Economic Surveys: Turkey - Volume 2006 Issue 15, p186.
This is available online as a Google book.

I was led to refs 9 and 10 via Fatma Gül Ünal, ibid.

11. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/foodclimate/HLCdocs/declaration-E.pdf

12. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), 2008. Global Summary for Decision Makers. www.agassessment.org

13. IAASTD, viewed 9th June 2008. Frequently Asked Questions. www.agassessment.org

14. Eg Terminator seeds.