HOBBY HORSE: Favourite subject or occupation that is not one’s main business. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary).
My particular horse is saddled every day. I rode it for decades. Unfortunately, like Don Quixote de la Mancha, I have spent my life charging windmills and achieving nothing. The majority of readers must think that I am as gaga as Cervantes’ hero but like him I persist. My horse and I are getting exhausted but we are not ready yet for the knacker’s yard.
Food has always been my life. Not that I eat very much but what my family, friends, animals and I consume in our house has got to be real, tasty and healthy. I made food production a business for most of my working life and now that I am retired I have time to be appalled by the poor quality of the produce and the indifference of the buyers of today. And don’t let me start on the “cooking” part of it. Most women viewers of those awful TV cooking programs (where the chefs need a serious shave and blow their noses in the bargain) will happily sip a Cyprus Sherry goggling the box and then serve a can of baked beans on toast because they had no time to cook a proper meal. Too busy watching those clowns.
There is very little understanding of the produce on offer. A friend of mine’s mother-in law puts the cabbage to boil (!) at the same time as she puts the roast in the oven. The result is not only felt but breathed by everyone when the gases released a couple of hours later in a confined area like a cosy living-room, or worse a car, will get everyone’s attention.
Raw food has got to be treated with the utmost respect. Food is what keeps our body going. Water is vital. Yet we seem to treat those two commodities as granted and for the population at large easy to deface, disgrace and torture in a pot. Any cook that “boils” vegetables should carry a government warning tattooed on his/her forehead: “Beware! This brain can damage your health!” The precious minerals contained in vegetables dissolve in water. When you drain veg through a colander into the sink all the goodness of the veg goes through the plug hole. One can always drain it into a bowl and let it cool. Then the geraniums outside that are dying for a drop of water might welcome the offering, guzzling the minerals that the humans are throwing away. Vegetables hold 80% of water. There is hardly the need to add anything to that volume except a couple of tablespoons of olive oil or unsalted butter. Cover the pot tightly and stir from time to time. On low heat. Have a glass of wine at your kitchen table and watch the pot. Now is not the time to get phased out watching those awful Australian soaps. Serve when the veg are still crunchy and pour the cooking juices on each plate. Salt is optional. My doctor gave me a wonderful piece of advice the other day: “Jocelyne, put salt in the cooking pot by all means, but not on the table, and present a bowl of chopped fresh herbs soaked in lemon juice. Any herbs. They carry natural salt”. It works. Not even our guests dare ask for the salt cellar.
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We have been used to expect cheap food and plenty of it at any time of the year. Never mind the seasons; they don’t exist anymore. A few weeks ago I wrote about the dreadful situation in the Nature Reserve of Doñana which is being wiped out of the map because people expect strawberries in January.
In the meantime, whilst the housewives with their trolleys full of industrial rubbish clamour for scampis and illegal small codlings caught by fishermen with a very short vision of the future of their trade, the prices of everyday commodities like milk, meat and fresh produce have very silently skyrocketed.
Hi-Tech Farming
Everyone feels entitled to cheap and plenty. Traditional farmers went broke in droves a few decades ago, unable to satisfy the ever-demanding guts of the new generation of consumers. Their land was sold to developers who built more houses to people who had to fill their stomachs with the cheap and cheerful.
Modern hard-tech farming is highly energy consuming. The rising prices of fuels have got to be passed on the consumer. The chicken farms, where a poor hen has only the space of the page I am typing on to live for a few horrible weeks of her life, use a huge amount of energy to get the birds to the supermarkets in record time. The cattle farms are in the same boat and when you get the forced production of vegetables under the plastic tunnels you can see the electricity meters and the generators going bananas.
All that costs money. Adding to the fact that illegal immigration is curbed down in the West and that very few of the native locals in whatever country are willing to till the land or tend to animals, the crisis is in sight and the price of daily necessities will reach a level which will be bewildering to a lot of consumers used to reach for packets of smoked salmon, bags of Dublin Bay prawns, avocados at any time of the year, strawberries in January, oak leaves lettuce to show off, rocket sprigs that taste worse than dandelion. Milk and bread will be expensive items. Government subsidies that regulated the prices for decades will dry out and it might be that the famous “cup of tea”, fabled to cure anything from ingrown toenail to anxiety from a serial killer at large, will have to be drunk “as is”. No milk, no sugar. That brew of dry hay will become even fouler than ever. You might even have to do without it altogether as the water resources are drying up due to the explosion of property building. It makes water for farming very expensive, scarce and sometimes unavailable. Soon, carrots, potatoes and other ordinary produce will become luxury items.
There are a lot of mouths to feed on this rock and it doesn’t look like the population will ever decrease. Two billion Indians and Chinese are enjoying the greatest improvement in their nations’ histories. Their improved diet means that there will be a greater demand on a shrinking market. The laboratories manufacturing GM (genetic modified) vegetable seeds might have to go to full production of the finished items. Like the newly fashionable Romanesco cauliflower. But at what cost! Incidentally this rather striking piece of rubbish vegetable tastes of nothing and once cooked smells like my cats’ sand tray in the morning.
It gets worse. Those bright green sparks, our scientists, have discovered bio-fuels. It uses corn and already millions of farming acres worldwide are being turned to the production of green fuel related corn.
Food or fuel?
No fun driving your car on an empty stomach. Even my horse is looking for a patch of grass.
There is no way to cut the cloth to make it fit.
