tbh I think a lot of the problem in this country is that we've lost the ability to cook properly.
I agree, although using the verb "lost" disguised what happened: it was stolen from us. To cut a long story short, we have a food industry which has weaned us off raw ingredients and onto processed food.
Allotments have been the butt of many jokes over the years, but there are serious issues at stake; their history, and what they represent, ought to be taken seriously. And not just for history’s sake, but for the difference that could be made to real people’s lives here and now.
It is instructive to see when self-production of food is encouraged, and when it is discouraged. Kropotkin noted (in
Fields, Factories and Workshops) that “the British nation does not work on her soil; she is prevented from doing so; and the would-be economists complain that the soil will not nourish its inhabitants!” It was inconvenient (to industry) at the end of the 19th Century to encourage self-production of food, when the industrial revolution had so recently robbed the masses of that ability and forced them into repetitive, and alienating toil. The exodus to the cities was made possible by the enclosures of common land, as land was appropriated by the big landowners, and self-production became less and less possible. But during both World Wars it became imperative to Dig for Victory, and so allotments – a feature of the city rather than the country - were suddenly patriotic.
Many people became inconveniently attached to their allotments, and in many areas had to fight to keep them. They have been strangled by at best a policy of neglect, at worst appropriation for profit, and have dwindled to a very few. In Scotland, a country of 5 million people, there are only around 5, 000 allotments. The conurbations of Glasgow and Edinburgh have little more than half that number between them.
Writing in 1989, Colin Ward noted that allotments have a “symbolic and historical significance as the only enshrinement in law of the ancient and universal belief that every family has a right of access to land for food production” (1). So, to see their perilous state now, despite a recent upsurge in interest, it is all the more important that they are defended, and access to them vastly increased.
From the Diggers of the 17th Century, who dared to cultivate waste land and grow crops, to those who plant, uninvited, in urban spaces, people have sought to take the matter into their own hands. These are people who are acutely aware of the rights that are being denied them. But the beginning of the 21st Century sees mass societies so divorced from the realities of food production that even cooking is becoming a forgotten art, never mind growing a few vegetables.
The processed food generation, according to a recent survey, doesn’t know how long to cook a soft-boiled egg. And why would they, in an age where McDonalds sponsorships infest our children’s schools, and where vegetables pre-prepared ready to stir-fry by Kenyan workers one day are cling-wrapped on the UK’s supermarket shelves the next? Fruit and vegetables that are in season locally are bought in from New Zealand, needlessly burning up kerosene, while local people are denied access, if even they knew it, to soil to grow their own.
The process by which people are robbed even of the knowledge that they have been robbed is subtle today. Noam Chomsky points to the far more open debate in Westminster when the Jamaican slaves rose up in 1831. The costs involved in quelling revolts necessitated shifting from a slave economy to a wage economy. But it was imperative that the basic relationship remained the same. However, the Jamaican slaves wanted to go onto the land, and quit the sugar plantations. So the British capitalists first closed off the land to the former slaves, and secondly realized they “would have to start creating a whole set of wants for them, and make them start desiring things they didn’t then desire, so then the only way they’d be able to satisfy their new material desires would be by working in the British sugar plantations.” (2) This was quite openly discussed. But the same process, now generations down the line, and by now far more subtle, is used for the masses at home. And it has become so successful, that not only do many people not question how far divorced they are from food production, they would think it an imposition if they were suddenly asked to begin growing a few vegetables for the pot.
But the health of individuals, the health of society, and the health of the planet are all at stake here. Peter Marshall writes that “Humans in the West have gone far in leaving the natural world and their natural desires behind them, creating an artificial world of artificial desires. In the process they have depraved their natures and injured nature as a whole.” (3)
The intensive mono-culture habits of agri-business, continually pumping chemicals into the soil, and illogically shipping produce around the world, is creating dust-bowls and despoiling the land. And the food that is most available to most people is low on nutrition and high on profit to the global corporations that have a strangle-hold on food production.
More locally produced, in-season food is a must. But how much better if we can prevent throwing even a little cash into global capitalism’s coffers by growing some of it ourselves! It has been estimated that every pound spent by the conventional leisure gardener on crop production will yield the equivalent of £9-worth of crops at shop prices. That can’t be bad. But the organic gardener can subtract the costs of the conventional gardener’s pesticides and chemicals. And enjoy a healthier vegetable than would be bought, cling-wrapped, in the out-of-town supermarket. The affluent can buy organic, but for many, the best option might be growing their own.
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1. Colin Ward, 1989, Welcome Thinner City. London: Bedford Square Press.
2. Noam Chomsky, 2002, Understanding Power. New York: The New Press.
3. Peter Marshall, 2000, Riding the Wind. London: Continuum.
