Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (10 page)

Although perceptions about food in Britain
are
beginning to shift, the ‘foodie revolution’ remains a predominantly middle-class phenomenon; farmers’ markets and organic box schemes are tiny countermovements against a general trend.
⁸²
How to scale them up is the challenge – and that, as a quick bit of turkey-maths makes clear, is no small task. The real barrier to changing the way we eat, however, does not lie in practicalities, but in our minds. ‘Third way’ methods, such as the farming of salmon in large pens in the open sea, or chickens in open sheds with access to the outdoors, already exist in Britain. In the absence of a magic fix along the lines of someone inventing a
miracle pill or manna descending from heaven, those sorts of responsible, middle-scale farms are probably the closest thing we are going to get to a way of feeding ourselves without destroying the planet in the process.

What would a Lorenzetti fresco look like today? It is hard to imagine how a painter could represent city and country on the same wall, let alone the effects of good or bad government on either. Feeding cities has become rather more complicated than it was in the fourteenth century. But one thing is certain: however much we look the other way, our rural hinterland will always mirror the way we live. Ancient cities were run on slave labour; so were the farms that fed them. Medieval cities thrived on trade; so did their hinterlands. Modern cities, like their industrialised hinterlands, have little respect for nature. If we don’t like what’s happening out there in the landscape, we had better rethink how we eat, because one will never change without the other.

It is no coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers …

Ever since I first heard about it, I have wanted to go to Brogdale. Brogdale is the home of the National Fruit Collections, where every known variety of pear, apple and soft fruit in the land is nurtured, alongside new varieties which are being bred all the time to see if any of them has what it takes to make it in the cut-throat world of modern food production. Throughout the summer and autumn, Brogdale holds festivals in honour of its various fruit species, and I have come to the biggest daddy of them all: Apple Day on 21 October, the British fruit equivalent of the Oscars.

Apart from its all-important tree collections, Brogdale consists essentially of a group of unprepossessing sheds; but on this, its grandest day of the year, it exudes the atmosphere of a village fête. There are tractor rides, a miniature train, stalls selling home-made chutneys and jams, and last but not least, a pig roast. Resisting them all, I head straight for what will surely be the crowning glory of the day: a large barn where this year’s apple harvest is on display. I am expecting this to be something extraordinary: a Busby Berkeleyesque piece of bravura along the lines of a prize-winning roundabout using apples instead of geraniums. Yet when I enter the shed, it is so dark and echoingly empty that at first I can’t make out any apples at all. Then I spot them in the gloom, snaking around the walls on a low plywood plinth, each variety represented by four perfect specimens next to an identifying label. People in rustling waterproofs file past the apples, peering down at them and murmuring to each other in low, appreciative voices. ‘It’s a bit like a fruit version of the Crown Jewels,’ I mutter to myself before realising that, actually, that is precisely what it is.

I fall in behind the queue and begin my dutiful scrutiny of the
collection. As the apple trail unfolds beneath my gaze, I begin to realise its modesty is misleading. There is a staggering number of varieties here. Every few yards, they change from big to small, shiny to rough, red to yellow, green to brown and back again. I find myself becoming transfixed by them. Apple varieties are like languages, I decide. There are some 2,300 of them in Brogdale alone, each representing a tiny universe; a culture rooted in time and place, unique and irreplaceable. And just like languages, apple varieties are dying out all over the world. There is no place for them, it seems, in the global food economy. As I peer down at the distant cousins of Cox and Bramley, I marvel at each family’s survival. All of them have a story, a provenance, a legacy – and a taste. Hmm, yes … taste: that’s the one thing that’s missing here. Realising that for the past half-hour I have been fighting the urge to pick up one of the apples and take a large bite out of it, I can’t trust myself in here any longer. I’ve got to get out and find something to eat.

Back in the daylight, the harvest festival mood is in full swing. Children run about laughing and squealing, tractor rides come and go, and there is a heartening whiff of roast pork in the air. But there is a long queue for the pig, and I see there is a walking tour of the orchards just about to start. My excitement returns: perhaps now I will finally get to discover the true Brogdale. I join the group, and we set off with our anonymous guide (a compact, weatherbeaten type somewhere between a mountain explorer and a Boy Scout) in search of fruity enlightenment.

A short walk past some poplar trees and a near-miss with a tractor later, we arrive in the orchard, and for the second time today my illusions are shattered. In place of the majestic Elysium of my imagination, we are in a flat rectangular field the size of a couple of football pitches, full of shrubs no higher than my head. Is this just the nursery? I wonder. But no: it seems that modern fruit trees are all grafted on to special rootstocks so that they only grow to six foot or so, making it easier to pick the fruit.
²
Our guide, possibly sensing our disappointment, produces a worrying-looking knife and plucks one of the few remaining pears off a nearby tree, slicing it expertly into portions for us all to try. The pear is a Comice: sharp and sweet, dripping with juice and absurdly delicious. My first bite elicits an
immediate flood of emotion: gratitude and pleasure, but also puzzlement. How is it possible that I can walk past a bowl of these very pears at home for days on end and never be tempted to try even one? Here, plucked straight from the tree, they are pure ambrosia. The undramatic surroundings are forgotten once again – I am a townie on a voyage of discovery, and life is good.

We weave our way up and down a few times, tasting more pears as we go (like echoes of a first love, none quite matches up to the Comice), before filing round a tall hedge and past a field of brassicas into the heart of the collection, the apple orchard. There are some 4,600 apple trees here (two for every variety), and it looks like it. Lilliputian shrubs drip with edible baubles as far as the eye can see. ‘Does anyone have any apples they particularly want to visit?’ asks our guide. ‘Cox!’ pipes up a little girl, only to be swiftly reprimanded by her mother. ‘Ashmead’s Kernel?’ drawls a bespectacled know-all, easily trumping the little girl, and making me suspect he’s been swotting up his name-tags on the way in. ‘Excellent choice!’ says our guide, and off we tramp.

Since our quest involves travelling to some far-flung corner of the orchard, our guide inducts us into Apple World as we go. First he gives us a Linda to try (which is light and fragrant); a Lynn’s Pippin (sweet, but lacking lift); an Elstar (an in-your-face, Barbra Streisandish sort of fruit). We learn about russeting, the deliberate cultivation of rough or reddened skin to improve sweetness and richness of flavour, and why so many English varieties have failed in the face of competition from easier-cropping ones like Golden Delicious. We snub the latter when we come to it, although, to be fair, most of us are rather appled out by now. At last, after what feels like several hundred samplings, we track down Ashmead’s Kernel, which turns out to be rather a fine specimen: Cox-like in colour, texture and taste, with just a hint of additional fragrance. It’s a good way to end our tour. As we trudge back to the centre, I catch sight of all the apple-related products I swept past on the way in. They make me realise I’m not going to be able to eat another apple again for weeks.

Brogdale is an amazing place, but it only exists by the skin of its teeth. The original collections were set up in Chiswick by the newly
formed Horticultural Society in the early 1800s, where they remained until 1921, before being moved first to Surrey, and finally to Kent in the 1950s, when they were taken over by Defra’s predecessor, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). But in 1990, MAFF decided Britain didn’t need National Fruit Collections any longer, and the orchards, the result of two centuries’ worth of continuous research and breeding, were threatened with destruction. Prince Charles intervened, helping to broker a deal in which the site was sold to the newly formed Brogdale Horticultural Trust, with the government maintaining ownership of the trees. However, funding levels were so minimal that seven years later, the Trust decided to sell the land and lease it back, and in 2005 did another dodgy deal, this time with Tesco, who are now principal sponsors of the site. Although Defra claims it remains committed to preserving the collections, it has a strange way of showing it. Brogdale faces an uncertain future – so if you fancy a walking tour of a Very Large Orchard (and possibly a pork roast) any time between May and October, you had better hurry along while you still have the chance.

In its quirky, British, miniature-steam-trainy sort of way, Brogdale is the kind of place that gets you thinking. Why did the government think it so important to have National Fruit Collections in 1921, yet so unnecessary in 1990? How did we manage to acquire 2,300 varieties of apple in this country anyhow? And now that we’ve got them, what are we going to do with them? Supermarkets typically stock fewer than eight varieties, of which only two – Cox and Bramley – are indigenous, so what about the rest? The answers all come down to a question of scale. Apple varieties (and all other food varieties, for that matter) are the result of local cultures: the product of generations of farmers struggling to get the best out of the land, and the accumulated knowledge of how to do just that. It’s what the French call
terroir
: a term originally used to describe the effects of local climate and geography on the quality of a particular wine – right down to the angle of the hillside where the vines are grown – and that now encompasses not just the physical terrain, but the traditional know-how that goes into producing any local food.

Local food, however, is not the sort that keeps vast, throbbing
metropolises going. Modern city-dwellers demand constant supplies of cheap, predictable food, and agribusiness has evolved to produce just that. The food we eat today is driven not by local cultures, but by economies of scale, and those economies apply to every stage of the food supply chain. In order to feature in the urban diet nowadays, produce not only has to be bigger, better and breastier than ever before; it also has to be capable of withstanding the rigours of a global distribution system the aim of which is to deliver fewer and fewer products to more and more of us – that’s how economies of scale work. Wheeling your trolley down a supermarket aisle, it might be tempting to think that we have never had a greater choice of things to eat. But that is not quite true. Yes, you can now eat strawberries at Christmas if you really want to; but if you want to choose the variety, forget it. Three quarters of all the strawberries sold in the UK today are of just one kind, Elsanta (which, oddly, even sounds a bit Christmassy). If you want to eat another sort, you will probably have to pick it yourself. Strawberries these days are a commodified product; the result of a food industry geared less towards the niceties of
terroir
than to the principles of car assembly pioneered by Henry Ford. Its success lies in its ability to reduce a highly complex process (food production) to an operation so streamlined that its very product (food) is now subservient to it. As Henry Ford is once supposed to have said, ‘You can have your Ford any colour you like – as long as it’s black.’

Some months after my visit to Brogdale, I found myself chatting to Peter Clarke, a farmer who spent most of his career in the international fruit and veg trade but found that he missed the hands-on experience of growing food himself. We’re standing shivering in Sainsbury’s car park on the Finchley Road, where Peter comes every Wednesday during the summer with a vanload of lettuces, cabbages, beans and broccoli (plus more types of radish and beetroot than I even knew existed) to sell at the farmers’ market. His farm is just within the M25 – ideal for supplying London – and he’s doing reasonably well at it, although life is one continuous slog, spent driving to different markets four days a week and farming the other three. I ask him why, with all this mind-boggling variety of vegetables in their car park, Sainsbury’s have so few apple varieties on sale inside their store. I explain that I’ve
just been to Brogdale, and can’t quite get the taste of Ashmead’s Kernel out of my head. ‘Ah yes,’ says Peter, ‘that reminds me of a farmers’ meeting I went to once. There was a guy there who’d come to persuade us to try growing some traditional apple varieties. People were just starting to get interested, when one old farmer got up at the back of the room and said that that was all very well, but old varieties were like old girlfriends: very exciting when you first met them again after a long time, before you remembered why you dumped them in the first place.’