Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (11 page)

In the 1960s, the government, anxious to encourage beef production, instructed British farmers to use one-third more than
the recommended dose of organophosphate (OP) to kill warble flies, which lay their eggs subcutaneously along a cow's back.
When the grubs form they crawl out through the skin, leaving holes in the hide which reduce its value as industrial leather.
The organophosphate was used simultaneously across Europe and Southern Ireland, but only in Britain was the dose increased
above the recommended safety level. Ander is now firmly of the unproven belief that the drug upset the chemical balance in
the cows' brains, leading, years later, to the BSE outbreak. OPs were originally designed as a nerve agent for use in combat
and, despite clear evidence of their dangerous side effects, the military used them in the Gulf War to spray the insides of
tents against flies. They have been cited as causing mental health problems in Gulf War vets.

Ander and Richard are good custodians of the land. Since the war, they've ploughed up only one hedge to make bigger fields
to accommodate today's gigantic machines. There are 4,500 pigs on the farm these days and they rotate the pigs and the grain
crops, thus dramatically reducing the need for fertilisers. The pigs have good lives, living in large fields with corrugated-iron
pig arcs as homes. They sell each animal, at six months old, for around £75, and in 2005 the pigs made them £70,000. Supermarket
buyers drive hard bargains: if a pig has arthritis in one of its legs, they'll hack it off and chuck it away. Even though
the meat itself is edible, arthritis causes discolouring. They're also fussy about fat, wanting it less than twelve millimetres
deep and reducing payments for every extra millimetre on the animal.

Ander and Richard have two hundred beef cattle which sell for £2.09 a kilo. Each year they slaughter half of these, earning
about £700 per animal. The remaining income comes from the cereal crops. It doesn't sound that bad, but the farm supports
three families, one full-time employee and the costs of machinery, drills, building maintenance, chemicals, antibiotics and
feed for the animals. My cousins could never be described as the sort of farmers - so despised by rural-phobic city folk -
with grand lifestyles, supported by ED subsidies. My cousins still belong to a community which modern life has done so much
to traduce. Farming in the past might have been a miserable affair for many, but living closely with the land did provide
a network that was sustainable through good times and bad. A community is like a coral reef in its multiple layers of dependency
and in its relationships. I see it now in Ilminster and I see the way that politicians, always keen to stress its importance,
are also so willing to chuck it all aside in the relentless pursuit of profit.

One bright, wintry Saturday morning, Charlie and I set off to the farmers' market in the old stables at Montacute House, seven
miles away in the small village of Montacute, nestled under the easterly side of Ham Hill, from where all the mellow local
stone originates. Montacute is a perfect Elizabethan house which Lord Curzon once rented as a love nest with his mistress,
the infamous Elinor Glyn, with whom he was said to have committed sin on a tiger's skin. Curzon installed Montacute's first
bathroom, a tiny chamber built in one corner of his bedroom, less than one hundred years ago.

We're meeting our friend, the food and cookery writer Rose Prince, who is signing copies of her just published book,
The New English Kitchen: Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat,
from a rickety table under the roof of the open-sided barn. The market is jostling with people: business is clearly terrific
for the stallholders with their cheeses, vegetables, meats, ciders, jams and chutneys. Food here is about history, culture
and ritual, and shopping here is probably the only time that buying food can be described as retail therapy. The rich local
cheddar has been made this way for hundreds of years, and the flour for the bread has been ground between stones, not squeezed
between two rollers to extract the wheatgerm from the grain, which modern millers then sell to the health­food industry to
sell back to us as expensive wheatgerm oil.

There's a stall selling salt marsh lamb, the sheep fed on the wild grasses found only in estuaries. I go over to introduce
myself to the man running the stall. Until 2003, Andrew Moore worked as an international stockbroker in the City, but after
a series of take-overs and rationalisations, he found himself with a decent pay-off and the chance to change his life. 'My
passion was food,' he tells me from behind the table where the joints of lamb are laid out in cold boxes. 'I'd always gone
shooting and to start with Idealt game, smoked it, made pies out of it, made sausages. It was OK, and the margins are good,
but if you're talking about a 20p margin on an 50p product, you've got to sell a lot of product to make any money.' He is
so earnest, I start to laugh: clearly it takes a lot to get the City out of a man. I hadn't thought of our business in terms
of margins, but it makes sense. 'I had a friend in London who was looking for lamb for a restaurant,' he says. 'We went into
business with a farm near Bridgwater. I supply the sheep and they've got the estuary grazing. It's not only the taste that
improves when they eat grass grown there; the salt water of the spring tides floods the marshes, naturally killing off harmful
parasitic worms and bacteria. We sell at markets and through box schemes. We send half or whole lambs all over the country.'
Ichoose a plump-looking shoulder and start counting out the money: it isn't cheap, Andrew's lamb averages £7-£8 a kilo, but
I am sure it will be delicious. As he wraps it up, he tells me that what he likes most about the markets is the chance to
talk to people and get feedback on his food. 'Although some people do come up with the most amazing things,' he says with
a grin. 'One man spent ages staring at some smoked pheasant breasts. Finally he asked me if they were fish as they didn't
look like the sort of meat he was familiar with. I told him they were breasts. He cheered up immediately, saying, "Oh, I see,
they're from the females.'"

There's farmhouse cider, handmade chocolates and stone­ground flour from Burcott Mill. Next to the archway, there's delicious
bread from the Thomas Bakery and Patisserie of Wells. Tina Thomas, a Pakistani who's lived in England for twenty-seven years,
started the bakery three years ago after quitting her job in telecoms. Following a stint in Paris studying pastry cooking
at the Ritz, she took a lease on an old hairdresser's shop in Wells. It is now her bakery, where she specialises in producing
bread that has been fermented for between sixteen and twenty hours, which allows the yeast to metabolise fully. Tina's husband
Paul helps with deliveries, but she sells most of her bread, croissants, Bath buns, smooth macaroons and saffron loaves through
farmers' markets. 'I started baking at 1 a.m. this morning,' she says with a yawn, 'I finished by 8 a.m. Got here by nine.
Market days are tough. But I'm doing well, I love having my own business, I love making food that's just how I want it to
be.' Under the long open barn, there's a stall selling ewes' milk cheese. Their leaflet tells me that sheep's milk is both
nutritious and delicious, containing twice the level of important minerals such as calcium, phosphorus and zinc, and B vitamins.
By now I've collected a handful of leaflets, colourful and informative about the food and the process of making it: a great
alternative to reading the contents on the back of a ready meal. Rose is doing good business too, signing copies of her book
while Dominic, her husband, pockets the money. And there are lots of delicious things to eat: little bits of brown bread and
butter, slithers of cheese, slices of sausages fried on small stoves and skewered with toothpicks, small glasses of cider
and fresh apple juice, biscuits to dunk into homemade raspberry jam.

In their modern incarnation, farmers' markets are barely a decade old. The phenomenon emerged in 1997 with a single fledgling
market in Bath. Now 550 markets are thriving across the UK, generating a total of 8,000 market days. More than fifteen million
people visit these markets each year, with 60 percent of customers going back regularly. There are no big advertising campaigns:
farmers' markets rely on word of mouth, leaflets, temporary road signs, local media, tourist information and returning customers.
There are few regulations, apart from a stipulation that all stall­holders actively farm or manufacture in the locality, and
that everything they sell must have been home-grown, reared, cooked, brewed or baked. In 2002, farmers' markets earned producers
a total of £166 million and for some stallholders it can mean an extra £20,000 worth of business. One unexpected boon from
this remarkable growth is that up to 80 percent of neighbouring businesses have seen a boost in trade following the establishment
of a market nearby. And they're not expensive, I realise as Charlie and I tour the stalls, sampling bits of cheese and sausage.
As well as Andrew's salt marsh lamb, which we'll eat for dinner, we buy a circular goats' cheese called a Little Ryding, which
weighs 220 grams and will last us for a week at least, a loaf of Tina's bread, a bottle of cider and one of cloudy apple juice,
half a kilo of pork and apple sausages, and several jars of jam and local honey. In the nearby West Country town of Wincanton,
a survey revealed that the seasonal purple sprouting broccoli on sale at the local Safeway was selling for £7.10 per kilo,
nearly four times more expensive than the local organic farmers' market broccoli at £1.90 per kilo. In the same survey, imported
Spanish carrots at the Stroud Tesco superstore were selling at 99P per bunch compared to 50p per bunch for the local carrots
selling at Stroud farmers' market.

The setting gives the market an old-fashioned feel, but there's nothing either old or exclusively middle-class about the shoppers.
Many of them are having their lunch on the move at the same time as filling their baskets with weekend food. When the rural
poor began moving into the cities in large numbers in the first half of the nineteenth century, many of them had no option
but to eat on the street, as their homes had no cooking facilities. Street eating must have been a little similar to being
at a farmers' market, and in London, which in the mid-1800s was home to 15 percent of the population, street food grew
in popularity as choice and availability expanded. Strolling the city streets in the Victorian era you could have found hot
eels, whelks, oysters, sheep's trotters, pea soup, fried fish, ham sandwiches, hot green beans, kidney puddings and baked
potatoes. Sweet biscuits, gingernuts, fruit tarts, Chelsea buns, muffins and crumpets rounded off the meal, and drinks such
as tea, coffee, cocoa, lemonade, peppermint water, rice milk and sherbets washed it all down.

Here in Montacute the money is changing hands briskly. Before we leave, I track down the organiser, Elaine Spencer­White,
to ask if we can have a stall in 2006. All the stallholders live and work on the Somerset Levels, the region of flatland between
the Quantocks and the Mendips, with Glastonbury Tor standing proudly at its heart. Ilminster is on the extreme southern edge
of the Levels, but Elaine reckons that we just qualify. However, the only slot left is for a stall to sell herbs. The rental
will be £25 a day, or £120 for all six dates. So far we haven't pursued a speciality, but herbs seem like a good idea so we
sign up straight away.

Now it is mid-January 2006, under three months till the date of the first market, and we are sowing vast quantities of herb
seeds: parsley, rosemary, thyme, basil, chervil, oregano, chives, mint and sorrel. I've found some research on the net which
tells me that sales of fresh herbs have soared by 124 percent in the last five years to the value of £38 million. Despite
the demand, the home market is lagging well behind. Most of us are buying our herbs from the supermarkets, in neat little
plastic packets and grown in Israel, Spain and North Africa. And they're expensive: right now, a 109 pack of rosemary costs
75P in Tesco, which translates to an incredible £75 a kilo. Maybe we're on to a good thing, but how well they'll sell at Montacute
is anyone's guess. Charlie thinks we probably need at least fifty of each, but that's pure guesswork. I like the idea of having
a brochure for the nursery, so I've asked my friend Yseult Hughes to help write and design a booklet explaining how to grow
each herb and including a recipe. We can sell them for £1 each and they'll be a good advertisement for the nursery.