I’m a great fan of Guy’s News which arrives at my doorstep early on a Thursday morning at the bottom of a box of organic vegetables from Riverford Organic Farmers. This week it contained the usual interesting insight into real farming and sideswipes at both Defra and the NFU – we are on the same wavelength!
Guy on Defra:
Later in the week, after months of arguing over whether an artichoke is a vegetable or not, Defra finally accepted our Countryside Stewardship Plan.
Guy on the NFU:
I am confident we can grow even more food, capture carbon, and enhance biodiversity – although in the short term at least, it will cost us more. I commend all those who have fought for these changes, and resisted the attempts to block them by a recalcitrant NFU, hellbent on maintaining an insane farming system whatever the environmental cost. Long live the newts!
Now who wouldn’t want to buy their artichokes from that man!?
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“who wouldn’t want to buy their artichokes from that man?”
Me. I might if they were globe artichokes, but the link is to Jerusalem artichokes – which are a completely different animal.
Wiki sez: John Gerard’s Herbal, printed in 1621, quotes the English botanist John Goodyer on Jerusalem artichokes: “… which way soever they be dressed and eaten, they stir and cause a filthy loathsome stinking wind within the body, thereby causing the belly to be pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine than men.”
I ate some once and can confirm this. The appalling effect is caused by the high content of inulin, which we can’t digest, but gut flora can. The gaseous emissions therefrom contain more carbon dioxide than was fixed by the plant in the first place and I am very surprised that Riverford is involved in this GHG emissions faux pas.
Fartichokes.
We don’t need to grow that much more food – just eat less (not none unless you want to) meat. Its not just the farmers – in fact they are bit part players – its the food industry which is feeding us a diet that suits their profits rather than our health. When you feed grain to an animal the conversion rate is at least 4X less nutrition for the human, and more usually 8X – work it out – halve your meat consumption & there’ll be enough for everyone – especially if that meat is grass fed. Much of the UK is far better suited to producing food through grazing than through arable crops – its all that rain.
Hear, hear. Eat less and move more is my mantra. We should eat more, much more venison. Cheap and sustainable. Too many in some areas and Muntjac is delicious. But the Bambi syndrome is hard to overcome. Why? I eat it as often as possible.
Austringer I agree, as long of course as it is shot lead free. the same is true of bunnies, wood pigeons and perhaps Grey Squirrels. Plenty of naturally fed wild meat out there, eat more of that and much less of the industrially farmed meat, can only be good for us and the environment.
Thank you. At last a breath of fresh, pragmatic, air to counter all those bunny huggers who happily scoff burgers. And, I have eaten squirrel at my local pub. Wouldn’t be my first choice but come a winter Armageddon I know how to survive whilst the veggies wait for the spring crops they may not see! Don’t take this too seriously, it is meant to be humorous.
Everybody goes on about ‘grass fed’ meat, but the animals we farm would naturally be browsers, giving them a much healthier diet. Feeding them just grass is better than just grain, but not good for them or the environment. We need ‘extensive’ instead of ‘intensive’ farming, in a landscape rich in biodiversity and with plenty of trees and shrubs (scrub) for animals to browse. Not sheep, as they don’t belong here, but we could do this with cattle, pigs, deer and even horses.