Free Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives by Carolyn Steel

main cause of this decay has been the rise of modern, often more intensive, farming techniques. Agriculture was once environmentally benign, and a healthy and attractive countryside was a relatively cost-free by-product. The practices that delivered this benefit for society are often not now economic. Farming practice and the familiar English landscape have diverged. 72
     
    The solution, concluded the report, was to stop subsidising farmers to produce food, and pay them to manage the countryside instead.Which is where we are now. In 2005, the government ‘decoupled’ farming subsidies from food production. From now on, instead of being paid to grow food, farmers would be paid to prettify the countryside and encourage wildlife. They would be given a flat rate according to the size of their farm, and could apply for bonus payments for providing wildlife habitats, planting woodland and hedgerows and so on. So there you have it. In modern Britain, an attractive countryside is worth paying for, but local food isn’t.
    Which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all. The British countryside is a working landscape, the product of countless agricultural revolutions driven by urban demand. It is a landscape made by food, and those parts of it we find pretty are mostly the accidental by-products of the way we farmed in the past. The Curry Report insists that ‘the countryside is not a rural Disneyland’, yet its recommendations are likely to produce just that. It is all very well – indeed highly desirable – to have a rural landscape teeming with wildlife, but without food production alongside it, such a landscape would not only be fake, it would be unsustainable. The report says it wants to reconnect food production with the countryside, but is silent on the question of how that is to be achieved, when most of the food we eat in Britain today produces anything but beauty – hell on earth, more like. If we want a rich and varied landscape on our doorstep, we are going to have to start eating as though we mean it.
    One of the ironies of British attitudes towards the countryside is that arguably our most famous image of it – John Constable’s
The Hay Wain
, painted in 1821 – itself depicts a rural way of life that was disappearing. A contemporary of Cobbett’s, Constable could see the farming communities near his home at Dedham Vale on the Suffolk/Essex border were under threat from industrialisation, and he sought to save them by painting the landscape he loved so that others might fall in love with it too.
The Hay Wain
shows a perfect English summer’s day: scudding clouds sail over a flaxen meadow, oaks rustle in the breeze, a team of carthorses cools off in a stream. The immediacy of the image comes from Constable’s ability to capture the constantly changing light and mood of the British weather: ‘No two days are alike,’ he wrote, ‘nor even two hours; neither were there ever twoleaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world.’ Standing in front of
The Hay Wain
, one can almost feel the breeze on one’s cheek, hear the horses neigh, smell the hay. Constable makes us see the world his way, through a window as manipulative as any TV screen. But, as with all pastoralist imagery, the painting’s beauty masks a desperate reality. Rural life in Britain was already on its knees, squeezed out by the economies demanded by urban markets and competition from abroad. When it comes to food, some things never change.
    Today, with farmers fast disappearing from the scene, the British countryside is starting to look to a growing number of people like a large piece of valuable real estate. Many, quite understandably, are asking why, if we are not going to be farming it any more, we need to keep all that green stuff empty. With a chronic housing shortage in the south-east, the sanctity of the green belts is coming under increasing pressure. Meanwhile others are looking to turn the countryside into a business