Since my book A Small Farm Future makes quite a play for local self-reliance, I thought I should at least temporarily try to put my money (or, more pertinently, my produce) where my mouth is by only eating food produced on my farm for a week. I did this in the middle of September last year, when most of the folks in my household were away on a trip and I thought the exercise would be less distracting. I don’t suggest that by doing so I’ve proved anything much in terms of larger arguments about agrarian localism, but I found the exercise interesting nonetheless, so I thought I’d share a few observations about it here.
I made things easy for myself in various ways:
- Doing it in September, when the produce is abundant
- Allowing myself a few off-farm luxury items, provided they didn’t significantly meet my major dietary needs: salt, pepper, cinnamon, coffee
- Living on a diversely productive small farm
But I made things hard for myself in various ways too:
- Not preparing ahead of time to furnish things that I could have done with forethought
- Not orienting my farm production over the years to full self-reliance, albeit that we’re moving increasingly in that direction. And therefore…
- …having to forcibly deny myself various foodstuffs lying temptingly in the larder or on the plates of some of my fellow farm dwellers
So (note to self) here are some things I’d do differently if I try this again:
- Grow more wheat ahead of time
- Brew some beer ahead of time
- Make some kraut ahead of time
- Buy a cow ahead of time
- Be sure that everyone around me is following the same regimen
Here are a few notes on some of the foods that I did (and didn’t) eat during my vigil.
Fat and oil: this was simple, because whenever we cook the lamb or mutton that we’ve raised on our grass we pour off the fat into an ice-cube tray (there seems to be a lot more fat in our home-grown meat than in the stuff you get from the shops) and then freeze it. The fat was great for making my food tastier, though I would have preferred vegetable oil for some things. And I probably used more animal fat during the week than I could sustain year-round at our level of productivity. In the absence of a productive sunflower patch and press, the alternative would probably have to be more boiled or baked food. But, seriously, who wants that?
Starchy staples: also simple – the answer was potatoes. And more potatoes. Which actually was fine – I love potatoes. But I did miss snacking on bread, and felt a vague sense of gastric unease through the week, which eased when I reverted to flour-based products. Perhaps I’m kind of a post-Paleo gluten-bothering farm boy, just that little bit more evolutionarily advanced than all those marrow-suckers out hunting deer on their men’s weekends. Or maybe it’s just a bad idea to abruptly change diet. Whatever, I’m planning to upscale my home wheat-growing in future. I did experiment with eating fat hen seeds (Chenopodium album), which apparently Britain’s prehistoric people ate as a staple – kind of a local version of grain amaranth. My gastric jury is out on that one.
Vegetables: super-simple, since I live on a veg farm. Plenty of onions, carrots, chard, lettuce, green beans, sweetcorn, you name it. An advantage of the diet was that I made better use of this bounty than resorting to the bread bin and the cheese tray. But it was a bit harder to snack on, and required more forward planning – which I’m not very good at (see above). And … if only I’d started a couple of jars of kraut a few days before having this madcap idea.
Fruit: I ate a lot of apples. Snacking between meals on fresh apples worked tolerably well, but didn’t quite hit the spot. Stewing apples for breakfast or dessert with a pinch of cinnamon worked better. I also picked wild blackberries from the hedges and sea buckthorn berries – painful, but delicious. The impetus to go out and seek fruit around the farm was one of the unexpected pleasures of the exercise. But it clarified for me that wo/man probably cannot live happily on fruit alone.
Meat: I usually eat meat about once a week, almost always the pork, lamb/mutton or occasionally chicken that we raise on the farm. I ate a little more during my homegrown week – partly perhaps to boost the tastiness. But also because my family are less enthusiastic than me about offal, so it was a good opportunity to clear some hearts, livers, gizzards and kidneys out of the freezer while the folks were away. If you’re going to kill an animal, Small Farm Future says – make it count.
The freezer of course was a useful resource during the week, locally powered by the sun falling on our PV panels, themselves locally produced in… Anyway, I’m drifting from the main point. In a truly low-energy society, I guess meat would likely be shared around more. The freezer as a killer of community?
I trapped and ate a couple of squirrels during the week, again boosting my meat intake. Since coming to the farm, we’ve planted thousands of trees, including a lot of nut trees. In the last year or so, the squirrels have moved big time into the woodland we’ve generously provided for them, seriously threatening the oaks, hornbeams and beech, while our nut harvest has curiously diminished in the same period. There are interesting underlying issues here about creating wild habitat on the farm, consequently losing crop to the wild creatures moving into the new niche, and then gaining something back by cropping them. I’ve never been that interested in trapping or hunting per se, but – as with most things – I’ve started to get more interested in it as a result of seeing the ecological cycles involved in it right in front of my nose. It’s easier to do this when you’re losing crop, especially to a voracious interloper introduced by human hand from overseas.
Dairy: oh my Lord, I dreamed of butter melting onto warm bread, hot milky coffee and tangy farmhouse cheese (hey, Cheddar is only twenty miles away – that’s nearly local, right?) And I have to confess to an indiscretion here whose details must forever remain a secret between me and my fridge. The use-by date was literally just days away, and wasting food is a crime…
I’ve never raised dairy animals because it’s seemed like too much work in our particular situation of being essentially single household veg growers with other work besides. And don’t say goats – as I just said, I’m a veg grower. But if I were truly gearing myself for food self-reliance I’d embrace dairy, especially within a wider community context.
Nuts: slim pickings on this front (see squirrels, above) and what we did have wasn’t quite ready. But this is definitely a good way to go for the self-reliant farm. Especially if you like eating squirrels – there’s nothing too vegan about nut crops in southern England these days, I’m afraid. Still, while on the subject of nuts, had the harvest and the timing been different, I suppose I could have made some hazel milk for my coffee instead of … [fifth amendment here]
Mushrooms: I’ve cultivated mushrooms from time to time over the years, but never really taken to it. I managed to harvest a couple of wild ones during the week, but the weather was dry and sunny and the fungi had other things on their minds, or whatever intelligence it is that they have down there. Perhaps this suggests a general side-note: there’s plenty of wild food around on the farm if you know where to look and you’re prepared to bide your time.
Beans: there were green beans aplenty, but my modest crop of proteinaceous drying beans wasn’t yet ready. That’s why I ate so much meat. Honest.
Eggs: an egg every day or so from our little flock certainly eased the burden. Served up with a salsa of onions, tomatoes and chillis from the farm, I barely even missed my regular Sunday breakfast croissant. The hens do get some feed bought-in from offsite, so strictly speaking perhaps I shouldn’t have eaten their eggs. Strictly speaking, there’s a lot of things I shouldn’t do…
Alcohol: if I’d planned ahead, perhaps I could have eased my way through the week in a homebrew-assisted haze. But I didn’t. And this lack of forethought was probably the single thing that contributed the most to the healthiness of my homegrown diet.
On the upside, I’d say that it’s surprising how congenial a homegrown diet you can produce without even trying all that hard if you have a small spread available. On the downside, I’d say that it’s surprising how hard it is to break from ingrained dietary habits like cheese and cereals, and how hard it is to focus production on these latter basics unless you’re singularly gearing yourself towards self-reliance. In some ways, the distance that even someone like me who’s well equipped materially and mentally to produce my own subsistence from fully achieving it is something of an eye opener. In my defence, I must point out that the focus of our farm for a good stretch of its existence has of necessity had to be upon proving to other people that it can earn a tolerable income. The challenge I now want to prioritise more strongly lies in proving to ourselves that it can produce a tolerable diet.
