A Greedy Man in a Hungry World Read online

  ‘Eight months. This bloke didn’t have a clue. He thought they were straight off the tree when they couldn’t have been because the Braeburn crop had been over for months. And he lives in a village in the middle of apple-growing country. What hope is there for people living in the cities?’

  Then there are issues around how consumers buy. ‘If the supermarkets put a couple of pennies on the price of a kilo of apples,’ Lance says, ‘it would make a big difference to us. Many consumers don’t even notice price.’

  ‘Up to a point,’ says Paul. ‘A lot of shoppers are only shopping on the offer.’ They are obsessed with ‘bogoffs’ – buy one get one free – and that damages the whole market. ‘When our Braeburns are on offer in the supermarkets it doesn’t expand sales. What happens is that sales of Cox and Gala drop through the floor. There’s too much promotion.’

  Is he seeing the impact of British supermarket pricing on the willingness of growers from abroad to do business with them? ‘Absolutely. Growers come to see us from all over the world. They want to look at the way we work. Increasingly they’re saying to me they have no interest in the UK market. They say it’s too much hassle. Not enough money in it. They’re looking to the Middle East and China.’

  That, he says, is an opportunity. He’s working hard to continue growing and expanding. ‘Within two or three years we’ll be self-sufficient in Braeburn, at least within the seven-month growing period.’

  We finish our drinks and say our goodbyes to Lance and Robert. Paul offers to take me on a short tour. He wants me to see what he’s been doing. Contrary to what I’d been told he’s eager to explain his business, and quickly the reason becomes obvious. He may have a sharp business mind – ‘We’re big enough to supply one of the multiples with all their apples by ourselves,’ he says at one point – but it’s not the business side that drives him. He’s not merely obsessed with turning fruit into money. He just adores growing apples.

  Paul turns off a lane onto a rutted track and then steers his Range Rover out across a muddy field, and through a gap in the hedge. Beyond is an enormous hillside planted with new trees. Every few trees there is a concrete pole secured deep into the earth. A high-tensile cable runs along the top, linking them, with further wires dropping down to keep the bamboo posts supporting the young trees upright. What’s most startling is the precision. The poles line up in each and every direction. It’s mesmerizing, this endless grid of tree and post and line. The tiny saplings are just coming into blossom.

  We sit in the car and stare out over them.

  ‘That’s what I like to see,’ Paul says. ‘Trees, planted properly, in bloom. My dad would have been so pleased with this. He really loved it when it looked like this. We used to do this together.’

  I ask him how many trees are planted on the field in front of us.

  ‘There’s only about 50,000 here. We’re planting 200,000 trees a year at the moment,’ he says.

  It sounds like a massive investment.

  ‘We put 90 per cent of our money back into the business every year,’ he says, and then, ‘To be a fruit farmer these days you have to have money to burn or be a little bit crazy.’

  Which are you?

  ‘I’m a little bit crazy.’

  It was what I expected him to say. I knew it wasn’t true.

  Learning to cook almost scarred me for life. I don’t mean that I was humiliated by a hag-faced cookery teacher who ridiculed my sauce béarnaise and mocked my dauphinoise. I make a bloody nice dauphinoise, thank you very much. I mean that when I was seven I poured boiling pig fat all over my left hand while preparing breakfast for my old brother, and that this could have caused permanent scarring.

  I was naked when it happened.

  I want to say it’s a long story because sibling relationships generally are. Our relationships with our brothers and sisters tend to outlast those with our parents and lovers. They build scar tissue and bonds in equal measure. They can be as old as us. But this story is pretty simple. Adam is four years older than me and when I was a kid I did what he told me to do. So when one Saturday morning he said I should go downstairs and cook him bacon and eggs for breakfast I went to the kitchen, found a frying pan, cranked up the gas and got cooking. Without the aid of clothing. It was all to do with the duvets bought on the proceeds of my mother’s big American book rights sale. She said duvets were what people slept under in Scandinavia – we called them continental quilts – and that nobody there wore clothes in bed, so we should all be Scandinavian and not wear anything either. To be honest I think she was just bored of washing pyjamas.

  Either way, for a few Saturday mornings I went downstairs and made a cooked breakfast and all went swimmingly. I never quite understood why my parents didn’t notice the smell of frying bacon in the house, but they always seemed to sleep through it. The morning everything went wrong, though, they knew about it. I’d fried the bacon to a nice shade of bronze. I’d managed to do the eggs without breaking the yolk, and had put it all on plates. (I also cooked myself a portion: it wasn’t entirely selfless.) I took the pan to the sink, still full of fizzing, bubbling fat, and then, with a distracted curiosity, felt the greasy handle turn in my palm as I reached into the sink to make a bit of space. I remember the way the still bubbling bacon grease poured out onto the side of my index finger and across my thumb, how the skin fizzed and bucked as it started to fry and, in a moment of clarity, thinking about how justified screaming very loudly right now would be. Which is what I did. Gripping my still-smouldering left hand in my right I stood at the bottom of the stairs and howled.

  It was all a blur after that: the rush of the cold water tap, the bowl with the ice, the trip to Accident and Emergency, the heavy bandaging. Before the crepe was wrapped around I got to see the massive blister, a great ivory bubble of smooth, denatured skin that ran the length of my index finger, expanding out to fill the space between it and the thumb. Later that Saturday, woozy with pain and shock, I watched intrigued as my mother heated a needle over a flame to sterilize it and used that to prick the blister so that it deflated like a Lilo. Then she re-dressed it. Only later did Claire tell me that she feared the damage I had done that day would be with me for life.

  It wasn’t. My mother also refused to let the accident become a stumbling block to learning. There is always risk in life and it has to be faced head on: you cannot learn how to use fire and knives without burning yourself with one and cutting yourself with the other. It happens. And so as a kid I was given free rein in the kitchen, though my brother would kill me if I did not now acknowledge that he was actually the family’s cook during our adolescence. He specialized in what was, for the early eighties, a convincing form of home Chinese cookery; introduced me to the virtuous pairing of oyster sauce and sesame oil; and learned how to turn finely sliced Savoy cabbage into a reasonable facsimile of the crispy ‘seaweed’ served at our local Chinese. The secret is to bombard it with equal volumes of salt and sugar. I, meanwhile, baked banana bread, and did things with mince.

  For all those efforts, however, I arrived at university a lousy cook. I did something awful with limp cuts of chicken from the Kirkgate Market in Leeds and a tin of Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup. (Pour one over the other. Bake. Lie to yourself about how nice it is while eating.) I massacred the cheapest bits of stewing beef, from an animal that died of old age in Kazakhstan some time in the seventies, by trying to fry them up in a fake Chinese sauce that was so much sugar it caramelized to black on the bottom of the pan. In my third year I cooked lunch for my parents in my student flat, ambitiously attempting to braise beef in red wine. I can still recall the stench of raw alcohol in the ‘sauce’. My mum and dad were very polite and ate it all. Bless them.

  But my greed was insistent, my endless hunger stubborn. Looking back I see now that I only really started learning to cook in my early twenties, when my then girlfriend and I moved into a flat together. It was, I suppose, a part of nesting; a way of making sense of adulthood. For o
ne birthday I bought my beloved a stack of cookbooks. It wasn’t a subtle hint; it was what she’d asked for. But quickly I became the one who was using them, though not for recipes. Other people’s dish ideas felt – and still feel – like an invitation to fail. I wanted to know about method: the way to roast and bake, how to build up and reduce a sauce, the science of the emulsion. Then I could make my own dishes and, having used no one else’s blueprint, I could always claim that the outcome was what I intended. Even if whatever it was seemed to be a little eccentric.

  All these years later, this should have led to me being a fully rounded cook, and in many ways I am. I can and often do get the kids’ tea on. I can do the quotidian (a curiously exotic word for something that means ‘everyday’). I can cook for reasons of need. But that’s not how my cooking skills manifest themselves. The fact is that, despite all the endless talk of gender equality, the way many men approach cooking is entirely different to the way many women do. We treat it like it’s a contact sport. We choose the team of ingredients. We consider our tactics. Then we enter the arena of the kitchen, lift the knives high above our heads, so that the blades shimmer beneath the halogens, and scream, ‘Victory or death.’ Take the very first thing I ever Cooked, with a capital c, way back when I was a callow youth in my twenties: that roast saddle of lamb stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes, torn basil, ciabatta crumbs and black olives which I needed to buy the balsamic vinegar for on the outskirts of Blackpool.

  This was completely male cooking. First, it required me to go to the butcher’s, buy a piece of meat bigger than my own head, and then ask the bloke behind the counter to ‘chine’ it, which was a word I’d just read in a volume called something like Cooking with Testosterone. (Any dish which entails talking to butchers and using jargon is bound to have been cooked by a man, particularly if the jargon refers to slicing around bones, as ‘chine’ does.) Then I had to take it home and do savage things to it with one of those fancy Japanese blades fashioned out of a single piece of stainless steel. Next I had to brutalize a whole bunch of things for the stuffing, before trussing the saddle together with twine like I’d just got a distinction in advanced bondage and domination.

  Finally I got to crack the oven up to the ‘hotter than hell’ setting and throw the whole thing in there. I shoved the knife blade into the waistband of my apron like it was a pirate’s cutlass, pulled the cork on a bottle of Rioja, and stood swigging in the kitchen as if it were my lair. Later I did all the stuff you are meant to do. I rested the meat. I deglazed the pan and made a jus. I carved. I took the applause. This is what we are like. Men do not cook because they – or even anybody else – is hungry, like women do. We cook because we are greedy, not just for the end result but for the congratulations the finished article brings. We cook because we want to prove supremacy over ingredients and equipment. We make things that require the endurance of multiple stages to reach completion. Ideally we make things that require knife work and the threat of amputation. Mostly we indulge in what my beloved calls ‘show cooking’.

  This can take many forms. A man can make a salad, as long as it requires a lot – and I mean an afternoon full – of chopping and slicing. (You should try my pepper salad. You will marvel at the knife work.) A man’s salad will usually also involve a certain amount of heat, if only to make the croutons or the completely unnecessary shards of crispy bacon. Men will cook with vegetables, if they have to, but only if they get to char-grill them on a skillet. Men don’t do steaming. Advanced pasta dishes are a favourite, though mostly because, in the closing stages, they demand a lot of serious tossing and throwing about of wet stuff which makes us think we’re professionals. Naturally we love anything involving booze from which the alcohol then has to be burnt off, in a roaring sheet of flame that will terrify the cat.

  So what don’t men do? We don’t make soups. I mean, why would we? Shove ingredients in stock. Boil them to buggery, then shove them in the Moulinex. Where’s the skill – not to mention the artery-severing risk – in that? We also rarely make bread. You know how people say cooking is an inexact science? Well, they are right, apart from when it comes to making bread. That is an exact science. Get the measurements wrong and you won’t have food. You’ll have house bricks. Men are not good at the exactness business in the kitchen. Why do you think almost all the pastry chefs in top restaurants are women? It’s because they can be fagged to do all that spooning stuff and staring at scales. Men can’t. Which is why in our house She does the puddings and She bakes the bread. Me? I just wage total war on ingredients.

  And now we are teaching our sons to cook. The younger one, Daniel, helps with baking. He’s a whizz on the shortbread and the bread kneading. Perhaps he’ll break the mould on the ‘men and baking’ thing. Eddie, who is 13, has developed an obsession with maki rolls. He has a kit. He knows how to do the rice. The things he can do with a sharp blade and a cucumber are really quite thrilling. I look forward to watching him bleed some time in the near future. What matters here is the transference of skills, and we are trying to do our bit.

  Which gently brings us back to the question of whether large-scale farming really is the big evil. A lot of the self-appointed guardians of our food culture bang on endlessly about provenance. They want you to know how good the ingredients they cook with are, and how clever they are for locating them. They want you to know all about the narrative of their lunch. Every meal, and every part of it, must come with a story. I too like a story. I adore good stories, as a man who has written novels should. It’s also obvious that the story of big agriculture is far less compelling and far less sexy than the story of small agriculture. It is less about the personal and it is people who make good stories sing out.

  But when it comes to the nitty-gritty of how people really live, all that guff about provenance and human narrative misses the point. We agonize, rightly, about obesity levels, especially among those on low incomes. We worry about people losing the skills essential to cook food from raw ingredients, rather than just shove fat- and carb-heavy ready meals into the oven. But we don’t agonize enough about it. For if we really do care about our food culture what really matters is how we eat, not how soft and cuddly the narrative of the ingredients is.

  The great chef and food writer Simon Hopkinson once said to me that he would prefer to have the cheapest chicken roasted for him by someone who knew what they were doing, rather than the most expensive, artisan-raised, frottaged and fondled chicken cooked for him by somebody who didn’t. I am completely with him. In the end what really matters most is not how the chicken – or the onion or the potato or the apple – was produced. It’s not about whether it comes from a small or big farm. It’s about whether it ends its life in the deep-fat fryer.

  Only an idiot would argue that all farms now need to be big, and I really do try my best not to be an idiot. Idiocy is a terrible waste of time. What’s more, that would be indulging in the sort of polarized arguments I so hate. There will always be a space for small farms, even if it is only to offer examples of good animal husbandry and agricultural practice to those working on a much larger scale. Plus what will eventually be large-scale farming often has, by necessity, to start small. If farming on a small scale makes the people doing it happy, if it produces enough to be self-sustaining, especially if its product has a certain uniqueness, then only an idiot would object to it. And as we know I do try not to be one of those.

  And yet, even as I say that, I know people will still be curling their lip. Because what’s striking is just how emotional some people get about large-scale farming. God but they hate it.

  Back in 2010, during a slightly ropey TV series I made for Channel 4 about the state of our food supply chain, I looked in detail at the dairy industry, and the ways in which it could face up to the challenge of the consumer’s addiction to paying under the odds for milk. (Let’s accept that a major part of the solution lies in encouraging supermarkets and therefore shoppers to pay a little more now, so we don’t end up paying much more in
the future should we be required to rely on imports.) One of the new ideas, imported from other parts of the world, was the super dairy. At Nocton in Lincolnshire plans had been submitted for a dairy farm that would house over 8,000 cows and produce over 100,000 litres of milk a day. They wouldn’t be out in fields. They wouldn’t be chewing the cud, noses down in the cool, damp earth. They’d live in open-sided sheds, on sand, and be fed silage from elsewhere.

  The critical response to this proposition was immediate. It was wrong. It was the battery farming of cows, just like the battery farming of chickens, which, during the same period, was in the process of being banned across Europe. It was, some critics said, evil and distasteful and grotesque and lots of other things besides. Anybody who even wondered casually out loud whether it had anything going for it deserved to be tied up to two tractors and pulled limb from limb as a warning to others.

  I got one point they were making. The super dairy idea wasn’t especially pretty.

  I visited a small version of what was planned – a mere 1,000 cows – and it did have an industrial aspect to it: the large sheds stretching off into the distance; the clank of metal grilles and fences and gates banging against each other; the tractors rumbling up and down to refresh food and sand and clean away the crap that cows have a remarkable talent for producing. The smell and the squirt and the call and response of the lowing.

  But not everything is always as it looks. I’d also spent time on a traditional dairy farm down in the West Country the day before, which had a herd of about 180 cows, the average for this sort of business. The third-generation farmer, Roger Jenkins, had modern kit. It was no ramshackle affair. But he found it very hard to make the economies of scale work. A lot of his income was derived from renting out holiday homes. Roger did it because it was what he’d always done. He did it because it was what he knew, and what his father had known and what his father had known before him, even though it was a very tough life.