Totally agree with you but CONSUMERS need to change their behaviour as ultimately they can influence policy by choosing where to put their money. We have become an obese and sick nation of people who want cheap, processed food who put hot tubs and paving over what green space they have. Until they start valuing healthy, high welfare food and the natural world the supermarkets and high street chicken outlets will win.
Totally agree with the challenges you discuss here. Until we have policies that support small producers it’s massively difficult to keep going. People need to be able and prepared to pay the real cost of ethical, high-welfare production, but much of the UK seems locked into a cycle of the cheapest possible food and not caring where or how it has been produced. With the cost of living becoming a real strain for many, this just gets ever more difficult.
Sadly when I sign on to Substack it feels like being surrounded by like minded people. All happy to pay for whole foods, direct from farmers and support agriculture!
But the reality is we are still a minority of like minded individuals in the UK…
My wife and I are carnivores. Since 4 years back. One year in. my wife was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. She'd had dreast cancer, diagnosed 2017, fixed (huh) 2018; yearly scan.
She skipped in 2020; felt fine, no lump in the remaining breast, and hospitals were hell during Covid. Same time we started carnivore. Dec 2021 - you've got 9 months to live max, but if you have more chemo (hell first time round) your teeth and jaw will crumble and you will feel like shit, but may get a few months more.
Nope, she said. I'd rather die than go through that hell again*.
Scan Dec 2022. No more lesions. No change in presentation. Same still. Nor is she by any means alone as YouTube and X make clear.
We're lucky; we live in rural Somerset and get glorious grass fed meat. One farm we have known them from 20 years back. Local Butcher visits every farm he buys from. They know and we know that livestock farming replenishes the soil whilst (Vegans huh) mass arable farming has destroyed the soil and caused utter havoc with flora, fauna, birds and insects. We are all Iodine deficient as a result (supplement Lugols).
Me? Well I've always been lucky to be fir with a strong constitution. Now 73 going on 50 with endless energy (must get into the garden). 6'5" and 14 stone (for decades) in 6 weeks; visceral fat (think fatty liver) and water. Settled around 13 stone. Cold tubs and wild swimming as well.
Homo whatever has been around for c 1 million years. 8k years ago, agriculture started.
We as a species are adapted to carnivore. Short guts, highest stomach acid of any mammals. And - you can swallow a lump of meat whole and it will get digested - handy when a predator turns up when diving into a prey. Try that with carrots and corn eh?
The current assault on meat enrages me. Over my dead body.
Just picking up on your query about the biggest challenges.
I’m a consumer, not a farmer. I’m a vegetarian from decades ago, but I don’t have a problem with people choosing to eat meat, I’ve cooked it enough for my own kids when they made that choice, and I see the role of husbandry for soil and for nature.
If I had to put it in a nutshell I think the growing separation between farmers and consumers is a big problem. The whole food system seems to exacerbate this, and we end up eating unhealthy processed food because it’s cheap, and we have no real understanding of what the underlying problems are for farming. We see prices rising, but we don’t really see that this isn’t because money is going to those doing the farming bits of food production. We see the impacts of pollution - eg chicken production and the river Wye- and we’re told we can’t have any meaningful right to roam ( rejected out of hand, rather than a conversation about the responsibilities that might come with any rights). The gulf between farming and consumers gets wider and wider, and our ability to see productive changes, like regenerative farming, gets more and more remote.
This is NOT to suggest that farmers are to blame for this, but how do we get to a situation where there is a real chance of solidarity with farmers and a move to tackle the issues? I (now) live in a rural area, but I don’t know how to help.
Hi Helen, I'm really enjoying your posts. I grow food in containers at home in my concrete front yard - and as such often get pigeon holed as a 'gardener' - but I often find myself relating more closely to farmers than to most of the content on Gardeners World! I completely agree that we need a revolution of food growing in the UK and look forward to following you and learning from you here on Substack.
Quinoa can and is grown in Europe. Just sayin. As for avocadoes in Southern France we get those from Corsica or Spain a couple of times a year along with mangoes once a year. Talk about a treat.
Totally agree with you but CONSUMERS need to change their behaviour as ultimately they can influence policy by choosing where to put their money. We have become an obese and sick nation of people who want cheap, processed food who put hot tubs and paving over what green space they have. Until they start valuing healthy, high welfare food and the natural world the supermarkets and high street chicken outlets will win.
I do agree Emma, every pound spent as a consumer is a vote for the food systems you want to support!
Totally agree with the challenges you discuss here. Until we have policies that support small producers it’s massively difficult to keep going. People need to be able and prepared to pay the real cost of ethical, high-welfare production, but much of the UK seems locked into a cycle of the cheapest possible food and not caring where or how it has been produced. With the cost of living becoming a real strain for many, this just gets ever more difficult.
Sadly when I sign on to Substack it feels like being surrounded by like minded people. All happy to pay for whole foods, direct from farmers and support agriculture!
But the reality is we are still a minority of like minded individuals in the UK…
My wife and I are carnivores. Since 4 years back. One year in. my wife was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. She'd had dreast cancer, diagnosed 2017, fixed (huh) 2018; yearly scan.
She skipped in 2020; felt fine, no lump in the remaining breast, and hospitals were hell during Covid. Same time we started carnivore. Dec 2021 - you've got 9 months to live max, but if you have more chemo (hell first time round) your teeth and jaw will crumble and you will feel like shit, but may get a few months more.
Nope, she said. I'd rather die than go through that hell again*.
Scan Dec 2022. No more lesions. No change in presentation. Same still. Nor is she by any means alone as YouTube and X make clear.
We're lucky; we live in rural Somerset and get glorious grass fed meat. One farm we have known them from 20 years back. Local Butcher visits every farm he buys from. They know and we know that livestock farming replenishes the soil whilst (Vegans huh) mass arable farming has destroyed the soil and caused utter havoc with flora, fauna, birds and insects. We are all Iodine deficient as a result (supplement Lugols).
Me? Well I've always been lucky to be fir with a strong constitution. Now 73 going on 50 with endless energy (must get into the garden). 6'5" and 14 stone (for decades) in 6 weeks; visceral fat (think fatty liver) and water. Settled around 13 stone. Cold tubs and wild swimming as well.
Homo whatever has been around for c 1 million years. 8k years ago, agriculture started.
We as a species are adapted to carnivore. Short guts, highest stomach acid of any mammals. And - you can swallow a lump of meat whole and it will get digested - handy when a predator turns up when diving into a prey. Try that with carrots and corn eh?
The current assault on meat enrages me. Over my dead body.
Just picking up on your query about the biggest challenges.
I’m a consumer, not a farmer. I’m a vegetarian from decades ago, but I don’t have a problem with people choosing to eat meat, I’ve cooked it enough for my own kids when they made that choice, and I see the role of husbandry for soil and for nature.
If I had to put it in a nutshell I think the growing separation between farmers and consumers is a big problem. The whole food system seems to exacerbate this, and we end up eating unhealthy processed food because it’s cheap, and we have no real understanding of what the underlying problems are for farming. We see prices rising, but we don’t really see that this isn’t because money is going to those doing the farming bits of food production. We see the impacts of pollution - eg chicken production and the river Wye- and we’re told we can’t have any meaningful right to roam ( rejected out of hand, rather than a conversation about the responsibilities that might come with any rights). The gulf between farming and consumers gets wider and wider, and our ability to see productive changes, like regenerative farming, gets more and more remote.
This is NOT to suggest that farmers are to blame for this, but how do we get to a situation where there is a real chance of solidarity with farmers and a move to tackle the issues? I (now) live in a rural area, but I don’t know how to help.
Hi Helen, I'm really enjoying your posts. I grow food in containers at home in my concrete front yard - and as such often get pigeon holed as a 'gardener' - but I often find myself relating more closely to farmers than to most of the content on Gardeners World! I completely agree that we need a revolution of food growing in the UK and look forward to following you and learning from you here on Substack.
This was such a clear and heartfelt post thank you for sharing this!
The rate we’re going the only thing we will have left to eat is corn and potatoes and meat yuck
Quinoa can and is grown in Europe. Just sayin. As for avocadoes in Southern France we get those from Corsica or Spain a couple of times a year along with mangoes once a year. Talk about a treat.