Recently, my family welcomed a new arrival. This event was keenly anticipated. We had watched it grow, fretted over its development. And then suddenly, there it was, sitting in the kitchen: a bright orange pumpkin, about the size of my head and equally as weirdly shaped. While I was thrilled to see it, I can take none of the credit for its production. The farmer was my wife, Pat, who fretted appropriately over the way the pumpkin plant clearly shut down all other production to bring forth this one beauty. A reasonably productive tomato plant kept it company. We also got a couple of chillies from a tiny seedling brought to the house by a lunch guest. Tom and Barbara Good had nothing on us.
For a while we fretted over what to do with the pumpkin. We thought about carving it into a lantern for Halloween but in truth we’ve opted out of being mugged by children for sugar. Ours are adults. We’re done. Round our way if you don’t put out a pumpkin, the door knocker stays unmolested. So we thought about roasting and even pickling it.
But mostly, we admired it. Two thoughts occurred to me, the first of which is obvious. But because I’m a cynical, dreary, hammer-faced excuse for a human it took me by surprise. Growing food at home is marvellous. It’s engrossing. It turns any outdoor space into something functional rather than just ornamental. And the second thought? It’s a terrible way to produce fruit and veg. Awful. Cataclysmically bad. The effort that went into producing that pumpkin was hilariously huge.
Does this mean I think people shouldn’t grow their own? No, quite the reverse. We need to keep reminding ourselves just how difficult it is to keep a mass population fed, and what a brilliant job large-scale agriculture does. And the best way to do that is by trying to mimic it at home. There will, of course, be some people with burgeoning allotments and home veg patches who will be chuntering at this. Just because the Rayner family can’t do much of a job doesn’t mean it can’t work. Indeed, it must be lovely to sit down regularly to a meal nurtured and harvested by your own hand. The problem is that environmentally it doesn’t quite stack up.
A decade ago, while working on a book about food and sustainability, I was introduced to the concept of whole life cycle analysis (LCA). Using an LCA means that when you talk about the footprint of food production you can’t just consider the fertilisers or the fuel used to transport the food produced. You must include the carbon in any tools and machinery, in the fencing and the irrigation and in the lifestyles of the people involved. Did you drive to the allotment? Oh. Then you divide that by yield.
As a result, when it comes to growing stuff even the most productive home effort will never compete with a large-scale arable or vegetable farm’s production. None of this is to excuse the worst excesses of industrial agriculture. Running to the margins in a discussion like this doesn’t help anyone.
But the reality is that feeding a population of more than 60 million is always going to be dependent on mass agriculture which, done right, has a better chance of being carbon efficient. And curiously a very good way of doing this is to remind ourselves just how hard it is by attempting to produce significant amounts ourselves. We’re certainly going to have another crack at it next year. It will be brilliant. It will also be pathetic. By the way, we turned our pumpkin into soup. It was very nice.
