Opinion: Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose!
I have been writing these pieces for some considerable time now and I hope I have earned the right to be a little introspective. By the time I write the next article I will be married again for the third time. Yes, the third time!
I was chatting to my daughter and I said that I have never met anyone like Nici and that if I failed this time then I would never get married again. Now my daughter is a little like me and just simply could not resist saying: “Never say never, Dad”!
I can understand her thought as my history has been less than perfect in the sphere of marriage.
However, as things change, so have I, and if someone my age does not learn any more then it would be a very sad thing. I am getting better at listening, I think. But there are also things of which I am much surer than I was, particularly when it comes to food.
For our wedding, we have chosen very particular foods, not necessarily because of the companies which we have been associated with, but because the foods involved are of the highest quality that we know of. Of course there is Loch Duart salmon and it would be fair to say that I have an association with that company. However, I realised yesterday that I have not visited a Loch Duart site in over a decade, so I cannot really speak with any surety about their methods of production. I hope they still have good values.
We will have smoked salmon from Ardshealach, which is a smoke that we very much enjoy. It is not made with Loch Duart salmon but it is extremely good. The beef will be from my farm in Orkney. The venison is Sika, shot and butchered by a close friend. The ham will be from old breed pigs. The potatoes will be produced from our garden last year. The blueberries will be the ones picked and frozen by us last year.
’We are heading for a very dark time with food’
You get the picture? We like to know where our food comes from, and also to have an association, where possible, with its life and death. In this lies a very significant point. We are heading for a very dark time with food. In our country, no one complains about the price of a mobile phone or a new iPad but food is always required to be cheap.
The only way to maintain such a strategy is to import but also to encourage production using cheaper and cheaper methods. Both of these are doomed to failure, but our politicians cannot see it. In farming, cheap production can only be achieved with the heavy use of fertilisers. When I was young, before the advent of chemical fertilisers, we were taught that food production was maximised and could not be increased, so something had to give. The use of chemical fertilisers has reached its peak and government is now discouraging their use as they have degraded the natural biodiversity of the soil and are also perceived as un-environmental. So where to now?
As to importing food, has anyone noticed that there are a number of wars on? Relying on foreign food over your own production is a recipe for disaster and that disaster will come faster than we expect. You cannot rely on the world to be stable all the time. Just as shutting down North Sea oil production has come home to roost, so will shutting down farming in order to re-wild large sections of the countryside, paid for with government handouts. We need some grown-ups in charge.
If this is all rather depressing to you, please do not be shaken. All it proves is that those who invest in food production will become far more important to the nation. Fish farming is going to become even more central to protein production but the competition for feedstuffs will intensify. Fuel is going to get more expensive and I would not be surprised if there is rationing introduced in the not too distant future.
Most of all, the price of all foodstuffs will rise and the public is going to have pay for profligate government as well as significant inflation. ‘Twas ever thus!
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