Dog Poo & The Ludlow Spring Festival - Published in the South Shropshire Journal 10/5/13

By the time you read this, the local elections will have been and gone. Quite honestly I’ve lost interest. If there’s something guaranteed to turn you off local politics, it’s following local politicians on Twitter. The hair pulling and tit-for-tat that goes on between wannabe (and indeed existing) councillors on this so-called social networking website, has been anything but sociable. What’s the big fuss anyway? Once they’re in they will spend the next five years arguing about dog muck and who’s supposed to mow the grass in the cemetery. Important stuff granted, but come on girls, play nicely.

So, if the new guard hasn’t taken control of the South Shropshire Journal you will have read the first bit of this column, and if you live in Ludlow or its environs (or anywhere else for that matter) you can look forward to this town putting on a socking great party that celebrates victuals and grog. The Ludlow Spring Food Festival is like the sexy but demure sister of the big September event. Both equally luscious in their own way, but the spring one for me has the edge.

The Spring Event has a big old beardy beer tent and here Shropshire does its thing better than anyone else in the world. We are a county of understatement and quiet plodding, but we brew beer like nobody else. The sausages, the bread, the E-type Jags and Alvises (the Marches Transport Festival runs concurrently in the castle grounds) and a bit of iffy folk music is just so very British. And it takes place in May, the most splendid, verdant British month. A big hug of a festival that shows off what we do best in this not-so-quiet corner of England. And it makes me jolly proud to be a Shropshire Lad. 

Whilst Ludlow’s gastronomic crown may have slipped and slided around on her head over the years, it’s these weekend-long jollies that keep her steady. Michelin stars come and go, but the festivals make life gastronomically and socially sound in this town. The May Fair last weekend will no doubt have attracted it’s usual tedious dose of NIMBYism from Disgusted of Ludlow; “The helter-skelter was virtually in the upstairs drawing room, simply ghastly. And the smell of fried onions, uugh.” but actually, it all adds to the fun of living in a market town.

Festivals and fairs make places tick, whether you like them or not. Communities come together and celebrate the good things - bangers or candyfloss- and others flock in from afar and point out the things that we as natives take for granted: low house prices, friendly smiles from strangers, quirky independent shops, omnipresent dog poo, untended graveyards…We live in a good place. Let’s enjoy it. 

Food Waste and Bare Naked Laziness - South Shropshire Journal (3/5/13)

You’ve probably gathered by now, that I’m not that hot on in-depth research. That’s what proper journalists do. Researching. And whilst I suppose I am a proper journalist (I write stuff in a newspaper, ergo I’m a proper journalist), I don’t consider myself as such. So gathering facts and quotes and general noteworthy hunks of journalistic hardcore is just not something I do. Let’s be honest, I’m lazy. Naked industry simply doesn’t number itself in my arsenal of attributes.

But, in a convenient Muhammad-meeting-the-mountain fashion, some research came to me a few days ago by way of a press release from goodtoknow.co.uk which is apparently a women’s lifestyle website offering “practical tips and advice for busy mums…” It may not be a real website, I haven’t been bothered to find out but they threw some interesting nuggets in my direction which apparently they’d pinched from the Office of National Statistics. The general gist being thus:

Food prices have risen by 12% in the last five years; over the same period household income has dropped by 12%; consumer spending on food has increased by 3.5%; and the average UK household chucks out £480’s worth of food annually, 61% of which is avoidable.

Bone-idleness aside, this is why I don’t do much research, because the results are generally terribly boring (see above). We have a Ministry of Sums to do statistics for us. Not proper journalists.

But let’s go with it, because now more than ever this is a Really Big Issue and wherever these figures came from, we know what the situation is and it’s bloody scary. Thoughtlessly hurling food in the bin is an utterly heinous thing to do, whether you can afford it or not. We all know that the cost of eating has risen scarily over the last few years, the reasons being too numerous to discuss in the 150 odd words I have left today. As a species, we simply cannot ignore the impact that the desire to fill our bellies is having on our tremulous little planet, and all who live on it.

By unnecessarily wasting food, we’re waving two fingers at so much. And it’s odd because most of us are either of - or only a hop, skip and a jump away from – a time when food was respected and cherished. If this is some sort of a backlash, then we need to stop it.

Food retailers deploy use by dates to cover their backs, not to save our guts. Use your nose and taste buds, and your common sense. Buy only what you need and get inventive in the kitchen.

In this topsy-turvy world there are many things that we can’t control, but not filling up wheelie bins with perfectly good scoff is one that we can. There’s no time to waste.

Polythene and Purple Tips: South Shropshire Journal (unedited) 26/4/13

It’s been killing me over the last few weeks not mentioning it because it’s such a yawningly obvious subject. Everyone else has been carping on about it literally forever, but being the razor-sharp gastrohack that I am (“Wow!” my half-dozen readers are frequently heard to exclaim, “Mackley’s surprised us again with his off-the-dial outré opinions. Such a maverick”) I’ve been original enough not to have had to scrape the barrel, for want of a less original cliché. 

But hang it. It was St George’s Day on Tuesday, and I’m an Englishman so this week I’m going to kick off with the weather. Not in a whiney way, because if there’s anything that an Englishman is better at doing than talking about the weather, it’s whining. Boring. Pull your pants up, crack on, and cry God for Harry, England and Saint George.

Anyway, the weather hasn’t been altogether the loveliest, which has meant that spring is late. Not just turn up for dinner at 7.30 and arrive at 8.00 late, but send a text the next day to say that Strictly was on and you couldn’t be bothered late. I’m not whining but... For some farmers, horticulturalists and the like spring’s rudeness is potentially livelihood threatening. For gluttons, it’s irksome.

So thank goodness half of bucolic England is wrapped in sturdy polythene! I tell you, this stuff is amazing. Sod the aesthetics: over the last few days I’ve been snarfing properly, slap you in the face stunning tomatoes from Worcestershire; proud purple-tipped asparagus from the Wye Valley (eye-wateringly expensive but a nice alternative to a pack of fags); tinky-winky, nutty little spuds from Jersey. This is British produce at its almost-very-best and it’s worth every penny.

How wonderful that humans have the ingenuity to cheat the weather and to coax tasty edible plants into thinking that it’s nice and hot, when in fact it’s not. We’re just about to emerge from the “hungry gap” (the time of year when pre-imports, winter stores had run dry and ye olde veggie patch was still snoozing), but until the weather perks up a bit, embrace the moist and fertile warmth of the English polytunnel. 

Incidentally, this is the one time of year when I throw caution to my carbon footprint and go potty for foreign imports. Pakistani Alfonso mangos, Sicilian blood oranges etc are so very tasty. Sorry, I momentarily forgot about the polar bears. Oopsie.

Lambs unfortunately cannot be reared under plastic, and the harsh early spring weather tragically killed off thousands of them. Give British mutton and hogget a go instead (you won’t regret it), and if your local butcher or supermarket won’t stock it, keep pestering until they do. If they refuse to, go to someone who will. My dear half-dozen readers, you have much responsibility on  your shoulders. 

Pollocks, shanks, Labradors (unedited): South Shropshire Journal 19/4/13

Following on from last week’s bit about the Austerity Food Revolution and all that sustainability jazz, I turned my mind to food fads. Now, depending on what paper you read (and if it’s just the South Shropshire Journal, it’s okay but you need to broaden your horizons just a teeny-weeny bit) or watch on the telly, you may well be aware that food faddism and sustainability go hand in hand.

It’s like the horsemeat thing again. Recently the National Federation of Fish Friers reported that some of their more unscrupulous peers were palming-off totally unsustainable cod and haddock as the hipster uber-faddish and seafloor friendly pollock and whiting.  So there’s a chance, albeit a small one, that the last time you went down the chippie for cods, they gave you a load of old pollocks instead.

In some places, namely east London and every twee gastropub in the Cotswolds (invariably run by a sacked banker called Hugo and his Labrador), people actually demand pollock, whiting and even nasty old coley because apparently they’re just as tasty as cod and haddock. This is without doubt, utter nonsense. Give me a blind tasting, and I’ll tell you what I’d rather share my chips with.

Fads of course lead to other more tasty sustainability issues. The lamb shank thing of the early noughties for instance: tremendous, lovely cheap bits of sheep, braise ‘em in red wine for three weeks or get M&S to do it for you. The problem was, there weren’t enough sheep for shanks so they had to come from New Zealand, and then the British ones got expensive.

I’m no economist, but I think they call it supply and demand. Demand goes up, supply goes down, price goes up. It’s happened to poor old pork belly, ham hocks, beetroot and rhubarb (I kid you not). Food, like everything else is subject to trends. So while we’ve all been looking at those cheaper cuts of meat, licking our lips and getting change from a fiver – it won’t last. Although it will in Shropshire, for a little while at least, because we’re a little slower to catch on. 

My pal John at the Ludlow Food Centre does a cut of beef called onglet. Onglet dangles off the diaphragm of a cow and it is ferrous, visceral, and deeply bovine. It’s the best bit of steak you’ll ever cook, except that you won’t because nobody knows about it apart from John and me so I get it dead cheap. On a recent trip to London I saw some on a butcher’s slab in the wonderful Ginger Pig in Marylebone. Demand must be high for knobbly cow-bits in the Smoke, because a pound of this would have bought you a five-bed house in Shropshire. It’s a funny, faddy old world. 

Austerity Foodie Revolution (unedited): South Shropshire Journal 12/413

We know what happened when Lehman Brothers went kaput in 2008: They all went tumbling down and took the rest of them too. MPs, coppers, journos, the lot. All in a oner. Five years later you can’t pay a cheque in over the counter without cocking a snook at the teller behind the Plexiglas. Who can you trust?

They owe us big time those bunch of bankers, but on the plus side we got the Austerity Foodie Revolution (AFR). The AFR digs for victory, makes do and mends, keeps calm and carries on, just like Granny and Gramps had to in the war. But they actually had to because their house had been smashed to bits by the Luftwaffe and they were properly, old-fashioned skint and scared. If they didn’t turn their dahlias over to mangolds the war-ag would’ve had them in front of the firing squad, and their daughters handed over to Yank airmen.

For us however, the AFR means that we can go back to a time when Englishers wore smocks and big hats and didn’t have a care in the world (apart from bad teeth, high infant mortality rates, and the death penalty for apple scrumpin’). The 2013 AFR is biodynamic pigs in your garden to save money on lard, growing potatoes in old tyres (Sustainability? Check!) and buying eggs from the bloke who actually laid them at the farmers’ market.

The AFR makes people more aware of how they spend their money, what they spend it on, and who the profit goes to. This is tremendously commendable, but the poor kids are still eating rubbish.

Marie Antoinette had Le Petit Hameau - a mock-up farmstead - built in the grounds of the palace of La Versailles. There she could play the shepherdess and hang out with agricultural types whilst the proles starved on the other side of the palace fence. SUCH FUN!

I’m just saying.

So, the Austerity Foodie Revolutionists would love to tell you that this isn’t a class thing, and they may be right. Fred down the road grows his own tomatoes, and Iris next door takes a half pound of tripe from the butcher every week – and they’re as working class as Cheryl Cole. But there’s a skipped generation. Could it be that the here-and-now children who don’t care about what they eat have parents who don’t care about what they eat? How is it that the old-fashioned ways of growing, rearing, and buying food have become whimsy for the moneyed and utterly uninteresting for those without?

A lot of the fluffy stuff sought by the AFR is unattainable, and in global terms unsustainable. But much of it isn’t. Food for thought? After all, that’s why I’m here.

South Shropshire Journal Column (Unedited) 5/4/13

Last week a school in Essex banned triangular flapjacks after one was hurled across the canteen with ninja-style precision, and one of its three corners sort of imbedded itself in a child’s almost ocular area, nearly resulting treatment from matron. This decision was so bonkers that the local health and safety spokesman declared it “half baked”. When you get the grey-faces from the town hall smirking at stuff like this, you know that it must be funny.

So back in February the horsemeat scandal broke, but unlike flapjackgate, this is something that’s still being talked about, and with good reason. As it rippled out, more and more of the big boys put their hands up pleading guilt, and taking up whole pages in the national press. “We’re going to change!”, they wailed, “We got it wrong!” “We won’t do it again. Promise!”

Some of the supermarkets feel guilty about flogging us a dead horse, but actually why should they? We’re the ones who demanded cheap food from them and we’re the ones who never EVER asked any questions. Until it was too late and by which time so much horsemeat had passed through our systems that there was not much that even the most brutal enema would ever be able to reverse.

I’m not suggesting that Tesco et al are inculpable, but they have a living to make like the rest of us. If you want to buy really awful food at really appealing prices, you’re going to have to take the hit. In the chops, and the belly. You’ve been asking the supermarkets to drive their prices down. They’ve done what you asked, and you’ve been eating horse.

But here’s the thing: In the twelve weeks to March 17^th, Tesco saw its market share staying below 30%, the lowest in eight years. And with consumer group Which! reporting that trust in the industry has fallen by a quarter, it looks like consumers are starting to sit up and take stock.

Consumers (that’s you) have started asking questions: Where does my food come from?

A Ludlow butcher tells me, “Since the horsemeat scandal broke, our sales have gone through the roof. We’re selling as much meat in our quietest time of year as we would normally be doing during peak times.”

Too many of us are either unaware or simply don’t care about the option that isn’t the supermarket. Go to your local butcher, greengrocer and baker and make friends with them, tell them what you need and what your budget is, and they’ll sort your supper out. Look after them, and they’ll look after you.

Make demands on your local council too: where I live, parking restrictions and overbearing traffic wardens are merely encouraging people to shop in Tesco. 

The Vegetable Patch

Occasionally, I really do wonder why I go to the bother of growing my own vegetables. I wonder why I invest all this time and all this anxiety and I wonder if the final result is worth it.

I think about my vegetable patch an awful lot. It takes up space in my brain that might well be given over to other things, to other more useful things. But then, if I didn’t have my vegetable patch, if I covered it in Tarmac and stuck a Swingball in the middle I think that I’d worry that there wasn’t a vegetable patch there instead.

I started growing my own vegetables because we moved to a house where there was space to do so. But then again, I think part of the appeal of this house was that there was room in the garden for a potential vegetable patch. It’s all so very confusing.

My father grew vegetables. Lots of them, and he would huff and puff about growing his vegetables, every year without fail. And my mother, sister and I would feign wonder at the handful of runner beans or potatoes or spinach, which would appear throughout the summer months in the old trug.

Some of my earliest boyhood memories involve tray upon tray of shallots drying out in rows in our London garden. I remember the allium smell and the parchment-paper feel of their skins. I remember Dad, in his special gardening smock and special gardening Chelsea boots, and I remember him helping me to sow radish seeds in heavy London clay. And they grew well those radishes, in the clay, in amongst the turds of neighbouring cats. I have never successfully grown a radish – the easiest of all vegetables to grow – since then.

As a teenager, if my parents went away during the summer, I would be instructed to water the vegetables, to look after them. I hated this, because I was a teenage boy and I was more interested in kissing girls and smoking fags. Teenage boys also hate being told what to do by their parents. I did water Dad’s vegetables though, because I think I knew how important they were to him and I knew how much effort he had put into producing them. And somewhere, deep beneath my zits and raging hormones, I enjoyed seeing the garden grow.

Like my father used to, I now huff and puff over matters horticultural, although unlike him I can dig a trench for my runner beans in a matter of minutes. Dad’s bean trench would take him days to dig and prepare. A spade and a half deep, a layer of well-rotted horse shit, a layer of shredded damp newspaper (the Daily Telegraph for preference), a fine layer of blood fish and bone, and repeat.

And now, as an adult, with a vegetable plot of my own, I worry about the seeds I have sown. I worry about my vegetables from the day that they sprout from the ground until the moment they safely reach my kitchen. I worry that insects or animals will eat them before I do, I worry that unseasonal weather will kill and maim them, I worry about ghastly and terminal vegetable diseases invading my tiny little corner of England and killing it stone dead. Surely, surely, this can’t be good for the soul.

But it is worth it. For all the anxiety, for all the heartache, for all the sweat and tears and foul fucking language that is vented over my garden, it is ultimately so very, very good for the soul. Yes, there will be casualties, yes there will be disease, but when a seed that you have sown and nurtured and loved, survives all that is thrown at it and develops into a proud adult vegetable, well, that’s a very fine thing indeed.