International Sausages

Once upon a time, not so long ago, two Austrian ladies came to live in the North of England. The pet gripe of these two ladies was to bemoan the lack of decent sausages to be found in England. Such was their wailing and moaning about such sparcity of good sausages that some felt they were becoming British in their love of complaining about the state of things.

One evening these two ladies were at a party and were wittering on to all and sundry about their sausage woes. Until one gentlemen, encouraged perhaps by the drink, piped up to say “My dear ladies, there is nothing finer on this Earth than the British sausage!”. After much tittering, the Austrians decided to call out the gentlemen’s bloated patriotism and issued a wager, they would host an international sausage evening and challenged the man and all his friends to come to their garden with their fatty offal tubes to a sausage sizzle against the sausages of Austria. There, supremely confident in the superiority of the Austrian sausage they would prove that not one British sausage could beat their sausages in a taste test.

And so, came the night of the international sausage evening. Their fridge was filled to it’s very brim with specially ordered sausages that had asked friends and family to deliver to them all the way from Austria. The rain could not dampen their confidence, nor the sausages, because the Austrians had come to know the British summer and prepared gazebos to keep the rain off the grills erected in their garden.

Their smugness quickly turned to shock, then despair and finally to joy, for their burning desire to win the contest was trumped only by their love of excellent sausages, every British sausage they tasted was indeed superior to their sausages from back home. And everybody lived happily ever after.

All the best stories are true. I think many other Europeans coming to Britain are shocked and surprised by British food. If you visit a British supermarket [well perhaps unless you are lucky enough to go to a Booth’s] you will find aisle after aisle of over-processed, poor quality foods, that it seems the British have come to love. They may also moan about the ‘toast’ [the sliced “bread” in plastic bags only good for toast]. Yet outside the supermarkets, in the little back streets of British towns and cities, on market stalls and in small farm shops, you can still find fantastic butchers, bakers and fine cheeses, maintaining the tradition of producing basics like bread, cheese and indeed sausages to a decent standard using local ingredients from small producers as many had for centuries before them. Whilst the majority of the country spurns them to spend their cash in the bright lights of the supermarket for so ‘modern’ are they. It was from these little shops that the gentleman and his friends had acquired the winning sausages and certainly not from the supermarkets. For many Britons have acquired the local knowledge of where the good stuff is and we will go out of our way to visit these places when nearby and stock up, but they are not always easy to find. Such foodyism is largely a middle-class preserve, but such a class division does not exist in the rest of Europe to anything like this extent.

Travelling on ‘the continent’ is always a a food journey. There is good food seemingly everywhere, available to all. Even in the glitzy city centres and indeed the supermarkets, fine food can be purchased and enjoyed, even in the supermarkets! It seems to be only Britain and her cousins in the United States that have lost their food traditions to be slaves to intensive, industrialised food systems, where shelf-life and price is more important that giving people the simple pleasure of eating good food. It’s not really such a surprise that obesity is such a problem in the UK and the US. It is much harder to splash out on luxury food when it isn’t there, instead you have to binge on sugar and fat to satisfy cravings. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the US and the UK were the early adopters and champions of corporate capitalism, we don’t even understand what it is we’ve largely lost from our culture.

The supermarkets have been ruthless, they used to have in-store bakeries and butcher counters offering a comparable quality to the high street, but at a lower price, until they succeded in almost completely killling off local food shops. Then the supermarkets started lowering the quality, until today and most Britons don’t even notice how bad the cheese they buy from the supermarket is. It’s so easy to do, replace 10% of your favourite coffee blend with a cheaper alternative and 99% of people won’t notice. Then you take away another 10% and so over years people think they are drinking good coffee when it no longer is. This has happened to the entire British food culture. The British, in general are just too good at not wanting to make a fuss for their own good.

Note:

The International Sausage Evening was not a fair competition. The English gentlemen used local knowledge networks from across Britain to source the very best British sausages, whilst the Austrians sourced their sausages from their local shop in austria, very good sausages but perhaps not the very best to be found in Austria. Saying this above would have perhaps ruined the story.

Sitting on the Fence, Hiding in the Hedgerows

I became a vegetarian when I was fourteen. This was an uncomfortable decision as I grew up in a rural farming community, spent much of my childhood playing and occasionally helping out on friends farms. My family isn’t very far away from farming, my grandparents grew up on farms. Almost everyone I knew found my decision a little odd and they struggled to get their heads around it. I love the farming community, like many growing up in a rural area I was involved with a local YFC [Young Farmers Club], it is the land I grew up in. Whilst I was clearly different, seen as a leftie and had a sandal on one foot, my other foot stayed in a wellie, happy to be out in the mud.

What had caused this fairly radical decision was learning about intensive farming. That some of the meat I ate came from animals reared indoors on feed grown with artificial fertilisers and pesticides on giant fields with no relation to the small family farms of my area. Whilst I was happy to eat from the traditionally reared animals, who grazed outside on local farms, I was deeply unhappy about eating meat from intensive production. Everyone else seemed less troubled by this, though noone, somewhat oddly, was hostile, I was being agreed with to an extent, I only rarely suffered from the ‘bloody vegetarians’ jibe. As a fourteen year old, I wasn’t responsible for the food on my table, so the only way I could guarantee not eating food I objected to was to go vegetarian.

My parents attitude was that this was just a ‘phase’ and they said this was fine if you cook your own meals, so I learnt how to cook. I didn’t look back as this allowed to to experiment and discover interesting tasty meals. A few years later I left home for a big city, where butchers shops were already dying and people were almost exclusively buying meat from supermarkets, with scant labelling as to production methodology, this at least made my life easier as I didn’t even know how to get meat I was happy with. I couldn’t understand why no-one else was as troubled by my dilemma around food.

I then felt a pressure to go vegan. It seemed you either support farming or went vegan, there is no middle ground or place for a ‘fence sitter’ such as myself. I was still buying milk, because in Britain at the time most milk was still from pasture based producution from small farms and cheese would have been even harder to give up, I love blue cheeses. As the years past this was changing, the small dairy farms and dairies were disappearing rapidly, I needed to make a decision about milk.

In the 90s there was a craze for organic produce, it even became available in the supermarkets. Organic production standards require animals to graze on pasture, so in organic milk I could be assured, so took the decision to only buy organic milk. I also took the decision, to start eating organic meat. I’d never objected to killing animals for food, I grew up in the countryside amongst natures continuing cycle of birth and death. I’ve never intentionally killed an animal myself, I’ve hit the odd rabbit or badger with my car and I have seen people and animals die in front of me.

The thing was I was now a competent vegan cook and hadn’t eaten meat for fourteen years. I’d been brought up to cook from scratch so I had to learn how to cook meat from scratch and never out outside of the home. Also organic meat is relatively expensive, so it became a weekly treat. For years I’ve eaten meat containing meals two or three times a week with the majority of meals vegan or vegetarian. It turns out this could be the most sustainable diet we can have and mirrors how Britons ate for millenia.

I grew up at a time when traditional farming, mixed rotational farming, was in decline, yet in rural upland Wales it continued to an extent. I went to YFC events such as ploughing and hedging competitions, yet such skills as hedging [making hedges] were in rapid decline. However in places like the USA and Australia, small single family farms were fast disappearing, to create ‘mega farms’ of vast fields to produce food industrially with artificial fertilisers, pesticides and GM [genetically modified] seeds. Animals are managed indoors. This “modern” farming produces food at scales the small traditional farms could not hope to compete with commercially, as the new capitalism of Thatcher and Reagan demanded ever cheaper food to create capital. The hedgerows, trees and awkward parcels of land were “improved”/ destroyed to facilitate cheap production.

We are now at a point of crisis from climate change. Wider society is waking up to these challenges and meat production is seen as part of the problem. We are all responsible for the way we as humanity produce food. More and more people are going vegan as the way to at least do something about it. Yet this has produced a false dichotomy. Farmers being blamed for the food production system they’ve been forced into by the supermarkets and large corporations and vegans for reliance on unsustainable imported food. These arguments are a distraction from the real issue of what sustainable agriculture looks like.

If you look at a typical Mid-West US farm today, you will find vast fields of grain, watered by equally vast pivot irrigation systems, managed by vast heavy machinery such as combine harvesters with GM seeds with a special coating to provide the soil microbiology absent from the soil, with the cattle kept in vast sheds with the associated health issues, but we can keep developing expensive supplements to get around that. This system feeds the world but it is an incredibly vulnerable system, reliant on so many inputs and is increasingly expensive as new varieties of seeds and treatments are continually required to keep up with the pathogens, there is a whole multi-billion pound industry constantly developing new treatments. If this system goes, the world will starve.

Contrast this with traditional farming. A traditionally managed field is rotated, one year it may have barley for winter feed for animals, another year vegetables for sale and winter feed, hay pasture for winter feed, pasture for grazing for a few years, a rest year. All the while, manure from the animals returns nutrients to the soil, the lack of heavy machinery restricts soil campaction, so a healthy soil is maintained, with a rich microbiota that can usually outcompete pathogens. Hedgerows maintain a niche for birds and insects who will also feed on pathogens. All with a farmer keeping an eye on things to make sure that nature is preserved but not taking over the fields from production, it’s a delicate highly skilled balancing act to produce enough food to sell to the rest of us. Yields are not as great, as some of the crop will be lost, more human labour is required making it less ‘efficient’. Yet it is a sustainable system.

Unfortunatly, even if we collectively decided that we wanted and needed this sustainability, it could not feed the world. The worlds population has increased massively over the past fifty years and we don’t have more land to get, there is none left. I think the farmers I knew growing up were sceptical of the changes and didn’t like losing their traditions, so this was why they had some sympathy with me, but were economically compelled to adopt some intensive practices and considered me the ‘lefty’ economically illiterate townie.

I almost hate that my concerns about food and farming have been perhaps correct. It’s not actually sitting uncomfortably on the fence, it’s simply a recognition that the dichotomy, the arguments we have on social media is a false one. If as a planet we cut out intensively produced meat and maximised arable production for human consumption, we could allow much much more sustainable agriculture. It’s not about giving up meat, livestock are an important element of the agriculture system. It’s for most people now, eating less meat, but when you do it will be more tasty, nutritious and more of a pleasure. A free-range chicken or grass fed cow contains much more essential micronutrients than the intensively produced one and has a rich taste with little need for additional flavouring. The traditional British ‘meat and two veg’ meal isn’t bland if you get traditionally produced food, it is full of interesting flavours. If we saw meat as a treat and as part of a sustainable system and had vegan meals for the mostpart, we would be progressing to a sustainable existence on this planet.

Sometimes I wish I’d have had the confidence to shout a little louder when I was younger.

Believing in Evolution

There is a substantial difference between knowing something and believing it. Belief is much more powerful as it goes beyond logic and connects with peoples sense of self.

This idea helps make  clear why there is a stigma about mental illness. The anxious person or the depressed person can know that they are ill, that it is possible to not be ill, often the problem is that they don’t believe that they can be well. I suffered from anxiety, there were brief times when I wasn’t anxious, instead of knowing I was well, I believed it was merely a temporary respite. It was when I believed that there was nothing wrong with me, when I believed what I already knew rationally, did I become well. so the mental illness stigma is perhaps because healthy people don’t recognise the difference between knowing something to be true and believing it. Perhaps for the healthy, they believe they are well before they have developed an explanation for why they are well, belief comes before knowledge in this instance.

As a scientist I both know and believe in the theory of evolution. I know, because I have studied, read and observed the evidence and accept evolution as a rational, empirically produced explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. I believe,  because I also accept the scientific process for discovering the laws of the physical universe, I accept the process as a valid way of generating truth.

Many scientists have difficulty understanding why those of religious faith lack a belief in evolution, indeed some of faith have difficulty believing in evolutionary theory. Religious faith is different to simple belief. Belief in God is different to beliefs about the physical universe, because belief perhaps comes before knowledge, rather than coming after knowledge. Religious belief connects to the self, before any empirical process of gathering knowledge. Faith concerns something beyond understanding of relationships in the physical observable universe. As a scientist I believe that it is possible for science to explain what God is, but that humanity may never establish a theory of everything. Sometimes, it is perhaps dangerous or less open to truth if belief comes before knowledge.

It is accepted that such theories as evolution or gravity are true. such truths can be established from raw data acquired from the physical universe. I believed these truths before I became a Christian and I know that there is no conflict between holding these beliefs in addition to religious beliefs, such as God having a role in the creation of the universe. The issue is perhaps that for some people the religious belief is more powerful to themselves than a mere rational piece of knowledge. To the atheist scientist, belief in scientific theory is more powerful than mere knowledge or understanding of religion, often atheists struggle looking beyond mere empirical understanding of the physical universe. To someone of faith, these powerful ideas can make the concept of evolution seem less important and hence less true. Yet people are not robots, they all harbour non-rational thoughts and ideas, the belief of humanists that there is perhaps, simply, that there is a physical explanation for these mental phenomena, but their belief may not be as strong as these less easy to break down logically ideas are not as fully explored, perhaps mentally acknowledged or as strongly believed. No individual person has a fully coherent explanation of themselves or the wider universe, yet every individual is on a journey to discovering truths.

I think I should point out, that I am in no way declaring any superiority for religious faith over atheism. What I am saying is that faith is worthwhile exploring. It is a question of balance, people choose what to invest our mental energies upon, there should be space for rational scientific inquiry as well as reflection on the question of faith.

Anxiety and Understanding

Generally, there is much misunderstanding of mental illness in the world. Mental illness doesn’t receive the same support and sympathy as other ailments. I suffered from severe anxiety for most of my life, as did my mother and my maternal grandmother. for which, we as a family received little support or understanding. It is partly that I grew up surrounded by anxiety, that it seemed normal, that anxiety seemed to be a part of me. It was wonderful to discover that anxiety wasn’t a part of me, that it was simply an illness and it wasn’t something I had genetically inherited.

I fortunately managed to to self diagnose and work through a solution to this chronic anxiety. I still get anxious from time to time, because anxiety is a natural part of existence. It is perhaps for this reason that people don’t understand anxiety or such conditions as depression, because there is a perception that people are simply wallowing in it or using it as an excuse. Most of the time people with such conditions aren’t behaving that way out of choice, they fervently wish that they were healthy.

One of the issues that I struggled with in overcoming anxiety, is that often people don’t understand what it is like to recover from such a condition, to become ‘normal’ [by normal I mean mentally healthy]. It’s like being re-born and you realise that there is this whole world of social interaction that you can now participate in fully. That the people who like you and you share positive experiences with are no longer confined to people who suffer from debilitating conditions themselves. you no longer find the need to seek out the vulnerable to find people to be open and honest with. The issue has been for me, one of being more open with ‘normal’ people. Being open with ‘normal’ people is great, it’s only a problem if you open up about your past anxiety, because ‘normal’ people don’t understand it.

It took me quite a while to appreciate the difficulty of discussing anxiety, an issue the other people have scant understanding of. It’s kind of a taboo subject, something people don’t want to think about. I can completely understand this taboo, as it’s like the fear of trying to understand the motivations of a terrorist or a serial killer, the fear that this mental condition could happen to you, the fear that you may contract anxiety and not have the skills and knowledge to get out of it easily.

It was especially problematic for me as I didn’t know anyone else who had overcome anxiety, to ‘compare notes’ and to realise that I wasn’t the only person in the world who this had happened to. I kind of needed some reassurance that not being anxious was really a good, healthy way of being, that I could just stay not being continually worried. Also the people who had encouraged me to be more confident and less paranoid, were people I couldn’t thank properly, as they didn’t understand, that what happened to em was more profound that simply building up confidence and experience of situations; even as an anxious person I still built up confidence with experience of situations.

Food, Family and Fun

Last night I watched “How to live to a hundred” on the television. The argument put forth is that a traditionally based lifestyle helps keep people happy and healthy, that Food + Family + Fun [community] = Happiness. Whilst the ‘modern’  post-industrial economy of Western Europe is actually causing a range of modern diseases such as diabetes, cancer, food allergies and social diseases leading to mental health problems. I tend to agree, it backs my long held view that much of how modern society operates is really unhealthy and just seems loopy. It is why i have struggled to find my place in society. It is simply better to work with nature, rather than against it, the answer I believe lies in evolutionary biology.

Food

The modern western diet differs from the traditional diet in a number of ways: It consists of high quantities of meat,  often meat of poor quality produced industrially and intensively. Food is often processed and contains artificial compounds such as preservatives. This industrialisation of food means food is nutritionally poorer and lacks flavour, so often processed food contains high levels of salt and sugar to compensate for this lack of flavour, these high levels are beyond what the human body can cope with.

Family

I have wittered on previously about the importance of acceptance for humans in society, family provides that. I’m living with my father at the moment and it is simply nice to share meals together at the kitchen table. One of the reasons I was unhappy in Surrey was because I had to eat meals by myself in the bedroom, which is simply wrong, but many people are thrust into this position by the economy. Due to economic diversification, people often have to move away from their family to take on jobs and one person abodes are expensive. This modern way of working detracts from humans ability to take pleasure from eating and sharing food as part of the enjoyment of eating.

It does annoy me sometimes that i took decisions at quite a young age that led me to be ‘mostly vegetarian’, rather than conform to the mainstream diet, as sometimes my father and I have to cook separately to stick to our dietary choices. This phenomena is compounded by food allergies and different diets, I don’t think most people know how to provide a meal that will satisfy everyone at the table, yet I feel it is important that everyone should know how to put on a collective meal. Having a collective meal is fun

Fun / Community

Cooking together and sharing food at the dinner table is an enjoyable social event. When I was working in the forests of Madagascar, the whole team would sit together for dinner, the conversation flowed and it was a hugely enjoyable experience, even if only to see what those on cooking duty had managed to produce from our limited resources (rice and beans, supplemented with mangoes or breadfruit that had been gathered during the day, we had zebu (type of cow) once in two months and that was a real celebration). Human beings are social animals and interactions between the local community are fun. There is a special something about an event that draws the whole community in, which offers something to everyone, this has value in ensuring communication between generations and social groups. The example is of  summer fayres, where everyone comes to together to eat, play games, sing and dance together (and provide talking points about performances in the ladies over 40 sack race!), Fun and Community, where everyone is free and encouraged to make a fool of themselves is important. Sadly such community events are dying out as people retreat into only socialising in there own social circle.

Happiness

It isn’t possible to go back to a time when people physically lived off the land with their family, socialised in the village and the wider world was the ‘here be dragons’ of faerie tales. However human beings lived for millenia in such societies, it is what our species evolved to cope with. I think the problem is partly that we are living lifestyles that genetically we are unsuited for. It’s only a few generations since many people no longer had physical labour jobs, a few generations since we began eating industrialised processed food and very recently since we now spend parts of our lives not in family units.

Many of the elements of a traditional lifestyle are possible, but often difficult. People claim not to have time to cook properly as they have to work long hours and may spend hours every day simply traveling to and from their place of work. People often don’t have the time or space to maintain a kitchen garden or a similar physical project. People sometimes don’t put the time and effort into maintaining family units and consequently that may fall apart.

Processed foods are I believe to blame for the rise in food allergies. Humans tend to like salty food as humans lived for millenia with low Sodium diets and more Sodium was required for health. Now our diets contain too much Sodium salt, this has health consequences as the body struggled to metabolise  so much salt. Hence, processed foods are putting pressure on out metabolisms they haven’t had a chance to evolve with.

There is much talk of a establishing a work/life balance. In a traditional society, such an idea is absurd, as work involved your family and community, the family and community contributed to your work too. Post-industrial work is largely not like this so generating time for family, for social activities is paramount, however, the modern economy makes it harder and harder for people to find this time and hence people become unhealthy and less productive, it’s the crisis of the Western world in the 21st century.