Hobbitisation

Watching TV here in the UK can give you the impression industrialisation is a thing of the past. I just saw an advertisement by "Which?" for their instructional book(let?) on how to grow your own vegetables.

The question I would ask myself is: Why would you want to?

Sure, the quality of food you get in the supermarkets is not always the best. But the question is if your own produce would be any better - and if it was, would it be worth the effort? Or would it not be a better to spend the time doing a trip to Borough Market once a week.

Many people say that they are attracted to home gardening as a means to avoid food that has been "messed with". To have nice and natural food. Seeing as we have spent the last 12 000 years trying to get away from nature, that seems a pretty vain quest. After all, farming in and off itself is unnatural. When it all started we lived in forests with little or no protection, ate what we found, be it roots and vegetables or be it leftover meat and bonemarrow from larger animal's feasts. It must have often been rotten, as we would be among the last of the scavengers to get a bite.

Of course, there is the other fraction, the ones who want to get away from "food scandals". This group is not very common in the UK, where any fear of modern food production is usually only expressed in a rather timid "You don't know what has been done to it", but far more evident in Germany, where every year one or two incidents of heightened measurements of a substance controlled by the ministry of farming stir deep fears of doing lasting damage to your body.

Usually, the only damage done by these heightened measurements is done to trees: The amount of paper that is being printed (and sold) over the matter is astonishing, yes outright scary. Germans love being in a state of anxiety, they worry about nuclear power, about global warming, and, yes, about food. After all, they are safe things to worry about, as neither seems to pose an actual threat to human existence - except if you count the lack of food. It is also a good way to keep the mind busy when faced with actual problems, such as the diminishing of the work force or how to avoid economic collapse, with or without the Euro.

It is just all too much. Worrying about the food is much easier. It is fixable! It is in our hands. We can just garden ourselves! In pots in our living room, yes, ma'am. Looking around my small living room, and remembering the amount of food that I usually bring home when returning from work in the evenings, I am wondering how I am to find the space to plant all that.

But that is of course a trivial objection. All the world, finds Prince Charles, should turn towards "organic" farming. That this would cut food production dramatically and mean thousands, if not millions, would find themselves starving is also trivial. After all, Prince Charles owns enough ground to feed the family. Though I do have the suspicion that maybe his elderly mother would not be up for the backbreaking task of tilling the land.

Another odditiy one may observe is how food scandals that actually kill people seem so much less significant. The reader outside Germany may never have heard about it (except if you were a knight of the pepino espanyol), so let me inform you about EHEC. EHEC was a virus that showed up in Germany, and Germany only, after people ate at chique organic restaurants and shopped in natural organic shops.

Soon the German elite of science (and yes, sadly these people really ARE the German elite of science) found the culprit: Cucumbers from Spain. That this would most likely be nonsense should have been clear even before the statement was made. After all, all infections occured in Germany, and there at different locations, though most occured in Lower Saxony (including Hamburg and Bremen). No infections occured in Spain or any of the other countries Spain delivers vegetables to.

This simple information makes it very likely to assume that the source of the disease was located in the north of Germany - and was finally found in a small organic farm near Oldenburg, Lower Saxony.

In the meantime, EHEC, the disease of oranic farming, had claimed 53 lives and caused permanent damage to 400 others.

Looking at it from this angle, is it really appetising to eat something that was grown in a "natural" way? Is it really more healthy? Or is it really like homeopathy: a bogus cure for the bored and rich?

Enjoy your food!