Читать книгу Crap Days Out - Gareth Rubin - Страница 13

As the name suggests, Windmill Hill City Farm is a farm in a city. In other words, it’s a farm to be visited by city people who can’t be bothered to go to the countryside to see a proper one. Beyond that, its slogan is ‘A place where people grow’, demonstrating that they have clearly misunderstood the purpose of a farm.

Continuing the questionable phrasing of its own raison d’être, its mission statement includes: ‘To meet the needs of local people regardless of age, race, sex, disability, and social or economic circumstances’, which surprises anyone who had presumed they would operate a strictly racist admittance policy, sexually harass women upon entry, and make ‘spazmo’ gestures at any working-class children in wheelchairs.

Like many a substitute, however, city farms bear little resemblance to the real thing. First, city farms raise a small number of animals that have been given cuddly names and are lovingly looked after by staff. Real farms, by contrast, produce a multitude of faceless animals to be slaughtered in their thousands by industrial killing machines while humans stand about reading the paper and occasionally pressing the button marked ‘faster’.

To someone who works at a city farm, each animal has personality, each cow has an old-fashioned girl’s name and each chicken, duck or goose is a feathered friend. To a real farmer, each animal has a cost and a sale price, and every chicken is a unit comprising 2.7 kievs and half a can of Whiskas.

Another important difference between city farms and real ones is that city farms welcome visitors. This is in stark contrast to real farms, where no one looks forward to sportswear-draped families scaring the livestock or trampling the crops under impractically shod feet. Turn up at a real farm expecting to tickle the animals and enjoy a home-made scone and you will be as welcome as a turd in the thresher.

One argument in favour of city farmers presented by people who work at city farms – or ‘hippies on benefits’ – is that city farms help people from the inner cities – or ‘chavs’ – to better understand the countryside by pretending it exists in the middle of Bristol. Urban dwellers often lack a connection with the food they eat, but once they have visited a city farm they know that every Starburger or bucket of Popcorn Chicken they eat comes from an animal called Daisy or Henrietta who was happy right up until the moment she was dragged out of her field and slaughtered.

As well as allowing you to feed the fluffy animals who won’t be killed in front of a crowd of terrified primary school children as they should be, city farms also allow you to look at the cows and pigs, enjoy a teacake, and even offer the chance to ‘sponsor’ one of the animals. But to anyone from the country, this idea is a confusing one. Unless you are a vegetarian, you already sponsor animals all the time. ‘Raise this attractive, friendly animal,’ you say to the farmer, ‘and when you have killed it and cut it into bits that I can eat I’ll give you some money for it.’ Looked at in this light, the city farm doesn’t offer much of a bargain: ‘Raise this animal and as long as you never cut it up into anything anyone can eat I’ll give you some money for it.’ See?