Читать книгу Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen - Jane Baxter - Страница 19

I remember being taught that evolutionary progress happens on the fringes: whilst the dominant, overtly successful species (currently us) are busy thriving, dominating, specialising, multiplying and basically doing more of the same, the less successful, freakish creatures are banished to the harsher fringes, where they scratch a precarious existence and await their day. For most freaks it never comes, and they perish without a fossil or obituary to mark their struggle.

Our planet is constantly changing, and no one stays at the centre forever. The fine adaptation and specialisation that bring a species success ultimately prove its downfall. Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 160 million years until, 65 million years ago, a 10km-wide asteroid crashed into Mexico and upset the conditions in which they thrived. They couldn’t adapt to the new reality and were gone in an evolutionary blink.

In so many ways, business follows the same patterns as nature: survival of the fittest is one with obvious appeal for many post-Thatcherite worshippers of the free market and globalisation. Response to change is something on which those at the centre, growing fat on the status quo, tend to be less keen.

Organic farmers were freaks from the fringe until very recently. They typically lived in isolation in the depths of Wales or Devon, where no selfrespecting, tweed-clad, country-landowning Barley Baron would soil their fat, oversized Range Rover tyres. Some were even women and one or two wore sandals, woolly jumpers and beards and had the occasional dope plant hidden amongst the tomatoes. They were derided for decades. Surely it would take a massive intergalactic collision for this lot to threaten or displace mainstream farming and food retailing, which is fiercely protected by a well-heeled agribusiness and backed up by a powerful global agrichemical sector.

Change has been driven more by an asteroid shower than a single meteor: BSE, foot-and-mouth, pesticide and fertiliser pollution and contamination, global warming, ‘peak oil’, public concern over the excesses of food transportation, routine antibiotic misuse, the imposition of genetic manipulation, revulsion at factory farming and the normalisation of the abuses of a food industry where a chicken can quite legally be only 50 per cent chicken, the rest made up of beef gristle and water. The soft underbelly of success is complacency, and the accompanying lack of imagination and willingness to learn. Within the mainstream, there is little genuine desire to adapt to a new climate of well-founded public concern. A few groundbreaking organic brands have been bought by Cadbury, Dean Foods, Unilever and the like, and a fair amount has been spent on greenwash-inspired PR initiatives and Corporate Responsibility Indexes, but behind the smokescreen little has changed. Could we be witnessing the start of a mass extinction of global agri-food businesses? For decades, they have seemed immovable and omnipotent in their power – but then so did the dinosaurs, until the last one found itself being chased around by a bone-wielding, two-legged freak previously seen rubbing two sticks together in a cave.