Dublin Report Foot and mouth is the price of producing cheap food

By John Kelly

Like many jackeens, I have always had more than one foot in the greatest part of the island: the land. City folk and townies most often describe it as "The Country." As the son of a seventh son from County Roscommon, I spent most of my boyhood holidays, summers and Christmases on the family farm.

I learned a lot then. Now, as Ireland hovers precariously on the edge of agrarian disaster, tottering on the abyss of a foot-and-mouth epidemic, I feel that some service may be done if the sad British calamity prompts us all to think about what we eat and how we obtain it.

In the sprawling British cities too many people are removed from the land. For them, food must be cheap, varied and easily available. The seasons no longer matter. The world is the larder.

What a difference a generation makes.

I will never forget that venerable large cottage, thatched, of course, complete with a porch. It was the cottage in which my father and generations of his forebears were born, a house and farm, poised in a corner of Roscommon, surrounded by the rolling fields of Mayo and Galway.

As a lad, I slept on the wooden settle bed beside the warm embers of the dying turf fire. It was there that I first heard the chuckling chirruping of the crickets that dwelt precariously in the environs of the gaping chimney.

And it was there that I saw bacon handing on hooks above the fireplace. Bacon was cured naturally then, not injected with chemicals.

Sleep was never a problem. The next day beckoned cheerfully with promises to keep and hundreds of things to be done.

There was hay to be mown, a large barn to be filled, turf to be cut and, of course, cows to be milked.

There were sheep to be chased, crows to be shot at, trees to be climbed, eggs to be gathered, and potatoes to be plucked from the back loam of the small field that stood immediately outside the cottage half-door and provided all of us with its vegetables.

As a boy, unlike too many city children these times, I never had any illusions about the origins of milk. I knew intimately that it came from a cow, not a bottle.

Vegetables had roots and when you pulled them from the soil, you got your hands dirty. Water was more valuable in the country than in the town. It was treated sparingly. The rugged well, surrounded by a hive of flies, was a long walk back with two filled enamel buckets.

Genetic modifying was absolutely unheard of, so remote that few even contemplated the possibility of forcing crops. Food was natural and naturally obtained. All things had their fixed places on the farm, the placid mare who knew her name was Rose, the plow and the old, open trap that took the family to Castlerea for the minimal Saturday shopping and Sunday Mass.

No chemicals, except the occasional copper sulphate spray to prevent potato blight, were used on that farm or on any of the neighboring land.

Fertilizer was horse manure. While the pigs were fed swill, the leftovers of the day, the swill was first boiled and continually stirred in large tin barrel.

No consumer bodies lobbied for more organic farming. All farming was organic in Ireland then. The seasons took their course and nature ruled all of the roost.

It could not last. As the trap rotted away in the backyard, supermarkets came to Ireland. As small farms faded away and big farmers became even bigger, greater production and standardization became the order of the time.

Vegetables had to look alike and taste alike. All foods had to meet the requirements. And the biggest requirement of all was that it had to be cheap, especially in the UK, which retained its international suppliers through the Commonwealth.

The standards were set elsewhere, in other markets, free of any Irish influence.

The family cottage in Roscommon has long been razed. Small trees and wild bushes jostle for the space on which it stood. If you thread firmly on the soft earth, you can still feel its foundations beneath your feet.

No vegetables grow in the haggard now. There is no need for them. Everything is bought in the supermarket in Castlerea.

And what a huge choice is there. You can buy green, white or even red cabbage; all uniform in shape and weight, all carefully cleaned, almost polished, before they are placed on the bulging shelves. The produce comes from all over the world, from Holland, from France, from Italy.

Nobody really cares too much about how they were grown or how the chickens and the beasts that provide the carefully sculpted cuts of meat were nurtured.

All that matters is the price. The price must be kept down. If the domestic producers, the few who remain, cannot meet the demand, then other markets must be sought or bigger production targets must be met.

Foreign producers do not have to meet any domestic standards. Pork, the retailers argue, is pork — no matter where the pigs are reared or fed. The market will get what it demands.

Seemingly, this is how unfortunate British farmers became afflicted with the scourge of foot-and-mouth disease that still threatens the whole of Europe. Scientists believe it may have been imported through infected pork. They suspect that the pigs were fed with swill.

Even now, in this, the most enlightened of times, it seems that we learn too slowly. Farmers throughout the world are forced to cut corners. The market demands it. The market is God.

While we can never return to the idyllic world of my boyhood, and while that world, in reality, entailed back-breaking work in the face of poverty and huge disappointment, we must venture forward only with caution and extreme vigilance.

Food production and farming techniques are too serious to be ignored.

If we are what we eat, then, at least we must know what we eat. The problem is that too many of us have grown too far removed from the land. The big question is still this — what is the real price of "cheap" food?