Opinion: Retailers have skewed our sense of seasonality
© Adobe Stock My primary school had a Harvest Festival every year. “We plough the fields and scatter…” was sung, and there was a display of produce, the centrepiece of which was always a loaf of bread in the shape of a wheatsheaf, for later distribution to the needy.
My contribution would be apples from the tree in our garden, but most of the children brought tins of something. Spaghetti in tomato sauce, mainly.
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This was the industrial North East, and none of us had the first idea about ploughing or scattering. Where the town ended there were fields, but I couldn’t tell you what grew in them.
My mother always referred to the autumn half-term as “potato-picking week”, but this was anachronistic, even then.
The thread connecting us with farmers and producers was thin, but when we had Harvest Festival, we did at least know it was harvest time.
I suppose the modern equivalent is the wildly early arrival in the shops of gruesome tat for Halloween, part of the relentless campaign by retailers to sell us stuff we don’t need.
Distressingly, some stores are compressing the seasons still further by displaying their Christmas goodies already, alongside the plastic skeletons.
Hot cross buns are available year-round and I expect Easter eggs will be in the shops soon.
Formerly religious occasions of some solemnity, these dates are now used simply as marketing gimmicks, but are so jumbled up that they have set us completely adrift from the calendar.
Our relationship with food is equally out of step with the cycle of growing and harvesting.
We no longer have to wait for things to be in season as we can buy everything all the time and, while it’s great being able to enjoy British strawberries for several months, the effect still skews our concept of seasonality.
With a few honourable exceptions, the population seems to fall into two camps when it comes to what it eats.
In one camp are the vast (in both senses) majority, who subsist on ultra-processed comestibles, mysteriously concocted in factories and owing more to the chemical industry than to agriculture.
In the other camp, but equally sundered from the rhythms of British farming, are the devotees of healthy eating who diligently consume, for the sake of their “gut biome”, a myriad of nuts, seeds, pulses and grains which are brought here from all over the globe.
I do not miss the dull meat-and-two-veg dinners of my childhood and I know, of course, that the British diet has long been augmented by imports, many of which we’ve enjoyed for so long that we probably no longer think of them as exotic – tea and bananas, for example.
However, we have gone way beyond that now, to the extent that it is fashionable to deride the food we produce so well here.
The ultra processed food camp want cheap grub even if it is from countries with lower welfare and environmental standards.
The “gut-biome” camp would rather be washing down their tofu with almond “milk” than polluting their bodies with the saturated fat in meat and dairy and the gluten in wheat.
Add to this public indifference a government whose attitude is that land ought to be used for housing, electricity generation, recreation and rewilding – anything but food production, in fact – and I’m astonished that farmers still bother to plough and scatter at all.