Friday, 1st April, marked the 20th anniversary of Jim Buckland’s appointment as Garden’s Manager at West Dean, near Chichester, West Sussex in the UK. Jim and his wife Sarah Wain, who joined him at the Gardens a few months after his appointment, have been the driving force behind not only the world-famous walled garden restoration but also the revitalisation of both the pleasure grounds and the arboretum at this wonderful estate.
Jim is gardening royalty and, indeed, has been courted by Royalty to garden for them. He is a workaholic, a perfectionist and immensely physical in his labours. He demands and expects the highest possible standards and is a quite brilliant organiser although he would always rather be gardening than doing the paperwork. A skilled builder, his work can be seen from the bridges in the restored Stream Garden beyond West Dean House to the paving in his own garden, which occasionally opens for charity. Jim loves flowers, often picking posies for his windowsills, and trees, bats and insects, pruning and encouraging young people into horticulture. He is also sincere in his encouragement of my community gardening endeavours and truly admires people who ‘have a go’.
I not only admire Jim professionally but also treasure him as possibly my closest male friend (apart from the Chief taster, of course!). We share a deep Catholic faith, a love of music and good conversation - and of eating and drinking. I met Jim about 18 years ago when organising the Chichester Food Festival at West Dean. I thought he was Gorgeous in his OshKosh dungarees and invited him to supper almost there and then. He turned up, of course with his equally gorgeous wife, and a great friendship was formed.
Jim loves stylish socks, pink pullovers, singing, ice cream and books. He wants time to learn to dance. He reads the Bible in French to brush up his language skills and showed true envy over a seven language dictionary owned by another friend when we were all in Venice together. He’s a great gardener - and a very wonderful friend. Happy anniversary Jim!

I have shares in 2 allotments: a community garden in the village where a dozen or so of us regularly garden together (there are a further 18 or more members too) and share the produce, and a more conventional allotment at West Dean, not in the main gardens (oh no, tucked well away from sight) and shared with Annie, who runs the gardening courses at the College. This allotment is a teaching resource for both the gardening and food courses that we respectively run.

So, it will be no surprise at all to read that I currently have a glut of beans; lots of runner and plenty of green beans too. They do, of course, all taste fantastic and I think that I shall be starting to blanch and freeze some of the green beans for the days of swedes and cabbage that are surely just around the corner.

Living on the Chichester Plain, an area of outstanding micro-climate for vegetable growing, I work closely with local growers who supply produce to the multiples; the supermarkets. This year has seen good UK crops of sugarsnaps and green beans and they have been delicious, but they will soon be replaced by beans and peas flown in from Kenya and other far off places as the supermarkets think we need all fruit and veg, all the year round. They sell 80% of all the fresh produce consumed in the UK so we cannot ignore them. Indeed, if change in the way in which we eat is ever to happen it will have to be driven by the offer on the supermarket shelves to have significant impact on the world food chain.

My local grower cum year-round exotic veg supplier has farms in many parts of the world to supply demand. The question is, is the demand that of the supermarkets or of us? The grower is LEAF accredited, which is about as close to organic as you can get on a large scale, using some chemical inputs when necessary and biological pest controls whenever possible, as well as ensuring good crop rotations for soil fertility. One of my regular contacts was recently in Kenya and came back full of praise for the growers that he had visited, at least one of which was part of the Waitrose Foundation established to support native African farmers in the development of their own farms. An understanding of crop diversity is essential for these people to do business together - other UK supermarkets want to buy just two crops, baby corns and mangetouts, from developing world farmers but these alone rape the land of nutrients and return nothing to it, leaving arid soil for the local population to farm once it fails to deliver the sought-after, (tasteless) convenient veg of global emblandishment to our UK tables.

So, I was feeling pretty OK about these crops coming in from Kenya after chatting to my grower friend whether I choose to buy them or not (which I don’t, being a seasonal soul with 2 allotments). That is, until I was clearing out my InBox today. In a weekly mail that I get from CAFOD I read the following relating to the Gospel for 25th July (OK, my InBox needed tidying!).

‘Give us each day our daily bread.'
The fundamental prayer that Jesus teaches to his disciples and to us in this passage includes a petition for our everyday needs to be met. But the phrase ‘give us this day our daily bread’ may lose significance for those of us whose basic needs are always met. How often do we really think about the words we are saying in this prayer? There are people living in poverty around the world, however, who may well witness to this prayer being answered on a daily basis. In Kenya I heard time and again how the people there viewed the support they had received from CAFOD’s partners as a direct answer to their heartfelt prayers. Ensuring an adequate supply of clean water for drinking for people and their livestock can transform the life of a community, from one near extinction to one that is flourishing. How often do we take the supply of clean water flowing from our taps and the seemingly endless supply of food in the supermarkets for granted?

Generous God,

Help us to recognise that all good things come from you, and make us ever more mindful of those who are denied access to the resources you have provided for all to share.

Amen

So, in Kenya where precious water is used to grow green beans using sound agricultural methods for us and to put money into their economy, there are still people in the same country who pray for adequate supplies of clean drinking water.

On the day when the news of world grain shortages owing to Russia’s disastrous prairie fires and their need to feed and look after their own finally became headline news, I remain convinced that the only way in which we shall change the global food system is by acknowledging the need to change as individuals, and then to convince the market leaders that they must acknowledge that need too. Not for profit, not for PR and not for market share; simply for sustainability. The sustainability (or survival) of us all.

The Prince of Wales is spearheading START, a new campaign calling upon each and everyone of us to willingly and happily embrace the challenge of living more sustainably. He explained that the effects of climate change will not be truly felt for years and those who will be hardest hit live far from the UK, so it’s hard to realise just how important this is. Certainly our village Community Garden shows that growing your own veg can be fun, and that you can grow new friends as well as tasty, fresh food to eat. All the multiples seem to be signing up to the Prince of Wale’s campaign, with ASDA actively encouraging their customers to eat food that is in season. Perhaps this is the START of something good? I hope so. And I hope that for every £1 spent in telling us how these big companies are supporting START they spend another, helping the countries around the world that supply their out-of-season-produce, out of poverty.

A truly effective local food economy may be many years away and yet the concept is gaining popular appeal. Slowly but surely consumers are beginning to think Local and, if they cannot actually grow their own food, they want to buy Local. This is an article that I wrote for the January 09 Chichester Organic Gardening Society newsletter. COGS meet on the last Monday of the month from September until April at 19:30 at the Basil Shippam Centre, Tozer Way, ST Pancras, Chichester. PO19 4LG. All are welcome.

Local food makes sense to me - delicious, varied and seasonal sense. Whether living in the City or surrounding villages we are never far from some beautiful and productive countryside in the Chichester district. Not that all the countryside boasts particularly good soil - much of it is only grade 3 out of 5 - and growing conditions are very different north and south of the Downs.


Mr Upton’s annual display of pumpkins may not be organic but it is one of the best local food tourist attractions in the area

Eating with the seasons gives a chance to enjoy a wide variety of foods and, whilst we might all be bored to tears with swedes and cabbages by the end of March, we will welcome them again in the autumn. I am happy to eat apples only when the local fruits are available and to gorge on rhubarb and berries for the rest of the year. Eating local keeps our money in the local economy too - we tend to buy from local shops or directly from producers, and it stops the homogenisation of the High Street. As we face a time of reduced finances it is up to us all to decide how we spend what money we have and I, for one, would like to plough my pennies into Local. Of course we must trade and have always done so, but when we want to buy bananas, citrus, spices, tea, coffee and cocoa and sugar, we should strive to buy fairly traded produce - Chichester is, after all, a Fairtrade City.

I now have to make a major confession. Until I became involved in Transition Chichester I was utterly On The Fence about organics. Having consulted to Waitrose for 11 years I am a great fan of LEAF, a scheme they champion. It is a marque promoting integrated farm management with minimum interventions into crops, i.e. restricted use of inputs, fertilisers and pesticides. It is the best way of producing fruits and vegetables for the mass market - i.e. the supermarkets.


Many saddleback pigs are reared organically in the Chichester area - this one is part of a private pig co-operative at the Aldingbourne Country Centre

Producing for the mass market inevitably leads to waste, as does the perceived need to offer imported exotics, often picked with no chance of ripening into the delicious treats that they are in their native settings. Until people stop buying out of season fare we will continue to be offered it by multiple retailers, keen to improve their results year on year. Food waste and the environmental costs of bringing produce to Chichester from depots up and down the country, yet alone from half way around the world, will continue to mount.

In terms of spreading the Organic Word, many shoppers are put off by the premium that organic food commands because of lower yields and higher labour costs owing to hand weeding, etc. We will fail to see the real value of local, organic food until the true cost of the indiscriminate use of oil-derived interventions for mass production is appreciated, both financially, as cheap food cannot be sustained for very much longer, and environmentally, as we see how non-productive over-used land becomes without added synthetic fertilisers.


Even if we have to import some foods like almonds and cranberries, most of our food can be produced locally

Yes, I just said Local, Organic food. I have become convinced that the ultimate goal of a responsible food society is to produce local food by organic methods. I think it would also be possible for communities to succeed in producing a fair proportion of the food that they need in this way. It will require a huge change of culinary expectation but local, seasonal food is far from boring and offers an ever-changing menu (except when those swedes and cabbages seem to endlessly be the only veg available!).

It will take many years for us to reach such a goal and the biggest challenge will be to start to change the mindset of those who regularly jump into their cars to shop at a one-stop supermarket. Until the majority start to think about buying local - and the costs of not doing so - we will make little significant change. Local will be the first step for most, and organic local food may be many years hence for the majority of consumers. You, as organic gardeners, have the upper hand here and are at the cutting edge of this ‘Back to the Future’ way of life. But incremental changes will start to mount up and, who knows, perhaps the speed of change will amaze us all?

I was at a lecture recently where the audience was challenged to eat one meal a week at which they knew the provenance of all the ingredients. As a food writer I make it my business to know as much as I can about the food that I cook and yet, in reality, even I don’t know as much as I should.

During 2009 I am going to learn as much as I can about local food, here in Chichester. I also want to find the stories, good and bad, behind the foods on offer in my local shops, including two supermarkets, Waitrose and the Co-op. I have to declare that I was a consultant to Waitrose for eleven years and am well versed in their approach to agricultural practice. The Co-op is new to me and, as they are establishing a very good and convenient chain of convenience stores in my local area, I will try to find out more about their sourcing policy and suppliers. I have chosen the Co-op as, up and down the country in towns and rural areas, food writers and cooks that I respect tell me that they are increasingly using their local Co-ops and that they are more than satisfied with the goods on offer.


Local Cox apples on the grading machine prior to bagging and selling

Many broadsheets and magazines run features on local food, but they are on-offs and do not provide a year-round guide to shopping in one area. Whether you live in Chichester or not, if you follow this blog I hope that it will provide the questions that you will want to ask for the food produced and sold in your area.

Ethical Eating sounds so boring but I feel that my journey towards greater knowledge of what I eat will be empowering and that I shall be even happier with the food that I eat.


Mushroom farms were common in the Chichester area up to a decade ago. Now the nearest one that I know of is at Leckford, near Stockbridge in Hampshire.

I start with these preconceptions:

That there is no such thing as cheap food without someone being expoited
That economical food does not have to be boring food
That I would miss spices, tea, coffee and cocoa more than any other imported foods
That bananas and citrus fruits are the main fresh fruits that I would miss, and that dried vine fruits are also necessary in my store-cupboard. We do need to trade and we should try to buy fairly traded foods when we trade with producers in the Developing World.

I don't know whether my shopping habits will change at the end of this exercise, but my first posting tomorrow will explain my long-term hopes at this stage of my culinary journey.