Article
Comment
Eating
General Election 24
5 min read

Give us each day our daily bread

Why the political parties cannot understand farming.

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

A man stands looking baleful next to a row of red tractors
Jeremy Clarkson re-considering the farming life.
Amazon Studios.

Go to the Labour Party’s ten election pledges. Search for the word ‘farm’. I’ll wait. 

You’re not going to do that, are you? Fair enough. Let me tell you happens when you do. Nothing. You won’t find the word ‘farm’. That absence is revealing. 

Or is it? Am I just being parochial? I’m not a farmer, but the son of a farmer and raised on a dairy farm in Somerset. It was a relief to my parents that I didn’t want to follow them – and every other Cary throughout history – into the family business, as the good years were clearly coming to an end. My parents sold their herd of cows a few years before Mad Cow Disease. They bought sheep for a variety of slightly perverse incentives. After a few years they discovered sheep are the worst, since they find all kinds of imaginative ways to die. The only bit of luck they had on the sheep was selling them before the Foot and Mouth epidemic hit. 

Farmers in the UK have gotten used to being ignored by politicians, even though 70 per cent of the UK’s land is farmed. So what’s the plan for how over two-thirds of the country is going to be managed, given that Labour are certain to win? It’s hard to tell. 

I found a more detailed manifesto on the Labour Party website, based around five Labour policies called ‘Let’s get Britain’s future back’. Idiotic nonsensical slogans notwithstanding, I did find one mention of the word ‘farm’. But only once. And it was part of the word ‘windfarm’. Labour is more interested in the farming of wind than the farming of wheat, cattle or vegetables. That managed air might explain where their slogan came from. 

It is no wonder that the rural communities don’t trust Labour. According to FarmersGuide.co.uk, only 28 per cent said “they believe Labour understands and respects rural communities and the rural way of life”. But it’s not all bad news for Labour. The Tories are trusted even less, having dropped down to only 25 per cent. In short, the people in the countryside have no confidence in politicians. 

The reason agricultural policy gets so complicated is because we have a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom.

You need only to watch Clarkson’s Farm to understand why this is the case. Farmers have been subject to an enraging mixture of overregulation and political indifference. Some of this has been Brexit. Some has been bureaucratic incompetence. 

But there is another more fundamental problem. I discovered it when reading The National Food Strategy. This was a document courageously commissioned by the Conservatives in the hope that someone else would come up with some coherent policies for the countryside. It runs for hundreds of pages plus footnotes and sources and is an impressive piece of work. It pulls together issues around land use, food security, climate change, food inequality and obesity. 

These issues are all interconnected. In fact, they are interdependent. How can they not be? You have to consider them all together. But once you open these cans of worms you end up with all kinds of other questions about pesticides, genetic modification, food waste and the identity of the maniac canning worms in the first place. 

The reason agricultural policy gets so complicated is because we have a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom. We understand crops on a molecular level. We can design gigantic machinery to efficiently administer the correct dosage of pesticides to individual plants. We can theorise about animal bedding until the cows come home. But we can’t make decisions. That requires wisdom. 

Wisdom is discernment, choosing between two good things – or making a decision based on the lesser of two evils. We can’t do that, because we can’t decide what is very good, what is good, what is okay and what is evil. Everything is practical pragmatic politics. You do what works. Except how do you define ‘what works’? For whom? Based on what? 

Because we can’t make decisions, we end up having to balance entirely valid concerns about climate, obesity, food inequality, subsidies and the life cycles of bees. But we can’t do it. It’s too complicated. It produces anomalies and perverse incentives. The result is middle-aged men taking their own lives because TB-ridden badgers have ended up with more legal protections than tenant farmers. 

We would do well to look to our ancestors. They lacked our granular knowledge but they had wisdom which, according to the Bible, begins with ‘the fear of the Lord’. They ploughed the fields and scattered the good seed on the land. They understood that our food doesn’t come from our brains, our labs, our factories or our highly integrated just-in-time delivery systems. Our food comes from God. As the Psalmist writes: 

He makes grass grow for the cattle, 
     and plants for people to cultivate— 
     bringing forth food from the earth: 
wine that gladdens human hearts, 
     oil to make their faces shine, 
     and bread that sustains their hearts. 

Psalm 104

That’s why our predecessors ask for God’s blessing on their tools on Plough Monday in early January. It explains ‘Rogation days’ in the spring when the entire congregation would wander round the fields asking for God’s blessing. There was Lammastide when the harvest was beginning to ripen in early August. And every Sunday, the congregations prayed this central line of the Lord’s prayer: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. 

Jesus was good at bread. He was so good, he didn’t even need wheat to make it. He could feed five thousand families from a handful of loaves. It’s interesting that avowedly atheist regimes – like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China – end up with mass starvation. 

Our own society has turned its back on God. We have made ourselves gods. And after much consultation and two hundred pages of background and policy – plus foot notes - it turns out that food is a lot harder than we thought. Omniscience and omnipotence are really handy which it comes to a coherent plan for 70 per cent of the land in the UK. Rather than another National Food Strategy, let’s just have Psalm 104. Right now, our farmers are prepared to try anything. 

Snippet
Care
Comment
Trauma
2 min read

Rushing recovery and failing the marshmallow test

I simply didn’t like being told ‘no’ even by my own body.

Mica Gray is a wellbeing practitioner working in adult mental health. She is training to be a counselling psychologist.

A crutch is held in the hand of someone in pyjamas.
Towfiqu Barbhuiya on Unsplash.

For most of my life, I’ve identified as someone who would fail the marshmallow test—the famous experiment testing delayed gratification in children. In this test kids are presented with a marshmallow and told that if they don’t eat it and wait for ten minutes, they can have a second one. Like those kids who couldn’t wait for the second marshmallow, I rarely want to wait for things in life. And this desire for immediacy has been amplified by our culture of microwave meals and next-day deliveries. Within our convenience culture, this desire for immediacy finds itself at home. However, when recovering from recent surgery I found myself frustrated with the idea of waiting to heal. I wanted my recovery delivered quickly, like an Amazon package, so I could return to normal life. 

But rushing through healing can come at a high cost. Studies show that athletes who return too soon after injury face a 60 per cent higher risk of further issues, and patients who resume normal activities before their bodies are ready suffer more complications, anxiety, and delayed healing. Though I was fortunate enough not to feel external pressure to rush back to work, I realised the real force pushing me to get back into normal life was pride. I simply didn’t like being told ‘no’ even by my own body. Furthermore, I didn’t like the feeling of being helpless and not in control of my own life - the feeling of appearing weak in the world. 

Surgery humbled me, forcing me to admit that I am in fact weak and not in control. It invited me to surrender—to doctors, to my body, to friends, family and to the process as a whole. As I meditated on an ancient wisdom, from the Bible, “Patience is better than pride,” I found truth in it. Patience helped me recognize what pride didn’t; the strength of my body and the abundance of love and support around me. 

In trying to rush back into normal life I was forcing my body beyond its capability and falling into the trap of believing that weakness is a shameful thing - rather than just part of our natural human experience. In waiting, I’ve experienced a deeper appreciation for my body, my community, and the gifts of rest and healing. These things are as sweet as a second marshmallow. If life is asking you to slow down and make space for recovery, lean into it. Set the boundaries you need and trust the process. From someone coming out on the other side, I can say it’s worth it.