Colm O'Regan: We need to normalise growing a bit of food ourselves
Our food growing is sustainable in the environmental sense but obviously not in the commercial sense. But we don’t care
What is it with robins? You only see them one at a time. Each with a sector to mind. Like one of Chris Judge’s Lonely Beasts. There’s one in Drombeg Stone Circle car park that I presume eats worms and wannabe druids’ crumbs. But I’ve never seen robins in groups. Maybe they’ll come together at the Battle of the End of the World. Darkening the sky as they carry the fairies to the fray.
The one watching me now watches me eat standing at the redcurrant bushes HORSING into the berries. Picking stuff and eating it makes anything tastier. Even bits of twigs have gone into my gob. For a few minutes, my unfit frame and soft hands are those of a lean and lithe hunter-gatherer, grabbing a snack from nature’s bounty before bending down and sifting antelope dung to see if a hunt is worth the calories.
We won’t win competitions for prize marrows but the little robin seems happy with our work on the allotment. He’s not the only one. Apparently growing something is one of those sure-fire things you can do to increase happiness. Provided you’ve enough things that survive. I don’t know what a cursed earth of withered stalks would do for the serotonin.
But for now things are alive. I get a boost from the pleasing PHHTOKK! that a ready-to-pull rhubarb makes as I pull it out of its shoulder socket.
It’s nice to see The Two eating strawberries off the ground and peas from the pod, doing something resembling the idyllic Enid Blyton childhoods everyone frets that Kids Today don’t have (the countryside rambling side of things, not the weird racist stuff). It makes up for whatever helicopter parenting I was doing that day.
Our food growing is sustainable in the environmental sense but obviously not in the commercial sense. But we don’t care. It’s a thing to do. A gym for developing the farmer muscles the lat pulldown machine won’t reach.
The allotment was officially out of bounds during the start of lockdown last year as ‘not an essential activitiy’. I understand the impulse to shut down all single points of access, but still though, feck sake. The idea that growing food is not a necessity was just taken as a given.
For such a supposedly agricultural country, obsessed with feeding the world and encouraging them to buy our milk powder instead of breastfeeding, we have a weird relationship with the idea of ordinary people growing food for their own table. In a weird inversion of ‘All Of History’, growing food yourself is seen as an affectation. Eamonn Ryan became a laughing stock for telling people to grow lettuce. But like, he had a point. Imagine if everyone was helped to learn how to grow even a few plates of food. If only he’d said spuds. They would have backed him then but he had the misfortune to mentioned a salady thing. Which made everyone think of Salad Days. Which in Ireland is a bad thing. Because it makes us remember salad cream, which is mayonnaise for those who think mayonnaise is too nice.
We need to do a bit more to normalise growing a few bits of food. You don’t necessarily need a load of land. A few things on a window ledge. Peas germinating in the hot press. Replace at least some of the pointless manicured lawn in the country with a few fruit bushes. And the odd robin.
