10. The Fat of the Land

A month into our new life as faux small-holders in which the farmer does the dirty work while we scold the pigs for nicking each other’s beetroot leftovers and chat to the sheep about the imminent arrival of the ram, and Ellie has turned vegan. It was bound to happen; she’s 13. How else is she going to rebel? She’s not going to smoke while she and her sister comb the duck house for signs of sneaky cigarette butts, and the likelihood of us finding vodka bottles among the popcorn and Friends DVDs under her bed is tiny while she’s still pasting the latest Government statistics of middle class drinking on the fridge door. I write about food so of course she’s going to try to survive on crisps.

So it was with some trepidation that I drove Loulou, already a vegetarian thanks to her sister’s mighty influence, to watch chefs from The Tin Drums, the string of Brighton restaurants owned by our friends Dave and Vicky Radtke, carving up their Saddleback pigs which Loulou had known since they were four weeks old.

Since moving to the countryside last May, Climate Change, Peak Oil and the recession have been the main inspiration for Dave and Vicky whose restaurants are having an identity make-over after they swapped the eco-home they built in Preston Park for a farmhouse and three acres in the middle of nowhere to provide as much food for the Tin Drums as the land will allow. Their pigs, two for the restaurants’ pots and one for their own, have spent the last six months ploughing and naturally fertilising the land for the vegetables that will now take their place, and chickens run freely, laying just enough eggs for the family’s Saturday brunch. With the rest of the ingredients for the restaurants procured from a network of small producers within a five mile radius and the kitchen's cooking oil providing the bio-fuel for Dave’s daily commute, it’s an eco-dream that they can put on the plates of their clientele back in the big city.

Loulou has been slowly digesting their food philosophy since the piglets arrived, sweet and squeaky last autumn but is still not quite convinced about the “happy meat” story. Had I mentioned, therefore, that we were off to witness the miraculous alchemy of piglet to pork which we would almost certainly be invited to share around their kitchen table within the next week, her memory may well have spun back to the rather more bloody Matanza pig festival we witnessed some years ago in Andalucia. Best to keep quiet, I decided.

I’m very jealous of the Radtkes. And no, it’s not because Vicky’s commitment to Bloomsbury-style hedonism is legendary and yet she still looks like a cross between a slim Nigella and Jenny Agutter circa 1982. It’s not even because they really do the small-holding thing while we’re busy suspending reality with our more Johnny Morris interpretation of life on the farm. It’s because their children have utterly bought into the lifestyle while mine spend their afternoons planning protest marches to the local abattoir. Their boys, aged seven and ten, love their chickens and their pigs, but when their time comes, their response is rather more down to earth than my vegan and vegetarian children’s would be. Even when the frantic squawking of their chickens alerted me to the murder of a young cockerel by one of our terrier pups last week, it was met with acceptance and even a lick of the lips. As I retrieved the still warm, still whole body, imagining how our kids would react if a friend's dogs had killed one of our brood, Louis, the elder of the two peered at the body nestling in my arms. “Ah, Philip”, he said calmly. Monty ran in to check on the news. “Is he dead, Mummy?” he asked, gingerly patting him. “Can we pluck him?”

So I wasn’t surprised to find Monty and Louis studying the Tin Drum chefs’ knife skills as their former playmate held back for the family’s dinner table was sliced into enough charcuterie, hams and chops to keep them in supplies for the next few months.
Vicky busied herself with the leeks and carrots that would accompany the head for a stock as she told us proudly of the dignity of the pigs’ departure on the Monday morning. She had been determined not to cause any distress to the pigs (or to Dave and herself) and to let them saunter into the trailer in their own time – however long it took. No herding, no cajoling as they rolled and basked in the spring sunshine before strolling up the ramp to sniff at the fruits smeared on a plank among the straw. Once in, it was a ten-minute ride to the abattoir before pottering from the van into a holding pen of more straw. Then it was over, in seconds. The kids listened intently to her story, the boys finding further confirmation that their parents are just as committed to humane animal husbandry as they are in avoiding the unnecessary shot of adrenaline that toughens the pork served in their restaurants. I watched Loulou’s brow furrow and wondered what she would tell Ellie about her day.

As I presented a roast tenderloin from one of the deliberately unnamed pigs, delicately rubbed with home-grown sage and thyme for our Mother’s Day feast the next day, Loulou was more silent than usual. She is clearly confused about where she stands on the meat issue now; she may still refuse to eat the stuff, but her sister has taken to eating cardboard which just doesn’t have the same panache as her previous foray into activism. Dave and Vicky are nice people, and Monty and Louis don’t appear to have psychopathic tendancies. The narrative of their carefully raised, well fed, caringly dispatched pigs has unravelled a new thought process in the inner foodie hard-wired into her DNA.

I may be wrong, but I smell change ahead…

9. More Than We Can Chew

Ellie’s life is closing in on her. Everyone she knows is eating their pets. And I have to admit I’m beginning to lose my own appetite for meat.

It’s a long road from Brighton to Planet Countryside. When we moved from the buzz of the seaside to the lazy plains of Bloomsburyshire three years ago, my plan to leave Sainsbury’s to the townies and go local was little more than a social experiment. Since then my shopping philosophy has gone through politics and health and out the other side until, inspired by the adventures of our fellow city resisters who moved from Preston Park to pig farming down the road, we are perched on the verge of small-holding ourselves.

By the time you read this, we will have moved from our community of snow-balling school-bunkers with its veg plots and poly tunnel, horses, chickens and co-housing philosophy and will be knee deep in pig poo. After dipping our toes in country life, we’re going in. Deep.

Well, deepish. The house we’re moving to is not only a cycle ride away but is part of a 21 acre estate with sheep, pigs and chickens roaming freely like something out of a Disney story. The boundaries were supposed to be set in stone - three acres for us and 18 for the vendor’s animals, but when I looked past the duck pond to the fields next door a vision of my childhood, my parents’ and grandparents’ and a fantasy I could impose upon my own children’s pulled suddenly into sharp focus. A quick word with the farmer, and the deal was done.

Co-farming, we shall call it. He pays the bills and sells the meat and we feed, coo, clean and gambol with the animals. The kids’ lives will be transformed; it will have taken three years to pull them away from the TV to paddle in streams and make dens in the woods, but perhaps Wii will finally become something that we clean out of the chicken coop, and Friends will refer to our (almost) own lambs and piglets.

The sniff of a life in farming started for us here in this community of 22 families who moved from London and Brighton with a vague interest in self sufficiency and co-owning a lot of animals. It’s been fun spending the last three years feeding the chickens and gathering up the eggs on our chicken day, sitting in meetings discussing whether to get goats or llamas to chomp through our 25 acres in the interest of both Peak Oil and Climate Change. And I dare say when food security leaps off the pages of the Guardian and into its back yard, the community will realise its true Good Life potential. In fact, as we move the last of our boxes out, they will be voting on the idea of raising chickens for eating for the first time.

For Ellie, that means it’s time to go. The country air has permeated her soul, but not quite as I might have imagined; where once she might have been thrilled to hear that baby chicks would be reared under hot lamps outside her mate Zoe’s house, her activist’s face is set. “They’re going to eat them, aren’t they?” And she stomps off to pack another box.

I have tried to tell her about the pigs in the new place. And the sheep. Happily, she and her sister are still so excited about the colour of their new bedrooms and the 35 year-old horse in the garden that they have managed to put the reality of our new life on hold. Grandpa, tickled by the idea of our vegetarian daughter facing the truth of the land, couldn’t resist when we last went to visit. “This time next year” he said as he looked out at the first snowdrops peeking from beneath their wintry carpet, “you’ll be slapping on your rubber gloves for the lambing”. As the children looked at me to explain his crude impersonation of a country mid-wife, I quickly spun the conversation back to the story of Granny’s chicks.
“My father hatched them in my bedroom”, she explained. “They were our Christmas treat.”
“Ah, how sweet,” said Loulou, wide-eyed at the thought of her ten-year-old granny playing with a clutch of fluffy chicks in her doll’s house, before cuddling up with them in bed. Ellie’s eyes narrowed.
“You ate them, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” laughed Granny. “They tasted so much better than the ones from the market”.

Even Dave and Vicky, our newly countrified pals from Brighton who seemed so kind, so warm, are thumbing through their recipe books as spring calmly and certainly beckons their pigs to the abattoir. Luckily, Mother Nature, with a sweep of her magic wand, manages to turn the cutest of piglets into huge, snorting and slightly alarming beasts just before slaughter but even so, I'm beginning to worry about how I’m going to manage with the happy meat story when they’re my own. When Vicky’s escaped pigs tried to climb inside her car the other night, I knew that they weren’t trying to eat her as she suspected, but that they were heading straight for the key to the larder. These are some of the most intelligent animals in the world and they know that if Vicky is late for dinner, the world really could be over. The fact that it will be in a couple of months is, I increasingly find, not worth thinking about.

As we pile the last sofa into the back of the car, I frantically redefine my foodie philosophy. The way I see it is that our local butcher needs our business and it is our solemn duty to support all those local farmers by plying our trade in the proper manner. And while our chickens lay plentifully, their lives are not in danger. It’s a good eighteen months or so until we have to face the future of our lambs. They’re not even born yet, for God’s sake. No, as we head into a brave new world of small-holding, we’ll take it literally, holding small, sweet, squeaky things, bottle feeding the lambs and playing chess with the pigs.

What’s wrong with bee-keeping anyway?