“Kids will do anything for the taste of dairylea”

Unbelievably, not the triumphant rallying cry of an international paedophile ring, as your jaded, tabloid-addled mind may have inferred. It is, however, a pretty typical example of the kind of trite assumption advertising execs might have boldly asserted, in the days before the ASA would have demanded evidence in the shape of a peer reviewed meta-analysis into the infant inhibition-busting properties of dairy by-products, before it allowed such a claim to be trumpeted. Those were the days. I for one remain unconvinced of the powers of congealed buttermilk, and have always maintained a healthy indifference towards any such products. I’m also unaware of any incidences where juvenile acts of atrocity have been committed with the intention of securing a steady supply of the insipid little wedges.
I am, however, fairly convinced that most kids could be persuaded to do a great many things for a free custard cream. A conviction formed through personal experience, no less...

‘Sandra’ was our village’s very own screaming hysterical woman. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most provincial little backwaters have at least one loony-tune to call their own, and Sandra was one of the very many inhabitants of our locality coveting that prized title. If it’s true that every village gets allocated an idiot then ours was evidently being used as some kind of candidate holding pen.
Anyway, Sandra was hard to miss, even when she wasn’t stood at the top of her driveway, squawking obscenities at some poor, unsuspecting passer-by who’d had the temerity to glance in her general direction. She had an assortment of mysterious ailments that necessitated her being attired on a full-time basis in a Day-Glo pink dressing gown. In combination with her lurid orange hair which, thanks to the short thrifty style of chop favoured by Trish, the village’s resident mobile hairdresser, gave her head the appearance of a pixellated pumpkin, the violent clash of this two-toned effect could induce vertigo at fifty paces.

It went without saying then, that we children generally gave Sandra a wide berth. One day during the summer holidays of ’89 when heat and youthful insouciance got the better of our judgement, a small group of us were playing outside her house when she sprang, like a funnel-web spider from its lair, wielding a biscuit tin from which she invited us each to take ONE custard cream. It all felt so wrong; her rictus smile, the unsolicited generosity of her offer of confectionery. In spite of my instinct to resist, I took a biscuit, we all did, and proceeded to be lured into her hallway with promises of better treats to come. Possibly a Tunnock’s tea cake, I can’t be entirely sure now. Once inside, the façade quickly fell away, as did any further offers of cookies, and she promptly launched into a thirty minute invective about how callous and thoughtless we all had been for playing in full view of her living room and her two housebound offspring. I should mention at this point that her two children would, if left to their own devices, have happily joined us outside were it not for their mother’s total neuroticism about it being too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold etc, for her loins’ fragile fruits to safely venture. As a result these two poor little fuckers were condemned to languish in the chemical mist of their mum’s OCD-driven cleaning frenzies, with nothing but the biscuit tin for comfort. Consequently, they also ‘enjoyed’ morbid obesity, permanent upper respiratory tract infections, and a matching pair of perennial Hitler moustache-style snot sculptures on their upper lips.

While our bollocking was being issued, I couldn’t help staring at the subdued siblings, wondering if they were going to raise any objection to their mother’s paroxysm. Sat passively, the two tiny, pudgy prisoners of love, with their coryzal tributes to the fuehrer, barely raised a section of heavy mono-brow. It occurred to me that this was business as usual for them. It also occurred to me that we were being held hostage.
In due course we were frogmarched out into the garden and forced to play with the unfortunate pair. Before long we were able to stage our escape by clambering over the chain-link fence, once Sandra had finally disappeared from view – presumably to liberally apply Dettol to any surfaces we’d touched – and we lived to play another day. The desperate beseeching look on those children’s clumsy hulk-like features as I made a final backwards glance before fleeing haunts me still.

Quite aside from incidences like this, which were far from isolated, life growing up in the midlands’ industrial countryside was on the whole a happy experience for me. Bordered by chocolate-box Cotswold villages, our little enclave was unlikely to appear in any guide to the region’s scenic loveliness, being, as it was, basically a giant cabbage patch. What wasn’t under a sea of artificially heated glass was under intensive crop cultivation, and as a child, naïve to the mechanics of the free-market and the commoditization of food, I failed to understand why we bought the same food at the supermarket, shipped in from far-flung reaches of the globe, as that which was growing right on our doorstep. If only someone had explained the intricacies of Capitalism and the Common Agricultural Policy to me, all would have become clear. All of which leads me, in a highly contrived and convoluted way, to a discussion I had with my friend Paul, down the pub t’other night.

Since the publication of the Stern review earlier this year, the debate around food security and sustainability has been pretty well hijacked by individuals driving their own agenda. As trite assertions go, the frontrunner so far for fatuous, myopic declaration to rival all others is the notion that the world’s population would have to become vegan in order to be sustainable. My initial, facetious response was that I’d like to see how that would be enforced anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, but in all seriousness, this is exactly the sort of solipsistic vacuum logic that leads to nothing more than a sense of superiority from its espousers. I’m still not entirely certain what the founding argument behind this one-size-fits-all pseudo-solution is, but I can guarantee this: in a world where the breeding, feeding, slaughter, and export of lamb from New Zealand to Britain consumes considerably less resources than the cultivation of the glasshouse crops in my home town – even if they were sold in-situ, the simplistic option of not eating meat/animal-derived protein doesn’t hold any water in the argument surrounding the sustainability of food production.

Some very real and pressing concerns over animal welfare and the health implications of eating too much meat aside, the idea that vegetarianism/veganism is somehow a moral imperative for humankind is built on a shaky premise indeed.

On the subject of finding a way to feed ourselves that doesn’t exacerbate the suffering of the many, many people this world has teetering on the brink of starvation, I would just like to say this: the world already produces enough food to feed every person on the planet adequately. Those who lack the means to acquire sufficient food today will still be in the same position tomorrow, regardless of any decision you individually make as to what dietary regime to follow.

As of April 15th 2008 an obligation on the part of all suppliers of fuel to the U.K to include a percentage of ethanol in their diesel became enshrined in law. Any of the human grade food crops that don’t get fed to livestock will be fed into our cars instead. With the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition set to push the 1 billion barrier this year, this is nothing short of scandalous. That said, please bear in mind that, where you find yourself in the privileged position of having a choice about whether to eat this or that foodstuff, arguing about the relative merits of one choice over another, given the appalling depths of privation faced by so many, is a perversion of grand proportions. However well-meaning it may be, a decision to avoid eating meat barely begins to tackle the raft of truly epic humanitarian crises over food and energy security facing us all in the near future.
Until patterns of land ownership – barely changed in this country since the feudal era – see a more equitable distribution among the world's population, until the invisible hand of market forces becomes severed from the production of food, and until there is radical reform of the CAP, there are going to be children in this world who’ll do anything for the taste of, well… anything, really.
That’ll be all.