Karen Blackadder

A British girl in 1960 left school able to roast a joint, render the dripping, make a suet crust and bone a fish. Her granddaughter was taught to design the box a pizza comes in. It was called domestic science, and it was on the timetable from the 1870s. Once a week you carried your ingredients in on the bus in a wicker basket with a tea towel over the top. A woman in a white overall, who frightened everybody, taught you the lot. - How to choose a cheap cut and make it tender - How to make stock from the bones - How to use up the cold joint on Monday - How to feed a family of 5 for a week on a wage The boys were next door doing woodwork, and went home to be fed by someone who had passed the course. In 1990 the National Curriculum abolished it. Cooking was folded into a new subject called design and technology, alongside plastics and electronics. Pupils no longer cooked a meal. They "developed a food product". They surveyed their classmates on preferred toppings, drew the packaging, and wrote an evaluation. Thousands of school kitchens were stripped out, since nobody needed an oven to draw a box. That was 36 years ago. The first children through it are now the parents, standing in a supermarket with no idea what to do with a shoulder of lamb, and being told that their weight is a failure of willpower. It was a decision. A country that had taught every girl to turn a carcass into a week of dinners chose to teach her children to be customers.

Jeremy Clarkson cannot sleep the night before his animals go to the abattoir. He has said so in print, and it is the most important thing the show has taught the public about farmers. He cried on camera the first time he sent his lambs. It was worse with the cows, he wrote, and worse again with the pigs. He described the drive to the slaughterhouse as having "a hot cricket ball in the pit of my stomach". He kept two of his old sows back and found them a home on a children's farm, because he could not face it. This is a man who spent thirty years being paid to seem as if he did not care about anything. Every livestock farmer watching nodded. That feeling is the job. You are there when the animal is born, often with your arm inside its mother at three in the morning. You know it by sight. You keep it fed, dry and well for its whole life, and then you take it on its last journey yourself, because you would not trust anyone else to do it quietly. People who have never done it call that hypocrisy. It is the opposite. It is the oldest honest bargain there is. The animal gets a good life it would never otherwise have had, and the farmer carries the weight of the ending. The customer who buys a soya burger carries nothing. The field it came from was sprayed until nothing else lived in it, and nobody lost a night's sleep. Farmers are accused of not caring about animals by people who have never once had to look their dinner in the eye.

Two thirds of British farmland grows grass and nothing else, so name the crop you would put on it instead. Wheat on a Devon slope at thirty degrees. No. Oilseed rape at four hundred metres in the Borders. No. Potatoes on Bodmin granite under eight inches of soil. No. Lentils on a Sutherland peat bog. No. Soy in the Antrim glens, where the summer nights sit at nine degrees. No. An orchard on a Cumbrian fell in a hundred mile an hour January. No. Anything at all on ground the tractor cannot stand up on. No. The list of crops that grow there is one item long, and it has been the same item since the ice left. The animal that eats it is the one under review.

Nobody has ever laid a glove on a single number in Clarkson's Farm. So they go after Clarkson instead. The shape is always the same. - He is rich, therefore the £144 does not count. - He bought it for a tax break, therefore the tax break does not matter. - He is not a real farmer, therefore the crop did not drown. - Amazon pays for it, therefore the losses are staged. - He wrote a column about Meghan Markle, therefore the TB never happened. - He drives a Range Rover, therefore the fertiliser tax is not coming in January. - He has a film crew, therefore the council did not refuse the car park. - He presented Top Gear, therefore an imported sausage does not cost 18p. - He sells candles, therefore a third of British farms did not lose money in 2024. Every one of those is an argument about a man. Not one is an argument about a figure. And it keeps happening because the figures are unarguable. They come from planning files, Defra statistics, a government-commissioned review and the farm's own accounts read out loud on camera. There is nothing there to dispute, so the only move left is to dislike the messenger loudly enough that nobody checks the message. It has not worked, and here is how we know. Waitrose sold 193 percent more British thick-cut sirloin after series four. Acceptances onto agricultural degrees rose 8 percent in 2024 and are up around a fifth since 2019. Farm shops have queues down country lanes. Thirteen thousand people stood in Westminster over a tax on farmland, and the government eventually handed back £130 million a year. An Environment Secretary told the Commons he was changing planning law over the frustrations of a certain very famous farmer in Oxfordshire, and in May 2024 he did it. None of that happened because the public decided they liked Jeremy Clarkson. Most of them made their minds up on him twenty years ago, one way or the other. It happened because they finally understood what a farm earns, and they did not need to admire the man holding the accounts to read them. They are still debating whether the witness is credible. The country stopped listening to the cross-examination and went and bought the beef.