Jane Jordan 🇺🇦❤

What the label on a wool jumper would say if labels told the truth: - Grown on a hill nothing else can use. - Raw material: grass and rain. - Factory: a sheep. - Energy source: sunlight, via the grass. - Carbon: pulled from the air the summer it was grown. - Harvest: a haircut the animal needs anyway. - Warm wet, warm dry, warm in wind. - Will not sustain a flame in the air you breathe. - Takes a third of its weight in water and feels dry. - Worn for four days without smelling, because bacteria cannot get a grip on it. - Wears for thirty years, darns, passes down. - End of life: rots back into the soil within months, and the worms eat it. What the label on a fleece jacket would say: - Grown in a refinery. - Raw material: crude oil. - Factory: a factory. - Energy source: more crude oil. - Carbon: pulled from under the ground, where it had been for 300 million years. - Melts at 250 degrees and sticks to skin. - Smells after one wear and is washed after every wear. - Sheds 700,000 plastic fibres per wash into the sea. - Found in human blood, lungs, placenta and brain. - End of life: a hole in Chile, for the next thousand years. One of these two is in the sustainability section. It is the one with the oil in it, and the sheep is still being blamed.

Come on @andyburnham You can do this. You don’t have to drive a diesel to pay for expensive diesel. You just have to buy food. At a reported £2 a litre, road diesel costs run right through the food chain. Feed deliveries. Haulage. Refrigerated transport. Getting your food to your door. We absorb increases where we can rather than putting our prices up. But that cost doesn’t disappear. The government can’t control the world oil price. It CAN choose what it charges in fuel duty and VAT. With more duty rises scheduled for December and March, next week’s Budget is a chance to change course. If keeping food affordable is a priority, shouldn’t fuel tax be part of the conversation?

By 1776 the average American soldier stood nearly three inches taller than the redcoat sent to put him down. They were the same people. Same villages, same surnames, same blood, separated by three or four generations and one ocean. The Englishman had grown up on bread and the game laws. His deer belonged to the king, his rabbits to the squire, and his common had been fenced. The American had grown up in a country with no lord, no keeper and no forest law. William Penn wrote the right to hunt and fish into Pennsylvania's founding charter. Vermont put it in its constitution. Colonial Americans ate somewhere between 150 and 200lb of meat a year each. Emigrants wrote the same line home for 200 years: we have meat three times a day. Height is what a childhood of meat looks like from the outside. England proves it from the other direction. In 1800 a 14 year old cadet at Sandhurst, raised on beef and mutton, stood about eight inches taller than a 14 year old from the London slums recruited for the navy. So the English ruling class knew perfectly well what meat does to a child. They had the evidence at their own dinner table. They simply kept it there. The ones who got away grew three inches and then beat them in a war.

The first time ordinary English people could afford to eat meat, Parliament passed a law to stop them. In 1256 the harvest workers on one Norfolk manor were fed a diet that was 4% meat by value. Most of the rest was bread. The deer belonged to the king, the rabbits to the lord, and the peasant to the pottage. Then the Black Death killed half the country. Suddenly there were more fields than hands. The survivors could name their price, and they named it in beef. 1351: wages are frozen by law at their level before the plague. Asking for more is a crime, and every village is ordered to build a set of stocks for those who do. 1361: a labourer who leaves his lord for better pay is to be branded on the forehead with an F, for falsehood. 1363: a statute lays down what a servant may eat. Meat or fish once a day and no more. It held for 30 years. In June 1381 the ploughmen marched on London, took the Tower, and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. Wat Tyler put their demands to the king in person. An end to serfdom. And every park, warren, river and wood in England thrown open, so that a poor man might take game the same as a rich one. At St Albans the rebels walked into the abbot's private warren, caught a rabbit, and tied it to the town pillory, as notice that the game was now theirs. Tyler was stabbed at the meeting. The king, who was 14, took back every promise. Villeins you are, he told them, and villeins you shall remain. 9 years later came the reply to the rabbit. 1390: nobody worth under 40 shillings a year may keep a hunting dog, a ferret or a net, on pain of a year in prison. Parliament wrote its reasoning into the preamble. Labourers had been seen out hunting on holy days like gentlemen, and were using the hunts as cover to meet and plot another rising. There were plenty of deer. What could not be tolerated was a ploughman with a haunch of venison, because a man who can feed himself can afford to say no. The laws failed. Hands were too scarce, and by 1424 that same Norfolk manor was feeding its harvesters 28% meat. The instinct behind the laws has never failed once. Whenever the poor get their hands on meat, somebody important discovers a reason they should not have it. The king's pleasure. The social order. Their cholesterol. The climate. The reason is replaced every century. The people giving it have never once missed a steak.

Germany killed a third of its pigs in the spring of 1915 because a committee had proved they were eating the people's bread, and then the people starved. The committee was chaired by Paul Eltzbacher, a law professor, and reported in December 1914. The sum was simple. A pig eats grain and potatoes. A man eats grain and potatoes. With the British blockade closing the sea and the Russian grain gone, every potato fed to a pig was a potato taken from a German. The report gave the animals a name that did the arguing for it: Mitesser. Co-eaters. The government had already fixed the price of potatoes so low that farmers were feeding them to the pigs rather than selling them at a loss, so the state banned that too. Then, from March 1915, it ordered the cull. The herd stood at about 25 million. By the summer it was down towards 17 million. Somewhere around 9 million animals killed in a few months, in a country with no cold chain to speak of, so the meat was salted, canned in wartime tin that leaked, and left to rot in warehouses. Whole trainloads went off. The pork that was supposed to feed the cities in 1916 had been eaten or thrown away by the autumn of 1915. The grain did not appear. The pig had been feeding on kitchen scraps, whey, chaff and spoiled potatoes that no human was going to eat, and the professors had counted all of it as bread. Then the ground gave out. The chemical works that had made Germany's nitrogen fertiliser had been turned over to explosives, and on the small farms of the Reich the manure heap was the only fertiliser left. The manure heap was the pigs. Yields fell through 1915 and 1916, the potato crop failed in the wet autumn of 1916, and the country went into the winter of 1916 to 1917 on swede. The Turnip Winter. The Imperial Health Office put an adult man's need at 3,000 calories a day; the ration delivered about 1,000. A Berlin physician reported 80,000 children dead of hunger in 1916 alone. Youth crime doubled as boys broke into barns. The kaiser's Germany did not lose the war on the Marne. It lost it in the queue for turnips, and the strikes and the mutinies of 1918 came out of that queue. The pig is the most efficient animal ever domesticated for turning what people will not eat into what they will. It lives on waste. It fertilises the field that feeds it. And it was the first thing a modern state decided it could do without, on the strength of a calculation that counted only what the animal took and nothing it gave. A committee with a spreadsheet, a herd measured as a cost, a country told the sacrifice was for the bread. Nobody in the room was lying. They simply did not know what a pig was for until they had killed it. The manure heap never came back in time. The Reich did not survive it.

A poem asking why religion causes hate

Vegan leather is plastic. Vegan wool is plastic. Vegan fur is plastic. Vegan silk is plastic. Vegan down is plastic. Vegan suede is plastic. Vegan shearling, vegan cashmere, vegan feathers, vegan anything with a leaf on the tag. Plastic. Every wash strips a cloud of fibres off it and sends them down the drain. Half a million tonnes a year, off clothing alone, straight into the sea. The fish eat it. You eat the fish. It has been found in human blood. In lung tissue. In the placenta. In the first stool a newborn passes, before it has eaten anything at all. It does not rot. Every fleece jacket ever made is still here, somewhere, in pieces small enough to breathe. Wool comes off a sheep on a hill, on rain and grass. Bury it and it is gone in a year. They looked at the hill and the sheep and the rain and called it cruel. Then they dressed the country in crude oil and called it kind. Wear the sheep.

The year is 1917. The U-boats are sinking the food faster than it can be shipped, four fifths of your country's bread arrives by sea, and by April the government works out it has about six weeks of wheat left. No navy, no factory and no minister can make a loaf. Only you can. In August they guarantee your price and tell you to plough the old pasture, and you plough it, and 1918 is the biggest harvest this island has ever taken off itself. The year is 1921. On the first of October the guarantee is repealed, quietly, the war won and the ships sailing again. Wheat falls from eighty-four shillings and sevenpence a quarter to forty-four and sevenpence inside twelve months. Farming still calls it the Great Betrayal. Between 1918 and 1922 a quarter of the land in Britain changes hands. The year is 1939. They are back at the gate inside one lifetime, and this time they bring a committee that grades you A, B or C on your own ground. A C means they take it off you, and around two thousand seven hundred farmers lose every acre they have. Two pounds for each one you plough. By 1944 you have lifted the country from a third of its own calories to nearly half, which is the whole distance between a nation that can be starved into surrender and one that cannot. The year is 1951. The BBC starts a daily serial about a farming family, written with the Ministry of Agriculture out of its own pamphlets, because a country still on rations needs you producing more and the dry talks are not landing. Seventy-five years on it is still broadcasting, and Ambridge has outlasted most of the farms that inspired it. The year is 1984. On the second of April a quota tells you how much milk you may sell off your own land and fines you if you sell a drop more. The right to milk a cow becomes a tradeable asset with a market price. Your neighbour sells his and takes a job in town. The year is 2001. Six million animals slaughtered, ninety thousand a week at the peak, the army in Cumbria, six mass burial pits. Your flock is healthy and it burns anyway, for standing too near somebody else's. The cheque covers the animals. Nobody pays for the forty years of breeding inside them. The year is 2021. A television presenter buys a farm for a laugh and does more for public understanding of agriculture than every ministry since 1917. First year's profit, a hundred and forty-four pounds. Millions of people watch that number appear on screen and work out that the food is cheap because somebody up the road is being crushed. The year is 2024. In October the Chancellor caps the relief that let farms pass down whole, and men in their seventies begin calculating whether it is cheaper to die before April. The tractors come down Whitehall. The country grows about sixty per cent of what it eats, roughly where it stood in 1939, the last time the ships stopped. Now it is today. A minister stands at a podium and says the government backs British farming. This island has not been successfully invaded in a thousand years. Twice it has come within weeks of being starved into surrender, and both times the answer was the same men standing in the same fields. Both times the gratitude expired the moment the danger did. We put your work on the radio, then on the telly, and priced you out of doing it in between.

Just 1p on a loaf of bread, passed straight to the farmer who grew the wheat, would transform farming, food security and the countryside 👍 Money’s tight for everyone I know, but in world where a take-away coffee is £4.50 surely a penny to keep farming British isn’t too much to ask ? 🤔 bbc.com/news/articles/cgk64g… #Farm24 @agricontract @wheat_daddy @loosecollie @TheFarmingForum @Tesco @asda @waitrose @AldiUK @LidlGB @sainsburys @marksandspencer @Morrisons