How I became a hunter-gatherer

I’VE never seen myself as much of a hunter-gatherer. My spearchucking game isn’t up to much, I’m not the sort to drag down a wild boar, and I don’t have the patience to go about collecting berries.

The only fruit I’ve ever collected was for sloe gin, which hardly adds to my self-sufficiency credentials.

As far as I’m concerned, providing for me and mine comes in the shape of a small rectangular piece of plastic with “VISA” written on it.

The meat I eat comes in sanitary plastic packaging, hunted and gathered by someone way along the food chain, away from squeamish eyes. The vegetables alike, lovingly grown by some farmer somewhere, presumably, and bought from a supermarket without a second’s thought as to how they got there.

Until recently, a bag of carrots or a packet of crisps took seconds for me to acquire, usually by flinging them into a shopping trolley.

But last year, while still not fully over the sourdough and banana-bread phase of lockdown, I started trying to grow my own food.

It’s fair to say it was not initially a roaring success. In fact, you could accurately describe it as fun, but a total failure.

Plants, it turned out, need to be planted at a certain time of year.

It’s not so much that they like being planted then. It’s more that they will actively try very hard to die if you don’t.

The trouble for me was that I picked up my new hobby in October, when nothing wants to be planted.

Ignoring the insistent advice of those who actually knew what they were on about, I planted enough veg to feed a village. The only ones that didn’t die almost immediately never started growing. It might have been a totally unforced error, and I may have been down £20 on seeds, but the lesson was learned.

Come spring, and armed with my newfound knowledge and a couple of books, I made my preparations.

Last week, after months, my plans finally came to fruition, and I fed my family home-grown organic potatoes.

If you add together the cost of soil, wooden veg planters, time, water and seeds, I’m fairly sure the potatoes cost about £40 each.

But watching my daughter eat them awoke some animalistic provider instinct I was previously only dimly aware I had.

It was never my intention when I started out, but what began as a bit of fun has left me thinking much harder about the food we eat, just how much work goes into it, and how disconnected from that process I really was.