NFU’s food education too little, too late

I WAS having a check-up after an eye operation and got to talking with the registrar who told me her mother’s family were farmers back in India and how she tried to take her children over there as often as she could so they could learn about food.

Their problem was, she said, that they thought milk came from a plastic bottle and eggs from a cardboard box and that’s precisely how far their knowledge extended, despite the fact that she regularly cooked meals from scratch herself.

I said I felt that was a shocking indictment on our education system. But then, she said, roughly 50% of the adults she mixed with socially had the same outlook, held the same views as her children. None of them, in other words, was inclined to wonder how the milk got into the bottle or the eggs into the box and who was responsible for producing both – as well as the meat and vegetables they ate.

This quite clearly illustrates the massive gap that now exists between the great majority of consumers and the farming community. Food is what you take off the shelves and put in your trolley. It matters not where it comes from, or how it was produced or by whom as long as it is available – and at a reasonable price.

So it’s all well and good for the NFU to go trumpeting its new education initiative and how it’s going to start going into schools to spread the message. The fact is that it has been abysmally poor at spreading it until now, which is how we have arrived at a position where farmers and farming do not figure at all in any thoughts millions of people in this country might have about food.

How have we allowed this situation to develop? How has it reached the stage where such a vast proportion of the population not only lives in a state of utter ignorance about farming but fails – as it would naturally follow – to appreciate that British food is the best, the safest and the most welfare-friendly in the world?

I accept that for a long time the restrictions associated with being a member of the EU meant we could not make that claim. But that is not the only cause. For that you have to go back nearly three generations to when we stopped providing practical cookery lessons in school under the heading of domestic science – which was regarded by some politicians as a quaint hangover from the days immediately following the First World War when middle-class households discovered they could no longer afford servants and had to start cooking their own food.

It wasn’t necessary, it was argued, in an age when meals, rather than mere ingredients, could be taken off the shelves. So out went the costlyto-run domestic science units and children were taught how to design pizzas instead.

Since then schools have been very good at teaching about nutrition and healthy eating but woefully poor at telling the whole story of food production – which is why those who are currently preaching the distorted gospel of veganism at children can sow the seed in such fertile ground.

No one could have noticed that in recent weeks the media has become rather more focused on the question of food production in this country because commentators have finally got wind of the fact that half the country’s farmers are about to have their life support subsidy systems turned down and then switched off.

But if they think they are going to spark some consumer revolution which will put irresistible pressure on ministers to ensure farmers’ livelihoods are protected, they are in for a disappointment.

For as far as at least 50% (and I would probably say a lot more) of the population is concerned farming is not something they think of when buying, preparing and eating their food.

And as long as it’s still available why, indeed, should they?

Farmers and farming do not figure at all in any thoughts millions of people in this country might have about food