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Colin Tudge |
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Colin Tudge read zoology at Cambridge and then became a writer, first for magazines, including New Scientist, and then for the BBC. Since then he has focused increasingly on books, writing on agriculture and conservation and on genetics and evolution. His publications include The Variety of Life. Colin Tudge is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
Colin Tudge talks about So Shall We Reap...
What inspired you to write So Shall We Reap and how did you tackle such an enormous subject?
I'm interested in lots of things. So Shall We Reap is the coalescence of many different ideas (and indeed obsessions) that I've been brewing for at least 40 years. Biology is the core of it all (I got into it when I was six and went on to read zoology at Cambridge in the 1960s) but I have always been interested as well in moral philosophy and politics and, increasingly, in religion (what it is and what it's for). I never wanted to be a professional scientist (being interested in science and actually doing it are two very different things) but I always (again from age six) wanted to be a writer. ("Writer" is a pretentious term. Tolstoy is a writer, or George Eliot. You can't just say, "I am a writer". But you can aspire to be one). I worked for a time for a medical magazine and so got involved in nutritional theory. I also had an expense account (the '60s were conveniently decadent) and so indulged my interest in good cooking. Then I went to work for Farmers Weekly; loved it; and treated it as an apprenticeship.
My first serious book, The Famine Business, came out in 1977: The thesis was that world agriculture was failing to feed people for the stunningly simple reason that it wasn't designed to feed people. If it had been, it would have been quite different. The things that were held up as the saviours of humankind - notably, food processing in those days - were, in reality, at best a distraction: merely a way of making good basic food, expensive. I also realised (the greatest revelation of all) that good husbandry (good farming) also inevitably produces good food (defined by nutritional criteria) and in passing provides the basis for the world's greatest cuisines (French, Italian, Chinese, Indian, North African, Turkish, etc). In short, if we truly wanted to be healthy and environmentally sound, we should be gourmets. There was absolutely no need to live on lentils, as was fashionably supposed in the 70s.
Recent events have brought it home to me that the world at large - or at least, the people in power - has learnt nothing since the 1970s. Scientists are still hooked on technological fixes. Where there was TVPs, now we have GMOs. But there is the same absolute lack of perspective (and one theme of So Shall We Reap is how very badly educated many scientists seem to be, clever and well-meaning though they generally are). Governments if anything are even worse: Bush and Blair, for instance, clearly believe that the world in general ought to be run by corporations, and do their best to hand as much power as possible over to them. There is the same disrespect for traditional agriculture - the same belief that farmers in poor countries simply cannot cope (which is hideously untrue and, just beneath the surface, racist. Vide the recent comments re Zambia and GMOs). Foot and mouth disease and BSE were not accidents. They resulted from appalling husbandry - which in turn resulted from the government's obsession with reducing the cost of food production. (Cheap production does not of course mean cheap food, since the absolute requirement for the corporations that now run world farming is "value adding"). In reality, low-cost production means that agriculture is run on a wing and a prayer (and the cracks, or rather deep fractures, in the policy are then papered over with reams of laws and, for instance, by the toothless and pointless Food Standards Agency. As a friend of mine from the World Bank commented, "Bureaucracy is cheap. It's implementation that costs the money!").
As in the 1970s, there is the same miserable failure to devise anything resembling an agricultural strategy, either in particular countries like Britain or in the world as a whole, that is actually designed to feed people. If we had such a strategy then (as reflected in the subtitle of my book), all human beings who are liable to be born in the next ten thousand years could expect to live very well indeed - not on lentils but on great traditional cooking. In fact, 10,000 years is just an arbitrary period. There is no reason why the human species shouldn't be here, and flourishing, in a million years from now - or much more. But we won't be, unless we start taking food seriously - which doesn't mean handing over the production to Monsanto and Bernard Matthews. In fact it's almost game, set, and match. But not quite. In So Shall We Reap I suggest that agriculture that is really designed to feed people (and look after the environment, and support agrarian economies) should be called "enlightened"; and try to show how Enlightened Agriculture would work, biologically and politically. The book is meant to be the beginning of a campaign. The necessary ingredients are all out there: there are many people worldwide in all walks of life (including science, and many farmers and cooks) who are doing and saying all the right things. But the task is to bring them all together, and turn all their disparate approaches into a coherent strategy. So Shall We Reap (I presumptuously suggest) provides the underlying philosophy. I haven't lost my naïve ambition to change the world (but to make the necessary changes, we have to dig deep).
Do you think we really can change the way we grow our food and how could we go about it?
Absolutely, yes. As I say, all the necessary ingredients are out there. I am impressed whenever I travel, and at a great many meetings, and in articles, by other people's ideas; how much people know, and the depth of understanding. In every conversation I learn some new wrinkle. In fact another of my personal revelations is that "ordinary people" are way ahead of the alleged "experts" in their appreciation both of how to do things (like growing food) and of underlying philosophy. For instance, most people seem well aware that the present generation of GMOs is a political device, designed to enable biotech companies and the governments that support them (notably the US) to take over the agriculture of Third World countries. It's empire building without all the trouble and expense of making war, and of colonisation. Why invade, if you can stay at home and take over the means of production and the economic base anyway? The only people who don't seem to appreciate this are Tony Blair and (in her day) Claire Short (and, disappointingly, Gordon Brown). How we go about making the changes is not to be answered in a sentence, but the central requirement is to make democracy work - given that people at large are much more clued in than the leaders and experts in whom they (we) are supposed to place their (our) trust.
Did you travel to research the book and what was your most memorable experience?
In all my travels over the past three decades I've had this book at the back of my mind: India, Malaysia, China, South Africa, Israel, North America, Brazil, Costa Rica, Australia, New Zealand, and lots of Europe and of course Britain. There have been many memorable times, of very different character. But I suppose the one that stands out in my mind was in rural China (Yunnan) about two years ago. Traditional agriculture and the life that went with it were really flourishing, with islands of horticulture (maize, yams, vegetables) dotted around the flooded rice fields, and frogs and ducks everywhere, and chickens and pigs just knocking about in the village. The children were coming out of school when I was there and were a delight: wonderfully fit and energetic, and falling over themselves with laughter, as children ought to do. I have spoken to a great many people of many kinds (including scientists and economists) who have spent their lives in poor countries and insist that traditional farming and agrarian economies really can work (when they are not too put upon, or having to contend with civil wars) and here, for me, was first-hand illustration of this.
Is there a particular book or author who has had a significant influence on you as a writer?
Lots. John Burnett; Graham Harvey; Paul Richards; Philip Cornford; John Seymour; Norman Simmonds (on plant breeding); and many more that I quote in So Shall We Reap. Everyone should read Dorothy Hartley's Food in England. An inspiration and a joy forever. (If it's out of print, some forward-looking publishing house should re-issue it in paperback).
