richardbenson.com

I SUSPECT THAT when most British people think of a farm, they think of brick sheds and barns, muddy tracks leading into the fields, cows, animals scuttling about and a tweedy bloke chewing straw. This would all be set amid rolling hills in the countryside, with perhaps a few sheep and cows dotted about in the fields. Those idylls can still be found, but the truth is that to produce the variety of food people eat now, we need more than one kind of farmer, and more than one kind of farm. Kevin, in his enthusiasm for finding out about how food was grown, grasped this better than I did; I was still protesting that we should find prettier places while he was bounding towards this polythene building on an urban outskirt. “It has vegetables growing in it, doesn’t it?” he said, and quite right he was too. The vegetables in question were leafy varieties bound, perhaps, for kebab and sandwich stuffing somewhere down the road•