More than a way of living

Fed and watered beyond belief

Today I went to the Ludlow Food Festival. This is one the best food festivals in the UK - Ludlow is a lovely town and the festival attracts a great cross-section of producers. Aside from the festival, there are still proper butchers who sell rabbit and venison as a matter of course, one the best cheesemongers I've ever been to and a beer shop that has bottles beyond belief.

The town is a proper market town – you can see the green remembered hills of Shropshire from the market square, reminding you that farming in general, and sheep in particular, led to its creation in the first place. Luckily, being in an oasis of rural England that is beyond easy reach of any of the big cities, Ludlow has never had to absorb large numbers of commuters or industrial workers. Ludlow is what it always was, and I hope always will be.

And bizarrely, such a small place has hosted several world-class restaurants for the last decade or so. Maybe this does indicate a particular local interest in food – but I think it actually means nothing to most people, who can’t afford nor even want to eat in such places. Rather, the continued existence of ordinary shops selling high-quality basic foodstuffs is the extraordinary thing about Ludlow – shops you can use week in, week out, to put good food on anyone’s table.

These are the sort of shops that should be on every High Street. Shops which sell the start of a meal and leave you to look after the middle and end bits yourself. Shops where what you can buy reflects the season and the locality. Shops where the shopkeepers actually know rather a lot, thank you, about what they sell. Instead, most of the inhabitants of this fine land of ours have given over control over the food they eat to a tiny number of corporate grocers, victualled by a raft of industrial cooks and fed by fleets of lorries. Take the wagons away and the populace would starve. How did it end up like this?

Well, teaser that may be, but actually another question ran through my head after Ludlow. The food festival is just that – a festival. I went there, along with thousand of others, to have fun finding food. To have fun. Not to stay alive or keep going to tomorrow. To have fun. What a luxury, to be able to have fun staying alive. That’s what being in the West means, if ever you needed a defining example. That big marquee in the castle grounds was the equivalent of the emperor’s tray of sweetmeats, held aloft for his amusement and delectation. And it only cost me £6.50, and I didn’t have to invade any new countries for the empire, to boot.

So we were lucky, those of us who tramped round the various stalls manned and womanned by artisan producers of chocolates and cheese, pickles and ice cream. There was good familiar food, ventures into exotic avenues of sugar-coated fennel seeds and red mustard, and something in between – one of my favourites being the Hedgerow Creams of Dore Valley Chocolates, chocolate creams like no other you’ve ever drooled over. One of these, closely followed by a square of a single-variety chocolate from the Chocolate Gourmet on the square, redefined what chocolate could be. Cadbury, take a back seat – perhaps the Euromyth of proposals to rename British confectionery ‘chocolate vegelate’ had some merit, after all.

I’m uneasy that one of the three of air, water and food should be raised up to the status of a plaything – but I did have a bloody good time there and after, whatever you think. What this was doing in a country teetering on the brink of not being able to pay the rent, I have no idea - with an Apple Mint Cream on my plate, such trivial matters just fade away, believe me.