My father came to England from Naples on a boat in 1958. Born in 1928, he endured the very worst of the devastating circumstances that befell the Neapolitans during WW2 – a period he spoke about to me only twice during his life. His trip, sponsored by the Italian and UK governments as the re-building of post war Europe gathered pace, was to him, a supreme adventure. He spoke not a word of English but was determined to self teach using only a Collins Italian-English dictionary and the daily Times newspaper. His stay was intended to last for 6 months but he met an attractive girl 10 years his junior in Torquay, and never went home.

He was a sommelier my dad, and later in life, a restaurant manager, working for Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagatolla –  the pioneers of the modern London restaurant scene as it developed after the austerity of rationing. He didn’t get the modern cult of the celebrity chef, and was quick to point out that the very best culinary maestros preferred to stay out of the limelight, running their crews with passion, and loving nothing more than creating great dishes from often humble, but always quality, fresh, ingredients. He worked 6 days a week most of his life, minimum 90 hours a week, often more.

He was difficult to please but always selfless. An old fashioned man whose family responsibilities subsumed all else. He died in 2006. He was my counsellor and his departure has left a terribly deep void. However, as I consider my life as a father just a year after the arrival of my third child, I find myself considering more and more the teachings he left me, the wisdom, the irreplaceable patina of expertise he built up during his life. Conclusion is he was a doer, he was an 18 carat doer my old man.

He taught me that families should break bread and eat together as often as possible. Eat at a table, preferably with some Italian red wine, and without hurrying; he taught me to cook well, to respect food, and to respect the producers and labourers that create it, and to be parsimonious with leftovers and waste. He used to say there needn’t be any waste, that waste was laziness. He showed me how to cook outside – to experience the unrivalled flavour of cooking over wood burnt down to embers; he taught me that when a task is to be taken on (whatever it might entail), to plan, prepare, take time to accomplish it well, and to do it with conviction.

He also taught me the value of stuff and how to upcycle. Decades before the concept was fashionable he was a pioneer of sustainable living. He up-cycled everything. (His personal favourite was 1lb aluminium marmalade tins – he gave those babies so many new lives it isn’t true). He also tutored me in the virtues of compost. He had a system as sophisticated as anything I’ve seen in the 35 years since, based on scrap pallets, sliding front access hatches, and warmth generated by old carpets and discarded tent canvas. Man that compost was beautiful. (Upside – as a young angler I had an endless supply of first class worms that Tom Szaky would have been proud of). I saw him consume little but consume well. He taught me to consume nothing that that you cannot afford to pay for in cash. He told me to avoid borrowing.

He also taught me to be loyal to family however difficult that can be at times.

As I reflect on my father I realise that his teachings were subtle, not overt. He did his stuff, and I watched. When I got a chance to muck in all I wanted to do was to please him. And boy was he tough to please. He used to say to me later in life when I phoned to discuss cooking something I’d earlier eaten with him, and I was in need of quantities and timings – why do you not watch and learn. Learn by watching and doing not studying he’d say.

If my father was still alive he’d love the Do Lectures.

“In the mid-1980s, our family set out to do the seemingly impossible: To create what we dubbed an urban homestead and live a self-sufficient, low-impact life in the heart of the city”…. urbanhomestead.org

‘What do you do when nothing is left and in a community where you aren’t welcome because you are kind of different’ -Farmer John

Last night I watched a film called ‘The real dirt on Farmer John. This is  a moving portrayal of an unusual farmer.  Not fitting the mould myself many things resonated.

Farmer John was the third generation to inherit his farm, a dairy and mixed farm in Illinois, the Mid-West. His grandfather had safely seen it through the depression and his mother and father had worked hard to continue farming so they could stay on their land and raise a family there.

This piece of land is where John was raised. If you have the privilege of growing up on a farm it can instil a deep love of place. I feel this about the place I grew up and like him remember a time when the farm boundaries defined boundaries of my world. However the times were changing and family farm after family farm was dying. Larger and larger heavily mechanised, chemical farming was taking over rendering the smaller, mixed, family farms unviable and unable to compete with the prices of cheap food.

Farmer john had from a boy been part of the rhythm of sowing planting and harvest. It was instilled in him. It defined who he was so he struggled on with mounting debt.

Farmer John, though he worked hard was not like the other farmers in his locality. He responded with the times and In the 60’s whilst at college he had his friends stay on the farm and the place had become a diverse hub of hippie students, wishing to be close to nature. They made art and worked helping with the crops. It had been a time of real diversity, making the farm a richer place to be. On the flip side it had raised much suspicion from the local farming community.

By the age of 30- my age- he owed half a million to the bank. He had no choice but to sell land, good soil that would be developed, concreted over for housing. His world shrank from over 300 acres to 22. He got very depressed, felt like he had failed his ancestry, his community and failed his land. He stopped farming.

One day he had a call from someone in Chicago asking whether he would be interested in becoming part of a CSA –  a Community Supported Agriculture scheme. This is where the community pre buys shares in the harvest at the beginning of the season so the farmer has capital, pre season to grow crops and a definite market for the produce. At first he was not interested. He was in the depths of despair and did not want to share his final acres. But this despair was the turning point. The current model did not work for him-  isolated and dislocated from his consumers and in need of huge capital when there was unfair finacial return. The route of the CSA presented a new way forward. He rang back and said he would do it. He started farming again.

The times are changing – is this not just the natural pattern of progress… why does farmer Johns story matter?  The same thing that is happening in the USA is happening here and all over the world. It matters because it is our story too. We need food so we need the people who continue to desire to produce it. Our food system has shifted and now relies on mining capital that is not soley ours- soil and oil is not just ours but the property of generations to come. It  matters because for our health in its broadest sense we all need to maintain a connection with the soil.

This is a classic story but farmer john did not give the classic response. He realised the times were changing and he had to as well but he was not prepared to go down the path of mining his land.

The CSA model allowed a mutally beneficial relationship beteen farmers and the community. Allowed diversity, allowed support, financial and other. The people who joined the CSA came to the farm regularly and began to refer to it as ‘our farm’. The CSA movement is growing in this country too and is based on organic principles of sustainability -methods that are not just based on short term thinking.

Farmer John wanted to continue farming and this was a way he could do it that encompassed the things he loved about it.

At the end of the day it did not matter if he owned the land. What mattered was that he maintained his relationship to it and that he had the security to do this. For the people buying the produce these were the things that mattered too. They had a relationship with their land and food and they felt security in that it was being grown in a sustainable way – they had security of the most basic kind that they had a source of sustenance that was resilient to shock and not at the mercy of the wider system. Angelic Organics is still going and the share-holders have bought back more of the land.

Check out the film – you can see the trailer at

http://www.angelicorganics.com/ao/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=179&Itemid=307