The lunch, the cook and the larder
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. They lived with an old professor in the countryside, and they were bored. Or rather Edmund was bored. He was sitting in the school playground (safety regulation: no running) and complaining about the lunch.
“It’s always the same,” he said. “Turkey dinosaurs fried with mango and pineapple. Every Tuesday. And I read it’s the same for 44 per cent of the world: they all get fried turkey dinosaurs on a Tuesday in those same self-heating plastic packs made by Coca-Cargill Unilever. And guess how much it costs: 17p each. ‘Economies of scale’, they call it. I call it disgusting.”
“How can you be bored, again, Edmund?” said Lucy. “My Gran says that, when she was at school, all they got was peas, potatoes and cabbage. Now we get chicken alphabets and passionfruit jelly from a squeezable tube – on Wednesdays, anyway.”
“Potatoes! That would be something! We never get those any more.”
Sadly for the children, only one form of potato had been approved by the European Union for cultivation and it had caught a virulent blight and died out. There had been a heritage seeds project, burying unapproved varieties under the Arctic icecap for posterity, but the Arctic icecap was no more.
“But we get Nu-potato. That’s nearly as good. When we went to the TescoVirgin store last week, they had so many varieties of Nu-potato. Blue, pink, purple, green. That’s choice, isn’t it.”
“But it’s all the same gut-churner underneath,” said Edmund bitterly.
“Some people are never satisfied,” said Susan, sucking a Taste Pill™. She looked out across the dense undergrowth of what had once been Sprockett’s Farm and the hyper-highway in the distance.
“Don’t you think it’s romantic. Look at those TescoVirgin trucks. They’re bringing in our milk all the way from Ukraine. Think what they’ve seen!” She took a long swig from their bottle of water, guaranteed free from fertiliser or additives. The professor refused to let them drink from the tap.
“TescoVirgin, TescoVirgin! That’s the only company we ever hear about. I think they make everything!”
“You know that’s not true,” said Peter, who read the business-sport pages every morning. “There’s Coca-Cargill Unilever as well, isn’t there.”
“Yes and the water I’m drinking,” added Susan. “Look at the slogan: ‘Your Clean Local Water’.”
“Actually, it’s a subsidiary of TescoVirgin. It’s just bottled here,” said Peter. “All British companies are part of TescoVirgin now. They had to be big to compete with Coca-Cargill Unilever. That means more competition.”
“Yes, and competition is good for the economy,” said Susan. “Miss Leahy says so. And we need to be able to earn enough to buy flowers every year.” Britain’s wild flowers had unfortunately been contaminated by Terminator seed technology and died out in the space of a season, leaving the bushes bare. Public-spirited people like the professor invest in new plants from South Africa every year to try and keep the colour in the countryside.
The food they eat is a source of lesson plans for Miss Leahy, though the professor grinds his teeth when he hears about it. They have school debates about whether the sachets of British horseradish (Hungarian horseradish, acetic acid and Polish cream) they get on Mondays are really British. But then, if the school only has to spend 17p per lunch, they can afford an extra teacher and more books. And since that extra teacher is Miss Leahy, she is quite keen on the status quo.
It’s sad about the farms, but there’s always Farm World Theme Park™, which Peter and Susan are particularly keen on. You get to see real cows – well, one of them – real tractors and pat the sheep, who lead an idyllic existence of stroking, fed by the most delicious-tasting Chinese agricultural meal, with seven different tastes, one for each day of the week. And although the price of food is rising rather worryingly – it is now very dependent on oil prices – there is still the most exotic series of choices in TescoVirgin. It’s so exciting going in the doors and encountering again the recorded smell of baking bread – mmm, delicious!
Edmund was in the Behaviour stream at school (dissent was a discipline issue). Peter, Susan and Lucy were in the Asthma stream. It seemed sensible to organise the classes that way, so that medical staff could maximise their time and vigilance in the right places.
After school, the four friends joined the supervised walk down the high street, with its shuttered abandoned shops, to the delights of TescoVirgin. “I can’t think why Edmund’s always so bored,” said Peter, shaking his wise old head …
**
That night, Edmund was not just bored – he was hungry. He crept downstairs to the professor’s old-fashioned larder: the professor shunned the new computerised kitchen-larders which automatically dialled TescoVirgin when anything was finished. The professor’s larder even smelled old-fashioned.
Peter muttered about botulism, but Edmund loved its smell of long-mislaid cheese.
There it was again, as he surveyed the shelves for something to eat. But his eye was attracted instead to a hole behind the fridge he had never seen before. He peered inside, pushed past the old tea-towels and crawled further in.
It really was the longest larder, but suddenly he found himself in a small clump of grass. To his astonishment, it was sunny. He stood up and looked around. There were wild-flowers everywhere, and the unmistakable noise of a tractor.
A terrifying lady in white stood before him glaring: the tallest lady he’d ever seen, proud and cold. “Who are you?” he said, before he could stop himself.
“I’m the school cook,” she said.
“We don’t have a cook, do we?” The school cook just glared.
“Well, I’m glad to run into you because I’m ever so hungry,” said Edmund. “I could even eat fried Nu-potato. But I’d prefer a pineapple or mandarin.”
“Oh, we don’t have those any more,” said the cook. “We haven’t done since the great oil price hike, don’t you remember – or were you too young? Let me see, it’s autumn now. I can get you some delicious apples, grown at Sprockett’s Farm.”
“That overgrown dump?”
Not only was Sprockett’s not overgrown, it was a hive of activity, divided into three separate holdings, funded by a local customers who paid a subscription for a vegetable and fruit box every week, which they picked up from the local school.
Edmund followed the cook down the high street, and his eyes nearly popped out of his head as he looked at the little shops there, with their striped awnings.
Some were selling local cheeses in an array of rather frightening colours. Others were selling fruit. There was even one shop selling greeting cards: a poster in the window said: ‘Happy Apple Season! Make your day especially scrunchy!’
But something was missing: where was the vast red-brick structure with no windows?
“Where’s TescoVirgin?”
“I seem to remember there was something like that,” said the cook. “Have you come from another planet? When the oil prices rose, and people wanted healthier food, they broke up the big companies. I know the farmers are all millionaires now, and there are no bananas, but it’s a small price to pay.”
“No bananas? I don’t believe you.”
“Well, there are bananas of course, but you have to buy them in the West End. I can’t afford them myself.”
They were now at the school gates and the cook led him inside. “Come along,” she said. “I’ll make you something to eat, as long as no-one’s looking.”
Inside the school kitchen – which Edmund was sure used to be the staff room – there were boxes marked Sprockett’s Farm, and other farms with place names within the radius of 20 miles or so, all piled up to the ceiling.”
“Where are the turkey dinosaurs?”
“What! Those horrors were banned years back, and a good thing too. No, we only buy organic local food. We have to: the governors decided. Just like the hospital up the road: they’re the same.”
“How fantastic!”
“Fantastic, nothing,” said the cook, with a bitter expression. “I have to chop all these things myself – the only help I ever get is when one of the children are in detention. And some of the veg they send me – well, it should have been fed to the pigs if you ask me.
“When I was a girl we got our food from all over the world. Now you’re lucky if you can get a parsnip from the other side of Birmingham.”
Edmund didn’t like to ask what a parsnip was, so he excused himself. “I’d better go back and find my friends. They’re in the Asthma stream.”
“Asthma?” said the cook. “Never heard of it.”
**
As he made his way quickly back home, he remembered disconcerting stories about people who had slipped into other worlds and found that centuries had gone by. He began to run.
He found the clump of grass again and squeezed inside, past the tea-towels, but he emerged – not in the professor’s magic larder, with Peter, Susan and Lucy sleeping upstairs – but in a large expanse of tarmac. Where was he?
Then he saw in the dark ahead of him, a sign he could just read: it said ‘TescoVirgin: disabled parking only’.
“I can’t believe it,” said Edmund to himself. “They’ve concreted over the professor. Now I’ll never get back home.”
David Boyle is the author of Authenticity and an associate at the New Economics Foundation.
Visit David’s website
www.david-boyle.co.uk
also in issue 1 of pulse news
