Hi all!

no pictures I’m afraid, but here are my thoughts (apart from the stuff I’ve already given voice to - great fun, good company, etc):

Though fascinated in advance by the ideas and the issues surrounding food production, I have to admit that at the outset I wasn’t very clear where the human stories were going to come from. I had a couple of vague ideas but those went out of the window as soon as we began to talk to people. A week of total immersion in the stories and characters we encountered set me thinking in a different way about people, countries, landscapes and the whole question of our relationship to food and land - what the French would call ‘terroir’.

Above all I began to think about the tenuousness of things - how vulnerable farmers (like everybody else) are to the vagaries of nature (disease, say), politics (arbitrary regulatory decisions taken remotely) and fate (if the local abattoir closes what then?).

Who we are is a complex web of loyalties to and affiliations with land, culture, tradition and food - but it’s a web whose strands can easily be broken, casting people adrift in the world…

Food metaphors were hard to avoid during the week, but there’s no question that these researches helped to put flesh on the bones of an idea that I am now very taken with, and will undoubtedly pursue further.

Alan Pollock