Jay Rayner’s report on the future of British pig farming reminds me of my own childhood afternoons at the farm gate
I spent much of my childhood on one farm or another. There was the daily walk after school to get a box of eggs, or to pick up bacon for breakfast or a pot of jam for tea. There were summer afternoons spent picking runner beans or peas (On cold winter days I would be given a knife and told to go into the fields and cut my own cabbage or stem of Brussels sprouts). And then there were scary ventures into dim farm sheds and dark fumbles into deep hessian sacks for potatoes to cook around the Sunday roast.
Root vegetables and cauliflowers were picked up daily from farm gates and paid for by dropping money into the accompanying honesty box, while summer holidays were spent picking blackcurrants on the local fruit farms, most of which went off for jamming or, rumour had it, to the Ribena factory.
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