Two cases of culpable homicide (1)
Kenneth Roy
Two cases of culpable homicide (2)
Bob Cant
An old-fashioned fishmonger. Photograph by Islay McLeod
Marian Pallister’s fine article (10 January) on the decline and disappearance of a civilised way of life contains a number of salutary pointers to a bleak future where all our needs are met by multinational corporations.
I remember when my mother told me that Safeway had opened a store in Davidson’s Mains in Edinburgh. I told her not to shop there; that if she did, the butcher, the baker, the fishmonger and all the other little shops would disappear. But for someone on a fixed income, the cost savings of shopping at the giant retailer were just too hard to ignore. For many others the lure of the supermarket – the time-saving convenience of one-stop shopping, the price – was too hard to resist.
In the 1980s, when we lived in Edinburgh’s High Street, you could do your shopping there; real shopping – at the butchers, the fishmongers, the grocers, at a choice of bakers. None of these places exist any more; they’ve all been turned into tourist shops. Now if you live in the High Street and you want to buy food you’ve got to take a bus out to the suburbs, or walk down to the ‘Food Fair’ at Marks and Spencer’s in Princes Street, where much of what you’ll find will be pre-packaged mini-meals that only need to be heated up. TV dinners for the 21st century.
Some years after that, in the early 90s when we were again living in Edinburgh, my wife and I tried to do what we do here in rural British Columbia, which was to source as much of our food as possible from small farms in the surrounding area. We discovered Craigie’s Farm in the hills not far from Barnton. You could buy real food then from Craigie’s Farm – vegetables, meats, some dairy products. It was about as organic as things were then, 20 or so years ago.
Over here we buy our beef from a farmer at the southern end of Vancouver Island. We buy lamb from another farmer, chicken from another, vegetables from a fourth and fifth. My next-door neighbour, who keeps chickens, supplies me with big beautiful eggs at $4 a dozen. The beef and lamb are grass fed; the chickens free-range, and the vegetables are organic as well. All of it tastes like food tasted when I was a kid and there were no supermarkets, no growth hormones, no pesticides, preservatives or antibiotics in any of it.
The massive multinational growers and food producers don’t really care what they put into your food. At least, I don’t think they care very much. Nor do their investors or the great commodities traders at the world’s big stock exchanges. They care about profits. So long as the producers can produce as much as possible, who cares if it is laced with too many antibiotics because someone thinks that if one dose is enough surely two doses are better? Who cares if the pesticides kill off the bees and the butterflies, the pollinators, as well as the little bugs that eat the foliage or lay their eggs in the wheat and barley?
We source our food the way we do because of where we live. We know how fortunate we are to be able to do this, and we are aware that most city dwellers are at the mercy of the multi-national food producers and distributors. We are also aware of the great explosion of serious diseases such as cancers in our western societies, and how these cancers – once viewed as an affliction of wealthy ‘first-world’ economies – are now being seen all over Africa and in Asian countries. It suggests to us that the makers of the pesticides, preservatives and antibiotics are making life ‘easier’ for farmers and distributors on these continents as well.
The way we purchase our food doesn’t have the same levels of social engagement that Marian Pallister writes about, or that we knew so well when we lived in Killin in the 1970s. But shopping at the supermarket doesn’t either. We know our suppliers, the small, local farmers, quite well – and we trust what they sell us. We also seem to enjoy pretty good health. We are, after all, what we eat.
Michael Elcock
If the past arguments of Ian Hamilton’s (8 January) for independence and against union were to carry any weight in my mind, would he care to explain the apparent contradiction of an independence party’s insistence on independence from the rest of the UK but a simultaneous, wholesale embrace of a hugely bureaucratic and federal European Union?
It seems to me that the SNP want to swap one union for another, and for one in whose government they would have little or no say, compared to the present position. Of the two unions involved, I know which I would prefer, as I suspect does the majority of voters in Scotland.
James McGregor McNie
As Kenneth Roy says (8 January), the Alasdair Gray affair ‘was the star turn of the pantomime season’ till John Barrowman fell off his horse. I am not writing to defend Gray’s essay, if it needs defence. To my mind Gray is a great but uneven novelist and a significant visual artist. He is not a systematic thinker and his excursions into history and politics need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
What I do find intriguing is the way that the Scottish media have turned this affair into a ‘story’. Gray’s essay is one contribution out of nearly 30 to the ‘Unstated’ anthology edited by Scott Hames. For my money the anthology is a proverbial curate’s egg: it contains some excellent essays, some middling and one or two authentically awful. I suspect most readers will agree, while disagreeing about which essays fall into which category.
Apart from Gray’s contribution the anthology has been greeted in the media with near total silence. Among much else it contains a hard-hitting essay by James Kelman, perhaps Scotland’s most famously controversial author. This contains some serious philosophical argument and has attracted virtually no response.
Scotland once prided itself (rightly or wrongly) on its attachment to the democratic intellect. Why are its media now so attached to manufactured rows and so averse to principled argument?
Dennis Smith
I read the Scottish Review avidly and recommend it frequently. Last week, I read Robin Downie’s piece (8 January). I am tempted to reply at length, but shall restrict my comments here to saying that Robin’s rant is fairly old hat, inaccurate in significant places, remarkably presumptious and just about what I have come to expect of a secularist atheist rejecter of all but his own views.
David H Kinnon
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