Beyond Ultra-Processed Foods: Can Farmers Fix Our Health and the Planet? (James Rebanks)

26:22But there has absolutely been a benefit to farmers producing more food so that all of us can have very accessible food supplies with the basic nutrients in. Absolutely. I had no way wanted to go back to... Eating tinned spam or whatever. No, we've got to be really realistic about this. But the analysis you've just presented, which is what a free marketeer, sort of libertarian would present, is really flawed. Why? Because if you go to the Roundtree Foundation or whatever... Joseph Roundtree Foundation. Joseph Roundtree Foundation or others, you'll find that the 18 % of poorest people in Britain right now are not eating properly.

27:00They're suffering from dietary problems, whether that's obesity uh it's very low nutrition actually yeah or they live in food deserts or places where they can't access fresh fruit and veg etc etc um in fact uh most increasingly the biggest problems in our health system in the developed world are not problems of food scarcity they're problems of the wrong food consumed by far too many people leading us to diabetes obesity etc so if if that thesis that you just presented was true the healthiest population on earth would probably be in america right they've got the most free market food system that made food cheap for poor people but in fact you go to american cities and you're very struck by the astonishing astonishing amount of obesity 100 what's actually happened is that it's become a model for corporate consolidation so the walmart family owns more wealth than the 42 percent of poorest americans right cheap food was an amazing model for taking the means of sustenance for most of us and putting control of the system into a tiny number of people's hands so it's not very free market because it's monopolies it ends up in monopolies so absolutely results in that um you also end up with um a stripping away of the middle class and small businesses in every small town in rural america and every city in rural america the industrialization yeah you said earlier you're a hill man which made immediately made me think of jd vance's hillbilly yeah Not the first comparison that's been shown.

28:25He follows me on Twitter, bizarrely. J.D. Vance follows you on Twitter. But has the exact opposite values to me about almost everything. Yeah, our books were compared. Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. They don't have the same morality. I'll put this out there. I think Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, not only is beautifully written, but is an extraordinary, whatever you think about his politics and about him, is an extraordinarily important book because it really does chronicle de-industrialisation in Middletown America, a small town in America. He's literally from a place called Middletown in Ohio.

28:56And it's an amazing book for understanding the Trump phenomenon. And it's interesting that, you know, your book. But what is deindustrialization? Deindustrialization is people that used to have their own business or their own trade with a degree of autonomy, now working for minimum wage for Walmart. Or the jobs going overseas. Or the jobs going overseas. Or as he would put it, and others on the right would put it, people from overseas coming in and doing those jobs. So people listening to this in towns like the one I'm from in Penrith will know that most of the jobs now are either working in the supermarkets, nothing wrong with that, great people doing the best they can, but don't necessarily pay as well as the alternative jobs might have in another universe in which it wasn't so consolidated, or it's in logistics, driving trucks and stuff like that.

29:36So the free market model of cheap food has created a massive social problem, which is that we have this overabundance of food and the wrong food reaching some people. and actually it's the cost of that the externalities have been very much borne by people at the bottom of the economic chain where you have huge issues with obesity poor nutrition and so on diabetes and all that sort of thing and then at a bigger level in terms of the market you actually have massive consolidation of power in a few hands and behind all of that it always goes to the cheapest landscape that can do it the cheapest nearly always a landscape that's degrading its landscape but i I described you earlier as a realist.

30:13And does the realist in you think there's any actual possibility that people who've gotten accustomed to paying£3.50 for maybe a war treat, but relatively healthy chicken from Tesco would pay£5.20? And that£1.70 difference, it's not all going to go to James Rebanks, but you might get 50p and they might do that. Would it have a patriotic fervor for belief in British farming? No, no, that's not why they should do it. They should not care about anything, I'm saying, because they care about me or they care about farmers. The far more compelling reasons to care about this is that the chicken is drashing the river.

30:49Why? And it's not the right chicken to put in your body anyway. We're now learning that this food that they're encouraging us to eat, which is full of added value to manufacturers and corporations, is not actually good for us. It's full of crap. It's full of salt. Absolutely full of crap. Ultra processed foods. Yeah, and there's something else amazing we're learning, which is when you're feeding your family, there's an absolute link now that they're discovering between the biology of the soil, the biology of the thing that grows in the soil, whether it's a carrot or a cow, doesn't matter, it goes through both roots, into your gut biome.

31:24right really like we could eat you and i could eat um from two different fields one which has really health healthy soil biology because it's been well stewarded and well thought about and well looked after and the other one of us could eat from another field where the soil's completely degraded and drenched in chemicals and all the rest of it and it has an effect on you and i through our gut biome on our health and on our mental health and on many many other aspects of our life and there's there's now a whole raft of evidence from people like the food and farming Commission that not only could we feed Britain in what they call an agroecological system, which is a much more nature-friendly system.

32:02They did a report and they came back and said, yes, we can feed Britain with it, with some tweaks, but also we'd be healthier. There was another report came out of the Food and Farming Commission about the hidden costs of cheap food recently. So at a time when farmers and government were having the protests and the rouse, about£2.4 billion pounds worth of, in inverted commas, farm support. This report came out and said that the cost to Britain of a cheap food system through obesity, lost work, ill health, all the rest of it, will way north of 200 billion a year. That's why you should care about this stuff.

32:34If we get this wrong, and we're getting it wrong very quickly and very fast at the moment, we're going to be sicker, we're going to have way more mental health problems, our children are going to live less long, Our children are going to be smaller. That's already happening in the data. The poorest people are going to suffer the most. And our landscapes are going to be absolutely trashed. Now, that sounds about as dystopian as anything I can come up with, really. Why would anybody sane want that? So if we hide behind this thing that nothing can change, food just has to be ever cheaper, we just have to ignore all the externalities.

33:07We're kidding ourselves. You said you're screwed over by supermarkets. How are you screwed over by supermarkets? Just pure and simply by the fact that where this leads is to far too few players in the food system. They don't even really have to break the law to do this. It's really easy to drive across town to the other supermarket, see what they're charging for their cheapest chicken. And a sort of race to the bottom on price. So I mentioned him earlier. Professor Tim Lang did a study recently about food security. It wasn't an alarmist study. It was a very grown-up academic study. it was for the national preparedness committee which i think is the grown-ups who worry about what might happen if everything goes wrong in the event of something terrible yeah i think it may include the sort of intelligence people as well um and his report came back and said we have a just in time food system it's a staggering this is a phrase people know from talk about supply chains yeah and it's logistically it's staggering it's really impressive you watch those programs the sort of documentaries of what happened in factories and logistics it's very clever very very clever it's a staggering achievement but he was pointing out that it's not robust or resilient enough what we actually need is to after through through public policy we have to design a system which has far more resilience what does this really mean he he details it in that report people can go and read it he's saying that if we hit a crisis like covid again it could be worse could be it could be a worse problem than covid and if a second thing happens like sort of geopolitical instability in West Africa or something, whatever it might be, or there's somebody hacks into our software in three or four collection centres.

34:44What happens four or five days later? How robust are we? How resilient are we? And the answers to me are really worrying. We're not remotely resilient enough. And what we actually need is lots of local food production. You have to imagine that if all of the systems that we, software systems and things that we rely on at the moment were all hacked by Russia or China. Where's the food for you and your family in four or five days' time? But what does that mean for people who live in big cities, listening to this in Manchester or Bristol? What does that mean? That means you're in big trouble if something goes wrong.

35:16And you shouldn't be in big trouble because your food system should, somewhere within an hour, two hours walking distance of where you live, you need there to be some brilliant urban horticulture. Right? In parks, allotments, whatever the heck it is. and i'm not saying that the whole world should be fed by people on hillsides in the latest it was sheep and cows like me a lot of what we actually need is british veg production british horticulture uh british fruit right so we're ripping out our orchards because it's because we don't value them or they can't compete with spain at the moment right this is crazy in a crisis you need british orchards so that we have apples um in a if you live in manchester you need there to be some food production near to you but where's the economic imperative going to come from you're you're warning people you're warning your warning is very clear it's obviously it's not going to come from the market one of the key things that behavioral economics economists talk about is bounded rationality i think i think even notan friedman acknowledged it what is bounded rationality bounded rationality is uh my my wife my mom me my son go go to the supermarket we're in a real rush have you got time to make perfect choices perfect choices in the for the wider street no you're really busy and you've got a fixed income often insufficient fixed income you rush around that store and you do what you've got to do to feed your family but that doesn't add up to the system that we need nearly everybody sensible i've seen that looks at food systems says that we need to engineer probably more expensive food and and and it's a massive and we need to distribute wealth and look after the people who can't aren't coping well in the current system but definitely couldn't cope if you made food 10 percent more expensive or 15 percent more expensive to make it sustainable so these two things go together and how does on how does change how do you on the specific point which is there's a problem that farmers are i'm sure supermarkets wouldn't say this of course we should put their view but if the problem is that farmers getting screwed over by supermarkets how do you restore how do you stop that and restore the balance in your favor um other than through a union uh i think it's like german car makers basically so as i understand that the german government puts people on the board of german car makers to are speaking in board meetings about the public interest right you might have environmentalists on the or government representatives on the board of supermarkets saying well hang on a minute what's the downstream effect of this like you may have made a chicken three pounds but this is going to cost is 200 million pounds what's the social cost of this um i think there's a massive amount we can all do as individuals to educate ourselves and pick the right chicken not the wrong chicken if we can afford it now everyone can um but we have to follow through and the trouble with our food politics for last 20 or 30 years is there's no follow through like if you make british food have higher welfare standards or higher environmental standards and then you allow stuff from america or australia not held to the same standards on the shelf to undercut it that doesn't make sense You have to follow through across the different policies.

38:13Whatever happened to Henry Dimbleby's national food strategy? It's like everything else sensible anybody's come up with in the last 20 years. It gets nodded to, sat on and forgotten about. And if I was being cynical, I'd say that's what will happen with Minette Bacter's profitability review. There'll be a month of nodding to it and then it'll disappear. And I have a horrible feeling that we'll have to have a real scare in this country before we wake up to this stuff. Empty shelves. Yeah, and we had the beginnings of that, a mild version of that at the beginning of COVID. And if you can remember, there was some sort of hoarding, there was some shelves empty.

38:47And suddenly people, and Minette Batters herself tells this story. She, like literally weeks before, was going into meetings with government. And government ministers and civil servants said to her, farming couldn't matter less. 0.6 % of the economy. Like, why should we care? It's irrelevant. And literally weeks later, when the shelves start to empty, the same people ring her up and say, keep the food coming we'll give you whatever you need but this country can't go hungry what do you need we'll put every resource we possibly can at your disposal now sensible somewhere in the middle isn't it right like sensible is okay most of the time the market can sort out quite a lot of this most of the time we can have what we want but as tim lang was pointing out we need to use public policy to make this safer and more resilient and if sometimes that's a little less convenient Sometimes that's a little more expensive.

39:36That's the price you pay for not going hungry in a crisis five years down the road, 20 years down the road, 100 years down the road. So could I just personalise this for people in our fast-growing audience who are listening to this thinking, what can I do? I want to support British farming. I want my children to eat healthier veg and all the rest of it. I'm going to say something which I hope some people don't feel patronised by, But I think that a lot of people would instinctively feel that that means buying the thing that says organic on it. They might upgrade their supermarket. They might go from a Lidl or a Tesco to a Sainsbury's where they might get a taste of the difference or Marks and Spencers or Waitrose, whatever it might be.

40:16And in terms of consumer choice, I think that they'd be quite persuaded. And this is why we have labels on food by food labeling. And if it said organic or if it came from a posher shop or if it said, you know, special choice or something, they might think that that was them getting better food and more nutrients into their family and also supporting James Rebanks. Is that actually what happens? Sometimes. Sometimes. As consumers, what should our listeners be doing? Well, I might be one of the most cynical people in Britain about consumer choice as the engine to change this. I actually think the big structural stuff is political, not consumer choice.

40:50I don't think that's cynical at all. uh but um yeah people are doing the first thing i would say is and i get this all the time when i went on twitter early doors one of the best wake up and smell the roses moments for me was a lady i think she was from manchester really bit back at me and she said you're talking about making food more expensive and i have to feed a family of three on 46 pound a week and i'm a single mom and i live in this place where i'm miles from a supermarket and i don't have a car right and i remember thinking oh okay like you're right what's your duty your her duty is just to get by right like she's put in an impossible situation feed your kids do do any goddamn way you can and if i may say one of the things that makes what you say um powerful is that quite often in this country when we talk about food often the people who are talking about food don't necessarily understand the kind of just the economic imperatives and the sheer difficulty of feeding kids when you're poor you're totally right so what people say to me what do i do if i'm really poor sod caring about farmers sod caring about perfect just get it like get it over the line That's what I would say to the poorest people.

41:53It's not your fault. But what I have a slight issue with is the people that usually challenge me with that are middle class affluent people who just don't want to pay more for food because they want to go on like a third holiday. They want a£2 ,000 phone in their pocket. A lot of us are fortunate to be in a position where we could make different choices. And we've been absolutely seduced and suckered into spending our money onto other things, which our parents didn't think were essentials. And these are highly emotive conversations. whatever i say about this there'll be somebody screaming at the radio that i've forgotten about their their circumstance it's really really difficult um i what what i don't believe is that making cheap food cheaper necessarily helps poor people right you've got to look at the whole context of how you made it cheaper what did you destroy what did you change um i'm and food is about 15 of the poorest people in this country's um household budget it's about seven percent of yours and mine uh so food is a bigger deal paying for food is a bigger deal for them but it's 15 of the household income there's better ways to do this what do we do to build a better system what's a better so you want you say that that and you're again i don't think it's cynical but you say that consumer choice is a is a tool of limited efficacy you're not going to hear someone go into politics and say um what do we want we want more expensive chicken so you actually need a regulatory and policy framework which shifts the balance back towards the land yeah so so let me let me get let's take the chickens and the sheds on the river y right i won't be popular with the chicken farmers of the y area but nevertheless how do you what's what's really the problem the problem is over consolidation over concentration of too many chickens into too few farms in one river basin where the nutrient the muck from the chicken has to go somewhere and when it comes out those shed far too much of it is going on to too small an area of land where there's runoff into the river which pollutes the river with new nitrates that's the problem right how do you stop that really easily if you're going up government you can in the scandinavian countries you stop over consolidation of animals in cheds in denmark denmark as i understand it you can only have 5 000 pigs on a big farm so you have masses of pigs for still hundreds of pig farms in denmark and you're distributing the problem so going back to the problem with the river and the muck you've now got a much more spread out geographically spread out problem increases resilience in your food system yeah probably means less rivers are over polluted with pig milk i'm still i'm sure they don't get it perfect but you can spread the problem around soil can cope with it better um there's another way around this which is pretty brutal hardcore environmental regulations that just say no you can't you can't have that many nutrients in one place we won't x amount of nitrates in the river why too bad not allowed not allowed so what happened what happened so at this point the the the chicken farmer and pig farmer in britain will say but you'd make us very expensive we'd be we'd be smaller less efficiencies of skill we'd be more expensive we'd be undercut from other countries so yeah they're right so then you have to have a trade policy that has some balls and defends a british system where you specifically pursued a river protecting soil protecting more expensive things you know what i mean you start off in one technical little technical problem you're like no food systems are actually trade policy environmental regulation uh our ideas about welfare uh subjective ideas about scale what we like the idea of and don't like the idea of unless all of those things come together in meaningful use of law and regulation were basically just in freefall.

45:29Unless we stop this, that's where it goes. It's going there very rapidly. It's a long way down the road already, but it doesn't have to. And it's worth saying to people who don't know, and we'll get into your writing in a sec, you're not party political, notwithstanding your distaste from Milton Friedman. You're not party political aligned. What's your sense about the extent to which, so you're not saying this for a party pre-position, but what's your sense about the extent to which this current government really understands the crisis in our food and in our farming? i think my dog has more understanding of it like literally i've met cabbages with more understanding of it than this there's no understanding of it they've worsened the trading position of farmers right so if you're my dad you're not making any money you get bailed out the end of the year by this nonsensical subsidy system you've got one thing in your life which is at least i kept hold of the farm right it all becomes about holding on right and i can pass and onto my son so he can be a loss-making peasant as well right that's your thing that that that's the whole purpose of your life you don't have you give up holidays you give up the fancy car whatever i can hand it on what did this government come in to do they came in and went oh there's a weird tax break for farmers on inheritance take that away so now now they can't even hand it on without a whopping tax bill which they would say oh i know what they would say but they would say most most estates claiming agricultural and business property reliefs will be unaffected by the changes The latest data show that 40 % of agricultural property relief worth£219 million was directed to just 117 estates.

47:00A very normal UK farm, the ones that are feeding us at the moment are trying to and falling away because they're not being able to feed us, at the moment might have about£3 million worth of capital tied up to make a£20 ,000 a year profit. Now, you may or may not care about the£3 million figure or the£20 ,000 figure, but you should care that that's the unit of production that feeds us right so so if you crash that or you take away the motivation to produce food from it it's almost less about the family less about the tax that you think you've raised or not raised it's what does that do to our food system and our farming system so what should they do on that if you reform farming markets and you give farmers a fair crack at being profitable and our agriculture is in a healthy state i don't think farmers should get tax breaks over anyone else pay the same tax pay the i mean they do already on the profits they make why not in the current system that i've been explaining to you for the duration of this conversation where farmers are already screwed and already backing off producing food in a way that's damaging to the the public interest adding that on top of it's really dumb like it's not the time like that's what i would say to them no not now and also what does that do to farming politics rural politics like we haven't discussed this yet who do you think farmers are gravitating to politically at the moment reform yeah why because the the the last conservative government was so lousy on farming issues they lost all credibility.

48:37This one is deemed to be aggressively anti-farming in its interests. And the populists in America and here know exactly how to play this.

49:07Thank you so much. And now back to James Rebanks.

49:37covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

49:58Where you're from in the Lake District really goes back to Viking times. And, you know, farmers were Vikings way back when. And your family has been doing this for, you reckon centuries right yeah yeah as far as far as we know like it goes back 600 years on the paper and then the paper runs out basically uh so yeah so that there is that and the huge part of farmers identity is that they're going on of something bigger than themselves stewardship temporary temporary custodians so temporary custodians of this farm it feels massively personal well i think one of the major like there's three farmers a week commit suicide in the uk i think one of the things that i see all the time is that it's so personal they're so invested in it they're so invested in it if it fails they've failed and you think whoa no like that's structural that's to do with politics and economics no in their heads they just failed they failed to hand it on they failed to look after it they they're worried because the debt's growing i failed and and like and suddenly you've got this really miserable isolated person who feels like they've failed and there's a weight on them for months and months and months and then sad things are happening and like is that partly because of a certain masculine idea farming i'd say that very conscious and we talk about minute batters there's a huge number of female farmers of course but you if i may say uh reading your works imbibed um through your childhood a vision of farming through your one-toothed grandfather huey and you know he was this patriarch who i'm sure as you got older you came to understand more and more wasn't necessarily just the man that you got to know as seven or eight year old james bouncing about on a on a tractor um but he you Huey was for you this very, very strong, powerful figure, right?

51:34I had a very patriarchal version of this in my head as a kid. And although I was tiny and old-fashioned, it didn't make much money. I thought it was the center of the universe. I thought my grandfather was like the king, the hero of the story, the sort of old king. My dad was, very unfairly, was the sort of young king that wasn't quite as big. And I was the sort of prince. And I'd come along and save this farm. And it was all that mattered in the universe. I suspect you got this idea from all the books you were reading. Maybe, but what I should say is it isn't just male. My version of it was when I was young, but it isn't just male.

52:07There are so many amazing farmers. When my daughter was here, she would say it was nothing to do with gender. Like, my daughter is as passionate about that culture and doing those things as I ever was. It's almost funny. I look at her sometimes and I'm like, oh, my God, this is... Like, you are powerful. Your mum was this distant foreigner because she was from Lancashire. Yeah. And she was bookish as anything. Yeah, still is. Still is. She's the only person I know that, the last few years since my dad died, she started reading all the book short lists, the book long lists. Wow, dedication. Oh, she's well, she's like the nerdiest person I've ever met.

52:42So you had this incredible kind of twin, I mentioned these dichotomies, you had this sort of farming, rugged, patriarchal vision of the land, stewardship, temporary custodian, and then you're also just lost in books. And that was partly because growing up where you did, you didn't have much money, working class, rural working class, which is I think a part of society. Or somewhere between farmers and working class, somewhere in the middle I would say. We invent these neurotic categories, lower middle class, farming is its own thing. And as a 15-year-old, you were pretty wild out there. Just awkward, just couldn't sit still.

53:18So I've had such a weird experience, right? So at secondary school where you had to sit in a room and listen to people and that was the basic ask of you, I couldn't do it. You left with two GCSEs, is that right? Yeah, I got into really big trouble. Well, not really big trouble, but I just couldn't do it. And I've messed up. But when I went to Oxford, I got the complete other side of this. I think you went to Cambridge. And I loved that. Why did I love it? Because it's one-on-one. I'm like one-on-one with the best historian of the First World War. And I get to talk half the time if I'm smart enough, if I've done the homework.

53:51You were 25, and the point is you were ready then. And at 17, 18, I just want people to know that you had this, I don't want to use a sort of out-of-date language, you had this trauma, which is that Huey, your grandfather, who you were very, very close to, died. And your family fell on pretty hard times and you and your dad had to sort out the farm. And that was a tough time for you and your dad, wasn't it? You write about this in your latest book, The Place of Tides, and we'll come to that in a second. But that was a pretty formative experience for you, wasn't it, losing your granddad at that time?

54:20yeah i think so because then the the the silly sort of daydream of what we were died with him really and then oh we just got like loads of debt and it's just like me and my dad in a rainy knackered farm where everything needs money spent on it and everything's broken and so and you're dead and get on too well no like my poor dad is trying to sort that out and my dad's like typical of farmers in the late 20th century which is he doesn't understand why it doesn't make any money anymore like he thinks it's him so he's like crushed by it at times and and worse i'm like the 18 year old who thinks he knows better like my i'm like reinforcing my dad's doubts yeah it's your fault sort it out like well you ended up as you know before he very very sadly died he read a copy of your memoir slash autobiography and i know he almost didn't want you to know but he cried through every page didn't he yeah i said to my mom what did he make of it Because I knew my dad was like three or four weeks away from, well, you never know when somebody's dying.

55:16Fans are quiet when they're going to die. But I thought he's going to die soon. So, yeah, I said to my mum, what did he, because I said to him, what do you make of it? And he said, yeah, yeah, it's all right. Which is like Cumbrian for anything. My mum said he cried. Then I asked one of my sisters, I said, what do you make of it? And he said, he opened up to her and he said, he's made me the bloody hero of it. and I knew exactly that my dad knew what the crack was really which is if I'd written that book when I first thought of writing that book in my 20s it was going to be like an angry young man book by time I was in my 40s and I really or 40 and I wrote it I kind of got over that I'd like I'd got past all the tough stuff with my dad and we were friends again I respected him I saw what he really was not the just the negative stuff I should say that book's the shepherd's life yeah as opposed to the place of tides or English pastoral that's right and then uh yeah and and I think he knew He's like, you've stitched me, like his take was, you've stitched me up because I'm dying, haven't you?

56:08You've made me look great. So when you met your future wife, Helen, you'd gone to some evening classes, come across an inspirational teacher who said, you know what, you're, it turns out, you rebanks, you're unbelievably clever. I think you should go as a mature student to Oxford or Cambridge. You said, nah. Then you applied, have your interview, and you think, okay, I'm going to go for this. You get in, turns out you're quite clever. You get a double first. what was it like saying to your parents back on the farm presumably yeah i went to oxford and i got a double first my dad was sort of baffled by it i thought my dad i thought my dad wouldn't see any value in it and i was really touched because he did he would come back from like the auction where he'd been speaking to all the other farmers and they're all like patting him on the back on your boys you know it from what they say your boys don't well and i'm like oh i didn't think this would be a good thing in the whole in the whole world and he was he was sort of abstractly proud and you'd hear him telling people oh he got all these brains from me and stuff you know like the sort of dad jokes and i'd be like oh yeah of course i did that um yeah no it was cool about it really and then one of the nicest things was i you're supposed as you know you're supposed to go to those fancy universities then you're supposed to get a fancy job you're supposed to be the success in the world of professional and that usually means like london or somewhere right i didn't want to be in london like i briefly flirted with that and then I went home and all my life was about was I wanted to find a job where I could blag some money out so the serious money out of people to save the farm um and I knew that meant my dad had to keep hold of the farm for like 10-15 years until I could come back and I'm still trying to save I suppose like the boy I'd been a hero a returning hero like in the John Wayne movies I'm not sure it's heroic it might be dumb ass but uh but anyway my dad sort of I think my dad and I had a sort of unspoken deal on that he's like yeah i'll keep it going you just and even when he died he's like well i've kept it going like you're going now and um and i know that your most uh recent book the place of tides uh which involved you going to a kind of remote spot in norway meeting these two amazing women i think anna and ingrid um in a sense you did that because you hadn't really i hate talking in therapeutic language but in a sense you hadn't really grieved and so what was the gap between your dad dying you've got you know you've got kids and all this to think about you've got your writing career you're selling a lot of books but you're also trying to be a successful farmer why did you decide to go off to this strange spot so um i've had a i've had a job after i went back to cumbria i had various jobs people sort of found me useful um reasonably successful professionally and over time people i became an expert on sustainable tourism around the world i didn't i did various research and reports for people including for the world heritage center in paris right i think i started out in that kind of work thinking i was disadvantaged in it because i hadn't done a lot of travel i wasn't the kind of person that came from a family that had been everywhere in the world uh what i actually found was the secret to that work was nearly always finding the local people and just listening to them in a cafe or a pub or just sitting on the street with them and saying like what's what's happening in your life like is what's what is this flood of tourism doing to you how does it work and my background really helped me with that a lot of the places i went people were like you go to india or somewhere and people would be farmers or whatever and i tell them i had a churn the cows on my phone and they're like yeah we could talk to you about this come on in and one of the places i went was a tiny little island off the coast of norway to visit some people that have this mad old tradition where they look after wild eider ducks so they make nests for wild eider ducks that come in from the sea protect them from predators build these little beautiful little stone huts um and harvest the added down when the ducks go back to the open sea and they make duvets from them and i met these people i wasn't really there to study their culture to pay attention to all of that i was there to at a very boring conference about tourism and got a book and i met this amazing woman and when i left there i hadn't written any books at the time uh when i left i texted my wife and went if anybody ever lets me write books i'm going back to the island and i'm gonna just ask that woman questions like what why would you do that that's crazy so like wildest most extreme place on the edge of the arctic circle um just an amazing amazing woman and i i knew you were saying yeah so what's going on the rest of my life by the time i really did go back i'd written two best-selling books i was beginning to burn out of it i don't know if you've ever experienced that yeah so yeah so my whole hustle from being a kid onwards from the minute I went to Oxford was I thought I'd learned how to game the system just work harder than everybody else stay up later than everybody else please the powerful people the rich people do whatever they want you to do and you'll go through the gears and you'll have like a good career a good life and then you can have some money like and go back to the farm and live how you really want to live and and the one thing I hadn't thought through remotely about this my wife tried to tell me it was that that's just a good way to burn yourself out and it was starting to happen i'd lost my dad about five years earlier i couldn't stop thinking about this woman i'd met on this island who seemed like she was the same kind of people as my dad and rough hands rough hands and sort of really sort of isolated rural working people like the people i was from and i went and she was all that and more but what did being with these two women and isolated with them teach you about being a man a lot it was the first time in my life that so i tried i went i tried to be anthropological about it i thought i'm just going to turn off me for once in my life i'm not going to be projecting and trying to win anything i'm just going to turn me off as much as i can and i'm going to listen to them and want to try and understand their lives and what's going on with them um so the turning off the sort of male projecting was really really good for me let me let me breathe let me grieve a bit there's quite a few tears on sitting on rocks in the middle of nowhere um and then i was there a little while and they said to me what are you doing and i said i want to write about your world and try and capture it through your eyes and they said so you want to be like an honorary woman and and i burst out laughing like yeah if you could like go with that i would be delighted i would be over the moon if you could think of me that way even though it's silly um and they said um so anna and ingrid said to me they said well before we agree to that you need to know what's wrong with men and they began to tell me what was wrong with men and it took like three or four weeks of one thing after another and they were telling me about the way that men spoke over them and or sometimes they didn't tell me sometimes they just saw it so their their partners and the fishermen would come to the island and for the first time in my life I started to see stuff that the women listening to this world know already I saw the way that men do talk over women and do make these weird assumptions that they're the ones that can solve everything and they're the fixers and the menders and the tough ones.

1:02:57So I knew you were a polymath. I didn't know that fixing masculinity was another part, as an honorary woman, was another part of your incredible boat. There's a kid's book called The Storm Whale and The Storm Whale in Winter, which is not about women. It's about a young boy and his dad. And it puts me in mind of what you're saying about remote places and people that go out fishing. And it puts me in mind of a book by Ernest Hemingway called The Old Man and the Sea, which has a this kind of poor noble fisherman which is probably my favorite book okay okay so that's not a coincidence that's that's yeah so that's where that's where that's where your kind of love of these places oh yeah so if you want to if you want to hit nerdy version of it so what i got in my head i like a lot of writing it's like the most thing i lose myself in ever um so i was talking with the idea i was like okay i love the old man in the sea it's it's the book that speaks to me the most.

1:03:45What happens if you wrote a book in which a woman was a hero, not the man? What happens if it was not heroic, but it was like day-to-day? What happens if it was more like in the house and domestic rather than heroic? Outside. Out in the open sea. Could you turn all of the things around and could it still be a good story, a good book? Well, people will know because it's in the place of tides. That's the latest of how many books? It's the latest of four books that I've written and I'm just so lucky. All of them have been bestsellers and they've all been translated into lots of languages and I'm so, so lucky.

1:04:20And then some of my writing heroes, people like George Saunders, have been lovely about them and said that. Then John Banwell, people like that liked it. So I'm just so lucky to get to indulge the things I love and go home and have my real life as well with my cows and my sheep and my daughter and my wife. It's not bad for the bloke that was bouncing around on Grandpa Huey's tractor 50-odd years ago. 40 odd years ago. I'm not going to age you. Go on, there's one thing I wish I'd said earlier when we were talking about school. At school, I met one of the teachers just later and they said they thought I had learning difficulties.

1:04:52But if you let me learn in my own way, my own obsessive, nerdy way, where I do it when I want and how I want and from what I want, I'm really clever that way. Do you know what you need to do, James? You need to go on podcasts. You're trying to end this. I could go all day. Well, we're going to do a Q &A. You're going to stick around, aren't you? Because you're going to be the first, to use a farming metaphor that's not farming at all because I don't know if you raised guinea pigs anyway you're going to be our guinea pig for the first Q &A session the first Q &A episode of Radical as a podcast and I want you to know that that's an honour for you as well as an honour for us one word answers quick no they're going to be listen we've got actual listener questions and we're grateful to you for sticking around and also for this conversation James Rebanks thank you so much thank you for having me

1:05:43Well, James did stick around to answer your questions, and they were very revealing and mischievous and pretty honest answers as well. You can hear that in the next episode, which we're releasing on Monday. For now, just a couple of reflections on what I learned speaking to him. Lots of specific things and quite a few general ones, actually. I didn't know the way in which the imperatives of nature recovery and all these planning regulations around them where you have to do certain things to consider the environment before you take any action on the environment. He was sort of saying that the imperatives of nature recovery have almost overtaken the imperatives of actually creating healthy, well-farmed food.

1:06:21I mean, in a way, the two things ought to be consistent rather than different. But he was pretty clear, wasn't he, explaining how with that brutal example of a hedge, you've just got to do a huge amount to make sure you're looking after nature before you can actually do any farming. And that sounds pretty onerous for farmers. I thought it was very striking how he spelled out the fragility of our system, the idea that, you know, it just takes one minor thing to go wrong and actually supply chains could be badly affected and we're only a few days away, perhaps at best, from not really having things on our shelves in supermarkets.

1:06:54But, you know, the thing that comes across, and I hope you got a sense of it, is just the immense strain that farmers are under. I mean, James is the kind of guy, I've spoken to him in the past, never met him in person before, The kind of guy who doesn't really, I think, want it to be, he doesn't want to be accused of special pleading or playing the victim card. He doesn't want to be thought of as someone who's having a whinge, but he's under huge strain financially and emotionally in order to be able to do what he does. And what he does is create food that all of us really rely on. And I just think his central point, which is that we don't think very much about our food and about our food system, we just assume and take for granted that it will always be there because it has been, is a pretty dangerous and lazy assumption.

1:07:39I mean, the one thing that I think might rankle or might sort of annoy a few people is the idea that we need to pay more for food. I can see why farmers would say that. I think there will be some libertarians and Hayekians among you who say actually the fact that lots of people can get lots of poor people can get food which is healthy for relatively cheap is a great win for civilization. But there's a cost to that. What economists would call externalities. There's a cost to that which is that farmers are really really struggling. Two other quick things that I just want to touch on that he said.

1:08:09One is you know he benefited from going to university at the age of 25. He got a double first from Oxford. He's obviously a supremely smart bloke. But it did remind me of a theme that we've had on this podcast, which is that it's a bit weird, really, isn't it? We pack people off to university at the age of 18, assuming they're ready for it. What if they're actually much better suited to doing it seven or eight or 10 or 20 years later? And then the other thing is that James Rebanks, one of the things that makes him so compelling to listen to is that he is and he grew up in the rural working class.

1:08:39And it's just very important when we're thinking about the future of this country to realize that not everyone who tends to the land, not everyone who has a rural life. is rich.

1:08:53And that's it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, please do subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds. And by the way, you can also watch episodes of Radical, which an increasingly large number of people are doing on the iPlayer. Just search for Radical with Amol Rajan. And after you've watched every single one of the Radical with Amol Rajan episodes in full, If you really want more intellectual stimulation, as you must, then I've got to tell you about Nick's podcast, which you can also find on the iPlayer. It's called Political Thinking with Nick Robertson.

1:09:25And this week he's got a big one, a big name. He is sitting down with the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, undoubtedly one of the most important figures in this Labour government. He's going to be reflecting with her on the biggest week of her career in which she has announced radical immigration reform. She's a very, very interesting figure, and I've got no doubt Nick will get the best out of her. Right, for now, that is it from us. Thank you so much for your time and for your company. We're back at the same time next week. Goodbye.

1:10:01If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.