TURNIPS AND SEWAGE FARMS

Printed in the National League South game v Worthing Saturday 4^th March 2023  We drew 1-1 despite being down to 9 men for 50 minutes. Attendance 633

Government ministers might be telling us to eat turnips, harvest tomatoes from sewage and add sawdust to our porridge to help with the cost of living, but when it comes to foraging we were ahead of the game.

30 years ago I was part of the Slough free food revolution, getting up at stupid o clock to pick field mushrooms on the Langley roundabout, tipped off by my nan that a mushroom lorry had dropped its cargo years back. Plucking shaggy ink caps in Upton Court Park in the morning dew. I nearly poisoned my hosts with water hemlock; thankfully realising at the last minute it wasn't watercress My hands forever tingled from picking nettles. Nettles are a wonder crop and if they came from the Amazon rainforest they would be gobbled down in pills and potions by people who like to gobble down pills and potions. I still use them in my kids spag bol – just don't tell them. We turned hops into undrinkable beer (we still managed to drink it) and scrumped apples to turn into suicider (totally undrinkable but as you can probably guess we managed). Yep living in Slough was like an episode of The Good Life and to top it all off in late summer we headed to the sewage farm to harvest tomatoes whose pips go straight through the human gut and grow lush in treated slurry. Many a meal I whipped up for friends, only telling them after they'd finished where the tomatoes had come from. The sewage farm also grew enormous puffball mushrooms. We baked one once; one of the most disgusting things I've ever popped in my mouth, and that's saying something.

I always thought that Arbour Park should have had a vegetable bed – growing the salads to go with the burgers, onions for the hotdogs, maybe even some chickens for their eggs. Healthy eating and sport go hand in hand, not that you’d notice it from the food we get served up. I like the £5 pie and pint deal but surely Slough of all towns should also be serving up samosas and onion bhajis to go with a pint?

I run a community garden and spend a lot of time outdoors where we battle with the elements, the slugs and mice, pests and diseases to grow food. I should be the picture of health and but I must have looked so haggard to the young lad on the St.Albans City turnstile that he charged me seniors rate. St Albans are cashless, with quirky beers and even useless-to-hit cotton bins. They want to be trendy but with their ground they are trapped in an old persons body, that locks the gates to the sheltered housing at 5.30

Hampton are trapped in the 1950’s but their new owners have banned cash and set about winding up some of their old support making changes so quick. 

Brighton have done the same. Their pies win awards but everytime I’ve queued for one, they’ve run out by half time. They’ve got self service beer pumps and have added tickets on phones so you can’t pass them on unless you want to pay £20 for the privilege.

Worthing seem to have got it right. Our visit before Christmas netted us a valuable point, and I even got some very decent vegetarian food. You could pay by cash or card. There was the usual beer plus craft. You get a feel of clubs when you visit and Worthing is definitely a club on the up. The even had the most charming head steward who said her job was to make sure everyone had a good time. She even had a go on the bin we had commandeered for the afternoon.

So what of the latest food shortages. Well this was predicted long ago by food campaigners and restaurant critic Jay Raynor who said “In October 2014 I told the DEFRA select committee that we needed to start paying more for our food. If we did not do so, we risked paying vastly more later and experiencing shortages in supply, resulting in empty shelves. For decades the supermarket sector had been given a free run at our food supply chain by governments of both stripes. Just a dozen companies then controlled 95% of UK food retail and used that economic might to force such drastically tight deals on producers that many had gone out of business. Our self-sufficiency had withered. We were now, I said, at serious risk from external shocks disrupting our food supply because we were so dependent on imports.

"I didn’t expect one of those external shocks to be self-inflicted, but then the Brexit vote came along. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of how deformed our food system had become know it would have a drastic impact. And now here we are in 2023, with shelves emptied of salad vegetables and rationing in supermarkets. Is it solely a product of our leaving the EU? No, of course not. Yes, there have been weather issues. But isn’t it curious that the supply problems we have here are not being replicated in France, Spain or even Ukraine?”

Now with rising energy prices and lack of staff, UK growers are saying they can’t afford to grow salad, cucumbers and tomatoes until much later in the year.

So it might be time for Slough and other clubs to dig up that odd patch of grass and dig for victory – on and off the pitch. Unless you fancy turnip burger and chips.