Despite the best efforts of our celebrity chefs, this nation still seems to be in denial about where its food comes from.
Our disconnection from the land has produced a society of squeamish supermarket shoppers who care more about appearance than truth, and who struggle to relate the living animals in our fields to the dead ones on our plates.
A bushcrafting friend of mine tells the story of a roadkill deer he saw on his way to work one morning. His colleagues were disgusted that he'd put it in his boot to butcher and preserve when he got home. What once was normal behaviour has become unthinkable to most people.
A head teacher in Kent has been forced to resign over a project in which pupils helped to rear a lamb, on the grounds that its slaughter upset some of the children: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article7022554.ece
What are children learning from this witch-hunt - that it's better to eat in ignorance?
Elsewhere, the artist Matthew Herbert was forbidden to record the slaughter of the pig whose entire life he has documented: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/11/matthew-herbert-pig-slaughter . Whose agenda is served by this silence?
I'm all in favour of confronting reality. Environmental art, and environmental education, should not be all fluffiness and sunshine. It should communicate that humanity is part of a bigger system, that life is defined by the inevitability of its ending, and that nature is us.
Our need for food reveals us as the animals we really are. Civilisation may allow us to look away from the killing, but our hunger always returns. A little more self-knowledge would be good for us.
