COUNTRY LIFE
To see good food destroyed on a large scale gives a very melancholy feeling, especially at a period when food is not plentiful. The farmer loses his money and has wasted his skill, and the public is robbed. Yet such destruction is wrought—and of necessary purpose—even today. A farmer within my cognisance has just ploughed in some 50,000 excel- lent lettuces. He would have been glad to sell them at a halfpenny apiece, though he knew that the public in some places were paying a shilling for worse plants. Such things occur with some frequency. it is within my memory that an East Anglian farmer fed innumerable potatoes to pigs, and let some rot in the clamps. The poor of East London were paying at the rate of LIZ a ton, while the producer, not fifty miles away, could not sell at los. a ton. Transport and overhead charges, and the many minor costs of distribution, must always make the retail price look absurdly high to the producer ; but utter inability to sell is another thing. The fault largely lies in over-centralised selling and buying. Local self-sufficiency—village Covent Gardens—suggest the ideal.
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