Field Report - Weedkillers in the midst

Darlings, 

This silver fox has seen some things in his time. I once watched a man in Marseille eat an entire wheel of Époisses in a single sitting (the less said about the aftermath the better). I've witnessed Hunter S. Thompson attempt to make a soufflé with a blowtorch. I have, mes choux, lived a life of spectacle.

But nothing - and I do mean nothing - has appalled yours truly quite like what I witnessed last harvest while conducting a routine reconnaissance along the wheat fields of the Thames Valley.

 There I was, belly low, brush tucked, slinking through the hedgerow at dusk - a fox doing fox things - when I heard the rumble of a tractor. Now, darlings, one expects tractors in fields. That is broadly how agriculture works. But this tractor wasn’t sowing, nor was it harvesting. No. This tractor, darlings, was spraying. Spraying a crop that was golden, ripe and ready for the plucking.

Quelle honte.

What was it spraying? Weedkiller, darlings. Glyphosate - the active ingredient in Roundup - doused directly onto wheat that is about to enter the food chain. They call it 'pre-harvest desiccation', which is a fancy way of saying 'we kill the crop with chemicals so it dries faster and we can harvest it sooner.' Efficiency über alles. Never mind that the residue ends up in the grain, the flour, the bread, and then - in the end - people’s breakfasts.

The numbers, mes choux, are staggering. Glyphosate use on British crops has risen over 1,000% since 1990. Over two and a half million hectares of UK farmland are now treated with it every year - an area sixteen times the size of Greater London. It turns up routinely in tests on British bread. And the company behind Roundup? Currently settling cancer lawsuits to the tune of billions. Billions, darlings. With a B.

And here is the part that really makes this fox's brush bristle: the EU has already banned the practice of spraying glyphosate onto crops as a pre-harvest desiccant. But post-Brexit Britain? Au contraire, mes choux, au contraire.  

Now the reason your favourite food freedom fighting fox is sharing this particular dispatch now is that this summer the UK government launches a public consultation on whether to renew glyphosate's licence for up to fifteen more years. Fifteen! That’s a long time to keep spraying weedkiller on food, darlings, especially when the people who make it are haemorrhaging money in courtrooms across America.

So what can a fox - and his darlings - actually do?

One can buy real food from people who care about what goes into it. One can ask uncomfortable questions of everything in one’s cupboards. And when that consultation opens this summer, one can make one's voice heard. Loudly. Politely. But with tooth and claw.

Because here is what I know, mes choux: every slice of proper bread, made with clean flour from a farmer who wouldn't dream of dousing their crop in weedkiller days before harvest - every single slice is a small, delicious act of resistance.

And this fox does so love a bit of resistance. 

Toodle pip.

 R.

X 

PS - Do share this dispatch freely with any food freedom fighters who may be active, dormant and everything in between.