Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Modern Peasant, by JoJo Tulloch – review

A corduroy-trousered urban peasant carries home the goods from one of London’s many farmers’ markets. Credit: Getty Images | Shutterstock | iStock | Alamy 
issue 10 August 2013

You know that something’s afoot when Lakeland says so. Lakeland is the kitchenware company which has more of a finger on the pulse of Middle England than most MPs. So when the company declared that it can barely keep pace with demand for home mincers it’s a sign of the times. It attributes the home-made everything trend to the horsemeat scandal and a food supply chain that looks like the Tudor family tree. Its line of cheesemaking products and sausage casing is doing well.

The surge in the number of DIY/artisan cookbooks is telling too. The title of one of them sums up the mood: The Modern Peasant by Jojo Tulloh (Chatto & Windus, £16.99). She observes that

city-dwellers are cut off from the countryside and the chain of production that served our ancestors so well. In the past, we grew, reared and caught our food or procured it from producers we knew and trusted.

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