Corn Country
Full details
| Authors & editors | |
| Publisher | B.T. Batsford |
| Year of publication | 1940 |
| Languages | |
| Medium | Book |
| Edition | 1 |
| Topics | Climate, environment and development > Sustainable farming & Government support |
| Tags | |
| Scope & content | an account of corn-growing in England, its history, its processes throughout the year and its future. Spectator 1941: https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/28th-february-1941/17/king-corn" "an epilogue of controversial pleading and a well- ordered attack, supported largely by Lord Lymington's Famine in England, on the fumbling agricultural policy of the day. Mr. Warren remarks of Lord Lymington's warning of the consequences of a policy of making " the land give more and take less," it is not meant to be pleasant. The hypothetical situation, " if we find ourselves at war," on which the warning arguments of Famine in England are based, is now a plain and painful reality. So far as we know the most optimistic estimate of cereal food reserves now in Britain is a three months' supply. . . . Our own food reserves in England from home-grown wheat is enough for about six weeks. Our average day-to-day reserve of imported wheat is enough for about another six weeks, if we are lucky. To one painful reality Mr. Warren adds another : The basis of health is the land. If-the land is rightly served, its produce . . . and we who live on that produce will therefore be the healthier. To take a single instance: In order to secure the degree of whiteness in bread that is now the fashion, the germ of the kernel, which would otherwise colour the flour, must first be milled away. . . . It is then left to some enterprising business concern to point out the discrepancy to us, manufacture a patent food from the abstracted germs, and alarm us into buying it in order to restore the balance of health. The argument that between germless bread and germless politicians the country is slipping very fast into decadence is not new; but it is still highly controversial, still close to the truth, and it leavens the concluding pages of Corn Country with a constructive kind of zest entirely lacking in Mr. Warren's preceding book. If the banner-symbols for a rejuvenated English countryside are ever to mean anything, they must indeed have behind them some of this same energetic and positive zeal. If the day of victory by arms is not again to be followed by that old vicious rotation of subsidies, quotas and promises, but by the recognition, translated into vital and working terms, of "the responsibility we owe to the land as the foundation of national health," then the sooner we begin to think along the lines of this book and those by Professor Stapledon, Lord Lymington and others of their kind, so much the better for the future of England." |
Copies held
Accession no. 230664
- Shelf location: D100-WAR
- Donor: Michael Yates collection