Haydn Shaughnessy meets Colin Tudge, who advocates sound farming methods and reclaiming control of food from big business
Colin Tudge wants your ear. The former zoologist is intent on raising the humble farm to the status of a philosophical puzzle. "The point of science is not to alter our universe. It is to enhance our appreciation of it. The only right attitude to nature is reverence," he says.
According to Tudge, scientists in agricultural chemistry and biology, unaware of their responsibilities, have pursued an agenda of aggressive change, to our ultimate detriment. Their innovations include the cow that can produce 4,000 gallons of milk a year (800 gallons is already hard work on the udders) and turkeys that are little more than inflated breasts.
Amoral utilitarianism in the world of animals is being taken to extremes, Tudge believes, and the idea of a good society is lost on policy makers. He says this defies two philosophical principles. First, the proper attitude to nature is deeply moral. Revere it because it is too complex to understand. Second, people have to be able to make a claim for a good society.
The single most important component of a civilised society, Tudge says, paraphrasing Ghandi, is the degree of autonomy its people enjoy. By reducing agricultural diversity, we reduce human autonomy. The land, stripped of variety, needs fewer people. Human knowledge of what sustains us also declines.
We are currently imposing the same loss of autonomy on the Third World, the first recipients of large-scale, genetically modified crops. (Genes from different species should not be mixed, he says. Doing so has implications we cannot begin to anticipate.) Tudge is now actively involved in building the intellectual case for Compassion in World Farming, and the Forum For the Future on ways to monitor agri-science.
The fact that agri-science seeks to maximise the output of animals is, he believes, at the root of a wider social malaise. In his book, So Shall We Reap, just reissued in paperback, Tudge says farmers are unhappy because the craft of farming - the knowledge specific families had of particular tracts of land and the output their land could support - has been lost. What replaces deep knowledge is poor science. This should be the number one issue on election manifestos, he says.
We have fallen into the trap of seeing nature, and people, as expressions of chemistry and biology, made up of so many cells, vitamins and proteins. Modern agricultural scientists, he argues "are fools. Highly educated fools." Tudge says nature has to be understood through the millennia of evolution, and the startling degree of subtlety that this has brought us. The infinite variety of nature is something that humans understood when they were allowed to practise the craft of farming, rather than its industrial equivalent.
Cooking, animal welfare groups, community farms and farmers' markets are all a source of hope, however.
"Cooking", says Tudge, "is the most important craft activity for everybody. Cooking knowledge can drive consumerism and make it a force for good. People are absolutely ready for change. This is not an argument we have to win. People want something back in their lives." He identifies this something as autonomy, morality and skill, three elements of Tudge's philosophy of human nature.
So Shall We Reap by Colin Tudge, published by Penguin, €8.99