Sideways News

Alex James on the farm

2009 has been a phenomenal year for Blur - with the release of a career-spanning “best of” album, a series of triumphant reunion gigs across the UK, and an emotional headline set at Glastonbury providing high-profile highlights.

And yet, despite this surge in activity, each member has found time to continue to focus on the things that they’ve dedicated their attention to in the last couple of years. In the case of bassist Alex James, this is cheese.

Having put the excesses of the 90s behind him and swapped London living for a farm in rural Oxfordshire, he decided not to rest on his laurels and spend his money on soft furnishings and champagne, but instead invest in turning his home into a working dairy farm. Now, he’s arguably one of Britain’s best-known cheesemakers.  

Food is the new cool
We caught up with him after he’d spent the day on a West Country farm - drawing attention to the Sainsbury’s Eat Britain campaign - to talk about the lot of the modern farmer, how eating local produce makes a big difference, and why the nation is so taken by things that taste great.

“Food is the big story of the last ten years,” he said. “The 90s were all about arts, but things have changed… we’ve become ‘gourmandized’. Chefs are more successful internationally than rock stars, now.”

“In the past, when the German au pair arrived, she wanted to know if I’d met Robbie Williams: now people are far more interested and impressed to know whether or not I’ve met Jamie Oliver.”  

Shrewdly, he tapped into this increasingly food-focused mindset and isolated what it is that people really want: the basics, that they can afford to buy. “Once you have good cheese, everything follows. It began when farmers got into desperate circumstances; they couldn’t gain enough profit from their milk, but they could with cheese, so they switched to making that. Now this country is full of amazing farmers working to the highest standards in Europe.”

Quality consuming  
As a food producer, he believes people should think more about quality rather than the quantity of what we eat, and that this needn’t necessarily be a financial drain: “It’s easy to eat enough calories. But it’s far better to eat less, good-quality food. The richer people get, the thinner they are. And if it tastes good, people will always buy it. Food nowadays shares a lot with wine in the terms of taste, particularly things like cheese; specialist varieties used to be niche but they’ve gradually become more mainstream and available. But food is affordable, it’s easy to buy.”

Keeping it British
The Eat Britain ethos focuses on something that the environmentally-minded hold dear: imports and food miles. By urging us to look for good-quality food locally, it seeks to eliminate the environmental cost of transporting food to the UK. “There are threats with imports,” Alex concurs, although he remains cynical about the widespread uptake of ethically-sourced ingredients. “What I’ve discovered is that if you made a cheese from the milk of an endangered monkey - and you had to kill it - if it tasted nice, people would still eat it.”  

Our tastes have been conditioned by the intriguing flavours of exotic imports, now readily available in the supermarkets. So, have we lost sight of what’s on our doorstep? “We’ve got more varieties of cheese in Britain than there are in France, but they do it on a larger scale… they have generations of enthusiasm and experience, but we have that zest. The Internet has ruined practically every single business going – music, film, TV, arts. Food is about the only thing you can’t download, and it’s affordable.”  

“It’s party time for the British food industry - the US looks to us for good ideas now, instead of Europe, because there’s nothing happening there. The UK is a beacon for foodies because everything happening here is so interesting.”

Misleading food miles
Caution and common sense need to be exercised, though, both of which we also run the risk of ignoring if we focus too intently on the issue of food miles. “Food miles are important but they can be misleading. I heard recently that it’s better to eat lamb from New Zealand, since the costs of importing it to the UK are actually offset by the way in which it’s produced over there, where they have better conditions.”  

This isn’t just speculation, fuelled by a backlash against ecological thinking, he has a vested interest: “I’m a sheep farmer, so that breaks my heart to hear, because I love British lamb.”

His optimism for the local food industry is infectious, though, and it’s a message which he’s keen to spread, citing the cultural “following wind” as a way to turn the British food industry into a main global influence. Coupled with growing public appreciation of the good food that can be found locally, this could develop the enthusiasm of passionate farmers and producers like him into something far more mainstream.

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