Custard, Culverts and Cake by Courage Cara; Headlam Nicola;

Author:Courage, Cara; Headlam, Nicola;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

ALL GOOD GIFTS…

One of those ways is to celebrate a harvest festival and still to make the harvest supper a major occasion in the autumn calendar. That Alan Franks is the one who organises the supper ties it to the worship of the Church which gives thanks to God for God’s bounty. A key question is rural theology asks what it means to believe that God provides God’s creatures with the means to sustain life, a question that forms part of the doctrine of creation. As Young (1976, p. 13) points out, for all that Christian theology is centred on what Christians understand to be the revelation of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of creation ‘seems an obvious place to start any serious thinking about the Christian faith.’ Young points out that the Bible, the Creeds and even the 39 Articles of the Church of England all begin with God as creator.

From day to day, the practical concern in thinking about the notion of God as creator is not about whatever primordial events brought the universe to birth but about the fact of creation and the benefits that human beings derive from it; the theist believes that creation has been ordered so that creatures are fed and life maintained by God’s action or (general) providence. The fundamental nature of this belief in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is indicated by the first words that Scripture records God saying to the first human being — ‘You may eat….’ (Genesis 2v16).

‘You may eat…’ was a message that the Atlee government wanted to communicate in the late 1940s. The genesis of The Archers in 1948 was, as is well known, in the desire of the BBC to assist the Ministry of Agriculture to encourage farmers to make the reforms deemed necessary to feed a growing population that was still struggling with rationing: most of those who know about The Archers beginnings are aware of the story of Henry Burtt’s interjection in Godfrey Baseley’s discussion on how that desire might be met — ‘What we need is a farming Dick Barton’ (Smethurst, 1996, p. 12). The Archers has faithfully chronicled changing methods in food production in the subsequent 67 years. Such changes (as chronicled by, inter alia, Harvey, 2006) have involved the use and overuse of pesticides, the increased confinement of animals, the development of new breeds of both beast and crop, the deployment of new forms of pesticide and a move away from patterns of crop rotation. Alongside the growth of factory farming and a belief amongst many farmers (with Brian Aldridge as their champion) that efficient food production can best be accomplished through large-scale enterprises, there has also been a renaissance of small-scale production and an emphasis on local produce.

A key question that recurs in Ambridge is about the quality of food that is being produced. In January 2016, Ruth Archer returned from her sojourn in New Zealand full of ideas about the future of the farm.

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