The first visitors came to stay in my new house in the Dales for the Easter weekend. In the past few months I’d rather run out of steam with the moving and unpacking process; so was still surrounded by boxes and had got used to a ‘camping’ level of existence in which I was puttering along at a basic ‘just enough’ way of doing things.

Having visitors is a completely different level and way of being. I had to organise a bed for the spare room, which entailed taking down, transporting and reassembling beds from here and there. The kitchen needed to be stocked with both food and utensils to provide meals that were more substantial than cheese on toast. Boxes needed to be emptied and tidied away. Cleaning and vacuuming needed to pass muster. I’m still apologising to the poor spiders whose homes were swept away.

Then there was the matter of what to eat. My visitors were flexitarians and so would eat a traditional Easter lamb roast if I cooked it for Sunday lunch. In the past I’ve been vegetarian and vegan, but my mother was from a farming family and she always pointed out that if you liked to eat cheese then you needed calves, half of which were male. So when I broke my vegan diet because of the lure of traditional farmhouse cheese then the logic of food production meant that I also needed to be able to eat beef as well.

Likewise, I’m surrounded by fields of lambs. They are delightful but wouldn’t be there if they weren’t going to market eventually. And if the Dales farmers weren’t earning a living from sheep, then the dry-stone walls would fall down, the field barns would decay and collapse, the paths, meadows and moors would quickly revert to scrub, and in dry weather the whole lot would catch fire in periodic destructive blazes.

So, following that train of logic, if I enjoyed seeing the lambs gambolling in the spring, and if I didn’t want my house to burn down, I needed to also be part of the rural dale’s sheep livestock economy. So I bought some lamb to roast in the old Aga cooker in my kitchen.

I was careful to choose the provenance of the lamb and wasn’t surprised to find that the price was nearly double that of lamb from the supermarket, even though my lamb roast was coming from a few miles away and the supermarket lamb was coming from the other side of the planet. 

I reasoned that I was getting a lot more than a piece of meat for the price. I was getting the beautiful meadows next to my house and the lambs in them. My money was contributing to the livelihoods of the farmers who maintain the meadows and the dry-stone walls; and it was part of keeping my local butcher in business in the nearby market town.

Do you ever think about joining the dots of how our behaviour and purchasing power can cascade through society? By making certain choices we’re actually buying much more than the object in front of us. It can be quite a controversial topic though, for example in my case of eating lamb there are also some good arguments for a vegan diet.

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member