The Food We Eat

After a hot Sunday afternoon spent helping a good friend decorate her new home, we sat down to eat. We were weary, but it had been a good day: we had achieved what we had set out to achieve, and we had even managed to get down to the river for a dip. Food and wine found their mark. It was a quiet celebration between people who are important to one another.

Shelly commented at one point on how good food tasted after a day’s physical labour. My mind went back, as it often does, to happy childhood moments in Italy when my parents would invite neighbours to the house for a feast. They had recently purchased their own vision of earthly paradise in the Modenese Appennines, a pile of what we came fondly to call ‘designer rubble’ surrounded by ancient orchards that had seen neither hand nor blade for a good two decades, and the neighbours had all become involved in one way or another in helping us restore it to some semblance of order. 

The neighbours were farmers whose entire lives had been shaped by physical labour. Their memories stretched back to before the War, when village festivals were rowdy, all-out affairs whose purpose was to propitiate abundance in a life marked by want. During the War many of them joined the Partisan brigades hiding out in the woods above the house. They were fighting National Socialist imperialism and Fascist oppression. 

Their stories were all about survival: hiding animals and produce, evading detection, capture and execution, moments of extraordinary human connection when a faceless enemy became a frightened and vulnerable individual who could no longer sustain the lie he had been sworn into dying for. They recalled practical jokes, foibles, comic moments, and told their stories with natural ease and much laughter. They invariably turned up with bags full of homemade wine and spirits and cakes, and they praised my mother’s cooking. They honoured every invitation, and always made it a memorable evening. 

To this day, when walking in the woods above the family home, I visit the cave where the fighters stored their supplies, pause on the slab of sandstone up on the ridge where a rough hole was chiselled out to accommodate the stand of a gun, and imagine a local lad strafing Nazi convoys on the road below, now hidden by a thick screen of trees, before picking up his gun and ammunition and running off into the woods; I stop at the top of the hill and look down into the foundations of a twelfth-century watchtower where, right at the bottom, in a crumbling corner, an opening can still be seen, said by some to be the entrance to a tunnel that the Partisans used to smuggle supplies from the village below up into the woods, or to evade capture by roving bands of black-shirts and stormtroopers. The tunnel is said to come out on the little green my mother now uses to hang her washing on. It all seems so improbable now. 

My thoughts are always with those neighbours who brought blessings and grace to our table, who welcomed us with open hearts and did not resent us for buying over a property that for them held memories of a much older world which, even then, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, simply did not exist anymore, and to which we were outsiders. They taught me how important the food we eat is, how sacred the coming together to enjoy the fruits of earth and labour really is, and it suddenly struck me, as Shelly made her comment, that not only are we now ruled by children, but that our world is currently being systematically demolished by career technologists and technocrats who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives that didn’t involve a greasy pole.

Hashtag synthetic meat, insects, genetically modified vegetables, masked cattle, the wholescale destruction of traditional farming, centrally controlled digital currencies, social credits, mandated ‘healthcare’, lockdowns, bans on social gatherings (including funerals), bans on the freedom of speech and assembly, daily acts of globalist media terrorism, orchestrated migration flows, state-mandated lies and violence. National Socialism morphs into International Socialism: a recipe for anti-globalist resistance on a truly global scale.