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We have just had a heatwave in Britain for the second year running. Temperatures reached nearly 40 degrees centigrade in the London area, and well over 30 degrees over the rest of the country, even in southern Scotland. There was no rain for weeks and water supplies were badly affected. Emergency measures have been in place, schools closed, trains cancelled, cool refuges suggested. Only the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, basically the area north of Inverness, have escaped the searing heat. The effect on our food supplies is likely to be serious. Last summer’s droughts and floods affected harvests all over Britain. This year, farmers are reporting serious problems again as a result of the extreme and unpredictable weather. Food security has become a hot topic.

At the same time, the war in Iran, a war which we ourselves did not start and in which we are not officially engaged, has disrupted oil, gas and fertiliser supplies. Farm machinery uses fuel. So do the ships and lorries which move food around the country, let alone the planet. We also face threats from countries who object to our government’s political position on various issues, which could easily, if things escalate, extend to drone attacks and cyber attacks affecting our food distribution system.

In an article by Professor Tim Lang in the Guardian in March this year, he pointed out that we import half of our food. Britain is currently only 54% food self-sufficient and this percentage is probably falling. For comparison, France is 100% self-sufficient, Germany 83%, the Netherlands 80% and Spain 75%. 

All of a sudden, journalists have started writing about the probability of food shortages in the UK and calling on the government to make preparations to guarantee food security. It has been reported that households over the whole of the UK are going to be advised to store a supply of tinned food and other essentials to last three days. (In winter, in the stormy north of Scotland, we already do that.) The MP for Orkney and Shetland, who is chairman of the environment, food and rural affairs committee at Westminster, secured approval for a debate on food security (The Orcadian, Thursday 11 June 2026 page 21). Mr Carmichael has pointed out that for many years, the UK’s food security has been taken for granted, but this is no longer sensible. People seemed to have forgotten what happened during the Covid pandemic. Or what is currently happening with supplies of certain medicines that many of us rely on.

In the Guardian article I learned several things about how our food reaches us that I had never thought about before. As a museum teacher and re-enactor, with a character based on a Tudor cook, I was regularly astonished by how few children could recognise common herbs and vegetables which had not been chopped up and frozen in plastic bags. As a gardener I know how to grow potatoes and parsley. But I now feel ashamed that I have never thought before about exactly how the bulk of my food gets from farm to fork, and what some of the implications of the current system are.

One is Distribution Centres.  Most of us buy our food rather than producing it ourselves. Most of us buy it from supermarkets. Most farmers have to sell their produce to supermarkets. Professor Lang described Britain’s current food supply system as “agrifood capitalism” rather than farming. The priority is profit rather than feeding people, and it is dominated by a few big companies.  Nine large retailers supply nearly 95% of all of our retail food in the UK. And they depend on only 131 distribution centres, where the food is gathered and stored before being distributed to supermarkets. If anything happened to even one or two of them, the country would be in trouble. It isn’t just the climate crisis which threatens our food supplies. There have recently been reports that companies such as Peter Green Chilled, which transports chilled food to several major supermarkets in Britain, have suffered ransomware attacks. Whether by criminals just out for money, or by hostile governments as a modern equivalent of the submarines which attacked convoys in WWII, the effect would be the same on our food supply.

For example, in Orkney, we have three supermarkets, Tesco, Lidl and the Co-op. Tesco supplies almost one third of all UK retail food, and depends on just twenty of these 131 distribution centres. As far as I can see from an internet search, only one of them is in Scotland, near Edinburgh in the Central belt. Lidl has “over 14” centres in Britain, but only one in Scotland, in North Lanarkshire, again part of the Central Belt. The Co-op is the 7^th largest food retailer in Britain. It is not a single company but a complicated conglomeration of individual independent co-operative societies (I got totally lost over their structure and its implications). The Co-op has 13 distribution centres, 1 national, 9 regional, and 3 smaller local ones to provide for remote areas. In Scotland, there is a regional centre in Lanarkshire and a local centre in Inverness. Orkney also has wholesale suppliers such as JW Gray in Kirkwall and James Wilson in Stromness, which supply smaller local shops, and businesses such as hotels, schools, hospitals, etc.  Most of this food gets to supermarkets in towns and cities in big container lorries. In the Northern and Western Isles, they travel part of the way by ferry as well.

The other is stockpiles.  I found a company blog which gives a brief overview of how food wholesaling works in the UK. It is interesting and worth a visit. One important thing in particular which struck me had been pointed out by Professor Lang. It concerns reserves or stockpiles. In order to minimise the amount of storage space retailers require, the system relies on, and is proud of, ‘Just-in-time’ supply. In Orkney, we already know what happens when our normal winter gales disrupt the ferries – empty shelves in supermarkets. ‘Just in time’ doesn’t work so well for us during a stormy winter. Perhaps it is not only individuals who should be thinking about stockpiling food supplies, even if it does reduce their profits by a tiny percentage.

Many European governments are now talking about preparing for emergencies. They are building up stockpiles to keep their citizens fed in an emergency such as war or a pandemic. Switzerland, for example, has a stockpile sufficient to feed its population for three months and is increasing it to a year.  Finland, which produces 80% of its own food, in spite of its northern latitude and short growing season, has deliberately prepared for the possibility of interruptions to supplies of food and other essentials, such as fuel to keep agricultural machinery and food transport running.    Finland also has an amazing government website with detailed and very clear information about what supplies to keep ready for an emergency. It is aimed quite obviously at an emergency caused by invasion by a hostile power but it is very useful as a guide.

All in all, we have a lot to think about at the moment. Our food supply in Britain is very vulnerable to things like hostile action by groups or countries, diesel supplies running low, IT failures, bad weather etc. The question of ‘food miles’ is not only a matter of protecting the environment, it’s also about protecting the actual supply of food itself.

I ‘m not actually interested in games. Not since I grew out of childhood Snakes-and-Ladders. I don’t mind playing a few games at Christmas, but it is the social interaction not the mental exercise which gives me pleasure. And contrary to what appears to be public opinion, I didn’t have my personality erased on the eve of my 70^th birthday. I never have been and I’m still not interested in games.

I do like learning languages, so I signed up to improve my German with Duolingo. I’m using the free version, so my sessions are punctuated with advertisements. That’s fair enough. They started with advertisements for clothes quite unsuitable for my age, but they now seem to have realised that I am an old woman so I keep getting adverts for brain-training. “Specially for Seniors”, they coo. “Keep your brain active”. “Prevent Memory Loss”.  Do the idiots not realise that learning a language is just as good exercise for your brain as playing silly games, with the added bonus that that you end up speaking it?

If I indulge myself with a copy of a weekend newspaper or a magazine, there is bound to be a section at the end with brain-training puzzles. If I’m sitting in my GP’s waiting room, if I’m sitting in an airport departure lounge, if I’m sitting on a bench waiting for a train, the people around me are no longer reading a good book or a magazine as they used to do. They are all staring at their smartphones playing puzzle games, for the good of their brains.

Sometimes it seems to me as if the entire middle-aged to elderly population of Britain is obsessed with the idea that if they don’t keep doing brain-training puzzles, they will inevitably develop Alzheimer’s. Am I the only person whose ageing brain is getting more than enough exercise trying to keep up with running my everyday life, using technology that is constantly changing and frequently malfunctions?

I have just had to buy a new laptop with Windows 11. I still haven’t figured out how to do all the things I did for years using Windows 10. Even worse, I spend a lot of time turning down offers to do things I don’t want to do at all. They pop up at odd moments all over the screen.

My banks are another rich source of brain-training. Some of them provide me with a paper certificate for the tax man if I go in and ask them. Some of them send me one online in a tiny format that I can’t read on my smartphone. I have to download it as a pdf, then take a screenshot of the pdf and email it to myself, save it, paste it into a word document and print it. I can just about manage to pay bills and transfer money using online banking, but anything more complicated means a trip into town to the local branch for some help, at least the first time I do it. If the bank closes that branch I shall have to change banks. Every so often they change the format in their app so I have to hunt all over for the bit I need. And banks keep on taking each other over.

I wanted to get into my account with my broadband provider. It displayed a message in one corner saying ‘BLOCKED’. I had to text my son to ask if this meant that someone had been trying to hack my account or whether it was probably just the website playing up. On another occasion Firefox blocked me from logging on to our local library’s website on the grounds that it was unsafe. Next day it was OK again!!!? I’m always horribly aware of the presence of hackers, scammers etc out there, just waiting for me to press the wrong button in an unwary moment, so this kind of thing really ups my stress levels.

And although my current electricity provider is the best I have ever had, my smart meter has been sending my bill in two halves, a week apart, for months. I have already written about the extensive research I had to do to understand how my smart meter worked.

Summer is not just a time for long sunny days in my garden. It’s the time for renewing my house and car insurance. I have to spend days carefully going through the documents emailed to me line by line to make sure that the person issuing them hasn’t made any typos that invalidate the insurance. Or made a mistake because they are new to the job and don't understand how to input some of the data onto their database. On one occasion I had to go to my garage and get them to telephone the insurance people and talk them through it. Yes, these things do happen. Remember that poor old lady who recently got prosecuted over a typo in her car insurance? My nightmares every year at renewal time are not unrealistic.

Train tickets, plane tickets, tickets for events all come online nowadays, and have to be downloaded to your smart phone so that a QR code or a bar code can be read at the entrance. Each one has to be downloaded in a slightly different way. I’m really surprised how well I have managed the recent examples – I didn’t need to scream for help. And I'm pretty good now at checking in for flights online, within the UK. When I tried to do it on a trip to Germany and they wanted me to include my passport photo, I had no idea how to do it and had to queue for hours at the airport.

The nearest person I can ask for help is 15 miles away in Kirkwall, at the computer shop. The only computer shop in the whole of Orkney. In the past, bills arrived by post, printed on paper. So long as you could read and write and do elementary arithmetic you could manage your household affairs. If there was something wrong with your bill you rang up. People complain nowadays about being kept hanging on in a 30-minute queue while the phone plays ghastly music to them. That’s after you have guessed which button to press in each of several sets to get to the department which will help you. Or not: the last time I tried ringing a company up I was answered by an AI which wasn’t working properly and kept sending me round in circles. In the past you didn’t have to navigate your way around a website that keeps changing its layout and periodically malfunctions, nor remember or store safely an infinite number of pin numbers and passwords. You didn’t have to have a smart phone so that you could do 2-factor authentication. I believe there is a way to do that without a smart phone but it sounds even more complicated. If I understood my friend's complaints right.

For those who are very familiar with modern technology, it is probably convenient to be able to pay your electricity bill on the train, or organise your house insurance during your coffee break. But I don’t suppose it is only the elderly who struggle constantly to deal with all this, lose money they can ill afford, and even end up in trouble with the law.

All in all, even though I never play the recommended games, I reckon my brain is getting enough training to keep it going even if I live to be a hundred and fifty years old.  Auf Wiedersehen!

For the last two years, I have been learning a lot of new words. Some of these I have learned by choice, as in my German lessons, or my pathetic attempts to learn how to transliterate 17^th century Scottish manuscripts. And some of them, such as ‘MPAN’, I had to learn to ensure my household electricity supply.

Dear Reader, have you ever heard of an MPAN? Do you have the faintest idea what it is? No, nor did I until about eighteen months ago. I have had to find out as a direct result of the RTS switchoff. The Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) was a long wave radio signal, which was used to control the times at which household electricity meters switched on certain domestic equipment like storage radiators, to take advantage of off-peak (cheap rate) electricity. It has operated since the 1980s. The signal is being phased out from the end of June 2025 because the equipment is outdated and the parts are no longer available if something wears out.

The discontinuation of the signal means that anybody who uses off-peak electricity for something vital like storage heaters has had to get a smart meter. The smart meter sends a signal to switch on the electricity supply to your storage radiators, hot water heaters etc. Your electricity provider has a number of ‘codes’ which can be applied to your account to set the times of day when the cheap rate is in operation at your home. The meter also transmits readings automatically to your electricity provider which are used to generate your bill. As far as I can understand, it uses cell phone technology in central and southern England, and long-range radio technology in the north including Scotland. It does so via a Data Communications Company server which passes it on to your electricity provider. I have only just found out that when I pay my electricity bill I am not only paying my provider plus SSEN who own the cables and substations, but also this communications company which transmits the signal. (See Postscript below!!!)

It took me months to find all this out, because a year ago the information was not readily available on the internet and nobody, including my (former) provider nor the person I spoke to at the CAB knew enough about it, specifically which signal the smart meters in my area used. I got a variety of confusing answers, unlike today when you can get quite a clear explanation online. In an area with dire mobile phone coverage (improving now since the row over Digital Voice), this question was important. There is also the problem that young people answering telephones may know all about it (or not?), but however willing they may be, they don’t always know how to explain all this clearly over the telephone to novices of any age.

And so to the MPAN.  MPAN is short for “Meter Point Administration Number”, also known as a “supply number” or “S number”. It is a unique 13-digit number which does not change if you change your supplier because it identifies the “electricity supply point” for your home. This number is essential for managing your account. It is NOT the same as the “meter serial number”, a.k.a. Meter ID or MSN, (ten digits), which identifies the physical device doing the metering.

An MPAN can have several meters associated with it, or even no meter at all if the electricity supply is unmetered. Or the opposite. My meter (the physical device) has TWO MPANS, one for the cheap rate electricity that runs my storage radiators, and one for everything else. They each have a separate number and they appear separately on my bill. In fact I usually get two separate bills, because the smart meter isn’t smart enough to send me just one.

It gets worse. One of my two MPANS has two “registers”, one of which does not appear on my bill. Nobody seems to understand why – I have asked. My supplier’s customer service agents have given me several different explanations (don’t get me wrong, they are the best electricity supplier I have had to date). The local charity for helping people with their electricity problems doesn’t understand it. To make matters even more confusing, the register numbers which appear on the meter itself when you are trying to read it are not the same numbers as the MPAN numbers (S-numbers): they are four digit numbers, such “E1-01”. I am currently taking meter readings every day and recording which devices I am using and making huge Excel spread sheets, to try and make some sense of it. After some bad experiences with previous suppliers, I like to check what they say I have consumed against what my meter says. I don’t trust the technology. I have had too many experiences in many areas where technology went wrong.

The ‘Home Display Unit’ is useless because it does not show separate readings for the two different MPANS.

Of course nobody is willing to come out to my home and actually look at the meter themselves. Human technicians cost money, especially on a small island where they have to be shipped in for short periods from the mainland. I have seldom seen anybody as exhausted as the young engineer who installed my smartmeter (working for yet another company); he refused a cup of restorative tea because he had another meter to fit that day and it was going to take him another three hours. He wouldn’t finish until 8pm.

You are often asked to take a photo with your smartphone and email it to them. Fortunately, unlike many people of my age, I do have a smartphone (which really is smart) and I know how to take photos and email them to people. But it still is not so easy. My meter for some reason had to be installed at floor level, and it is difficult for an arthritic old lady to get down on the floor and read it. I have to use a garden kneeler. A friend had hers installed so high up that she needs a ladder to read it. And the display cycles so fast that it is difficult to either take a photo or write the figures down. I did try recording it as a video but my phone refused to transmit it because the file was too large.

Fascinating! But I never needed to know all this until, at the age of 75, I had to have a smart meter. Before, I just had two separate meters.  This is a good illustration of how life is becoming increasingly complicated for older people, unless they have family living nearby. Which more and more of us don’t. Or even then – my nearest (young) relative had never heard of an MPAN. He is living in rented accommodation with no prospect of home ownership. The MPAN is his landlord’s problem.

POSTSCRIPT. An interesting postscript to my investigation is an article in the Guardian on 2^nd November by Jillian Ambrose. The DCC has had to hand over the running of the data network which connects the UK’s 39m smart meters to a not-for-profit public interest body. This comes after what is described as “years of spiralling costs and delays”, with millions of households facing billing issues and almost one-third of smart meters have not been working properly.

PPS Sometimes the smart meters stop working for no apparent reading and the bill you are sent is wrong.

When I was young I had an aunt living in Kent who had a little greenhouse in her garden. She grew the most wonderful tomatoes and cucumbers in it. Green houses have long been popular with the gardeners of Britain, to keep the sharp east wind off their plants. Sometimes they had a little paraffin heater in them against frost, but for light and water they just relied on the sun and an outdoor tap. Half a century later, we've come a long way. It looks as if all the salad in Britain may soon be grown hydroponically in a form of super-greenhouse. Techno-lettuces, you might say?

During WWII the UK government had to cope with the problem of feeding a population of nearly 50 million people. Britain had depended for a long time on exchanging manufactured goods for food grown in other countries and there was no way that it could supply all its own food for that number of people. Every schoolchild knows about the heroic solution. It worked, but we may be facing a similar situation again soon. We still rely on imported food, and if our supply of imported food were to be interrupted for some reason, it would be far more difficult today. The UK population is now nearly 70 million and there just isn’t enough spare land. An enormous amount of what used to be farmland is now covered by a creeping sprawl of homes, offices, factories, roads etc. If our supply networks were interrupted we would have a serious problem. And these things can happen very quickly.

The favoured solution at present appears to be vertical farming, a form of indoor farming. Vertical farming means growing vegetables in giant greenhouses, not only outdoors on land usually farmed by traditional methods, but in places such as disused mines and tunnels, underground car parks, shipping containers, or on the roofs of buildings. The plants are grown stacked on shelves one above the other, or in towers, so that there is a massive crop from a very small footprint. Orkney is an agricultural area with centuries of experience in growing plants adapted to a difficult climate. Even here, the local college is working on a vertical farm project to avoid the difficulties of importing fresh fruit and veg to a remote storm-lashed island with a short growing season and hardly any daylight for several months per year.

Instead of using sunlight, the vegetables use artificial light from LED lamps. They are usually grown using hydroponic or aeroponic techniques rather than soil. The plants may have their roots in an inert substance such as perlite, with a water-based solution carrying all the nutrients they need running through it (hydroponics). Alternatively, they may have their roots growing down into a container where they grow unsupported but are periodically sprayed with a fine mist of water carrying the nutrients (aeroponics). There is even a method called aquaponics, where growing vegetables hydroponically is combined with farming fish. The waste water from the fish tanks is passed to the vegetables, providing them with nutrients, and then, having been purified by the plants, passed back to the fish.

These methods give complete control over light, temperature, humidity, and water, the vital things needed for plants to grow. Pollination of flowers such as courgettes or aubergines is done artificially as well. (What is the future for the pollinating insects I wonder?) This is known as Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). The use of LEDS means that you can supply the exact spectrum of light which a particular plant needs at a particular stage of its growth. These greenhouses use less water than a conventional farm, up to 95% less, because it can be recycled. They create less pollution than conventional farms because everything is done by electricity rather than tractors belching diesel fumes, although that of course depends on how the electricity is produced. There is far less need for pesticides and you don’t have to weed them. (Or worry about slugs.) The technology can constantly monitor how the systems are functioning, for example the pH of the nutrient fluid, the temperature and humidity of the surrounding atmosphere, and how well the plants are growing. Labour costs are kept to a minimum, because much of the process can be automated and controlled by computers (you may not consider that an advantage, if you are having trouble finding a job).  They are independent of the weather outside – gales, droughts, unseasonal snowstorms are no problem.  And you can grow food in cities so that it is close to consumers and food miles are low.

 In other words, you can grow large amounts of vegetables all year round, unaffected by bad weather, in a very small footprint, close to consumers and with fewer sources of environmental pollution, in a sophisticated form of greenhouse.  Sounds perfect.

Well, not quite. Some varieties of crops are more suitable for these techniques than others. Leafy greens such as lettuce, kale and spinach are easy, so are things like strawberries, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. But you can’t live on lettuce, and root vegetables are more difficult. However, it looks as if it might be possible to grow some of the staple carbohydrate crops this way.  Apparently potatoes are a possibility, although at present this is not considered commercially viable in the UK. Japan is experimenting successfully with growing rice hydroponically in vertical farms in disused warehouses. Rice is also being trialled in India. Barley is currently being grown hydroponically, although the articles I have seen focus on growing fodder for animals rather than humans. It can be grown very quickly using minimal amounts of water. I read about a fascinating project developed by refugees in the desert in western Algeria, with help from the World Food Program and Oxfam. These people are victims of desertification due to climate change. Unfortunately, climate change causes some people’s farmland to flood, in other places it becomes desert. They have been growing barley shoots hydroponically as fodder for their traditional sheep and goats.

There are some commonly-acknowledged drawbacks. These systems are expensive to set up, since they require a lot of specialised equipment,  for example LED grow-lights, or pumps for the nutrient fluids. You need ventilation and constant monitoring of the atmosphere to make sure that moulds won’t grow and there is enough CO2 for plant growth, which means electronic sensors and computers to analyse the results and make the adjustments. All this complicated equipment needs constant maintenance. It requires quite a lot of technical expertise in a variety of fields to set up and run an indoor farm successfully. And as it is a new technology, it is constantly changing and farmers or farming business have to keep on upgrading. Anybody who gets frustrated by the constant upgrades on their laptop will know all about this problem.

Doubts have been cast on how commercially viable they can be because of the large amount of electricity required. Renewable sources such as solar power are used, but power outages can be disastrous – a whole crop can be lost in minutes. Usually a back-up source is installed. The same goes for water. Even if the farm uses a system where water can be recycled it is usually necessary to top it up from time to time. There seems to be some confusion about plant pests. Although they are said to need far fewer pesticides, I have also read that waterborne diseases can spread very quickly, and tiny pests like aphids and thrips came become a problem.

Above all, there are possible supply chain problems for the technology. For example, there are firms based in the UK which make grow-lights. But when you search for what materials are needed to manufacture grow-lights, it would take several pages to describe them. And among them are rare earth minerals, 98% of which currently come from China. Other sources are being developed or “acquired”. But it seems to me that vertical farming merely moves the danger from supply chain problems one stage further on, from problems importing lettuces to problems importing the equipment to grow lettuces. A contribution from high-tech farming may be necessary to feed a massively oversized population, but we should remember that it isn’t in any sense a panacea.

And when I look out over the fields in Orkney and watch the wind creating moiré patterns across the fields of golden-brown barley, or watch a farmer ploughing a field with a flock of seagulls swooping and diving behind his tractor as it turns the earth, or even, when I smell the slurry that wafts throughout Orkney when the farmers spray the muck from their cowsheds onto the fields, I can only hope that conventional farming won’t disappear completely. Somehow I feel safer buying my food from a farmer who has at least some personal contact with the land and the seasons, rather than a businessman who considers raising crops a matter of computers, nutrient fluids and LEDs.

It’s early December, and a grey lid of cloud hangs over the Orkney Islands, alternately disgorging rain and sleet. Occasionally the clouds part and the extremely low angle of the sun results in the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen. Waves break across the Churchill Barriers, driven by sixty-mile-an-hour gusts. We only have daylight for six hours a day. What can you expect at 59 degrees north? In my vegetable garden, most plants have died back for the winter. The slugs have gnawed my Christmas potatoes down to the ground, and only my leeks, watercress and parsley are bravely holding out. Perhaps it’s a good time to visit, in imagination at least, the veggie patches of somewhere warmer and lighter. And I thought of babai, the Giant Swamp Taro, growing in the coral atolls of the Pacific.

When I was a little girl, nurtured on Robert Louis Stevenson* and RM Ballantyne**, I used to imagine living on the classic coral island. The sun always shone: on the equator, there is no winter dark and cold. White sandy beaches were lapped by the brilliant blue waves of the lagoon and fringed by waving green coconut palms. Coconuts dropped from the trees and tasty fish swam into your hands. Around the lagoon lay a reef of shimmering white coral, with a string of tiny low-lying islets rising just above the waves. The beaches on the outside of the reef were open to the vast Pacific Ocean. The only sounds were the rustling of the palm fronds and the breakers crashing and foaming against the reef…

I was recently re-reading an old favourite of mine, ‘A Pattern of Islands’, by Arthur Grimble***, describing his experiences as a colonial officer  in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, in the early 20^th century.  A second book in my personal library about these islands is ‘Atoll Holiday’, written by Nancy Phelan****, after she spent a long holiday in the Gilbert Islands in 1956. These islands were a British Protectorate from 1892 until 1916, and then a British colony until 1976, when they became two separate colonies. In 1978 the Gilbert Islands became independent, as the republic of Kiribati, and the Ellice Islands remained British, now called Tuvalu.

Kiribati lies in the central Pacific Ocean, and consists of 32 tiny atolls and one raised coral island, strung out across the equator. ‘Atoll’ is the name for a roughly circular coral reef, with or without islets, surrounding a central lagoon.  Atolls only occur in the warm tropical and subtropical seas where coral can grow. There are various theories about how they develop their characteristic shape, but the most popular seems to be that the coral formed around an extinct volcano which subsequently eroded away.

Daydreams apart, these islands are not the best place for growing vegetables. They are made of coral and have no stone. They also have very little, very poor, soil. Grimble, writing of his arrival in the Gilbert Islands in 1914, describes in heartrending detail how attempts to make compost for growing the sort of vegetables he was used to were foiled by the speed at which it eroded away. He wanted beans and tomatoes. He got coconuts. The islands are short of water too. Water comes from rainfall which forms a convex ‘freshwater lens’ between the ground surface and the lower layers of coral which are permeated with salt water from the surrounding ocean.  The little islets are usually only a few hundred metres across, from ocean to lagoon, so plants also have to be salt-tolerant. Most of Kiribati is only two metres above sea level.

Between them, Grimble and Phelan described a selection of vegetable foods which came mainly from trees.  There were coconuts: green and ripe, both nuts and milk, and the sweet sap known as toddy which was collected from the palm blossom. It can be drunk fresh, or fermented into an alcoholic drink. Toddy was collected every day by men climbing up the coconut palms, and Phelan explained that it contains many nutrients which complement a diet of mainly fish and coconut.  Pandanus fruit, breadfruit, banana and an occasional pawpaw or pumpkin were also mentioned.

The main vegetable grown by the islanders which wasn’t a tree, apart from occasional pumpkins, was a plant known as ‘babai’.  This is the local name for Cyrtosperma merkusii or giant swamp taro, a plant native to the islands and an important part of their culture. Babai has dark green arrow-shaped leaves, huge succulent stalks and flowers a bit like an arum lily. It can grow up to 6m tall, with leaves up to 2m long by over a metre wide. The starchy corm (the swollen base of the stem) can be nearly a metre in diameter and weigh 80-100kg. It can be stored for long periods in the ground, or sun-dried and stored, so it is a useful resource for times of shortage.

Both Grimble and Phelan talk about babai being grown in deep muddy pits with compost added, each plant wrapped round in a straw cage. The pits are muddy because they are dug into the level of the freshwater lens, and their size varies from a few square metres to over a quarter of a hectare.

Babai has to be properly processed to get rid of toxins but it is very nutritious and in the early 20^th century it was an important part of the local diet. Grimble refers to it being mashed with butter, or steamed. He found it indigestible. Phelan also found it very heavy (page 179), except when it was mixed with other ingredients. She was presented with a pudding called ‘buatoro’ which she thought very pleasant. It was made by grating the babai, mixing it with coconut cream and with a syrup called kamaimai which was rather like golden syrup and was made by boiling down toddy. The pudding was cooked in a leaf wrapper.  It does sound rather nice, if a bit heavy, rather like my father’s golden syrup steamed pudding.

Alas, in the 21^st century, although giant swamp taro is still quite widely grown, islanders have apparently largely switched from their traditional diet to buying wheat bread, rice and sugar with the proceeds from the copra trade. It may be more convenient in the short term, but the resulting health problems are causing serious concern.

And the legendary coral island with its shining sands, coconut palms and babai growing in muddy pits may soon be nothing more than a memory. The rising sea levels associated with global warming are threatening babai cultivation as the fresh water lens is being contaminated by sea water, and extreme high tides lead to salt water spilling over into the pits. Many Pacific island groups are preparing to migrate to other countries, as entire islands are in danger of being submerged. They are, after all, only 2m above sea level.

* ‘Treasure Island’, 1883 Robert Louis Stevenson

**‘The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean’, 1857 R. M. Ballantyne.

***‘A Pattern of Islands’, 1952 Arthur Grimble

****‘Atoll Holiday’, 1958 Nancy Phelan