One early and not entirely unforeseen consequence of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union was the disruption caused to the food supply chain. The soaring costs of importing goods, not to the mention the associated bureaucratic difficulties around the negotiation of taxes and duties, contributed to the gradual demise of many major supermarkets — not just the big European conglomerates with their no longer feasible budget prices, but also some of the country’s most venerable establishments, including, rather embarrassingly, two with Warrants of Royal Appointment.
The greatest challenge, however, and one which faced both the agricultural and food retail sectors alike, was the exodus of the largely European migrant workforce upon whom so many business models had come to depend. This was initially hailed as a victory by many pro-Leave voters, who seemed willing to accept the price hikes and temporary shortages as necessary inconveniences on the road to regaining sovereignty over every aspect of how the country was run.
But as the situation rapidly declined, resulting in acres of unpicked crops left rotting in fields up and down the country, and with outbreaks of civil disturbance greeting empty supermarket shelves which had no one to refill them and nothing for them to be refilled with, even the most hardened Brexiteers had to concede that enough was enough.
The Ministry of Food, which had seen Britain through two World Wars and which had more recently been referenced by a popular television chef as part of his attempts to promote healthy eating, was discreetly reactivated in 2018 with the appointment of a parliamentary under-secretary tasked with protecting food supplies in the face of the uncertain course of Britain’s exit from the EU. In 2021, however, after more than a year of diminishing supplies and mounting unrest, the government openly intervened with a programme of measures intended to re-establish domestic food supply and, with it, the public’s confidence in Prime Minister Argent’s leadership.
The most decisive of these measures was codenamed “Operation HomeGrown” and was inspired by a much earlier unrealised proposal to implement a system known as National Gardening Leave. Under the original plans for the scheme, the standard working week would shrink to four days instead of five, freeing up more time for people to spend gardening, both for productive and for pleasurable ends. This would, its proponents claimed, make people happier and healthier; would make communities stronger; and would make the economy more resilient and more protected from threats to external supply.
Thanks to the revised version of the National Gardening Leave scheme which came into force in April 2021 (timed to coincide with the Queen’s 95th birthday to maximise the sense of citizens fulfilling a noble duty to the nation), the much-cherished belief that Brexit would mean increased job opportunities for native British people did in fact come into effect; just not in the way that most Brexiteers had perhaps imagined.
The Ministry streamlined the original proposal in two key respects. One was to dispense with the idea of the four-day week (dismissed as “inherently unproductive”) and the other was to dispense with the idea of gardening leave being something that was merely optional.
The government realised that it could mobilise an untapped (albeit also largely unwilling) workforce by obliging people from certain sections of society to carry out compulsory agricultural work under law. Those receiving state benefits of various kinds were the first to be affected by the new legislation, and their receipt of those benefits was made dependent on them carrying out their quota of gardening hours. Human rights advocates challenged this legislation from the outset, of course, but a groundswell of popular opinion in favour of the scheme, and the shouting down of any attempts at resistance with the slogan, “No Grow, No Dough”, neutralised these appeals with ruthless efficiency. Supermarkets must be restocked, whatever the cost.
In due time, the pool of prospective gardeners was widened. On the advice of government analysts, the next section of society to be recruited were the recently retired, with a penumbral pension zone lasting for five to ten years after formal retirement, with participation in the gardening scheme being a condition of the receipt of not just state pensions but also any private pensions as well. This was backed up by the soundly evidenced principle that gardening was understood to promote long life and delay the onset of mental decline in the so-called Blue Zones, areas such as Okinawa, Sardinia and Costa Rica, where people routinely lived into their nineties and beyond. And the popularity of another slogan, “Dig Yourself Out Of The Grave”, cemented this idea of the positive power of gardening leave for the older members of society and effectively silenced any opposition.
Soon after, somewhat more contentiously, university students were also required to contribute, either in the form of a year of gardening work before their studies began, or on a one-day-per-week basis throughout their studies, whichever was the greater. It should be understood that this activity was not carried out as a way of replacing the payment of university tuition fees, and these in fact increased to record levels during this period: the gardening leave was made a condition, a prerequisite, of any young person being legally permitted to go to a university in the first place. And of course, a slogan appeared in support of this initiative, too — “From Earthworm to Bookworm” — which seemed to encapsulate the moral uprightness of this earned transition from manual labour to academic pursuits.
—
The government also found a good use for the gigantic warehouses and shipping depots which formerly served the now decimated food import infrastructure. Snapped up at bargain prices with a raft of compulsory purchase orders, reluctantly accepted by supermarket bosses and transport magnates eager to mitigate their losses, these buildings were now transformed into vast agricultural centres for the large-scale production of suitable crops.
Light-hungry species such as tomatoes and peppers proved to be a major false economy, as the astronomical costs of maintaining continuous light levels in these vast greenhouses made the resulting product even more expensive than the imported supplies available from overseas. Species which cropped well in low light or near darkness proved much more cost-effective, and the Ministry of Food launched a major campaign to rehabilitate some unpopular or unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, even resurrecting the late Marguerite Patten in holographic form, reprising her role as the face (or more strictly the voice) of inventive food demonstration programmes during wartime.
Rhubarb was an early winner, to the great rejoicing of growers in the West Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle, and the humble sea kale, largely forgotten since Victorian times, made a surprising comeback. It was the mushroom, however, which was found to be particularly suitable for this form of mass production, and scores of these empty industrial caverns were soon transformed into immense mushroom beds of a size which it is scarcely possible to imagine. Row upon row, column upon column, up and up they stretched as far as the eye could see (and beyond, in the permanent twilight). With alternating patches of black beds waiting for the mycelium to spore and white beds groaning with mushrooms ready to pick, these near-silent nocturnal houses were laid out like games of three-dimensional chess which had suddenly and mysteriously been abandoned by a race of vanished giants.
—
The eight members of Team K walked along the climate control corridor and stopped at the red mesh gantry which marked the departure point for the rotating squads of harvesters. Out there on the fields (for so they were still unironically called), several teams were already working. Each team member carried out a 12-hour shift, punctuated by two 30-minute breaks. Some of the teams on the fields were one- or two-thirds of the way through their shifts. Others were nearing their last few minutes of this current rotation. Team K, however, was just about to begin a 12-hour stint.
Made up entirely of Leavers — this term had now been applied exclusively to anyone working as part of the National Gardening Leave scheme, and any previous political linking of the word to supporters of a particular referendum campaign had been discreetly effaced from ordinary usage — Team K was inexperienced, poorly trained and profoundly resentful. Instead of there being a cheerful camaraderie born out of a common feeling of frustration against the Powers That Be, however, their inter-personal relations were virtually non-existent. No one asked questions about one another’s day; no one enquired as to the well-being of partners or parents, pets or progeny; no one gossiped about trashy TV or even about other members of the team. They scarcely knew each other’s names, or cared enough to find them out. If they wished to communicate with each other over the headset intercom, they would simply reference the co-ordinates of the specific square of mushroom bed in which the person in question was currently working.
There was little time for small talk or for pleasantry. Each team member had a target to achieve: 19 kilogrammes of mushrooms to be harvested every hour, or looked at another way, 209 kilogrammes of mushrooms to be harvested by each person during their shift. Quotas were not adjusted in any way to accommodate an individual picker’s level of skill (or lack of), level of experience (or lack of), or their capacity (physical, mental or otherwise) to carry out this task in the first place. “Quotas Means Quotas”, said a printed sign on the wall of the room where everyone clocked in and out for their shifts, under which someone had scrawled “No Grow, No Dough” in sinister spidery capital letters.
Karen, the leader of Team K, moved along the line, handing out the lists of the beds each team member would be harvesting during this rotation. Karen was the one person in the team whose name everyone did know. It had somehow come to the group’s attention that she was married to Travers, the foreman. No one had ever thought to wonder why the foreman’s wife was having to do gardening leave like everyone else, and no one especially cared. She was with them, but she was not one of them, and she never would be. Her presence made the team even more reluctant to speak or engage with each other in any way during their shifts.
A buzzer sounded to mark the hour. For some harvesters, this was the signal to come in from the fields for a scheduled break. For most harvesters, it just meant that another hour had ended and another hour had begun. One quota of 19 kilogrammes had simply been replaced by another quota of 19 kilogrammes. For Team K, however, this was the signal to head out to their allocated beds. Taking up baskets from the great stacks beside the gantry, they fanned out and set off along eight parallel walkways, and without a word, the picking began.
—
The rotations were by and large a monotonous affair, filled entirely with the business of picking mushrooms, loading baskets, weighing them in and then collecting an empty basket to begin the process all over again. In the permanent half-light, it was difficult to tell what time it was, or to be sure whether it was day or night. Here, such considerations scarcely mattered. Listening to music was not permitted, as it tended to prove too much of a distraction and adversely affected pick yield. There was no restriction on talking. They were free to talk as much as they liked. But nobody chose to. So only the harsh call of the buzzer ever appeared to interrupt this numb world of churning chatterless work.
Eight or possibly nine hours into the shift, the harvesters advanced into Sector 237, deep in the north-eastern quadrant of the field. No other teams were within sight. Tiredness had set in long ago for them all, and it was hard to keep up the pace required to meet the 19-kilo quota, but each was dealing with the challenge in their own way. Except, tonight (or was it today?), one of them was not dealing with it.
One of the men in Team K only had one arm. That is to say, his other arm was prosthetic. Some believed he was a former soldier who’d been given a medical discharge after losing an arm in combat, and others believed he was a drug dealer recently released from prison who had lost an arm in a turf war with some rivals. The truth was rather more prosaic. He had once been a factory worker and his arm had been amputated after becoming trapped in a particularly complex industrial machine. He was carrying out National Gardening Leave in order to forestall the threatened withdrawal of his disability allowance. And he had proved to be a very effective harvester, coming up with his own ingenious methods for plucking mushrooms with his flesh-and-blood hand and using his prosthetic hand to flip, swat or scoop the mushrooms into his waiting basket. In this way, he regularly exceeded his hourly quota and was close to earning a permanent reduction in the number of shifts he was required to do.
But sooner or later, the effort of this prodigious rate of work had to take its toll, and it was at this precise moment that, in reaching a little too far for a particularly choice mushroom, the man pitched forward and landed bodily in the mushroom bed. The shock of the surprisingly cold mass of mushrooms caused him to gasp as he fell face first, and a mixture of damp soil, liquid manure and fruiting fungus crammed into his open mouth. He drove his hands down into the bed, searching for a hard surface underneath which he could push against and lever himself up and out. But he found nothing except more cold clammy organic matter which closed around his limbs and which made it almost impossible for him to pull back. His legs flailed, his feet scrabbled across the top of the bed, but the smooth caps of the mushrooms gave him no traction, and instead he simply churned up the surface layer, if anything succeeding only in burrowing himself even deeper into the mulch.
His plight was not noticed by the rest of the team for some time. The initial impact had short-circuited the microphone in his intercom and with his mouth full, his calls for help did not reach far. By the time one of them spotted what was happening — a retired doctor’s receptionist in the fourth year of her five-year gardening leave — it was almost too late.
“Karen!” she screamed reflexively, and everyone else in the team stopped what they were doing, not so much surprised by the fact that someone was speaking, but by the actual out-loud utterance of Karen’s name.
“What is it, 237-G?” Karen spluttered, defensively. “Why have you made everyone stop?”
The woman gave a strangled cry and pointed over to the bed where the man lay, now almost wholly submerged. Exhaustion was rapidly overcoming him and his movements of resistance had almost completely ceased.
“Help him!” the woman finally managed to cry. “Somebody help him!”
But everyone remained rooted to their spots. The woman looked at them, her breath coming in panicked gasps.
“What are you—? What are you all doing?! Don’t just— Don’t just stand there! He’s going to— I think he’s going to—!”
“He’s going to make us miss our quota,” said a new voice, a young woman who was in the final year of a Masters in Philosophy at a respectable redbrick university. “That’s what he’s going to do.”
“But he needs our help!” the older woman started to protest.
“And I need to finish my degree,” hissed the young woman.
“But—” the older woman began, before—
“And I need to sort out my credit card debts,” jumped in a young man.
“And I need to pay for my Mum’s care home, somehow,” said an older man.
“And you need to protect your pension,” Karen rejoined. “So we need to get these quotas met. And Quotas Means Quotas, remember?”
“But a man is hurt—” the older woman tried to say. “A man is dying!”
And they all remembered to look back at the man in the mushroom bed, where by now, he was lying completely still. His own weight and his own downward digging had all but buried him in the deep layer of soil. Only his sturdy boots and the cuffs of his work trousers poked out amongst the broken mushroom caps.
“No Grow, No Dough,” the young man said in a voice which faltered for a second. Then, steeling his nerve, he said it again more confidently. “No Grow, No Dough.”
And the young woman joined him. “No Grow, No Dough!” And the other members of the team who had been silent up to now added their voices. “No Grow, No Dough! No Grow, No Dough!” And the older man, with seeming reluctance, also started to repeat the slogan. And finally Karen, in a loud strident voice well supported by her participation in a local amateur choir, almost sang the phrase as if it were an anthem. “No Grow, No Dough! No Grow, No Dough! No Grow, No Dough!”
—
One hour later, or perhaps two, Team K weighed in their final baskets of the shift. An observant eye would have noticed that only seven people made their way back to the red mesh gantry and out along the climate control corridor. But eight baskets had been checked in and the computer saw only what it was programmed to see. It did not see, for example, that one basket had been filled by six pairs of hands, silently agreeing to work even harder in the final push to ensure the team met its quotas. Only one person had not taken part in this collective effort, an older woman, whose final basket contained just 11 kilogrammes of mushrooms, a shortfall which led to a black mark being noted against her on the company record.
At the shift changeover, the hand of an unidentified person picked up a time card which did not belong to them, inserted it into the clocking out machine, and promptly replaced the card in the rack. As far as the machine was concerned, eight people had checked in and now eight people had checked out.
—
Because the farm is so vast, it is a long time before anyone has cause to pass through Sector 237 again. When they do, there is little to observe, except, perhaps, for an unusually rich proliferation of mushrooms in Sub-Section B of the bed. And one other thing. What appears at first glance to be a glove, peeping out ever so slightly between some of the larger mushrooms.
The picker pauses very briefly to examine this strange object. Holding it between his thumb and index finger, it feels suddenly very weighty and is clearly not just a glove but something more substantial. He quickly lets go and the curious thing, whatever it is, sinks back down between the mushrooms.
Probably something left behind by the maintenance people, he tells himself, and he resumes his picking. Whether or not he actually believes this is true is of no real importance. All he knows is, for this hour at least, meeting the 19-kilogramme quota will be easier than usual, and that in itself was enough to be thankful for.
