The Cornish Cockney Farming in France.

by Ben Green
(France)

The Cornish Cockney farming in France.
My love of cooking and producing my own food led me to meet the person behind fatmarrow.com - the new website which gives help and e-Support to people who love eating and producing food and keeping their own animals.

The infamous owner has a real love of nature and producing good wholesome food and he enjoys sharing his 40 years knowledge with others. The London born boy, who is really I suppose Cornish, worked the family smallholding way up on Bodmin Moor for many years. His yearning for knowledge in cooking and producing good food led him to his present day farm in Brittany, northern France.

Fatmarrow - as he is known to the locals, because he always grows the biggest marrows - has become part of a new culture in Brittany and has taken some of the Cornish one with him.

When we first met, quite by accident, we were both mushroom picking early one morning in the Foret de Fougeres. We got chatting about mushrooms and food and he taught me how to dry the mushrooms which I had picked. We have met many times since then and become good friends.

When I first met Fatmarrow, I was new to the food scene, as eating out was a pastime and I did not know one end of the cow from the other. Since then, I have started growing my own fruit and vegetables, keeping my own pigs, chickens and rabbits, curing bacon and making sausages and I have realised what rubbish I was eating before.

I thank him and the fatmarrow team of experts for their support and enthusiasm which they have passed on to me. Some of my friends use the fatmarrow e-Support network to ask their questions on cooking, growing fruit and vegetables and keeping animals. Some live in France and some in the UK and one old schoolfriend who lives in south London is now keeping chickens and ducks in his back garden and this year will be dedicating half his garden to vegetable growing. They have all signed up to fatmarrow.com, whose e-Support network is staffed by experts in every field - it is not a forum where the wrong advice (however well-intentioned) can be given.

I would like to encourage as many people as possible to start producing their own food - it saves you a lot of money, it is very healthy and you are cutting down on those dreaded air miles