Matthew Herbert's One Pig

If music be the food of concern … read on. Shakespeare didn’t say this. But Matthew Herbert effectively is.

He’s so disgruntled with the politics, class and degradation of Britain’s food that he’s made a protest album out of a commercially reared pig. A world’s first. We join him, knee deep in pig shit to find out more.

Would you say the idea of your ‘One Pig’ album is more important than the music?

H: I think it is now. I’d hope that in five years time it would be the other way round, but I think for now it is because, without sounding like I’m arrogant or classing myself as some pioneer, it is the only record I know made out of a pig or any farm animal for that matter, from start to finish.

As a consequence that has a novelty in the sense that novelty just means new; it has a novelty value. So for example a four-year-old kid knows what a pig is and so does a 90-year-old grandma, and therefore everybody has an opinion about it or an expectation about it that goes beyond just making it. It’s not like every four-year-old knows what dubstep is or every 90-year-old knows what dubstep is, so everyone’s got the same frame of reference which is a pig. So I think at this precise moment the idea of turning a pig into music is absolutely more important than the music. Although not necessarily for me.

How tempted were you to throw the album balance out and crunch out a particularly cheeky, particularly contemporary dance track that would get played in the right dance circles?

H: To be brutally honest I’d say that temptation is there almost every day you go into the studio. And it’s not just that, I know that for example every record I’ve ever done since ‘Bodily Functions’ has at least one review that said: “Well it’s not Bodily Functions, it’s not as good as Bodily Functions, it’s certainly not Bodily Functions two!”. And I could write another record like that if I wanted to, so there’s a temptation to just knock out another one of those.

What did DJ Shadow say the other week – he said: “You need to decide if you’re a fan of ‘…Entroducing’ or a fan of DJ Shadow.

H: Yeah. I think the minute you try and shape it, the minute you put a pig on a dancefloor… it undercuts any kind of moral (standpoint). The issue for me is that a pig is a pig is a pig is a pig and this week the kids might be listening to two-step and next week they might be listening to…

Three-step?

H: There’s always a temptation to shape what you’re doing to a contemporary, to make it more palatable, or more recognisable is probably the word, to a contemporary… and I think it then dates it, it automatically puts a date stamp on it. In (the track) ‘November’ I think there’s a slight acknowledgment of something that’s going on, it’s not totally devoid from, like if I’d made this record 10 years ago it would probably be four-to-the-floor or something.

Obviously if you did do that track, which is well within your capabilities, and it’s in everyone’s DJ bags and in all the charts and everyone’s playing it then it multiplies your audience by however many. And then all these pasty Croydon boys have a word with their mum.

H: I’m not sure if I want to be the Jamie Oliver of the DJ world! The difficulty is that clubs and dance music is about the instant and it’s about the moment. And the problems that I see with the world are long term and for me it’s hard to… if I could square the two together then I would. But it’s not achievable. I’m sure it is achievable I just haven’t worked out to do it yet.

Was the final master as musical as you had anticipated?

H: I think it was more musical than I had anticipated. And there’s bits that you can actually hum! But there’s bits to me that musically and politically and everything comes together because the question I always get asked in every interview, or have done for the last however many years is: what relationship are you supposed to have with the music if you don’t understand the context? But everyone knows what a pig sounds like so that probably disappears. There’s moments where it feels like it comes together.

Why does the album start so quietly?

H: Two reasons. First of all it’s like a minute’s silence for the pig, like a remembrance, a pig silence. It’s like the waiting for the arrival for the pig. Then when the pig is born it’s very quiet, like a tiny little noise.

Had you been allotted a pig number from the litter?

H: No, it was just whoever turned up when I was there. The other part is to encourage an audience or listener to just pause and to create a certain tension. Like the tension I felt – I had to wait 9 months and then when I got there I had to wait another 8 hours.

Did you establish that in your mind early on that that was how it was gonna be, or was that once you’d finished it?

H: A combination of both. I knew I wanted to start quietly because it started quietly in real life. There’s a minute silence at the end as well, but there’s about 50 pigs present in that silence as well. We were just sitting in the sty and there were 50 pigs present.

In silence?

H: Well there’s rain on the roof and there’s a brilliant part which is one of my favourite parts of the whole record which is when I’d very earnestly finished singing my song. And the minute I finish the last line the pig starts taking a piss, about two foot away from me, you can just hear like a big stream of piss and it’s like: “that’s what I think of you and your record and probably your species as well.”

At the end of ‘August 2009’ there’s the more melodic machine sounding music

H: That’s from a video camera I was recording with in the background. After I captured the birth I just turned it up. So that just becomes like a little metaphorfor a dialogue between me and the pig. Those two things bubble along together. The journey beginning kind of thing.

So we discussed briefly why ‘December’ sounded so dark. Is there any other reason, apart from the season, that that ended up so dark?

H: The pig was moved up to a new sty. The first half of its life was spent in stables, and the sty was metallic, with metal bars, metal roof, more exposed up on the hills, more open to the elements, corrugated iron inside and some brick. It was a much more industrial place so the music has to end up following that. Whatever you get back you have to go with it.

Is that the same with ‘February’, because that has quite an industrial sound?

H: Well that’s the butchery (phase) so yeah, the reason that sounds so like that is because we’re in the kitchen, everything was stainless steel, and because it was a professional kitchen. The fridge makes up the bassline. It’s on every sound. It doesn’t matter how delicate the sound is, just a massive sub bass. So you’re forced to be committed to the process, and work with what you have.

With the blood machine in ‘August’ does it actually sound like that or is it processed?

H: The only thing I did was put a bit of stereo detuning on it.

Were you surprised that that machine ended up sounding so human then? It’s kind of arresting to start with, were you like: “Oh my God! The pig has found a human voice.”

H: It was really surprising.

That wasn’t part of the brief?

H: No I said to Henry: “I either want to make it pretty hideous or really beautiful because I don’t want a nothing sound” … and he went for really hideous.

I think it’s the most powerful point in the album without a doubt just because it’s almost like the ghost of the pig

H: Yeah it’s really eerie.

Did you actually give the pig a loose name?

H: No. There were all these jokes that musicians play on tour buses like band fish. Like Notorious P.I.G. My favourite one was Bakon. I think the thing was I assumed I’d get more attached to it then I did, but I didn’t. I was definitely freaked out when it came back dead, that wasn’t a pleasant experience and I haven’t eaten pork since I’ve finished the record. Ultimately I don’t think the animal gave a shit about me. It was inquisitive but…

That’s the irony of the whole thing, isn’t it?

H: I think that’s ultimately what I like most about writing music like this. You’re constantly reminded how clumsy you are. Like taking yourself out of the studio and getting yourself away from the familiarity and the laziness and the instant and finding yourself in the pissing rain knee deep in pig shit trying to get a bassline out of a pig. You just realise how insignificant we are and how lucky we are to have the privileges we do, certainly in this country, and certainly me.

What like bass guitars?

H: Haha, well yeah, that’s a massive privilege, I can speak first hand about that. At times you just yearn to turn on a piano or to be able to express yourself with more clarity. But the thing is the record is really not about me anyway, the record’s about the pig and for me the best part of the record is the bit where the pig is the loudest. Where you actually just get to hear the pig do its thing.

Can I get a quick rundown of all the animal parts you managed to sue most efficiently, to fit into an editorial list.

H: We made the fat into candles, we had the trotters stuffed by a taxidermist and that was made into candelabra, we made pig’s blood paint, different types of paint which I still have actually, we made like a pig’s blood dye, so with that we made tablecloth and we made some bunting which we hung up when we ate it. We used some of the lard to make buns, like bread buns, we made ice cream, jelly. We made a pig’s blood instrument, a drum. We’ve still got the bones which we use as percussion instruments. I’ve still got 4 litres of pig blood in my fridge. I haven’t worked out if its gone off now but I don’t want to throw it away! And then of course all the food stuff we made, there’s a menu of that.

Was there sound sampling at the dinner?

H: Yeah there was. That was the whole point of the dinner. To record everyone eating the pig. And it cost thousands of pounds to set up this event. A great deal of time to organise. And a lot of people volunteered and gave up a lot of their time. It took 6 months of planning. It was a great evening with various invited guests.

Who set up the guests?

H: As many people that were associated with the record, and friends and a few journos and a few press and all that. It wasn’t a huge place, we couldn’t invite hundreds of people and we didn’t want to do it on too big a scale. And so we went to all this effort and then the sound engineer who recorded it had his laptop stolen the next day with all the sounds on it. Sort of revenge of the pig.

What about the intestines and faeces? Or is that cleared away in the butchery?

H: What I was quite surprised at was that the abattoir got it back with the head removed and the carcass split in two, with all its bits in the bag and the hair removed, because I wanted to make a toothbrush out of the bristles. But that was all gone. And they’d cleaned it all up. That was one of the reasons I was disappointed I wasn’t there.

You weren’t allowed to be there? Even as an observer?

H: No.

That’s mental. How do you get a licence?

H: It’s at the whim of the people there. The abattoir said yes but the vet said no. There was a vet on site. I think Gordon Ramsay had come down a few weeks previously. And we were limited with how far – we didn’t want an abattoir miles away and then have to drive it miles and miles.

So you were thwarted in the slaughter process.

H: Yeah, I would have liked to take ownership. It was a pity really.

What were you most pleased with? Did you have pre-conceived ideas of which parts would yield the best sounds?

H: The high hopes are always the birth in some exciting ‘arghhh’ but actually it’s just ‘pff pff’. And that’s it, it just comes out.

Animals are a lot better than humans.

H: Yeah it’s crazy. So that came out, I had high hopes for that. And it sounds perverse but I had high hopes for the death, that that would be something that would give me pause for thought, or be difficult to listen to somehow.

How was the kill?

H: Well they stun them first, and then they slit their throat, so that’s actually very quiet. And actually the itunes bonus edition is going to have sounds of pigs being killed and their teeth being pulled out and things that I wouldn’t use for… so if you really want to hear a pig being killed you can hear it. And that turns out quite quiet, again it’s very industrial, just the hum of big machinery, it’s like the eerie silence as well.

What ultimately turned out to be the best sound source?

H: A few of them actually are almost none of the pig. One of my favourites was the tractor - that actually forms the bassline of ‘December’. That track then becomes a metaphor I guess for the relationship with farming. I really like the track ‘October’ because all the chords are made from a cow in the next-door stables. I liked the idea of the cows, it’s such a warm and beautiful sound, but that cow’s now been killed too, so the cow’s like ‘me too!’ It’s like giving a voice to the other animals. It felt like the other animals wanted to be remembered as well. And that cow is ironically my favourite sound of the whole record. I tell you why that is, it’s purely from a selfish aspect because it played so well. If you play it on the keyboard it’s a beautiful sound.

I remember when you did Plat du Jour you were explaining the difficulties in getting melody out of rice, and sometimes it just fell in naturally.

H: Yeah that was the real headache of Plat du Jour.

What was the most surprising part of the pig then?

H: To be honest every time I went up I was surprised by some different thing. I mean one of the surprising parts was when it went off to the abattoir. And there was a huge drama, squealing, getting it out of the pen into the truck in January, but once it was in the pen it just went about its glory on its own, and there was something very lonely but still curious about it. All the time you had the car engine running as like a reminder – if that was Hollywood that would be some drone on the cellos to suggest danger but on here it was just a throb of a Land Rover engine underneath. And the juxtaposition of those two things – of the car engine ticking over and also you can hear muffled voices talking about the pig’s fate, just out of earshot, just the farmer and the abattoir man, about the price of pigs and how much they charge to kill pigs.

Why did ‘September’ sound so primal? Almost Jurassic…

H: The mother pig had never given birth before so she didn’t know what her body was going through and was very freaked out by it. So she attacked the piglets and bit one in the rump and took a load of skin off, and another one she picked it up and threw it across the sty and broke its jaw so it couldn’t feed, so that track is that pig being unable to feed basically. So that’s sort of feeding time and all the other pigs are feeding apart from one who’s quite edgy, it’s got this weird unsettled tension between life, literally life, and death. The tension between the feeding process, which should be about life, and one not being able to feed and one will shortly be killed. So it’s a really brilliant reminder early on that it’s not all fluffy toys and regardless of human intervention the natural world has its own pecking order if you like and its own friction and death is never far round the corner.

Which part of the process was the most political in the end?

H: I think it depends if you mean moral or political. I mean politically for me the fact that I wasn’t allowed to be at the death is brilliantly political because it explains perfectly that you can have anything you want to eat but you can’t see how it’s made or where it comes from so politically that was the most important thing. The moral part is very different because I could have stepped in and saved this pig but then what would I have done with this pig? It was growing for me, so unless I have a big enough garden and a willingness to lose every single plant in it then I couldn’t have brought the pig home. Then there was the moral part of eating it – I didn’t feel massively comfortable eating it – and the moral part of the butchery process – recording the bones being sawed through or the sound at the beginning – ‘jun jun jun’ which is the sound of the air being beaten out of the lungs, so this is a pig that you’ve heard its very first breath and then you hear the air being beaten out of its lungs – it makes for a pretty unsettling journey.

Parts of ‘One Pig’ are very melancholic was this deliberate?

H: I’d say it was, I think mainly because you have information that the pig doesn’t - you know when it’s going to die, from the minute it was born you knew roughly when it was going to die, you knew something it didn’t, so it was looking around, it was being playful and enjoying its time and you knew ok it has 5 months to go, or 3 months to go, or week to go, or it might be the night before it was going off to the abattoir. So that melancholy was always there, always implicit for me. And also when it was in the trailer and I patted it I was like no, that was the last time you’ll see it, or you’ll see it the next day but it would be dead.

Moving on to its effects, for the majority of people 43 minutes of a pig soundtrack is going to be far too abstract. How do you feel about this?

H: Because it’s not a single. We had this problem with the radio plug I wanted, the radio was really good about it but it’s not like you can pick a track from it and say this is kind of like the record because it’s not, it’s an album as well, and with the silences and everything its designed to be listened to. I felt I had a compulsion to say thank you to anyone who listens to it all from the beginning in order without stopping.

But that doesn’t trouble you that the majority of people won’t even listen to it.

H: I think all you can do is amplify, my job I think is to amplify the world, and I want to listen to that, I want to hear what a pig sounds like growing up and dying and if no one else wants to it then I’ll sell no records and if a million people want to listen to that then I’ll sell a million records, but I think I don’t feel like I have a responsibility if that’s one part of the implication to make it more palatable record. But at the same time I don’t want to make an unlistenable avant-garde record, maybe I’ve done that, because for me that would be a complete waste of the experience because there is a certain joy and playfulness in turning a pig into music. And if someone listened to it and just said ‘oh that’s a load of arty bollocks’ then I’ll have failed and maybe I have but it’s certainly not my intention to make it unlistenable or unpleasant or irrelevant.

I think that’s because there’s no right response to it. If say I’d made a record out of Paris and someone in your office on a Monday morning was not wanting to engage, not really bothered, thinks it’s a bit shit, thinks it’s a waste of time and say Tuesday they discover that one of their friends has died in Paris then on the Wednesday they’ll have a completely different relationship to that record than they would have had on the Monday. A good example of this is in Whitstable near my old studio there’s a railway line and there’s a warning trigger thing because there’s a crossing, there’s a horn that goes ‘do-doo’ and I don’t have sound proofing because I don’t believe in sound proofing so there are all these hums on my records and whenever I’m recording there’s a ‘do-doo’ because it happens every 30 minutes. And so it’s probably on 10 of my last albums. And for me it’s like a funny noise. And on the big band album, on ‘There’s Me And There’s You’ there’s a track called ‘Waiting’ – “could this be one of those days when everything goes right – do-doo.” Normally your instinct is: “Fuck! let’s do it again” but me being me I just left it in. In December this year just after Christmas someone I knew was killed there, on the crossing, and two weeks later someone else was killed, and then someone else was killed.

It just goes back through your record collection.

H: Yeah so when you hear one of my record from 5 years ago it goes ‘do-doo’ and it’s like a little audio reminder of something. So my relationship with that sound flipped 180 degrees in the space of 24 hours. So that’s what I mean. Because I’m working with sound there’s no right way of listening to it because you’re not at a fixed point. It’s like you’re listening to the sea, you’re listening to a pig, as I said a pig is a pig is a pig and a pig will still be a pig in 100 years basically and a pig was basically a pig 100 years ago give or take. And so you’re listening to that basically. People’s responses to that is going to vary according to what circumstances they’re in, what state they’re in and that’s totally fine.

How far do you expect its desired effects to reach in the modern climate of music and food? How effectively do you expect it to reverberate?

H: Its hard to talk about these things without sounding like a knob, but ‘Plat du Jour’ wasn’t brilliantly received, in terms of reviews they were really divided, some people really liked it, a lot of people just didn’t like the music and so thought that the whole point, the whole purpose was totally irrelevant.

There was a lot of divided opinion and the majority of people just didn’t think it was all that, and that’s the one record that’s got me more work than anything else, and I know it’s part of the curriculum for music collages now so there’s a new generation that have studied that and have questions for me. For me I appreciate the fact that people of a different generation are engaging with it in a different way. Ok people might not be dancing to it at weddings but that’s not the only criteria, or it might not be in top ten lists or best albums of that year, or might not have won the mercury prize, but I’m increasingly sceptical about all those achievements you know.

How was Radio Boy received comparatively?

H: For me I did a track called ‘Disney’ and I did it live until someone came up to me and said I work for Disney and I’ve just quit my job. For me that was the best kind of response, that’s what you’d hope in your dreams. And with ‘Plat du Jour’ I just wanted to change one person’s diet through music and I know that I’ve had that effect because a couple of people have written to me about it. I think at this stage its impossible to know really.

I think what’s annoying for me is that on ‘There’s Me And There’s You’ I sampled the sounds of Palestinian and international protestors being shot by Israeli defence force soldiers on the border, in Ramallah, against the wall and tanks demolishing homes and things like that. And that barely got a blink of an eye and yet the pig has got a lot more controversy about it, facebook campaigns, people in touch. So I find it very sad that you try and engage with something like Palestine in an explicit way and hopefully in a respectful and not too clumsy gesture and its ignored. So my experience is always that you can never predict those kind of responses. Long ago I assumed I would never sell any records anyway so the minute I started not writing records that could be heard in hotel lobbies or in airport lounges I knew that people would stop listening. That’s a price worth paying I think.

What would you do differently if you had to do it again?

H: I would be on the phone for the first six months, or before we even started with a written confirmation that I could record the death with the abattoir. The thing that I would have liked to have done is that I would have liked my pig to have been an organic free range pig.

For better sounds or a better life?

H: For a better life so I could out my hand on my heart and say that pig had the best possible life. And I think my pig was really taken care of by the farmer and I didn’t see it given antibiotics and the feed was a local cooperative feed of mixed cereals so it was really well raised and well cared for, it was very healthy, it didn’t require veterinary attention that I know of. So it’s not like it wasn’t an organic pig and also it would be great if the pig could have lived at least 5 years, half its life, but then it wouldn’t be a farmed pig would it.

What was the greatest thing you learnt?

H: I’m no better than the pig. And I went in thinking that my achievements were better or above it somehow but actually I just came away feeling I was its equal at best.

If the whole subtext of this is that capitalist structures are oppressing our food chain then what would the alternative be?

H: Well the first alternative is to eat less meat, the problem is we’re breeding more meat particularly in developing countries. And historically as humans our diet has involved eating a little bit of meat, a good amount of fruit and vegetables and a lot of pulses and grains. And now it’s virtually the entire opposite of that and that puts a huge pressure both on the access to resources and land and things and also our own health as well as it’s unhealthy for us to eat in that way.

So the first thing would be to eat less meat and the second thing would be to eat less of everything and the third thing would be to eat locally – know which vegetables are in season, buy them locally so you’re more in touch with your own food supply so you can know how it was raised, you can experience variations much more profoundly. If it has to be a sound bite the answer is don’t shop in supermarkets, that’s the answer. Basically the government allows supermarkets to make decisions on behalf of us collectively about how our land is used, what goes into the food, how it’s packaged, what kind of food we can buy and that’s what’s destroying it. So I would limit the power of supermarkets.

I would completely restructure the food system to prioritise the health and welfare of the land and the animals on it rather than on profit. The biggest purchase of meat in this country is the government because they buy it for our hospitals, schools and prisons and yet they’re buying the cheapest possible with no regards to welfare or circumstances. And we are the government so we seem responsible for our own demise in that respect.

Do you think state controlled food production could have any more transparency? Do you think we could demand any more transparency?

H: I think we can absolutely demand more transparency. The biggest thing is accountability. A private company is not accountable for us whereas a government company is accountable to us. And whilst governments aren’t perfect and the organisations of the state on a number of levels of bureaucratic league can be very clumsy and make very poor decisions it’s at least accountable to us and that’s the step in the right direction. The biggest thing is things like fish, fish should just be rationed. It’s totally absurd that you walk into any supermarket in Britain and there’s a wide variety of fish, it’s full of every vegetable or fruit you could possibly imagine regardless of season. And why would anyone not eat fish if they go into a supermarket and there’s fish everywhere. If there doesn’t appear to be a problem then people’s behaviour won’t change.

Do you think that capitalism creates scarcity instead of abundance or do you think that’s a myth?

H: I’d say it creates abundance for the few because it’s designed to constantly pay up, it’s not designed to pay down and now the gap between what the top half of a business earns compared to what the bottom half of the same industry earns is so vast. When you look at the profits in supermarkets for example compared to the conditions that the immigrants work in to harvest and pick out that food. There’s a really big problem here in that no one will pick the fruit anymore. There are all sorts of poorly paid workers leaving their jobs even in Kent, even just down the road, picking fruit and vegetables. So I just think we’re living in a recession but the top 10%’s worth went up 18% last year. That’s a vast increase at a time of a so called recession so I think capitalism doing’s just fine but it’s doing what it always does best which is to make rich people richer.

How much longer do you think that’s going on for?

H: I’d say it’s done.

So what’s going to happen now?

H: Somewhere between carnage and mayhem! I think the problem is we’ve designed a system that basically is impossible to do the right thing. So supermarkets now only have enough food for two and a half weeks, so if you went to the supermarket here up the road tomorrow that flour for that bread would have been flown in from Canada tonight, so it arrives tonight to be made tomorrow morning. I think there’s an assumption that in a supermarket out back there’s a million loaves of bread and there isn’t. There’s only two and half weeks worth of food in British supermarkets. For example if anything happened, like the riots, and if everyone went out and started panic buying, all the shops would be empty in two weeks. So I think the system’s totally ill-equipped and so far removed from things we that we need to keep us going like water, fresh food, our waste you know, I mean once we’re outside our house.

How relevant do you see central Government remaining over devolving power to local regions.

H: I think it’s more relevant than anybody thinks it is. I think basically the government can do whatever it likes, so it can say ok from now on it’s an 80% corporation tax. This government cut corporation tax. Now I pay corporation tax, some of my tax went down from 28% profit to 24%. But I’m sorry that doesn’t create wealth, that just gives me more profit, that buys me a nice lampshade for my house. Ok maybe someone in china has to make an extra lampshade. It’s just really tasteless. The government is in power – it controls our resources, it controls our money, it controls so much. I think it’s massively powerful but the problem is it’s funded my corporations and its anxious about oil because we’re addicted to oil and it needs to do what it can so we can still have access to oil. But that’s going, it will be water next.

Why do you think there’s been such a high level of compliance of food degradation?

H: It’s about convenience. We’re in a society where we all have to work longer, I don’t know about you but I have to work longer hours, weekends blur into weeks, we work longer for less security. So I don’t know anybody who’s got a pension or savings or anything like that, other from what may be in our house, a bit of equity in our house but none of our generation has any pension, or savings or back up or anything like that. All the legislation is geared much more towards the rights of corporations than it is to individuals.

So I think that compliance simply comes down to the fact we have less time. And I know I have a young family, and sometimes you’ll have 15 minutes to make a meal and during that entire 15 minutes the kids will be screaming and the young babies will be hungry because they don’t know what it is to wait or what it is to prepare and also they don’t care what it is, at that age they just shove it down. I just think that it’s all about convenience, for example the government subsidises the supermarkets, A little example will be parking – you have to pay to park in town but you don’t have to pay to park at the supermarket. So if you park up there and just get everything you need for the week, and once you’re in the supermarket you’re screwed. I can’t remember anytime I’ve gone into a supermarket and come out with just the thing I was looking for. You always seem to come out with something else.

What do you think has been the greatest loss to the food industry in the last 10 years?

H: I would say British dairy farmers probably. Something ridiculous like one a

day goes out of business and has done for 10 years. And now a pint of milk is less than a pint of water. And the price of a pint of milk has basically stayed the same for something like 20 years and yet the profit of milk in the supermarkets has gone up by something like 400%. So I think the total annihilation on Britain’s dairy farms is probably the greatest loss.

Felicity Lawrence’s book ‘Not On the Label’ was saying it costs farmers to raise pigs now. The supermarkets pay them less than cost.

H: Yeah at the moment pigs are selling £15-20 less than it costs to raise them.

How much do you think the loss of food innocence has affected society in Britain?

H: I think it all ties in together – the fact we don’t sit down to eat as a family anymore, regardless of what the family make-up is, adults not sitting down to eat with their kids home-cooked food, home-prepared food. The loss of gardens, for example in London, gardens have all been paved over to create parking spaces, so there’s a huge pressure on gardens. I think it all just ties in for me – we’re in a society that values money almost above everything else and everything is valued according to its worth. And I think that’s a huge detriment.

For example in a hospital they have something like 63 pence for a hospital meal, to feed a patient. The food is a disaster, what I saw is that almost all of it gets thrown away. When my wife was in high dependence she had a major operation on her stomach after the birth of our child. And the doctor said to her no salt, you’ve got to healthy, you’ve got to look after yourself, so what do they give her? Pie and chips. No vegetables. It’s a complete waste. And if she had eaten it it probably would have prolonged her stay for at least a day or two. So it’s a total false economy. I just think the whole world has gone to shit, if the only way we measure things is by money then we’re fucked.

If you could change three things about the way Britain’s food is produced what would they be?

H: I would close all supermarkets. I would subsidise farmers that are more, an emphasis on self-sufficiency for the country. At the moment we import a vast amount of food into the country, it’s gone up. I would bring back rationing, The best diet Britain ever had was during the war, things like a little bit of butter – well there’s poor people who couldn’t afford a little bit of butter, so they had some butter as opposed to no butter. So that was good for them and for the well off it would reduce their butter input. The third thing is, I would make cooking a compulsory part of every school child’s education. From primary school all the way through so it’s part of the curriculum. And as a consequence hopefully we’d have at least an hour for lunch everyday. I think there’s a politics of pleasure with food that’s really important. If we took more pleasure in it, if we took more time, then we’d be less inclined to put any old shit in our bodies.

On ‘One Pig’ why did you say grace before the meal, is that a standard practice?

H: I didn’t feel like there was an appropriate enough secular routine or ritual that would acknowledge that in the same way. I am religious, but not like that. I think like a lot of people I believe there’s something else going on that I don’t understand but I just felt I wanted to acknowledge that in a formal way.

Is it fair to say you realised you had engaged in quite a heavy agricultural process and you didn’t know what else to do?

H: Yeah, I think that’s fair enough to say. It’s a bit like a funeral isn’t it? At funerals I think it really helps to have that pattern, to recognise that this isn’t the first time this has happened in the world and that serves a useful function.

What are you hopes with the sample pack from Native?

H: I’ve no idea, I’m quite excited by that. I’m just going to make all the sounds available and see if they turn up. If you have like a pig in some dubstep tune a few years from now!

Pig-step!

H: Dub-sty!

Is that an attempt to light-heartedly seed future music?

H: I feel like it’s more…. I don’t really see it as my pig in a way. I’m interested in the idea of an afterlife. I’m interested in giving this pig a life after it’s died, and so for me that’s a life over which I have no control, I’m just putting it out there. We might sell 5 copies or we might sell 100,000 and we might find people doing all sorts of things. Part of me is curious to see if anyone can do anything better, which I’m sure they could. I’m curious to see what other people could do with the same terms, to see if I can learn something you know. And also from a purely selfish point of view it would be nice to not hear an 808 and a 909 on every record ever made.

I’ve never had this as one of my questions before but I’ve got a section called ‘In Better News…’ I woke up this morning to the Today program and a guy bragging about how better food’s got and how packaging has got better.

H: Basically by 2050 50% of the male population will be obese and we are already we are the most obese world developed nation in the world. And basically it’s a crisis. And he was from the food company. That was a news article and he was brought on to comment about it. And he represented supermarkets and the food industry and stuff. And he came on and said the food industry cares very deeply and it’s about personal responsibility and exercise and all this sort of rubbish. I found that customarily offensive. And it just seems amazing to me that the government is putting cigarettes out of reach of people, getting rid of packaging, hiding it behind things because they know smoking causes cancer. And yet they know what damage bad diet causes to people, and it has a huge cost impact to us as a society as well. So I think it’s like the worst possible thing we could do – why are we advertising chips? Do you know anybody who doesn’t like chips? Everyone loves chips so why are we advertising chips – it’s not like we need to eat more chips, I feel like I eat too many chips already.

The government’s attempts to seed and genetically modify food has been rejected, sort of, which was in my mind quite an impressive passive feat – that most people ‘ummed’ and ‘aahed’ and went ‘no’ and then someone somewhere quite high up must have rejected it as well. Can you see a more developed shouldering of that same attitude to extend past convenience?

H: Not really. The biggest consumer of oil in the world is the food industry so the minute the price of oil, we’ve already seen price rises, so supermarkets are basically tied to cheap oil. For example, this restaurant if you order lobster, you can see the lobster pots from the restaurant window but the lobsters are from Canada – it’s cheaper for them to get the lobsters from Canada than it is for them to get the ones you can see from the window. It’s just absolute bonkers and totally unsustainable. And so that decision will just be taken out of their hands. But I think that a movement can obviously have a profound influence but it will just be dwarfed by the end of cheap oil. Everything will then change because people wont be able to afford pineapples 365 days a year, lemons all that kind of stuff. The GM anyway it’s coming back, it’s being allowed in potatoes, it’s being allowed in things like meat. It’s all done for profit, for the food industry, and not because anyone’s requested for it.

I was reading about the RSPCA’s food freedom scheme – it rose by 116% by the first quarter of this year. Does that make you feel positive about ‘One Pig’ or do you feel like that undermines ‘One Pig’?

H: I feel like it undermines ‘One Pig’ because I feel that those are not very rigorous systems, by having that stamp they legitimise an industrialised way of farming and rearing food in large corporations. I found something extraordinary again. There’s a butchers down here and in the window it says:
“We guarantee that no bird will be left thirsty, suffering from malnutrition and beaten” It’s like wait a minute, why do you need a guarantee? That’s standard, that you feed and water and look after an animal if you’re raising it for food.

Would you ever go as far as saying that the food these days is still used to increase social divisions?

H: I don’t think it’s as pernicious as somebody setting out to create division because the middle class shop at Waitrose rather than Lidl or what have you, because everyone shops at supermarkets. So I don’t think there’s some great scheme I think the government controls the food supply of the supermarkets. And the supermarkets are just designed to make as much money as they can. They see a bit of money in Organics because the middle class like Organics so they then make Organics as a middle class lifestyle choice which is absolute bollocks. I don’t know how a carrot that has been grown with less chemicals, with less industrialisation, is more expensive than one that has. What’s interesting is that the majority of the world eats organic food because they’re too poor, the majority of the world are subsistence farmers and are too poor to buy the chemicals. It’s then sold to us as a middle class luxury item. The decisions are all taken on a business basis not any other basis. Although the poor spend a greater percentage of their income than the well off.

Why do you think that is?

H: They tend to be less educated, working harder, so they have less time to cook. They might watch more TV so be more prone to marketing and advertising. They’ll also be more price conscious and so will be more directly targeted by the supermarkets for their value-added price deals. If you’re at a butcher you can buy three sausages, but if you’re at a supermarket you have to buy sausages in a pack of 6. In a greengrocer’s you can buy one orange or 4 oranges, whereas in supermarkets they tend to come in little packs. So a lot of those decisions are taken out of your hands whereas you could previously go to a butcher and go to cut you an exact amount of meat that you wanted, and same for the greengrocers and the bakers – it was a much more customised service. There’s a lot more waste with supermarkets.

Since you’ve started the One project, have you become aware of any government initiatives to improve our food.

H: No. And this new government, they couldn’t give a shit. They invited McDonalds to sit on the panel to come up with health advise for the nation. They invited all the heads of companies to be part of it. The other thing, it’s a New Labour thing, is that McDonalds are opening their biggest franchise inside the Olympic Village. It hopes to sell an additional 490,000 Big Macs in the Olympic two week period or something.

Words by Matthew Bennett

Read Matthew Herbert’s response to PETA on his 'One Pig' project HERE