How to live off the land for a year

Could you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge a retired journalist set himself on Radio 4 this week. Max Cotton lives on a five-acre smallholding near Glastonbury in Somerset with his wife Maxine, two pigs, two dozen hens and a Jersey-Friesian cross named Brenda. He also has six adult sons who, as far as this project is concerned, ‘prefer to pontificate than help very much.’

Cotton conceded at the outset that he would allow himself to purchase salt as a necessity. For everything else, he turned to some ‘back-of-an-envelope type calculations’ and worked out that he would need to grow at least a million calories’ worth of food to sustain him year-round. This would equate to enough wheat to fill a tennis court, or an acre of cabbage if he ate nothing else.

‘Max, you do know some of these seeds are quite out of date?’ interjected his producer, Tessa Browne. Cotton’s confidence in the face of reality established the necessary sense of jeopardy in the first episode. Had he really thought this through? Had he prepared sufficiently to survive? Would anyone still be living with him if he did? One of his sons says to the producer: ‘No tea and coffee for a year? I hope you enjoy spending time with him.’

Much of the food Cotton prepared sounded less than mood-enhancing. There was bread so hard ‘you could put it in a cannon and fire it at someone’, tea boiled from nettles still rigid from the night’s frost, and butter which one regular maker said tasted ‘good… end-of-shelf-life’, before offering advice for improving its preservation. There was no theatre in Cotton’s proclamation that his baked beans, made with the previous summer’s tomatoes and honey, were ‘really important to me’.