Jeremy Clarkson has said that food prices “should be double what they are” because of the “soul crushing” work that is being put into the food economy.
Clarkson, 62, bought a farm in Oxfordshire in 2008 and began cultivating the land in 2019 after a tenant farmer retired. He renamed the farm Diddly Squat, a reference to their lack of profits.
In conversation with Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel The News Agents Podcast, Clarkson said, “People just don’t pay enough for their food. The one thing a government will never say, “Oh, you have to pay more for food, you’re not paying enough”.
“[Prices] should be twice as high as they are. It’s soul crushing the amount of work. I mean, last week I was outside in honest side rain, really heavy, heavy rain, trying to stick a pig’s penis in another pig’s back while Lisa, my friend, was trying to make another pig do the same thing to be copulated by her rubs her back.
“Then someone will say, ‘How much is your bacon?! Why are you charging so much?’ Because it costs a fortune to do it.”
Clarkson added that the experience was “a very, very fun day, but really hard work.”
“Then Lisa and I had to build all of our enclosures for you to be out at night because it gets dark so early. You’re out at night pounding fence posts and then running barbed wire and building electric fences just so someone can stand in Tesco and say, ‘Have you seen the price of those pork chops?!’”
The channel’s comments come after food inflation rose to a record 11.6 percent in October – 6.6 percent higher than this time last year, which was also a record.
Prices are expected to rise even further next year as farmers “are facing the worst conditions in living memory,” the National Farmers Union (NFU) warned MPs earlier this month.
Rising animal feed and nitrogen fertilizer costs, combined with chronic Brexit-related labor shortages, are expected to push prices higher.
Clarkson’s life and work on Diddly Squat is documented in his Amazon Prime series. Clarkson’s farmwhich has garnered a huge following.
