By some bizarre coincidence, today's dinner looked almost exactly like something I was watching on the BBC earlier. There was a short article where a journalist interviewed some people at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester about whether they would be willing to farm worms. (Click the title above for the link). There wasn't really much to recommend the article from the perspective of worm farming - it was all very light and fluffy. What was interesting was watching the journalist and the students he was interviewing. If you hadn't already realised, journalists are always very posh. For example, at least three presenters on BBC Radio 4 are called Quinton. Journalists invariably went to expensive schools (journalism as a profession in the UK has a higher % of privately educated people than even high court judges) and they know how to charm the dean of the Royal Agricultural College* into letting them film on their premises.

But did you know that the people who go to agricultural colleges are even posher? They are the poshest of the posh.

You might have thought that a college which specialises in teaching people how to grow more potatoes per acre or how to castrate a ram with some elastic bands, would be frequented by poor carrot crunching yokels like me, but it's not. Agricultural colleges are not for the people who farm the land, they are for the people who own it. Historically, eeking extra potatoes out of your 100,000 hectares allows you to reduce the amount of land granted to each Irish peasant, thus increasing your yield of cash. Of course this eventually leads to a horrendous famine but the land owners didn't seem to be bothered too much by this.

In truth, the students being interviewed seem perfectly nice - polite, thoughtful, much like students everywhere, but a question that is often asked of MPs, high court judges, journalists and even university lecturers, is never asked about the people who farm and produce our food - do these people represent enough of society to warrant the power they posess? Are farmers, land managers, agricultural specialists or whatever they call themselves, a part of the democratic process? Are they subject to the scrutiny that the other wielders of power are? In a democracy, anyone with any significant power should be in some way answerable to the people, but those who produce our food, own the land and keep us fed seem to have avoided any legislation drawing them into the democratic process, since Wat Tyler's rebellion of 1381.

These are the people who will decide whether GM crops are used, whether animals are raised in an ethical and hygienic manner, whether pesticides are used liberally and whether the green and pleasant land will be churned up and covered in polytunnels. The farming classes collectively wield immense power, but it seems to be power without responsibility, or at least power without oversight.