There’s so much to get excited about in the world of British food. Welsh Wagyu beef, artisan cheese, pickles and preserves – all of these ingredients have fantastic stories behind them and have become important parts of our nation’s culinary tapestry. But these all-singing, all-dancing products can sometimes overshadow the things that have been integral to how we've cooked since ancient times. And while many of us might find it hard to get enthused about essential ingredients like flour, that certainly isn’t the case for Clare Marriage, who founded Doves Farm in the 1970s with her husband Michael.
Back then, flour was seen as little more than a commodity – a mass-produced means to an end to create cakes and breads at home. However, Clare grew up with a fantastic cook for a mother, which in turn spurred her on to learn as much about food as she could. ‘My mother cooked with ingredients such as olive oil and avocados, which back then were quite unheard of – you had to go to the chemists to get the olive oil!’ she explains. ‘By the time I was a teenager I decided to become vegetarian, and from then on I became very interested in the nutrition of food and how it was produced. It quickly became apparent that many ingredients were grown on farms adopting modern techniques, using fertilisers and chemical sprays. But it wasn’t until I read a book by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring which pointed a finger at pesticides and what they might be doing to our environment that I became convinced that growing and eating organic food would be a really good thing to do.’
Clare eventually met and married Michael, who had inherited his parents’ mixed arable farm in the North Wessex Downs. While most would have continued to run it as a typical business, the two of them decided to do something seen as quite radical in 1976 – go organic. Starting off with a single field, they sowed their wheat and grew it without any artificial fertilisers, becoming one of the first organic wheat farms in the process amongst just a handful of others.