More Than the Show Itself

Nine years ago, PJ won a competition to create a sculpture that runs alongside our local library.

His Poemscape: A Physical Anthology comprises 18 hand-carved local Eucalyptus plinths, each with a brass plaque on top containing a poem. Beside each plinth, he planted an apple tree.

In summer we water the trees, in winter PJ prunes them and at the end of apple season we take all the fallen fruit home to compost. 

In autumn, I love riding my bike past the trees and picking an apple to munch on. In fact, one of my favourite things to do is to go biking around this hilly town, filling my basket with fruit gleaned from public trees to eat if they're ripe and stew if they're too much so.

Agnes Varda's gorgeous film, The Gleaners and I, is a political, moral, aesthetic and personal enquiry into the age old tradition of gleaning, which these days falls under the banner of freeganism.

I am thinking of PJ's Poemscape, Varda's film and Freeganism, because of a UK game show that I read about that is due to air online this month.

Ready Steady Skip is a game show where "needlessly wasted food is recovered from the bin and turned into delicious dishes before your very eyes!"

The Iron Chef meets Oscar the Grouch?

Like freegans, I'm not interested in being part of the conventional shopping economy, and I am very much interested in becoming a producer, not a consumer. It is this aspect - of self-sufficiency - that interests me about the show, more than the show itself.