Harvest Festival

If you watch the BBC news then you're probably already aware of this, but it came as a surprise to me to learn that what we think of today as the celebration of Harvest Festival in churches, with fruit and vegetables piled round the altar only goes back 150 years or so and started in a small church down in Cornwall.  Of course, man has marked the getting in of the harvest with celebration and jollity since time immemorial, and the Catholic Church used to (and perhaps still does) have a festival called Lammas (a contraction of Loaf Mass) when bread baked with the new season's flour is brought to church to be blessed.  The report on the BBC was concerned with the fact that these days less and less fresh produce is brought to church, and what you are more likely to see is tinned and packaged stuff.  The reason for this, to me at least, seems obvious enough - people simply don't grow stuff in their own gardens like they used to.