Barley
6am.
A lovely day outside and the jackdaws are already in the fields. The
house is surrounded by ploughed and greening earth - barley, sugar beet,
rape, potatoes and peas, the occasional flash of borage blue or flax,
and the spears of asparagus in May. I've been having a conversation with
Josiah about these arable fields for several years now. The vast
"agri-desert" of East Anglia that most people do not even notice as they
walk, cycle or drive by and Lord Deben, erstwhle Minister of the
Environment, wants to turn into the GM Bread Basket of England. When we began Roots Shoots and Seeds we
wanted to look at our relationship with these invisible fields, ask
questions that no one asks, even though we are entirely dependent on
what happens with their boundaries. And that's where I'm starting with
this post: with One Day (Tuesday) in my Life as a Low Carbon Cook.
It's a massive subject, as Jasmijn mapped out so clearly,
and clearly contentious. I could go in any direction as a long-time
food writer: from being a food fashion editor at ELLE magazine in the
80s to a Transition activist and blogger today. I could talk
distribution hubs, slaughterhouses, Monsanto and Cargill. I could talk
oysters in Paris, fugu fish in New York, baby eels in Madrid. I could
tell you about any number of conversation (and arguments) I have had
with hedgecutters, scientists, gamekeepers, shopkeepers, beekeepers.
bakers, farmers, radical growers, happy hoarders, city
chefs and local fisherman. I could show you the hell of the feedlots
outside Yuma and a paradise moment eating sea urchins on a Greek island.
And
yet, to address this topic squarely, honestly, it has to start with the
food we hold in our hands right now and the territory outside the
window. How we can put these two artifcially disconnected things
together. If we are going to be resilient as communities we need to
relocalise and shorten our supply chains in a world which is skewed to
favour big industrial farming and the global food machine. We're going
to have to wean ourselves off those pesticides and fertilisers from
fossil fuels, replenish the soil and think hard about water and
diversity. That's the big picture.
We
are also going to have to radically change our diet. As all resilience
food writers will tell you, from Michael Pollan to Colin Tudge, this
means less meat and dairy, more plants. Almost no fish if you care about
oceans. That's the small one. And this is the journey I have been on as
a Transition cook and writer, as part of a pioneer project called the
Low Carbon Cookbook. And it begins here in these barley fields outside
the small brewing seatown of Southwold. Because when you look at
civilisations you are looking at the cultivation of grasses, the
agriculture that keeps them alive. Maize and millet, rice and wheat. We
look fondly at leaves and we argue fiercely about animals, but actually
we should be considering these crops, in whose praise we once sung hymns
and danced at every part of the growing year.
Millet and Rice
9am.
Walking with Dano and Mark toward the tumulus, past wheat fields and
pig fields. Starting the day in a wild way. When you focus on the wild
you're looking at the cracks and edges of things in England because that
is where most of life is thriving. Your eyes scan hedgerows, the
reedbed, the copse, the speedwells and poppies that grow amongst
Demeter's grains. As Transition medicine and plant people, we're looking
to rebalance the domestic and the culitivated, finding the true form of
all living things - including our human bodies. So we start by looking
at the memory of this land, its shifting patterns, at the mesh of fields
and commons through time. We're not looking at land use, or environment
or diet, we're looking at earth and food, looking for a narrative that
grabs the imagination, pulls you closer to people and the plants. Less
mind, more heart.
In
Suffolk several Transition initiatives are going locavore in September,
following in the tracks of the Fife and Cornwall diets. If you eat
bread, meat and fish and cheese you could eat like a king within a 30
mile radius. But this is hard going if you are a gluten-free fellow who
doesn't eat animals. That's when you see our dependence on imported
food. And you start looking at those fields with some kind of respect,
wondering what other crops they could support. Can we grow lentils,
soya, chickpeas, all the mainstay staples of the vegetarian larder?
(very hard in this climate). Looking at my breakfast I know we can grow
millet (though mostly for caged birds in the UK), but not rice. "Wet
rice emits more methane than cattle", Josiah has informed me. So I've
learned to let go of Basmati, along with rainforest palm oil and soya,
tropical fruit and all processed food. I eat brown rice from Italy and a lot of tahini and winter cabbage.
You
might think this is depriviation, but it isn't: writers and cooks love
challenges. We love being resourceful and witty, coming up with creative
solutions. If we want to restore and rebalance the world, we have to do
it by sparking interest, waking everyone up. Facts and scientific
method are useful and call us to account, but they don't inspire us to
explore. Everything is material for a story to a writer, all ingredients
are a dish to a cook. Show them a cupboard or a situation, and they are
already imagining what inventive and delicious things they can do with
it. A cook is not a chef, a conjuror entertaining the masses on
television with their smart and sexy sleights of hand, or cooking up
fairy feasts for the elite. A cook is someone who alchemises the rough
and ready and makes life worth living, finds meaning at every turn,
every day. Somehow to downshift we have to unleash our creativity. We
have to learn to love the territory, get to have a relationship with
those fields. We have to immerse outselves in these grains and pulses
and find out their story. Put our lives in play.
Field Beans
1pm
Lunch of left-over black eye peas (USA) and rice, spring greens and
harissa, after bean planting today in the garden: black beans known as
Cherokee Trail of Tears, runner beans, French beans, wrinkly peas,
Dunwich broad beans, all from seeds I found at the Walberswick Seed
Swap.
In
the cookbook we have this game called Six Ingredients. Imagine you can
only live on what grows in England but are allowed six ingredients from
overseas. What would they be? Tough call for lovers of chocolate and
tea, raisins and durum wheat. We reckoned that between us we could share
our spices by post. Was that cheating? Or was that simply a sign of how
things might go?
This
is my choice: olive oil, lemons, black pepper, rice, red lentils and a
bean. Not sure whether that's a pinto, black, aduki, black eye pea or
lima yet. You could substitue hemp, sunflower or rape for the olive,
suggested my fellow cooks, and chillis for the pepper, and then have
oranges and noodles. Yes, I say but some things you just have to have in
life. Olive oil is one of them.
In
the last year and a half we have discussed a hundred ingredients, we
have looked at growing patterns, raw food and freegansim, we've lit
rocket stoves, cooked together, swapped plants, read books, watched
documentaries, and immersed ourselves in the living fabric of food, and reported all our findings.
Our main task is to bring awareness in an area where there is a lot of
denial. Most people live their lives entirely disconnected from food
production, from these fields. Our task is to reconnect, investigate,
make conscious, reduce carbon emission in all aspects of our meals -
transport, packaging, waste. But most of all to change what and how we
eat. How do you wean yourself away from a highly processed,
ready-cooked, addictive diet, from a culture built on bourgeois cuisine,
that makes feast food an every day occurance and turns organic
"peasant" food into something that is weird and elitist? How do you eat
ethically, ecologically, economically, with heart, in sych with all
creatures, all life on earth?
In Transition Norwich we started by mapping: Norwich FarmShare began with a plan called Can Norwich Feed Itself? The Low Carbon Cookbook began with Deconstruct the Dish, an
exercise which places attention on the material, engaging the
imagination, our ability to cross-reference and make different pathways,
to ask ourselves questions.
This
is how it goes: every-one sits down at a table with a large sheet of
paper (two people to one piece). You draw a circle and put all the
ingredients of the dish inside. Then you take each ingredient and write
everything you know about it alongside. You ask yourself and/or your
drawing partner: Where did I buy this? Which land did it come from? How
did it get here? What people were involved? What’s my relationship with
them? When did I first eat this dish? Then you share what you discovered
with everyone in the room.
The
dish I brought was Fava, which means bean in Greek. It's made with
yellow split peas, traditionally served with eggs, red onion and olives.
Beans are the big story. Right now we're working with field beans:
one kind of bean that grows brilliantly in these fields and makes one
of the best hummus I have ever tasted. Soon to be available in food
stores in Norwich, thanks to Josiah and Nick Saltmarsh of Provenance and East Anglia Food Link.
Quinoa
4pm Going out into the garden to pick the salad,
for tonight's Cook-book meeting. I'm pretty sure Erik will bring leaves
from among the 76 plants he grows in his permaculture garden in
Hethersett - sorrel, land cress, lovage, early lettuce (maybe), salad
burnet (for sure), so I'm collecting some perky wild leaves to add to
the base mix - dandelion, cleavers, daisy, chickweed, yarrow, mugwort,
hawthorn, with some flowers - violet, primrose, rosemary and alexanders.
I'm walking past my donated strawberries and cherry and apple trees now
coming into blossom, the three greengages, blackcurrant and gooseberry
bushes in flower, rhubarb coming up. Apart from oranges and lemons, I
only eat seasonal fruit, so Im looking at those trees with joyful anticipation.
Back
in the kitchen I cook up lentils (Canada) for a salad, and quinoa
(Bolivia), flavoured with orange and cinnamon, wild garlic leaves and
some seeds I've sprouted in a jar. Quinoa is a quandary crop. Hailed as a
modern superfood, it is an ace staple due to its protein content and is
a great gluten-free substitute for cous cous and bulgar wheat. But the
new global demand for it is destroying the fragile soils of the
altiplano and the people who grow it are are going hungry. Forced away
from their native food and eating white bread, they are going the way of
all people who eat a Western diet. I eat it now very rarely and buy
Fairtrade. Polenta has become a stand-by.
11pm
Returning from Norwich the fields are dark and still. The cat is out
hunting rabbits, the owls are hooting one to another in the oak trees.
Bilions of stars are sparkling over our heads. We had a good time at the
cookbook meeting. Erik didn't bring his leaves, but a delicious
home-grown apple, rhubarb and pumpkin crumble, sweetened with Norwich Community Bees honey.
Our main focus was on how much KW energy goes into making a vegetable
stew cooked in three ways - hay box, on the hob and pressure cooked -
and into baking bread and boiling water. Nick had been trying everything
out in his boat in the river outside the house. We exchanged facts
about gas and electrity and swapped stories about cooking under pressure
in the community kitchens of Norwich FoodCycle and Sustainable Bungay's Happy Mondays! And
then we talked plants: achocha and chia, goji berry and blue
honeysuckle, and all the wild things you can forage right now. And
quinoa seeds, which Erik is going to send me in the post. Yes!
"Does
it grow OK here?" I ask. It grows fine, says Erik, but it's tricky to
harvest and you have to wash it or it tastes of soap.
Outside
in the tiny yard stand trays of broad beans planted by Sophie's Spanish
flatmates who have come to the city in search of work. A memory of
their homeland. Plants that have been growing quietly for a million
Spring nights. Plants that keep us all rooted in a rocky time.
Looking
over the barley field (Mark Watson); roadkill pheasant on the Poetry
Paper; still from Power of Community; with Dano and Whitney and wild
salad, filming for the Journal of Wild Culture; postcard for Great
British Beans (Josiah Meldrum); mapping the dish by Elena Judd (Norwich
FarmShare) and Gemma Sayers (Transition Ipswich/Oak Tree Low Carbon
Farm); cape gooseberries and Tierney, head grower at Norwich FarmShare,
among the brassicas (by kind permission of Tony Buckingham, copyright )
Article originally published in the Social Reporting project during a week focussed on Diet and the Envrionment
Dark Mountain: Issue 20 - ABYSS is available 
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