Beth Eats Local

Last Saturday, on a day which I have taken to calling ‘Karma day,’ two very wonderful things happened.  The first was that I got an allotment.  For those of you who don’t live in Brighton, this is astonishing.   It was common lore amongst the soily and oily folks that I hang out with that the waiting lists had been closed down completely, only to be opened to community groups and possibly Gandi.  It’s well known down here that the only way to get an allotment is to befriend someone with their own plot and then hope very hard that they die.

Receipt of this letter then sent me into a tailspin of indecision.  There was a plot that I wanted very much…  cast your mind back to raspberry season and the overgrown allotment with rampant fruit canes and greenhouses overflowing with vines…  however, as far as I knew, this was still in the hands of a friend’s friend’s friend.  Perhaps I could contact him and get him to hand it over to me, as he wasn’t doing anything with it?  I tried to get in touch for a week with little success (you try getting in touch with someone three degrees of separation away from you), so on Saturday I trailed glumly up to the allotment site at 9am, ready to take whatever bramble-ridden offering I was given.  The gate was closed until 11am so, fuming, I trudged back home again chanting, “you’re angry because you’re hung over, you’re angry because you’re hung over” (damn you 9% Kentish cider).  Back I went at 11am and talked to some lovely old geezers in the allotment shop (open 11am-1pm Saturdays and Sundays).  “I’m one of the people you sent a letter to,” I announced.

“We like promptness,” said one of the guys (it was 11am exactly)

“I came up at nine,” I said, “but you were closed.”  Since school, I have never been able to rid myself of the habit of ingratiating myself with people in authority.

They showed me a map of all the plots that were free and I could hardly contain my excitement as they circled what looked to be the aforementioned allotment of my dreams.  I walked down to the plot, and with help from another guy working on a neighbouring allotment, we worked out that the grapes and raspberries and acres and acres of bindweed could indeed be mine.  I skipped back to the shop and told them which one I wanted.  The guy smirked and said, “I thought you might want that one, well done for being here first.”  As I was leaving (actually peeking in my new sheds and greenhouses), some other allotment hopefuls came wandering around with a map.  I did my best supportive voice as I helped them to work out which plot was which.  I’ve annotated our conversation with my real feelings…  

“You’re looking for plot 39-1, are you [you tardy suckers.  If you’d gotten out of bed earlier all these greenhouses and fruit trees and shonky wooden structures could have been yours].  I think it’s that one over there.  This one here [with all the COOL SHIT on it] I just got [because I was here earlier than you].  You don’t know whether to get a half plot or a whole plot?  I’d go for a half plot, it’s hard work [but clearly I can cope with it because I’m a superb gardener and also because I have a cunning plan to give part of it to my work colleague].  Good luck with your endeavours [you poor, poor, late fools].

My plans for my patch include planting unusual fruit trees such as medlars, and using the shed to store homebrew and some of my ever-increasing collection of bikes (I should start another blog about my many bikes).  I also intend to keep bees, something that I’m not sure my vegan friends will be too happy about, but I’ll do it in the most compassionate way possible – not replacing the honey with sugar and only taking part of it etc.  I’ll probably also read them bedtime stories and provide them with a little disinfecting footbath that they have to walk through to get in (I jest not, someone told me that this has been set up at some hives to protect against either varroa mite or colony collapse disorder).  I need to do a whole load more research into the various ways that bees can get sick and die but I’m very excited about becoming an urban beekeeper.  I somehow knew that I would be a beekeeper this year.

Marvellous occurrence number two was the appearance of oats in my diet.  I got an email from Sarah Dixon of Pickle My Fancy  blog.  Sarah and her partner did a hundred mile diet for three months in 2007 in Richmond (not too far away from here) and turned me on to a number of different foods that I didn’t yet have in my repertoire.  The most amazing of these was Pertwood Farm Organic Porridge Oats.  Oh dear god, if you have had to live an oat-free life for three months, making pancakes for breakfast from a mixture that sometimes explodes (I had bad luck with fermenting pancake batter and hot water - more on this later*), you too would be on your knees with gratitude at the slow release energy dispatched by this hard-to-find cereal.  A quick call to my insider friend at Infinity Foods and a pack of six boxes of oats were on order for me.  I picked them up on Saturday and hugged them all the way home.  When I got home I had a bowl of oats with honey , and raw milk and savoured their chewy  golden flavour.  I realised as I was eating that I had a person connection to all of the food.  The honey was produced by the man on the allotment behind me (well, strictly it was produced by the bees on the allotment behind me, unless Shaun is a really special kinda guy…), the milk was from cows I saw once a week when I went to Middle Farm, and the oats were from Pertwood where a friend of mine goes to do maintenance at the kids’ camp.  

It felt so wholesome to be eating this interconnected food that that’s all I did for a week.  Oats, milk and honey for breakfast and dinner (I skipped lunch).  Give me a break, eh - I got busy, my friend was in hospital and people were visiting from Australia and err.. Blackburn.  I started worrying on Wednesday that I was feeling dizzy while lying in bed (quite an experience, let me tell you).  That would be because I hadn’t had any protein for a number of days.  Ooops.   I’ve always been an over-eater so experiencing a lack of essential nutrients has been a new experience for me.  When I don’t eat properly these days, I don’t make up the deficit in biscuits, as I used to.  I just don’t eat!  I’ve all but stopped snacking, as to snack, you have to make the snack from scratch which kind of removes the pleasure you might get in, say, inhaling a Kitkat.  After the strange week of being dizzy, I’ve decided to mend my ways and make doubly sure that all the major food groups, vitamins and nutrients make an appearance in my diet (with the possible exception of vitamin B12, but I haven’t got a tingly tongue so I don’t think that any harm has been done yet).  

Last week apart, I’ve never felt healthier than I do at the moment.  I’ve lost nearly two stone since I started and really feel all glowy and positive.  I’ve started calculating how much energy I am going to need to do a particular activity and adjusting my diet as required.  It’s all very different to how I was say, a couple of years ago when I was doing my PGCE.  I would come in exhausted, take five minutes to cook some stuffed pasta and then crash out still exhausted on the sofa before dragging myself upstairs to plan lessons.  One other thing that I have noticed is that you don’t realise how much food you require for a day until you have to take the whole lot with you.  I recently went on an overnight bike adventure and at least a third of my panniers were filled with food.  I’ve discovered that boiled eggs are brilliant cycle adventure food – they’re not going to get squashed and go slimy, they’re full of protein and they’re quite small.  Unfortunately, there’s a limit to the amount of boiled eggs you want to eat.

Eating like this has become second nature to me now.  I’ve devised my self-deprecating way of telling people what I am doing, heard all the jokes, said no to all the offers of crisps and chocolate.  I don’t even think about it anymore.  That said, I do have to make a confession.  I did slightly bend the rules the other day.  It’s not as bad as you might think from this sheepish confession.  I drank Harvey’s Best Bitter (many pints of) in the pub.  This might not seem such a terrible thing – Harvey’s  is in Lewes (the next town along), they use 100 mile ingredients…  but they also use yeast and probably other things (sulphites?) in their brew.  I have to admit that this is the lunatic edge of the project that has always made me crazy.  There are lots of nice local wines and ciders and beers, but brewing requires all sorts of non-local ‘catalyst’ additives like the ever present yeast and sulphites. 

James and Alisa – from 100milediet.org – have always included such foods as allowed, but I wanted to be 100% down the line.  I would eat nothing that wasn’t totally local.  This hasn’t really been a problem until it came to booze.  Booze almost always has such things added.  The only stuff with nothing added was very few types of cider and perry.  I’m REALLY bloody bored of those few types of cider and perry!  Also, sitting in the pub drinking pints of water one after the other was starting to affect my social life (though it was probably doing some good to my liver and kidneys).  I wanted to do this project to bring me closer to people, not to distance myself from them.  Thus, from now on (or at least from the first, illicit, pint of Harvey’s on) I’m now allowing yeast and sulphites.  This will make a great difference to my ability to get rolling drunk and it’ll mean that I can drink wine in France when I go there next week.  I justify my actions by saying that it’s ridiculous to have such amazing local products and to not be able to enjoy them. 

 * At a recent stay at my friend Oliver’s, I took some pancake batter in a jar to have for breakfast.  Unfortunately it was quite hot and I didn’t refridgerate it, so it may have fermented slightly.  I couldn’t get the top of the jar off (because it was filled with gas) and Ollie suggested pouring hot water on it to remove the lid.  I duly did this and the whole damn thing exploded.  The glass didn’t break, but pancake mixture went everywhere - up the walls, on my face, in my hair, in the sink, in the kettle.  Ollie just stood there with a gleeful look on his face saying, “your food is always so exciting!”.  I wish I was better at physics (and possibly chemistry).

It has taken me some time to realise that Google doesn’t know everything.  My first reaction to desiring a particular food item is to google every permutation of its name until my fingers bleed, but I’m coming to believe that perhaps virtual food detection is a narrow street that I have walked the length and breadth of.  Perhaps it’s time for this culinary gumshoe to take to the streets.  If I told you I hadn’t been to the farmer’s market in the whole two months I’ve been doing this project, you’d beat me up, right? 

Though my diet harks back to pre-medieval times, my lifestyle certainly doesn’t.  I sit in front of a computer for three days a week at work and often for a further two days working on my own projects.  I’m a videoblogger, I run conferences on social and digital media.  The phrase ‘Web 2.0’ makes me feel all funny inside.  On top of this, I do a lot of non-tech stuff – from learning to mend bikes to organising clothing swaps.  In short, I haven’t got time.  Internet research is the easiest available option.

It’s starting to strike me that this isn’t really the point.  This project is scaffolded by the internet – I use it to find suppliers, to find recipes (it isn’t unusual for me to be looking at my computer while cooking), to communicate about what I am doing and to connect with others, but I think that I could be doing so much more. 

I could, for example, be using this project as an excuse to explore the 100 miles in which I live.  Unfortunately for me, a good portion of the aforementioned 100 miles is in the English Channel.  I have made tentative plans to get an unsuspecting yachtsperson at the Marina to teach me how to crew a boat but as I don’t eat fish, this won’t do me much good nutritionally.  Luckily, there is plenty of land left to explore and as of now I vow to explore it.  Yes, alright, I’ll go to the next farmer’s market, and if you insist, I’ll visit some pick-your-own farms.  What, you want me to talk to people while I’m there?  Well, ok.

As I write this, I have cunningly used the internet to find a directory of PYO establishments in the vicinity - http://www.pickyourown.org/uks2y.htm.  Later, I’ll spend a couple of glorious hours with an Ordnance Survey map, plotting the routes between them so that I can visit more than one in a day.  Then I’ll have to turn my brain to the tricky problem of how to transport soft fruits on a bicycle.  My life has become more adventurous and innovative since I started this project!    

They say you should listen to your body because it will tell you what it needs.  Recently, my body has been telling me that it needs to  go on long country walks and read books about explorers.  What it hasn’t needed to do (it was very clear about this) was look at a computer.  No posts for a while then.   Wait a second…  my body just told me that- as of right now - it needs to be a responsible local food correspondent and that it will edit the two videos sitting on my laptop and put them up as soon as possible.  I’m not sure if someone coerced my body into saying this… 

I spent last week at my parent’s house in Lancashire celebrating my mum’s birthday.   Actually, I spent last week doing the aforementioned walking and reading, but told her that these were valuable ways of celebrating 60 years of someone’s life.  This was the longest time that I had spent away from home since the project started and I was expecting it to be more of a challenge than it turned out to be.  The rules that I have set myself state that I can take food from Brighton with me if I travel somewhere, but that I should try to source food from within 100 miles of where I’m going whenever possible.   Obviously, I had big plans to scour the internet for sources of Lancashire food, but time – my nemesis – galloped away from me and I found myself on the eve of my departure with little idea of what I was going to eat while I was up there.

Luckily, my mother had not been so indolent.  She had been to a local farm shop and found me honey, flour, and cheese (which I didn’t eat for reasons I’ll discuss in another post).  The dairy farm at the back of the house (literally at the back.  As a child, I would go to school with clothes that stunk of cow shit from being on the line on the wrong day) provided milk and eggs.  The rest of my diet was not so much 100 mile as 10 metre – veg from my mum’s garden.  I brought butter up from Brighton though it went rancid before I could eat it.  It usually does this and I usually eat it, but somehow, in my parent’s house, without the funny smells and fruit flies that I am used to, it seemed gross.  

My mum’s new hobby also provided some sustenance.  She’s volunteering for the BTCV at Haigh Hall near Wigan.  They’re getting the old walled kitchen garden productive again.  It provided me with both a pocket full of raspberries and a fix for my secret garden fetish.   I was pleased to note that they had planted a medlar tree.  As well as secret gardens, I have also become fixated on medlars despite not having ever tried one.   I was also pleased to note that I knew the difference between borage and comfrey when my mum didn’t.  Competitive?  Moi?

It’s a good job that my parents like me as I spent my week filling their house with strange smells and unknown substances.  They weren’t pleased when I dribbled sourdough starter all over the kitchen, despite me protesting that it was a joyful union of wild yeasts and bacteria.  It’s a good job that I didn’t take my ‘vinegar’ with me.   This vinegar is cider that I left for a month on the window ledge in a bottle.  At first all that happened was that it attracted suicidal fruit flies and I had to scoop them out and attach a tissue to the top of the bottle with an elastic band.  After that problem was solved, a thick gloopy goo started forming inside the bottle.  It looked utterly gross and I started to think that I was going to have to throw it away.  Instead of doing that, I swallowed down the bit of sick that was rising in my throat and sieved the goop out of it.  When I tasted what was left I had, would you believe it, vinegar!  A little research on the internet has told me that the gross gloop is in fact called ‘mother of vinegar’ and is a ‘form of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria that develops on fermenting alcoholic liquids’ (thanks wikipedia!).   I did it!  I am a successful vinegar maker.  Now all that I need to do is read the book I have just inherited called ‘Vinegar: Nature’s Secret Weapon’.  It also features two other chapters entitled, ‘Honey: Nature’s secret weapon II’ and ‘Garlic: Nature’s secret weapon III’.   Oh, and I also need to use the bumper crop of apples I am expecting this autumn to create more than a teacupful of this elixir.  Salad dressings, you are now within my reach…

You never expect it to happen, and when it does, it hits you hard.  I’m talking of course about the end of the allotment strawberries.  For a few weeks, I had been in the habit of going up there, harvesting a couple of pounds of fruit and then stuffing pancakes with them for breakfast and I mean stuffing.  But, no longer.  I had planned to build a solar dryer and dry some for winter breakfasts.  No such luck.  I’m always slightly too busy to start building the dryer and what I considered my main drying crop is now over.  As I am reluctant to face a strawberry-free winter, my next plan is to borrow a friend’s dehydrator (electricity, evil electricity), go to a U-pick and pick an amount that will see me safely through to spring.

So, no strawberries, and to add insult to injury my clandestine redcurrant and raspberry stash has been rumbled too.  I was, oh-so-secretly, harvesting fruit from my friend’s abandoned allotment.  Abandoned in the sense that they moved to Bristol, leaving the allotment in the care of someone who didn’t (care that is).  The grass was chest height and hid my furtive doings well from view, but now it seems the allotment has been commandeered and handed to someone else, or at least the one next to it has.  I shall keep a weather-eye on it and see what’s going on.  I really hope that the allotment hasn’t been given to someone else yet because there are vines in their shed and greenhouse which are just about to spew forth pounds and pounds of grapes.  These too I was planning to dry in my not yet existent solar dryer and possibly make some wine from them.  I was planning to bathe in grape juice and make shoes from the skin.  I was planning to…

No strawberries, no grapes.  Looking at my meagre harvest of 20 blackcurrents, five redcurrants and six raspberries, I felt very sorry for myself.  Chris – housemate and fellow allotmenteer - suggested in no uncertain terms that I stopped sulking, but what does he know, Mr Cocoa and Sugar (I’m such a bitter person).  Sulk.  Sulk.  Sulk.  There is a silver lining to this very dark cloud, however, as I have just found some cherry trees on waste-ground near where I work.  I picked some yesterday, wearing office lady attire, going through my innocent foraging story in my head should some thick-necked security guard come along and ask me what I was doing.

There’s more on foraging to come, as I have started a foraging group (we go out on the last Sunday of the month for people who are interested) and we had our inaugural trip on Sunday.  I won’t say too much about it as I’ll be posting a video (this was supposed to be a videoblog, but video is way more time consuming than text to produce and I refuse to let blogging get in the way of eating). 

Don’t worry about me too much.  Though there’s a dearth of soft fruits in my life, there’s always, always rhubarb.  

An article from George Monbiot on small farmers…

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 10th June 2008

I suggest you sit down before you read this. Robert Mugabe is right. At last week’s global food summit he was the only leader to speak of “the importance … of land in agricultural production and food security”.(1) Countries should follow Zimbabwe’s lead, he said, in democratising ownership.

Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.

But he is right in theory. Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen(2), and has since been confirmed by dozens of further studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.

In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares(3). Sen’s observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Phillippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold almost everywhere.

The finding would be surprising in any industry, as we have come to associate efficiency with scale. In farming, it seems particularly odd, because small producers are less likely to own machinery, less likely to have capital or access to credit, and less likely to know about the latest techniques.

There’s a good deal of controversy about why this relationship exists. Some researchers argued that it was the result of a statistical artefact: fertile soils support higher populations than barren lands, so farm size could be a result of productivity, rather than the other way around. But further studies have shown that the inverse relationship holds across an area of fertile land. Moreover, it works even in countries like Brazil, where the biggest farmers have grabbed the best land(4).

The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per hectare than big farmers(5). Their workforce largely consists of members of their own families, which means that labour costs are lower than on large farms (they don’t have to spend money recruiting or supervising workers), while the quality of the work is higher. With more labour, farmers can cultivate their land more intensively: they spend more time terracing and building irrigation systems; they sow again immediately after the harvest; they might grow several different crops in the same field.

In the early days of the Green Revolution, this relationship seemed to go into reverse: the bigger farms, with access to credit, were able to invest in new varieties and boost their yields. But as the new varieties have spread to smaller farmers, the inverse relationship has reasserted itself(6). If governments are serious about feeding the world, they should be breaking up large landholdings, redistributing them to the poor and concentrating their research and their funding on supporting small farms.

There are plenty of other reasons for defending small farmers in poor countries. The economic miracles in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan arose from their land reform programmes. Peasant farmers used the cash they made to build small businesses. The same thing seems to have happened in China, though it was delayed for 40 years by collectivisation and the Great Leap Backwards: the economic benefits of the redistribution that began in 1949 were not felt until the early 80s(7). Growth based on small farms tends to be more equitable than growth built around capital-intensive industries(8). Though their land is used intensively, the total ecological impact of smallholdings is lower. When small farms are bought up by big ones, the displaced workers move into new land to try to scratch out a living. I once followed evicted peasants from the Brazilian state of Maranhao 2000 miles across the Amazon to the land of the Yanomami Indians, then watched them rip it apart.

But the prejudice against small farmers is unshakeable. It gives rise to the oddest insult in the English language: when you call someone a peasant, you are accusing them of being self-reliant and productive. Peasants are detested by capitalists and communists alike. Both have sought to seize their land, and have a powerful vested interest in demeaning and demonising them. In its profile of Turkey, the country whose small farmers are 20 times more productive than its large ones, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation states that, as a result of small landholdings, “farm output … remains low.”(9) The OECD states that “stopping land fragmentation” in Turkey “and consolidating the highly fragmented land is indispensable for raising agricultural productivity.”(10) Neither body provides any supporting evidence. A rootless, half-starved labouring class suits capital very well.

Like Mugabe, the donor countries and the big international bodies loudly demand that small farmers be supported, while quietly shafting them. Last week’s food summit agreed “to help farmers, particularly small-scale producers, increase production and integrate with local, regional, and international markets.”(11) But when, earlier this year, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge proposed a means of doing just this, the US, Australia and Canada refused to endorse it as it offended big business(12), while the United Kingdom remains the only country that won’t reveal whether or not it supports the study(13).

Big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual property rights over every aspect of production; by developing plants which either won’t breed true or which don’t reproduce at all(14), it ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate. As it captures both the wholesale and retail markets, it seeks to reduce its transaction costs by engaging only with major sellers. If you think that supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing countries sweep away street markets and hawkers’ stalls and replace them with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own, large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world.

This leads to an interesting conclusion. For many years, well-meaning liberals have supported the fair trade movement because of the benefits it delivers directly to the people it buys from. But the structure of the global food market is changing so rapidly that fair trade is now becoming one of the few means by which small farmers in poor nations might survive. A shift from small to large farms will cause a major decline in global production, just as food supplies become tight. Fair trade might now be necessary not only as a means of redistributing income, but also to feed the world.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/foodclimate/statements/zwe_mugabe.pdf

2. Amartya Sen, 1962. An Aspect of Indian Agriculture. Economic Weekly, Vol. 14.

3. Fatma Gül Ünal, October 2006. Small Is Beautiful: Evidence Of Inverse Size Yield
Relationship In Rural Turkey. Policy Innovations. http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01382

4. Giovanni Cornia, 1985. Farm Size, Land Yields and the Agricultural Production function: an
analysis for fifteen Developing Countries. World Development. Vol. 13, pp. 513-34.

5. Eg Peter Hazell, January 2005. Is there a future for small farms? Agricultural Economics, Vol. 32, pp93-101. doi:10.1111/j.0169-5150.2004.00016.x

6. Rasmus Heltberg, October 1998. Rural market imperfections and the farm size— productivity relationship: Evidence from Pakistan. World Development. Vol 26, pp 1807-1826. doi:10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00084-9

7. See Shenggen Fan and Connie Chan-Kang , 2005. Is Small Beautiful?: Farm Size, Productivity and Poverty in Asian Agriculture. Agricultural Economics, Vol. 32, pp135-146.

8. Peter Hazell, ibid.

9. http://www.new-agri.co.uk/00-3/countryp.html

10. OECD Economic Surveys: Turkey - Volume 2006 Issue 15, p186.
This is available online as a Google book.

I was led to refs 9 and 10 via Fatma Gül Ünal, ibid.

11. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/foodclimate/HLCdocs/declaration-E.pdf

12. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), 2008. Global Summary for Decision Makers. www.agassessment.org

13. IAASTD, viewed 9th June 2008. Frequently Asked Questions. www.agassessment.org

14. Eg Terminator seeds.

Success. After two weeks, finally a 100 mile meal worth sharing. Witness my breakfast of champions (don’t grimace - in a blog about food, I was going to use that phrase at some point, it’s better that we get it out of the way now.) I made wholewheat pancakes, wrapped them around some strawberries from the allotment and drizzled honey over the top of it. The full recipe is below with producers that I use.

4oz wholewheat flour - Wessex Mill

1 egg - Through We Love Local

Pinch of salt - Maldon Salt

½ pint milk - Middle Farm Unpasturised Whole Milk

Glug of oil - Sussex Gold Cold Pressed Rape Seed Oil

Mix the flour and salt in a bowl. In another bowl beat together the egg, milk and flour. Add the flour a bit at a time, then put it in the fridge for at least half an hour. After half an hour, heat some oil in a pan. The pan should be quite hot, but not as high as it can go. Add some batter and rotate the pan to spread it out. The first pancake will be quite oily, but the ones after will be fine. Flip the pancake over after a minute or so. While it’s still hot, chop some fresh strawberries into it, roll it up and drizzle honey on the top. Eat and enjoy.

To make this even better, how about chopping up the strawberries into a Tupperware pot, drizzle honey over the top and then put inside a rucksack and carry several hundred miles to Wales, including up a steep hill. When you’ve done all of that, the strawberries will have infused the honey with their sweet, sweet juice and will be almost unbearably delicious.

These pancakes have been a life-saver. Without my usual muesli, I have been at a loss what to have for breakfast. I’ve tried the day before’s left-overs. I’ve tried scrambled eggs, but try as I might I can’t eat eggs or left-overs day in, day out. Pancakes, it seems, are a whole different matter. On Sunday night I made up a whole load of batter and then used it for the next three days while I was at work and needed to eat quickly in the mornings. Pancake batter gets better if you leave it - something to do with the gluten in the flour needing time in the water to work properly (ah, lovely gluten).

It seems that this project is all about rhythms and routine, and in a life with very little routine, that’s quite a hard lesson to learn. In the past two weeks I have been learning to plan ahead, settle in and ultimately, calm down. I’ve learned that my veg box lasts for less time now that I am leaning more heavily on it, and that I need to be going up to the allotment 3-4 times a week to harvest. I am thanking myself for starting the project at the beginning of June (intentional), after the dearth of the hungry gap has passed and the strawberries and redcurrents and beans and peas and early carrots and potatoes are all ready to eat. We are harvesting a lot of strawberries at the moment, a couple of pounds a week – at least. I wondered out loud to my allotment mate why they were so expensive when they were so prolific at the moment and he suggested that it was labour costs – which then moved into a conversation about migrant labour. I’m learning that food affects everything.

One of the things that I have been learning to deal with in the first two weeks is panic. In the first week of the project, I panicked and spent a lot of money on food. In part, this is because I was stocking up on things like flour and oil, but I also spent money on vegetables that I didn’t really need to. I learnt the hard way how much more expensive vegetables in shops are than getting them through my veg box. To compare, a bunch of asparagus in a shop costs £1.99. Asparagus is in season at the moment and I got two to three times as much asparagus in my veg box and this costs me £8 a week for half the box (I share with my housemate). The asparagus in my veg box was much thinner, much less uniform than the stuff in the shops, but there was so much of it that it didn’t matter.

My veg box (or my half of it) lasts me nearly to the end of the week. Nearly. For the rest of the time, I have to rely on what I can get from the allotment. This panicked me at first. What if there’s nothing to harvest? What if the insects have got it? What if, what if, what if. It suddenly struck me that this was a fear that was millennia old but that curiously, in a life led close to supermarkets full of food, I had never felt before. I stopped panicking after I went on a foraging mission with my friend Kat. We got samphire, sea beet, mallow and sea kale (this is quite rare in Britain, but abundant in Brighton and we only took a bit). This is only a tiny fraction of the wild food available at the moment. I made comfrey fritters the other day (using left-over pancake batter). I’m not going to starve this week.

…asked my housemates yesterday as they tucked into a curry and swigged tea. “Umm, Ok” I answered. The truth is, they’ve been pretty tough. This, I find, is a mental challenge, not just a culinary one.

On the 30th May, the night before my first day of local eating, I found myself in a tent in Newton-Ferrers, near Plymouth in Devon. My friend Ollie and I had gone to walk the South West Coast Path. Walk we did, at a military pace on the first day as we only managed to start walking at four and needed to get to the campsite before nightfall. I was expecting the night before the challenge to involve relaxing with friends around a meal comprised entirely of chocolate, tea and sugar, all the things that I wouldn’t be able to have for the next year. There would be pats on the back and general warm glow of appreciation for my bravery and single-mindedness. Instead, we cooked pasta and pesto on a camping stove (according to Ollie the most complex meal ever cooked on that stove ) and dropped into bed early because we were so exhausted from walking. I woke up the next day and cooked my first local meal - local to Newton-Ferrers that is. I had asparagus and scrambled eggs from Riverford Farm, a shop that I had found on the internet before the holiday and rerouted the walk to include.

This picture of my first local meal makes it look pretty nice - a romantic and slightly decadent breakfast in a field. The truth is that while the asparagus was great, tender and gently seasoned with posh salt, the eggs were completely rubbery. The gas ran out half way through the cooking procedure and I had to nuke them in the campsite microwave. I hate microwaves, but it was either nuke the eggs or go hungry, so nuke them I duly did.

The past few days have made me utterly fearful of being hungry, even though there isn’t really much likelyhood of that happening. I’ve started having psychosomatic hunger pangs

at times when I cannot possibly be hungry. I thought that I had cut down a lot on ‘non-local’ produce before I started this, but didn’t add in all the snack items that I ate. I didn’t realise how much I snacked during the day until I could no longer do so. No more biscuits on tap at work, no slice of bread when I get in from where ever I’ve been (I’m hoping this situation is going to be different in a week when I have successfully made my own sourdough bread - there’s definitely a blogpost in that particular journey). No quick handful of crisps, no… need I go on? What I am missing isn’t food, it’s time.

Leaving for Plymouth, I felt like I had things completely under control. I had prepared a bunch of snacks in case I couldn’t find any local food in Devon, the first day of my challenge went fine, apart from the rubber eggs. It was arriving back from camping late on Sunday, dog-tired from walking, that I realised the flaw in my micro-managed food plan. While I had prepared food to take with me to Devon in case I couldn’t get any there (the rule is I eat within 100 miles of the place that I am, or take food sourced from within 100 miles of Brighton with me), I hadn’t prepared any for when I got back.

When I arrived home, my vegetable box had arrived and I decided to roast some tomatoes and asparagus (there’s a theme developing here - do you think it’s asparagus season?) and make something involving gluten to wrap around them. Pancakes would have been great but my milk had gone off while I was away, so I ended up making some ‘tortillas’ which rather than the soft, malleable circular bread I am used to, became mishapen and cracker-like. In actual fact, they weren’t bad - kind of like oatcakes - but I wish I had had more time to make something better. This theme of not having time continued throughout the next day. I woke, not knowing what I was going to have for breakfast and opted to make some more of the same cracker-cakes and spread them with butter and honey. At lunchtime, I came home from work as usual, but instead of going back there in the afternoon, I was going to the Houses of Parliament to talk to Lib Dem Environment spokesperson Steve Webb about how bloggers can encourage the government to set higher targets for reducing carbon emissions (more on this later). This left me about two hours to make some food for the evening. I cobbled together a quiche (not a very good one), some honey tarts and honey biscuits all of which were ok but suffered from a) the lack of time involved in their making and b) the fact that they were made with bread flour as I don’t yet have any normal flour. So, a series of hurried and disappointing meals characterised the first few days of the diet, but yesterday I stuck some potatoes in the oven to bake and had them for lunch and dinner today with shallow-fried pepper and asparagus (the theme continues). They were gorgeous, both hot and cold, so I learnt a lesson, two lessons really. Firstly that I always need to be a meal or two ahead if I want to fit this in around my already busy schedule, and secondly that I shouldn’t attempt things I’m not very good at (pastry) at speed and in a bad mood.

So, I’m feeling more positive now, but then I have breakfast and lunch in the fridge and lots of time to cook the next meal tomorrow evening. At the moment, this is what it comes down to, it seems. Half of my brain is living my life (organising conferences, twittering, organising trips to Paris), and the other half is performing complex culinary equations - ‘What am I going to have for lunch?’ Could I also have this for dinner tomorrow?’ ‘Do I have the right ingredient in the house to make this?’

My final taste of chocolate for a year - pear and chocolate tart at Riverford Farm Cafe…

Sunny Savage did a similar experiment in America in 2005. I got the idea from her when I read about it on her blog wildfoodplants.com. Here’s what she says about the experience.

“On September 1st, 2005 seven of us, connected to the White Earth Reservation through our work or family, challenged ourselves to eat foods grown within 250 miles of where we lived for one year. We allowed ourselves 12 ‘trade items’, which we could have at any time, to make the Challenge more realistic. These included salt, oil, pectin, and chocolate. This was an amazing experience in perseverance and sense of place. The sense of community, of people working together to create a peaceful and balanced way of life, was empowering.”

250 miles in a small country like Britain seems a little too much, so I lowered it to 100 miles and got rid of the trade items because I found them confusing. Idly googling ‘eat within 100 miles’ one day I found www.100milediet.org.

James and Alisa ate within 100 miles of their home in Vancouver for a year and they wrote a book about it. It’s quite hard to get hold of in the UK (or at least it was when Amazon (minus points for non-local book buying) tried to get my copy. Below you can find their 13 reasons for eating locally.

1. Taste the difference.

At a farmers’ market, most local produce has been picked inside of 24 hours. It comes to you ripe, fresh, and with its full flavor, unlike supermarket food that may have been picked weeks or months before. Close-to-home foods can also be bred for taste, rather than withstanding the abuse of shipping or industrial harvesting. Many of the foods we ate on the 100-Mile Diet were the best we’d ever had.

2. Know what you’re eating.

Buying food today is complicated. What pesticides were used? Is that corn genetically modified? Was that chicken free range or did it grow up in a box? People who eat locally find it easier to get answers. Many build relationships with farmers whom they trust. And when in doubt, they can drive out to the farms and see for themselves.

3. Meet your neighbors.

Local eating is social. Studies show that people shopping at farmers’ markets have 10 times more conversations than their counterparts at the supermarket. Join a community garden and you’ll actually meet the people you pass on the street. Sign up with the 100-Mile Diet Society; we’ll be working to connect people in your area who care about the same things you do.

4. Get in touch with the seasons.

When you eat locally, you eat what’s in season. You’ll remember that cherries are the taste of summer. Even in winter, comfort foods like squash soup and pancakes just make sense–a lot more sense than flavorless cherries from the other side of the world.

5. Discover new flavors.

Ever tried sunchokes? How about purslane, quail eggs, yerba mora, or tayberries? These are just a few of the new (to us) flavors we sampled over a year of local eating. Our local spot prawns, we learned, are tastier than popular tiger prawns. Even familiar foods were more interesting. Count the types of pear on offer at your supermarket. Maybe three? Small farms are keeping alive nearly 300 other varieties–while more than 2,000 more have been lost in our rush to sameness .

6. Explore your home.

Visiting local farms is a way to be a tourist on your own home turf, with plenty of stops for snacks.

7. Save the world.

A study in Iowa found that a regional diet consumed 17 times less oil and gas than a typical diet based on food shipped across the country. The ingredients for a typical British meal, sourced locally, traveled 66 times fewer “food miles.” Or we can just keep burning those fossil fuels and learn to live with global climate change, the fiercest hurricane seasons in history, wars over resources…

8. Support small farms.

We discovered that many people from all walks of life dream of working the land–maybe you do too. In areas with strong local markets, the family farm is reviving. That’s a whole lot better than the jobs at Wal-Mart and fast-food outlets that the globalized economy offers in North American towns.

9. Give back to the local economy.

A British study tracked how much of the money spent at a local food business stayed in the local economy, and how many times it was reinvested. The total value was almost twice the contribution of a dollar spent at a supermarket chain .

10. Be healthy.

Everyone wants to know whether the 100-Mile Diet worked as a weight-loss program. Well, yes, we lost a few pounds apiece. More importantly, though, we felt better than ever. We ate more vegetables and fewer processed products, sampled a wider variety of foods, and ate more fresh food at its nutritional peak. Eating from farmers’ markets and cooking from scratch, we never felt a need to count calories.

11. Create memories.

A friend of ours has a theory that a night spent making jam–or in his case, perogies–with friends will always be better a time than the latest Hollywood blockbuster. We’re convinced.

12. Have more fun while travelling.

Once you’re addicted to local eating, you’ll want to explore it wherever you go. On a recent trip to Mexico, earth-baked corn and hot-spiced sour oranges led us away from the resorts and into the small towns. Somewhere along the line, a mute magician gave us a free show over bowls of lime soup in a little cantina.

13. And always remember:

Everything about food and cooking is a metaphor for sex.

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And here is my latest inspiration. Fergus Drennan is also doing an eating challenge - the difference being, he is eating wild foods for a year. This blows my mind! Follow the link above for Fergus’ blog in the Ecologist. His attempts to make all-wild bread and his (valid) opinion that blogging is nutritionally futile are definitely worth a look.

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One year. One hundred miles.

From June 1^st 2008 to May 31st 2009 every item of food that I eat and every ingredient that goes into that food is going to come from a one hundred mile radius of my home in Brighton. If I’m travelling, food has to come from either a one hundred mile radius of where I am, or from one hundred miles of Brighton. I’m vegetarian, and I’m going to try to eat organic wherever possible. Am I crazy? Undoubtedly. Am I going to cheat? Not if I can help it. Am I going to starve? You’ve gotta hope not.

Why do this to yourself?

1. I like a challenge. Sure, I could just do the London Marathon like everyone else, but I generally prefer eating to running.

2. I want to raise questions about the food we eat and where it comes from. Who knows if I’ll find an answer but I want to find the questions.

3. I’m concerned about the world. Yes, another hairy hippy. Peak oil and climate change are going to drastically affect how we eat. It’s not just about flying mange tout from Kenya. A report published in the journal Food Policy found that road miles account for proportionately more environmental damage than air miles. It stated that “up to 40 per cent of UK road traffic is involved in producing or transporting food; 28 per cent of all freight on the roads of Britain is agricultural produce, and it’s being transported 65 per cent further than it was in the Eighties.”*

4. The carbon footprint of ‘long-distance’ food is not the only problem. The nutrients in fruit and vegetables start to decline from the moment they’re harvested and lots of the long-distance fruit and veg that you find in the supermarkets have been chosen because they travel well, rather than because they taste good. Long distance food is also generally surrounded by a good two layers of packaging which is largely (but not wholly) cut out with more local food.

5. I want to make new friends. Eating locally means you develop relationships with the people who supply that food. If you’re growing your own (we have an allotment) you start swapping tips (and produce) with fellow allotmenteers. I’m going to be having some regular local food soirees and getting friends and interested parties around for chats about canning rhubarb.

I am well aware that food and ‘food miles’ are not a cut and dry issues. There are so many variables to take into consideration. Was this tomato grown in a heated greenhouse? Was it sent to China to be packaged? This year is an experiment and a conversation, not an attempt to convince everyone to turn into an out and out locavore (though if you’re interested, why not try cooking a 100% local dinner to start off with).

I’m going to be building the website as I go along. I’m new to Wordpress and to code and also very busy (not least with cooking) so please forgive any hiccups or lulls that might be experienced along the way.

Beth

xxx

* Taken from Mimi Spencer’s article ‘Your Plaice or Mine?’ published in the Observer Food Monthly on Sunday May 15^th 2005.