Beth Eats Local

People’s opinions of what I am doing vary wildly.  My friend Oliver (he who as with me on the first day of the challenge and in whose house my pancake batter exploded) told me that he had explained to his dad what I was doing and that his dad was really, really angry about it.  “I had to defend you a lot,” quoth Oliver.  “My dad thought there was no way that you could be getting all the nutrients you needed.”  I recent went on a tour of my friend Erica’s family in London (we were there for a couple of days doing cultural things like going to Freud’s house and Selfridges) and the reactions of the various members of her family were hilarious.  Her very Russian grandmother simply couldn’t get her head around the rules and kept offering me yogurts and cake.  “It’s from Waitrose down the road,” she opined.  I had to sadly shake my head and say no, cursing myself for being so rude.  I crumbled under the questioning of her step-mother, a lawyer.  When asked why I was doing it, I said “Err, well, to learn stuff, and to, like, encourage other people.”  Reviewing the situation later on with Erica I said that I didn’t think that saying that I was teaching myself skills that I thought I would need in a less peachy future scenario would have gone down well.  Erica thought that that would have stood as a much more convincing counter argument than what I actually came up with.

Other people are more enthusiastic.  I have had people come up to me and say, “Oh my God, that’s so BRILLIANT.”  Last night I had dinner at my friend Tom’s house with another friend called Alice.  Strictly speaking, we were there to do funding applications for Cranks - the bicycle workshop that I volunteer at.  Actually it turned out we were there to cook food, drink wine and chat (amazingly about things other than bicycles).  “We’re going for full solidarity,” said Tom when I arrived and put his gin and tonic away to share some of the local wine I had brought.  “Full?” I asked.  “Wow.”  It’s really unusual that people want to go the whole hog.  When it comes to dinner parties, I usually have to take my own dinner.  We had possibly the best meal I have had in the nearly four months that I have been doing this.  I made chappattis (I have more or less stopped making sourdough as chappattis take half an hour vs two days for the sourdough) and we roasted some potatoes and a sweet potato (a sweet potato!!!!) from Alice’s friend’s allotment.  We made salsa from a giant green tomato from the same allotment and chillis that I grew in the kitchen (plus some that Alice brought).  It was an altogether astounding meal made so much better by the fact that so many of the ingredients were grown by us or people we know.  I left with a bagful of pears courtesy of Tom, a chiropractor, who said that there’s an abandoned peartree near the car park of his clinic.  He related the story of how he would annually get up on the roof of his car in smart workday clothes and throw pears down to his colleague.