Beth Eats Local

I’m feeling frustrated again, which can only mean that a discovery of epic proportions is just around the corner.   Last time I started feeling frustrated – about the lack of convenience provided by what I have come to know as the ‘silly diet’ - I discovered oats.  Lovely oaty oats.  I discovered them and found them so convenient that they were all I ate for a week.  This time my frustration is at a lack of taste.  I really want to find a taste that will blow my head off.  I need to go searching for horseradish root or mustard or some kind of smoked fish that there is more than one left of in the world.  I need, and this is the crux of the matter, to rely on more than my veg box, Middle Farm and the random gifts of my friends.  I need to put more effort in.

Next week I move house to a place which has a range.  Read it and weep, foodies – seven burners, two ovens, a grill and some kind of warming device that I don’t understand.  I have a fantasy of filling the cupboards and shelves with the preserved bounty of the earth –jars of dried mushrooms (currently in season but so very very difficult to identify), pots of horse radish sauce, cider turning itself slowly into vinegar, sauerkraut.  My fantasy is of being organised enough to take advantage of the masses of food available to me.  Then, instead of throwing myself solely upon the mercy of the season I could be tucking into cookies made with my home-dried currants, or spring omelettes made with last autumn’s mushrooms.  At least one of my new housemates is of a similar fermenty bent to me so I will have an ally when the smell of the sauerkraut gets too much.  I think this will make a big difference.  Making ten jars of sauerkraut on your own is a hassle, when you do it with someone else, it becomes an event.  Soon, Beth and Kat’s canning evenings will be a bigger social draw than the best nightclub down on the seafront.

Speaking of social events, my monthly foraging trips are gaining momentum.  We have around 15 people on the list and 2-8 people come out every month.  It is becoming a movement – although it’s not quite as successful as the vermicomposting (composting with worms) mailing list I set up which now has 88 members.  It just shows that if you pull your finger out of your arse to get something set up, people will join you.  Last month our focus was mushrooms and, despite significant over-indulgence the night before, I still made it into the woods at Stanmer Park by around midday.  My friend Jay, who had left husband and children to enjoy Apple Day celebrations being held in the park, was like some kind of mushroom bloodhound, dashing around finding specimens everywhere.  I stumbled after her, groaning and wearing dark glasses.  We found some edible mushrooms – the name of which I forget – but most interesting to me were fungi you can use for things other than eating.  There were some hard black fungi called King Alfred’s cakes that can be used for starting fires.  They take sparks very easily and burn slowly.  Apparently people used to wrap them in leather and carry fire from place to place.  The other kind of fungi was one which, when dried, can be used as a strop for sharpening things.  Brilliant! 

One interesting development of the past month is that meat is crooning to me in a way that it never has before.  This has happened to more or less all of the people who have done this kind of diet – Barbara Kingsolver gave up vegetarianism when spending a year being self-sufficient, Alisa Smith and J.B. McKinnon, the Canadians who made the 100 mile diet famous, drifted from near veganism to eating some meat and fish.  I think that I am going that way too.  The desire to feast on something’s flesh has come after a month of being more or less vegan.  My source of unsalted butter has dried up so I am using oil for all of the things I used to use butter for.  I decided that I was only using milk for my breakfast and that it was going off too quickly, so I stopped getting that.  Cheese I haven’t eaten for five months because of the non-local salt.  My only dairy staple is eggs, eggs and more eggs. 

Now I have ousted ‘cow-food’ from my diet I really, really feel like filling in the gaps with dead animal. After years of thinking that eating what is essentially the muscles of another being was just plain weird, I now have no problem with that side of things.  What I do object to is industrialised farming.  I am currently in a debate with myself about whether it’s ok to eat rabbits.  This isn’t just a theoretical debate, I have actually have been offered rabbits – a friend’s friend’s boyfriend works on a farm and shoots them.  What a conundrum!   To eat bunny or to not eat bunny.  They’re not being farmed and they’re not being killed for food, but then they are being killed so that said farming can go on.  I better stay away from them until my morals have come to some sort of truce.  I think what I really need to do is get the lovely Fergus Drennan to teach me the dark art of finding and cooking roadkill.  Then I can eat meat while simultaneously feeling morally superior to the bastards who ran it over in the first place.  Everyone’s happy (except the badger).