A feast to celebrate single use plastic.
Archives for category: Climate Change
It’s an infinite topic, all the interconnections of climate and weather, food, tradition and diet, worries and hopes. And everyone is going to have specific stories, part of the human story of where we are going as People. I find this short film moving in its particularity in Bangalore, and then imagining that the experience this narrator describes can be written anew all over the world. Facing up to it seems the most important thing.
“Two years ago, a group of grandmothers occupied Cuadrilla’s fracking site in Lancashire. They gave out cake and talked to people passing by about the dangers of shale gas drilling. Inspired by what they did, we’re back at the same site. Follow our live blog and don’t forget to sign the petition!” Emma and Sophie Thompson
Thompson sisters, go, go, go! Thank you for putting yourselves out there, responding to the climate emergency!
(I love how the practice and popularity of baking has created great moments for activism and self-expression, hence the hashtag #politicakes (credit goes to my daughter). Please if you see cakes like this, let me know so we can add it to Pinterest here.)
And on the theme of fracking… this is my all time favourite creative response:
On the growing popularity of fermenting in Britain, seasonal eating, working with gluts and waste, and a new approach to Piccalilli using a technique learned from making kimchi… Read the rest of this entry »
Enjoy the Guardian podcast above with Jane Perrone, Anni Kelsey and Martin Crawford Thanks to Anni for her wonderful blog where I first saw this. Inspiring and eas(ier) gardening, climate friendly and cheaper, plus interesting, tasty things to eat.
For those of us with a habit that pre-dates internet bookmarking: tearing an article from a magazine and stashing it either somewhere random or somewhere sensible — in this case, for me, the latter — my copy of Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food.
So I was easily able to find “The Ones that Got Away: A Field Guide to Rare and Extinct Varieties of Jewish Fish” when, a few weeks ago, I read a poem that recalled the writer’s immigrant Jewish grandfather and “the fish that we called “yum yum fish”/ (What WAS it?) /A mystery lost to time.”
There’s a sad nostalgia for me, thinking of the times in my life, mostly as a child around the deaths of my mother’s thousand relatives, when the food centrepiece would be a platter piled with fish, colours of salmon-orange-pink, skin-silver-bronze, white and bone-grey with bagels, slabs of cream cheese, wedges of wet tomatoes and thinly sliced onions. These were fatty, smokey, pickle-y delicious flavours, salty, strong, and specific to a time that to me feels past. I can’t imagine my own children enjoying this food, and I can’t imagine a social occasion at which I’d find myself now in which it would be offered– that lot of folk has died.
Remembering the generations of people who ate this way, and the knowledge and experience they held, across cultures, is one of the ways that the Slow Food Ark of Taste enters the discourse about lost and struggling traditions, in an effort to celebrate legacies of culinary diversity, and renew them. I’m also really pleased to see Slow Food entering the important discourse about food and climate change.
Roger Mummert wrote something truly fascinating with “The Ones that Got Away,” way back in 1993; he tied together much that is fun and foodie yet also so much about loss (of people, of foodways, of fish), beneath a humorous interview with the proprietor of a famous New York City fish delicatessen. Together they paint a beguiling and informative picture of old world food traditions within contemporary global markets and ecological overfishing. Read the rest of this entry »
Themes of the times are simplicity, economy, moving away from meat and dairy, and of course, ever importantly, deliciousness and health.
These past days I’ve made minor changes to my usual methods of soup-making, using vegetables and green split peas and yellow split peas respectively, in more or less equal measure – rather than giving the throne to one or the other. The result has been very smooth and creamy vegan vegetable soups with basic and local ingredients. I’ve used no dairy, and no potato or rice, so these soups are therefore lower and slower carb. They move beyond their familiar cousins –a Split Pea Soup with carrots and onion, thyme, maybe bay, perhaps ham or bacon — a Cream of Carrot as a thinned root vegetable potage with the variation you choose– to announce not a superiority but a difference, and an assuredly vegetarian one that doesn’t lack heartiness. Try this approach for ease.
This is a very informative and sobering video discussing the pitfalls of the potential trade agreement TTIP– the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. TTIP would represent huge benefit for gigantic agribusiness players, and severely undermine local, ecological and democratic approaches to food and growing.
PLEASE educate yourself and others and keep making a stink in the realms you have any influence– with your representatives, your politicians, your social media, your streets. Use your voice.
By the way, I found this SHOCKING: Read the rest of this entry »
Drought in El Salvador. Photo ©Sean Hawkey
I’m linking to an important response to some of the greenwash that takes place around the discussion of agriculture and climate change. The big United Nation Conference of Parties on climate change is about to take place in Paris, yet extremely significant greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are not even on the agenda (!!!). (And this.) Nonetheless there will certainly be a lot of conversation and media attention to issues of food and climate, and “Climate Smart Agriculture” with all its public-relations backing might get lots of airplay in the discussions that surround the central negotiations.
So many of us hope against cynicism that the urgency of the climate crisis can see a joining together of people and concerns. When you scroll down to the list of signatories to this letter, you get an idea how vast our social movements can be. We need people, not corporations, at the centre of decision making, envisioning and enacting a better future. Our messages must be powerful for our language to be so coopted and coveted by them. Please share this letter in response to agribusiness rhetoric, and as foodies concerned with climate justice.
DON’T BE FOOLED!
CIVIL SOCIETY SAYS NO TO “CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE” AND URGES DECISION-MAKERS TO SUPPORT AGROECOLOGY
SEPTEMBER 2015 Read the rest of this entry »
Kitchen Counter Culture 