Mallory O’Donnell on A Sustainable Mind

I’ve learned so much listening to podcasts on A Sustainable Mind through the years.

This interview with Mallory O’Donnell, whose blog How to Cook a Weed is a favourite, struck me. The discussion reflects an approach to foraging which isn’t so much about wild food as trophy but instead gathered plant as relationship– with nature, with gardened landscape and feral escapees, with one’s own process of learning and self-education. I find this moving and hopeful. Have a listen.  And there’s loads to learn and recipes to inspire on the blog.  Looking forward to Mallory’s book!

How to Cook a Weed

I had the great pleasure earlier this month to be interviewed by Marjorie Alexander for the incredible A Sustainable Mind podcast. Marjorie highlights people who are doing some truly inspiring work around issues of ecology, food waste, reusable energy, sustainable living and a myriad of other matters that all relate very closely to the issues that are close to my heart. I feel honored to be included amongst these folks who are contributing in a much more direct way to facing and resolving what is one of the great crises of our times.

It is my firm belief that living more simply and in greater harmony with nature is one of the most important and personal steps we can take in life. I urge you to think about the sustainability of your actions every time you collect wild food, to understand and acknowledge the relationships of the plants and wildlife around…

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Using Food to Change the Thanksgiving Narrative

Hope you like the picture of my cranberry sauce, the one made with the the recipe that used to be (still is?) on the packaging bag– cranberries blended with a whole orange, and sugar. This year I made it in advance with a little kombucha to enliven, in the hopes that it would keep longer without fermenting alcoholically… and be a bit probiotic.

Every year I celebrate Thanksgiving here in Britain, as a touchstone with my kids to the traditions I grew up with. For a decade now at least I’ve made a discussion of the history of the colonisation of the Americas part of what goes on– exploring the myths and lies of the holiday, and the shared experience of native peoples there.. I can’t really sit with the historic (and contemporary) violence without acknowledging it. When I read Anna Brones’s piece below, it was so spot on, I wanted to share it here on my blog.

As people in Britain increasingly celebrate this holiday, feeling grateful and loving with friends and family, enjoying the seasonal foods of autumn, gathering to feast, I hope there will not be here the same mistake as in the US– feeling grateful for everything we have at the expense of what people have lost, often horrifically, to make that happen for “us.”

For many of us, our associations with Thanksgiving are mostly about food. Cranberries, pumpkin pies, stuffing and all those other things that turns the food media world into a seasonal frenzy of recipes and roundups. It’s a holiday where we’re encouraged to gather with our friends and family and be thankful, showing gratitude for what’s on the table and the people we share it with.

These are admirable ideals, however when we talk about Thanksgiving, share iconic recipes, gather around the table, we avoid the harsh reality of a holiday with a dark past, one of slavery, plague and massacres. At its core, Thanksgiving is a story of genocide, and instead of facing that reality, it’s a holiday that we have chosen to mythologize, erasing real stories and people along the way. Instead of the truth, the false narrative around Thanksgiving allows us to focus on the easy stuff…

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Food-Themed Protest Posters as Resistance

Love this project, love the humour and creativity so many people are bringing to their activism and solidarity. And so important to help each other stay upbeat with a chuckle here, a naughty giggle there…

Emily Contois

Our current political moment has incited numerous protests and with them a new cohort of protest posters, including ones that engage food as resistance in ways literal and metaphorical, scathing and humorous. Megan Elias has begun a public history project to archive these political ephemera—Dishing it Out: Food-Themed Protest Posters. Megan is a historian who writes about food in the US. Her new book, Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture (Penn Press) will be out in June 2017. She was kind enough to answer a few questions about Dishing It Out:

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Emily: What inspired you to start gathering these images of food-themed protest posters?

Megan: I noticed the shawarma poster at a protest that I went to in NYC and then a friend in Boston posted a picture of a sign about coffee. The connection jumped out at me because I’m always thinking about food’s roles outside the kitchen. I thought that…

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Reblogging A Pebble in the Pond: People Need Nature report on opportunities for farming, food & nature after Brexit.

New Year’s Resolution to experience and express gratitude– I’m grateful to people who work really hard on the issues I deeply care about.  Miles King is one of them. Here’s what he says about Brexit opportunities.

a new nature blog

I’m delighted to be able to tell you about this new report which is published today. It’s the first People Need Nature policy report – A Pebble in the Pond: Opportunities for farming, food and nature after Brexit. You can download it here.

Here’s the summary:

As England prepares to leave the EU we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to change the way we support England’s land managers.  This report shows how leaving the EU will enable us to channel money from the public purse to land managers in such a way that they can both produce food, help nature and provide all the other benefits society needs.

The last forty years of farm subsidies from Europe via the Common Agricultural Policy has contributed to a dramatic decline in nature on farmland – land that covers three quarters of England. The vote to leave the EU means we…

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Brexit and GM food

I alway’s appreciate Elisabeth’s clear writing and logic. A good piece on what we might expect in the UK regarding the deregulations proponents of Brexit hope to bring to the UK.

Real Food Lover

Image from Sustainable Pulse 

“Waiter, waiter, where is the genetically modified food on the menu?”

Do you know anyone clamouring to eat genetically modified (GM) food?

One of the many reasons I voted Remain in the 2016 referendum was because the European Union (EU) largely protects its citizens against this unproven technology.

EU – a buffer against GM

Look, I am not saying the European Union (EU) is perfect. It needs reform. Obvs. 

But, in some areas, it has acted on my behalf.

The EU has also largely prevented the commercial growing of GM crops, only giving permission for one GM crop to be grown. 

In addition, European consumers can make informed choices about whether or not to eat GM thanks to the EU insisting that GM ingredients are labelled (unlike in North America, where its citizens are now campaigning for GM labelling). 

(Sadly, the EU does not label…

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Tasty Tulip Ideas

Tulips! Edible!

Charlie’s Blog about Food Justice and Injustice in the USA

My friend Charlie Spring is writing a brilliant and hilarious blog-travel-log about her time on a study fellowship in the US. “I’m going to spend the next two months in North America,” she writes, “meeting people who I hope can teach me lessons to bring home [to the UK]: about the entrenchment of food aid under austerity welfare conditions, about going beyond the food bank model, about participatory democracy and citizen involvement in food system decision-making and doing. About food justice, and food injustice.” Eagerly awaiting each new post, I heartily recommend you follow her writings. Here’s just one snippet that will lead you to more.

seekingsitopia

I was in a bad, cynical-feeling place when I got to Rainbow Grocery in the swelter of the day, having seen new dimensions of the homelessness of San Francisco. I felt guilty for entering this cool place of herbs, tonics, plinky music and funky coop members stacking kale chips in polka-dot party dresses, knowing I could afford this food, navigate the wealth of choice on offer. Sort of. Self-service (lots of it) flummoxed me- how much would a handful of decoriated cardamom cost when a pound would cost $50? Gah. You could self serve honey, roasted hazelnut-chocolate butter, tofu, kimchi, vegan chocolate-coated pretzels, pasta, tea, herbs, a million types of granola, dried persimmon, olives. You hold your little compost able bag and open the chute with a knob and gravity sends a landslide of mung beans out over the sides and you try to pull up the sides and once…

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How do making dumplings help people learn English?

“How do making dumplings help people learn English?” Here’s a link to a great project in Manchester, Heart and Parcel. I wanted to RE-BLOG this practical piece about the methodology of teaching ESOL through cooking, and to share the website in general with its fantastic dumpling recipes as well as interesting articles, particularly this one I felt, on Policy, Pierogi and the Perceptions of Women.

“The dumplings and wrapped foods that we make during our sessions are a vehicle. We are not making dumplings as a means to an end, nor do we expect that all women can make, or immensely enjoy, making dumplings. We are making dumplings as a distraction; to create the process by which our participants can explore their minds, their talent, their potential, either through the task at hand (maybe we will get fantastic dumpling makers!) or through conversations had between those women, through information and knowledge being shared and transferred from one woman to another, from one community to another.”

Ashraf Fayadh: ‘A Melancholy Made of Dough’

 

https://soundcloud.com/m-a-djeribi/ashraf-fayadh-a-melancholy-made-of-dough

 

The poet Ashram Fayadh is scheduled to be executed in Saudia Arabia. There is a call to read his poetry aloud all through today. There’s an appeal next week. Let’s keep hopeful: lots of publicity for his case, and maybe this Amnesty petition can help https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/free-ashraf-fayadh-saudi-arabia-palestinian-poetry-apostasy-execution

I chose this poem for its unusual and disturbing use of bread-baking imagery.

ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

This poem, from Instructions Within (2008), was translated by Tariq al Haydar:

A Melancholy Made of Dough

Parts of you pile one on top of another—a mixture of your blood,
sweat, remains, and discharge from your eyes.
And discharge from your eyes.
The knot of your tongue at the midway point of the ocean,
and when the sphere of the sun swims
in a preconceived orbit—
Complications!

What the sidewalk never mentioned
is that you used to step on it
and present your shoes on a plate of concrete,
your feet on a plate of shoes,
your legs on a plate of your misfortune.
You tune the strings of your head to affect your foolish delight,
you bury a skull—you’d rather not bear.
You heap yourself on a slate that claims whiteness due to a fistful of flour—
and you ferment.
You swell and puff your sadness like a hot loaf

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What’s Cooking in Hell’s Kitchens? Solidarity with Refugees in Calais

Amazing loving solidarity work, feeding people in the refugee encampments in the cold, wet muddiness on the outskirts of Calais. Reblogging from ThatCan’tBeRightBlog.  Please share in your networks.