freedom ahead

Six weeks in, and my Year of Buying Nothing New is going pretty well. Some things, like white paper, have been hard to source. Freegle this week yielded two bird feeders, and chicken wire for the allotment. I’ve been borrowing and lending a lot more things like books, and giving away quite a lot of stuff including my own produce and preserves. I’m buying the seeds we need this year, though – aiming to save a lot more next year. My Saturday Guardian has mainly been sourced from the Ellie where I have started to lurk, beer in hand, towards closing time.  Generally, though, I lack for very little.

Being in my early 50s, I find that I already have enough ‘stuff’ and clothes, probably, for a lifetime if carefully looked after and mended. But age isn’t the only factor: buying second-hand and making do with less seems to come naturally my 22-year old daughter and many of the younger people in our 36-strong Facebook group. Perhaps it’s because they have less money and are also more canny and more aware of the problems of the throw away culture.

I can sense that some of my contemporaries are uncomfortable with this little experiment and project on to me that it’s an exercise in righteous self-denial and even self-punishment. Far from it. As anyone who has experienced fasting or conscious simplicity knows, there can be an increase in connection, joy and freedom.

Freedom Ahead is the title of a lovely new film being shown by Transition Town Lewes this Friday; see here for the trailer. It documents the lives of a growing number of people across the world who are turning to the land and a simpler life, with fewer overheads, less stress and more community and more security. As an eloquent young Indonesian says in the film, ‘Security is in seeds, not money’.

checking out from the checkout

Today I’m celebrating liberation from supermarkets. I last stepped into one of these cathedrals of consumerism three months ago, before the Lewes Octoberfeast. Far from being difficult, it’s been a great relief  - as though I’ve finally come off a toxic addiction.

Looking at a recent questionnaire about food shopping by Transition Town Lewes, it appears that I’m joining a growing band of people seeking supermarket freedom: there are at least 32 people in Lewes who buy almost all their food from our two markets and local shops. The others stated that the main barriers to supermarket freedom are convenience and price. I’m going to argue that this doesn’t have to be so.

In the spirit of enquiry, I’ve kept a note this last week of all my food spending in my little diary. The backbone of our household’s food spend is a quarterly delivery from Infinity Foods of grocery items, including pulses, grains, tins, sauces, chocolate, teas, toilet paper and cleaning products. Everything that’s not fresh gets delivered to our door, for free; being wholesale it turns out incredible cheap, apportioned weekly here:
 

£25 Infinity Foods chickpeas, lentils, oats, rice, pasta, noodles, sauces, oils, spices
£50 weekly food market (£6 bread, £8 apples and eggs, £13 meat, £8 veg, £15 cheese)
£26 Pleasant food stores (oranges, lemons, milk, butter, biscuits)
£11 Lansdown (veg sausages, yoghurt and tofu)
£4 potatoes from sack from Ashurst Organics

Backed up with plentiful greens and some frozen fruit from the allotment, this weeks’ total  food supply, for a family of four adults came to just under £120 or about £30 a week per person for a diet that’s entirely organic or biodynamic and where all the fresh stuff is local. 

I think it's so cheap compared to supermarkets because little of this food is processed or part of the industrial food chain and because I'm not temped to just buy a few extra treats.
 

It's also convenient: I shop at to the market every Friday and bike down to Lansdown every Saturday. For dairy and some treats, one of us drops in at our lovely new Pleasant Stores.
 

It’s bliss not to have to deal with supermarkets, which are designed to dupe us into spending more on things we think we need and bombard us with choice. I hate all the packaging waste and the lifestyle messaging that we are fed in a zombie-like accepting way - including the idea that Waitrose is really much better than the other supermarkets. I’m also delighted to withdrawing my support of the industrial food system with all its own fat cats and hidden costs to the earth and people.

Most importantly, people I know who are shopping this way say they like putting their positive energy and money into systems worth supporting: local farmers and shopkeepers, wholefood coops with strong ethics and a resilient food system that is fit for purpose.

Photo by Emily Faulder

well-fed neigbours

I don’t want to scare you but I think it’s time we started to store food. It looks as though we could be in for quite big changes in the coming decade. We might be looking at the Long Emergency and we might be facing some sudden changes. These could come from one or several areas: economic, energy and climate. Most pressing is the recent news that British government is planning for the possibility of economic collapse following the now-almost-inevitable collapse of the Euro.

When change happens, we’re all better off if we see it coming. There’s nothing more conducive to panic and bad behaviour than being badly prepared. You only need to visualise the Christmas rush at Tesco or the empty shelves in the fuel strikes in 2000 to get my drift. Or, as the article above describes, banks being unable to give out money and destroying companies dependent on bank credit.

But you don’t need a national crisis to justify storing food. Friends of mine who are going through financial troubles say that they feel so much better knowing they have a few sacks of rice and pulses in their store cupboard. And such things were totally normally in our grandparents’ day before the just-in-time brittle corporate food chains were established.

As I see it, there are three main ways to build food resilience. The easiest is to simply build up your own stores. Aim for a couple of months’ of your usual staples at any one time, then just get used to rotating the food as you eat it.
For a decade now we’ve been ordering our bulk food from Infinity Foods, a co-op that’s cheaper and more convenient than supermarkets. They deliver free to Lewes on a Tuesday if you buy over £250-worth. We order every four months, storing the 5kg bags of rice, oatmeal and pulses, tins, oils and jars on top of our cupboards and in our basement. There’s always a bit of space somewhere to store food. I know people who group together to share orders and others who buy Infinity food from Just Trade, a brilliant Lewes-based non-profit co-op that runs a drop-off  at Lewes New School (next delivery 9 December).

Some people feel afraid at the mention of food storage, projecting out that it’s about being selfish or fear-mongering. And though it’s true that denial is a first cousin of fear, it’s best to get over that fear and be practical. The more of us who are storing food, the better. As they say, our best defence is a well-fed neighbour.

hook, line and sinker

I know I’m going to dream about fish tonight, after a day of mackerel fishing on the sea.  It feels as though my kitchen is rolling on the swell and the Easterlies that rocked our boat, the Ocean Warrior 3 all day.


We set off from Newhaven harbour at eight in the morning on what is, despite its name, a small chartered fishing boat. The skipper, Dave, took us straight out to some wrecks where he located fish on the screen in his cabin. Once anchored over a shoal, the mate, Steve, put on the tackle and bait on to our rods and off we went.

I’ve never caught a fish before but I had asked for a rod for my birthday two years ago as I wanted to develop what is a crucial skill for feeding ourselves. I’d been occasionally fishing off Seaford Head since then. Even though I’d accepted that I might not catch a fish today I was really excited when the first took my bait - a mackerel whose doleful eyes stared at me as I pulled the hook out of its mouth and threw it in the box to suffocate. Then another, and another. One of the men on board, Ron, lent me his mackerel tackle, which consists of six feathers and hooks that the mackerel seemed to love, because I immediately caught six on one line, almost as soon as I threw the line in the water.

When I caught two dabs on one hook, Steve told me I was a ‘dab hand’ at this. I was happy at that and also happy to move and roll with the boat. We all caught many fish between us. After a while, though, I stopped, though, as I felt that would easily do for my dinner, my friends and my freezer. It almost seemed unfair to the fish for the fishing, and their death, to be so easy. I felt grateful that these gorgeous grey-green dappled mackerels and the white, soft bellied whiting were giving their life for me. I said a little prayer as I put each one away and thanked them as I was gutting them back at home.

I now understand the lure of the sea, the magic of that suspended time with the wind, the waves and the fish. I hope that dreamy state will stay with me for some days yet.

trouble in store

I’ve started to store food. I feel slightly embarrassed to admit this, because it’s  not normal behaviour. Last year our family waterproofed our under-street coal hole, turning it into a dry, cool store for both fresh and dry food. In the autumn I stored 12 squashes from the six plants on my allotment. This year I’m growing 15 squash plants for the winter store: Uchiki Kuri, Potimarron, Turk’s Turban, Butternut, Crown Prince. They’re as exotic to eat as they sound, making golden, warming, nutty soups and pies all winter. 

But why, when you can simply feed your family for fifty quid from the supermarket? Because big change is ahead andThe World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Assessment shows that the greatest risks facing us in the coming decade are climate change, ‘extreme energy price volatility’ and fiscal crises. Some say that high food prices are here to stay. I’m not saying that we’re going to go hungry in the south east of England, but I do want to live in a world where responsibility for feeding ourselves doesn’t lie with multinationals; I want to get more food skills under my belt; and  as food prices rise and our income is vulnerable, we might just be happy to have some hearty food to hand.

So, it’s time to get resilient, no matter that the politicians, corporations and popular media would prefer us to be shopping. Over recent months I’ve deliberately created more time for growing food and learning how to preserve it. I’m growing most of our vegetables for about ten months of the year from my allotment (apart from potatoes, onions and carrots, which can be grown in fields and stored in sacks in my basement). Now, as summer brings abundance, I spend some time each day growing, harvesting, drying, pickling, fermenting, freezing and storing.

And I’m about to take another step: next time I put in my bulk order with Infinity Foods, instead of a five kilo bag, I’m going to order a whole sack each of rice (25kg for £28), chick peas (£35) and lentils (£36) – all from Europe - and I’m going to store them in our food store. I know that I’m only as resilient as my neighbours are, and I'm not planning on defending my stash. Maybe I’m mad, or a decade ahead of my time; maybe in ten years our town will have a huge food store under the castle. Who knows. But my gut is telling me to do this and it feels really good.

I protest

Of course I was embarrassed that a photo of me being arrested last week appeared on the front page of the Sussex Express. Not only was it unflattering, but the headline, ‘OAPs arrested in Boots picnic demo’ was equally humiliating (I am 50). However, once my ego got over the shock I realised that the whole fiasco, including the illegal arrest, was effective because it had got loads of people talking about the issues. Several schoolchildren who remembered me from Lewes New School were very concerned and gave their parents the chance to unpick the story.

I’ve been occasionally protesting over the years since I was a teenager, and I tend to do it when the feeling of outrage rises up and needs expression. It’s an intuitive thing. Revolution seems to be in the air, yet the underlying causes of the problems – a capitalist system designed to reward the wealthy – economic growth based on increasing use of finite resources and polluting fossil fuels – peak oil imminent – are so endemic, it’s hard to know where things will go.

The sane place for me to turn, when my heart literally hurts, is always towards nature. I’ve been escaping off to the allotment this week whenever I’ve had enough of the computer. Finishing preparations for the spring which is tangibly starting to happen. Harvesting green salads daily from my polytunnel, which feels at times like a little chapel. This week, inspired by my friend Tali, who has a stall at the Friday market, I’ve been picking the first tender shoots of chives, sorrel and parsley and chopping them up fine with goose grass from the hedgerows and mixing with lemon juice, salt and a little olive oil, for a spring zing on our supper.

I’ve been sowing the first seeds into a small propagator I bought over the winter, a little mantra: cucumber, tomato, celeriac, celery, chillies, aubergines, dreaming of sunshine and abundance. I wonder if we’re dreaming our way out of the dark times.

rooted

I find that one of the best antidotes to January is to make marmalade. Over a few days the golden Seville oranges from Bills are converted into a steamy, pungent, sticky mess that is captured in the warmed jars for eating with thick butter on my mate’s oatcakes.

Now the 20 jars sit alongside treasures accumulated over recent seasons: Sophia's plum jam from the young tree on our allotment, pickles and chutneys from summer veg surplus, exotic swaps from friends. In the freezer we're coming to the end of the blackberries and stewed apples and the transluscent red wild plums from the tree by the Tally Ho pub. Summer fruit always seems like a chore to preserve at the time but is so welcome in the midwinter. Down in the food store that we converted from the coal hole last summer, my last pumpkin was made into a nutty soup for my sister in law last weekend and the last two Bramleys from my neighbour's tree are waiting for the final crumble.

Just in time, frothy green shoots are appearing in the hedgerows to supply me with the spring greens my body is craving after a winter of roots. Dandelion, nettles and Alexanders will go into soups and salads along with the greens that have sat patiently through the winter in my polytunnel, anticipating the lengthening days to bring me bitter salads of chicories, endives, turnip tops, parsley, corn salad and small heads of the hardy lettuce Valdor, whose seeds I collected from a bolted lettuce that survived last winter under snow. 

It's Imbolc next week, the turn of the year when our ancestors welcomed the tender glimpse of spring, the lengthening days and the first tentative blossoms. Gradually, over the years, I've aligned myself with the seasons and their harvests. With less central heating and light but more wood fires, blankets and hot water bottles, I've enjoyed withdrawing into this winter, accompanying my honeybees, clustering in their hives. Now I'm just starting, slightly reluctantly, to feel the pull of the sun, drawing outside on to the land, just as the bees will, I hope, soon be foraging among the first crocuses and catkins.

whiff only

We’ve recently returned from a long train journey  through Europe, Turkey and the Caucasus. A month to celebrate being alive, together after 20 years. A cross-reflective journey in search of the exotic after four years of not flying. We’re still having travelling dreams, where the smell of sewage mingles with the call to prayer and the beautiful, dilapidated, ancient and chaotic has its own cohesion. It’s hard and unrealistic to try to make sense of such rich exposure. As difficult as interpreting the curly script of Armenian or the professional fleecing techniques of the Georgian taxi drivers. It’s enough just to wonder.

As a food lover I was struck by the inverse relationship between the wealth of a country and its interconnected, employment-intense food infrastructure. As soon as we crossed the Bosphorous in Istanbul, that marks the divide between Europe and the East, we saw people growing and selling food all along the roads, from women knocking walnuts out of the trees growing along the main roads, to horsedrawn carts piled with produce. Outside our homestay in Tblisi, Georgia, a man and his wife sold freshly-made khachapuri – cheese-filled pastries – from their front window, an old lady sold tomatoes and grapes from a little shelf outside a shop to supplement her tiny pension, and the next-door shop employed five women attending five counters, each selling different goods: fresh, preserves, alcohol, toys and household goods, cooked fast food: a whole department store in one little shop the size of Bill’s. And yes, it smelled very good, a mixture of fish, pastries, tobacco smoke, bodies and fruit, with a whiff of sewage.

Returning home, through Austria and Germany, I became chilled by the cult of efficiency – acres of clean pavement; supermarkets with minimum employment: materialism gone too far. Back in Lewes, I have mixed feelings; we’ve definitely lost our food resilience, being 98% dependent on Tesco and Waitrose. But we have a weekly market. And we’ve created a kind of token ritual in the Octoberfeast. Maybe, tentatively, we’re coming back to our senses.

veg out

Something is happening to me and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I had to go to the supermarket a couple of times last week - I can’t remember why - I was in a hurry or my usual shops were closed. Standing in front of the vegetables my stomach spoke to me: ‘Don’t eat that stuff. You don’t know where it’s from.’ I walked up and down the vegetable aisle but there wasn’t a thing there I felt like eating, even organic. Normally I get a little joy-song from my body when I think of eating the food in front of me. But the sullen silence meant I left without the planned supper. Maybe it was seeing Food Inc a couple of weeks ago. Maybe I’ve gone off industrial food.

What to do? The allotment is still mid-hungry gap, and my Ashurst veg box is still fortnightly. But there are a few things to eat. There’s the last leeks and some chard, just about to bolt. I’ve been steaming chard, chopping it up with the end of the garlic and olive oil. There’s nettles, of course, which make the best soup on these cold days. There’s rhubarb, loads of rhubarb, still. And there are some good salads around, if you use the young lime leaves along the Pells to replace lettuce, and mix in a few odd leaves like dandelion, kale and rocket. I’ve got some spring onions left over from last year, some just-up chives plus the last parsnips from the old lady in the nearby allotment.

So, in fact, there’s plenty of food. It’s free and it’s incredibly tasty. It’s what there is, until June when the variety starts to grow.

Someone commented recently that I am a rich woman playing at the good life. And the Tesco supporters at the planning meeting implied that local food is for wealthy people. These facile repetitions need to be challenged. I am technically quite poor – poor enough to qualify for tax credits and maximum grants for my children in education, and happy to be so. But I am educated and I read about the world, and so good quality food is a priority, and I forego much of the ‘stuff’ and activity other people seem to find so essential. I’m not alone on the allotment in growing my own food partly because it saves money, and will do so increasingly as economic growth continues to stall and peak oil starts to be felt. The kind of food we eat is a choice. We are not victims of our economic circumstance; we are partners in our own destiny.

Our vicar in Firle, Pete Owen-Jones seems to feel the same in a new BBC2 series, How to Live a Simple Life.

My last posting about Tesco

So Tesco won its application to expand in Lewes yesterday, increasing its already massive share of Lewes’s money and further undermining an already fragile and complex local economy and employment structure. It was interesting to watch how the drama played out in the formal planning meeting. The two members of the planning committee who spoke to accept the application said they opposed it but could find no material objection that would stand up to appeal. In my view, having read the documents, if the committee members had been minded to, they could have called on a number of laws now in place to prevent this kind of monopoly. They could have commissioned better, independent research. But they didn’t and the legal officers, ultimately, ran the process last night. A sad day for democracy.

But hey, I’m not sad. I did everything in my power to prevent the extension. I researched and wrote about it here. I had fun taking part in publicity antics like the Tesco whirl. We got 1,000 signatures, which meant that those 1,000 people are thinking more carefully about the ethics of their food. I got to know the wonderful Marina Pepper a little better. And I learned more about how corporations and local government work.

And much more importantly, I’m also helping create better alternatives. I’ve joined a Transition Town Lewes group forming to create a weekly local produce market, thanks to the support of the Lewes Town Partnership and Lewes District Council. We met yesterday, before the Tesco debacle, and had really positive meeting with vision, skill pooling and can-do. It’s going to be a wonderful market, with affordable, nutritious, local food providing creative enterprise opportunities for many people and rebuilding our relationships with each other and the land around us.

The old paradigm and the new are so poignantly juxtaposed. Here we are at the cusp of transition from an industrial growth society that has, especially in my generation, all but destroyed our collective natural capital. We live in the last days of unchecked greed; the machine is running out of fuel. And little by little, this creative, collaborative parallel public infrastructure is forming, not just through the Transition movement but in many, many different individual and collective ways, quietly, gently, persistently, beautifully.

mind the gap

I bought a cucumber and a bunch of grapes from the supermarket yesterday. The only odd thing about that is that I’d not done that since last September when they were in season. Nowadays, eating fruit and veg mainly from veg boxes and my allotment, such things are a rare treat, in this case an attempt to get my son to eat cheese sandwiches for lunch and a treat for my daughter who craves grapes when she’s ill. In terms of British eating season, we’re entering the hungry gap, when the roots all go floppy and start to sprout. I’m finding it hard to muster enthusiasm for cooking up, again, the swede, celeriac and parsnip in my fridge drawer. Yet, just in time, the greens are starting to come into their own and now every meal is green, rotating between chards, sprouting broccolis, various kales (this year I’ve grown Pentland Brig, Borecole and Red Russian) and the early pungent salads, a mix of rocket, lamb’s lettuce, dandelions, fennel leaves, various herbs, chives and young cleavers and brassica leaves, all coated with a honey and tahini dressing to offset the bitterness. The hungry gap means that the apple season is over, oranges from Europe have nearly finished and bananas are now a rare occasion in our fruit bowl. For the next two months, rhubarb is our main fruit and when strawberries arrive we will so very much enjoy them.

Am I a joyless self-flaggelating purist? No, on the whole – apart from, ahem, the roots - eating locally in season is pure pleasure, and the range of vitamins and minerals soaked up from our local, natural, unpolluted soil, water and sun are perfect after a long winter without sun, fresh local veg and exercise. Mankind has been finely, intuitively, tuned to nature for 80,000 generations, and just because one generation of Brits has bought the marketing message that supermarkets mean progress, doesn’t mean that it is so.

taking the 'ate' out of corporate

I’m still buzzing from a talk by Patrick Holden, chair of the Soil Association, at Pelham House last night, during which he described the mad vulnerability of our food chain to the complex man-made crises ahead. He reminded us of the collapse of other civilisations, usually because they ran out of food or fuel, often precipitously, because they continued apace until the final collapse. And because we globalised in the 20th century, the crisis in the 21st century is likely to be global, he said. Factors contributing to this include fossil fuel depletion, resource depletion (including phosphates we use for fertilisers), climate change, a rapidly growing population, diminishing growing land, the industrialisation of agriculture and a complete failure by our leaders to ensure we have a resilient plan B.

In our lifetime, in one generation, we’ve used up half of the world’s resources, laid down over hundreds of millions of years, including topsoil, fossil fuels and fish. Pause a minute to let that sink in; it’s deep. We’ve lived way beyond our means and we’ll pass down a severely depleted planet to our children. We’ve all been responsible, he said, even organic growers, so now it’s time to reverse the trend and start to take personal and collective responsibility. He said he sat next to Professor John Beddingham, the government’s chief scientist, at a lunch recently, and asked him about his thoughts on our resilience. Beddingham replied he thought that things would get very challenging in 15 years.
Holden’s main concern is that our food systems are far too concentrated in the hands of a few corporations and physically dangerously centralised, making them vulnerable to fuel price rises when peak oil hits. In the US 80% of arable land is planted with only two varieties of crops: maize and wheat, both genetically modified, so the seeds cannot be saved. A lot of that is used to feed animals in feedlots covering as far as the eye can see. It’s getting that way in the UK, he said. If you buy own-label milk in supermarkets, it comes from one of five milk processing plants. All of Sainsbury’s meat comes from one abbatoir. Even in Waitrose, if you buy carrots they are likely to come from one of 10 carrot producers, who produce 80% of all carrots.

Some of my best friends still shop in supermarkets, even though they admit that they don’t really want to. It’s almost addictive, the rut of supposed convenience and supposed savings that supermarkets tie you in to. They say they are too busy or can't afford to do otherwise. Yet I notice that cost isn’t such an issue when it comes to other expenses such as holidays and entertainment. But this isn’t about making people feel guilty or stupid; it’s about trying to raise awareness and talk about the issues. I’m wondering if we might need a sort of Supermarkets Anonymous – a 12 step programme to help us get off shopping and hand ourselves back to nature to feed us – any takers? Though a simpler start could be to simply join one of Lewes’s vegetable box schemes listed here.

And as I’ve said before, we shouldn’t demonise the supermarkets; they are doing what it says on the packet - maximising profit mainly through economies of scale and externalising costs (that means using our common natural capital as though it’s interest and exporting the pollution/cheap labour to somewhere invisible). And apart from being unsustainable and abhorrent, this practice is not resilient. The great thing about resilience – the ability to withstand shock – is that it’s about self-preservation – whereas the response to climate change is essentially a moral one. My hope is that once the penny drops and we all – from individuals, communities and governments, realise that the corporate food system, including Tesco, is not only unhealthy and immoral but also makes us dangerously vulnerable to shock - we will come to our senses and start to treat food as though our lives depend on it.

the wasteland

A little pleasure garden is rising out of the rubbish and brambles on the North Street industrial estate. In the marginal land between a building that used to house the fire brigade and the walled-in river, a patch is being tended, tenderly, by a few people thrown together through the love of it. It’s a community garden in the making, so everyone’s welcome. On the first day we picked up the litter and cut back the brambles. The stronger among us hoisted logs to make a hexagonal raised keyhole bed. At the next session we planted strawberries, raspberries and an artichoke in it and made some paths using an old pile of woodchip. A little boy pitched in with his bucket and spade. An artist made a path around a welcoming mound by the entrance, on which we’ll plant crocuses, primroses and forget-me-nots. Soon we’ll make a swing, a fire pit and somewhere to sit, and a willow dome for the children, all out of scraps and unwanted things. A friend is running a biodynamic compost making workshop there soon, which will help revitalise the polluted soil. It’s becoming a place of beauty and intention.

Last week’s Costing the Earth spent 30 minutes covering the New Diggers, a new wave of people reclaiming unused land all over Britain in order to feed themselves. It’s a visceral collective response to climate change and peak oil, a move to empower ourselves in the face of uncertainty.

We all garden for different reasons, and this patch is special to me because of the people I am working with and because I love marginal places, derelict land where nature shows up through the cracks. That’s the reason why I never pay to visit National Trust gardens and the like; to me they’re sterile, forced arrangements in comparison. No, the wild places, the edges, are where it’s all happening. Last night’s totally gorgeous Natural World focused on the Wild Places of Essex. And there are plenty all around Lewes, when you start to look. From the moss on a wall to the tall grasses on the mounts and the wild patches near the castle, nature is constantly reasserting herself; you can never keep her down, never tame her. So we’re helping her along, a bit of Earth repair in our little Pop-Up garden, a place where people can be together and do what comes naturally.

jump up and live again

During this week's World Cafe conversation at Bill's Cafe about supermarkets, I realised how insane it is to eat supermarket food when delicious, vital, colourful, word-free food springs up out of the ground all around us. For instance, last night our family ate a wonderful organic supper of baked potatoes with butter and a yoghurt sauce, butternut squash roasted with masses of garlic, and rocket salad with a honey dressing - a very cheap meal using what was available, now, from my allotment, from my home stores and Laportes. Sure, I did have to grow some of the food and tend the bees, but I probably spent less time and probably had more pleasure than many people do earning money to pay for supermarket food and other accoutrements of the modern world.

Meanwhile, Tesco's application to expand in Lewes by 50% is still pending, despite already taking a full 2/3 of our retail spend out of our community; Waitrose is arguably simply a plusher little brother. We know that industrialised fossil-fuelled supermarket-driven agriculture feeds on and uses up soil, community, health and wellbeing. Yet the sheer rut of habit runs deep.

Many people I talk to know they want to change their food-buying habits but feel powerless over the situation. Yet as with all addictions, change can be easy, one step at a time. To step out of the rut, it can be as simple as: Turn off the TV, get informed and get a veg box delivered from this link. In these extraordinary times, when our addictions to lifestyle threaten life itself, I believe we are called to question everything. We're being called to adventure, to live at our own edge and reconnect the broken threads. Deep within each one of us lives an indigenous soul, a natural human being. It's time for that being to jump up and live again.

thanks allotment

To my sheer delight I discovered last week that I have an allotment. Having at last reached the top of the Landport waiting list I have by remarkable good fortune been allotted the land previously cultivated by my friends Chloe and Tilo. Once again, my gratitude in advance has been heard (thank you)…

This is a lovely embryonic Permaculture patch, with fruit trees and bushes, a mammoth rhubarb and another giant rosemary now in full-on pale blue flower. Plus five full compost bins and an equal number of water butts and a very leaning shed… Any gardener reading this will understand the depth of my joy at being given land to caretake. For the gardening instinct runs deep among us. Evidence shows that we humans have been growing our food, mostly small scale, for 14,000 years, long before the advent of so-called civilization.

When I dig out the weeds, tamping down the clods of soil with my hoe to a fine tilth seed bed, when I sow peas as I did this morning, I am re-enacting a sacred and life-giving act that runs back and forth through the generations. It’s an act of love and interdependence, human to land, hand to soil. As I lean over in the hoeing and the seeding it’s as though my body remembers the work of all the past generations of growers. Our present fossil-fuelled supermarket fed way of life is only that of my generation – my grandparents knew how to grow a tomato or two, as did my father, even if it was just as a hobby.

This is the month in which we sow most of our seeds for the year to come, hoping and praying for a perfect balance of light, heat and wet, fondling, feeding, the soil that will nourish us. We are totally interdependent on our Mother Earth, our soil. Though most of the other allotmenteers seem to prefer a scorched earth approach, to a permaculturalist that is anathema; I will be covering the soil with straw mulch and green manures like clover and phaecelia, feeding it with nettle and horsetail teas and sprays. Dreaming into being my future food. All is well in the garden. As William Blake put it:


To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

imaginary chips with everything

I'm becoming aware of the connection between a healthy appetite and the will to live. My dad stopped eating a few weeks ago when he was at death's door. This is one of the 'old ways' of dying: refusing to eat, not from conscious choice in most cases but from a more instinctive, animal, sense that life, the life force, is coming to an end. Hospitals increasingly acknowledge the need for a dignified death and don't feed patients intravenously at this point. My dad's recovering now, partly through the attentive care of my mother, who has been spoonfeeding him all his meals, adding in fresh vegetables and his favourite ice cream brought in a thermos from home.

Something I've noticed while undergoing chemotherapy is that the chemicals have induced a strange loss of appetite, causing me to go off the fresh, organic, raw foods I had been treating myself with so joyfully for a few months. More problematic: even thinking about certain foods has me feeling queasy. I'm the main cook of our large family's (and droppers-by) main meal. The way I cook, I now realize, is to imagine the meal as though we're eating it and work backwards - so I'm handicapped before I even start. Walking to town to buy provisions for our meal yesterday all I could usefully conjure up in my mind was pizzas, cheese on toast, chocolate mousse - hardly recipes for people with cancer, let alone a healthy life.

And losing appetite has caused this zest for life to wax and wane lately with the three-weekly cycle of chemical treatment. I'm watching it curiously, kindly, learning to nurture myself through the troughs. I'm lucky to have plenty of love and other resources to help me through – I wonder how others, less fortunate, cope with this double-edged treatment, the cure that could as easily kill.

There's some upsides though. I've discovered that my imagination still has a lusty appetite, even if it isn't for things green. Last week while waiting for a friend at the local (chamomile tea the order of the day) I managed to munch my way through the entire menu – in my mind. Roast beef with all the trimmings – aaah. Pizza with chips - mmm. Sandwiches filled with all manner of cheeses, meats and pickles. Washed down with a couple of pints of Harveys. I could get used to this!

tangerine dream

I had a peak moment with a tangerine this week. It was a pretty sexy experience, full bodied… that combination of sweet and sour, hitting my tongue, juices bursting… groans of delight… you get the picture. The tangerine was biodynamic, which helps, but the main reason for the rapture was that because we mainly eat in season, when citrus time comes around, it’s an exciting experience; I get to taste things anew, as though for the first time.

The tangerine in question was from Tanya Laporte’s new shop on Landsdown. I had just bought a few, which were wolfed down by my four children – sorry, young adults - but I returned the next day and got a whole big brown bag full. At around 25p a fruit, they were excellent value. Indianna, who runs the shop, says they will be kept stocked up for the whole season, depending on supply.

In recent years I’d all but given up on citrus, since dry, tasteless fruit is so disappointing. But now I have a new policy: taste them all to find the best and gorge on that. Next day I went to Bill’s for breakfast. I bought one tangerine, a mandarin and a navel orange and settled in for my trial with a paper and a cup of tea. The tangerine was disappointingly bland, but then Bill, who joined in the tasting, pointed out that tangerines are always quite bland. We agreed that the mandarin was a bit pithy. But we hit gold with the navel – Yes! It was as zingy and juicy and messy as I remembered navels from my childhood. (I used to eat so many that a dentist once commented on it.) They were 6 for £1 so I bought 30 for 5 Lewes Pounds. They were mottled from rain and Bill reminded me that the European Commission is allowing Class 2 fruit and veg - with cosmetic defects – to be sold where before it was being sent to landfill – a full 20% of all European produce. Bill’s keen to take on a ‘pile em high, sell em cheap’ approach with certain gluts, which is great for foragers like me.

I suppose my point is that living simply, in season, locally, from glut to glut, is not the hairshirt lifestyle that consumerists paint it to be. It’s an adventure, it keeps me fit and it’s enjoyable and deeply satisfying. A bit like sex really.

Local food costs less

‘Only the wealthy can afford to eat local food; us locals on a budget have to do with Tesco and the likes.’ In Lewes that’s the easy reposte that trumps so many attempts at progress. ‘Down From Londoners’ are painted with a broad brush as poncy and spoiled, whether us incomers like me have lived here for 10,20 or even 50 years. But in my newfound spirit of action in the face of scorn and apathy, I decided to don my scientist’s hat and do my own analysis of whether it really does cost more to eat local food.

Our family has recently taken over being one of the drop off points for Ashurst Organic’s vegetable boxes. You can buy £10, £13 or £17 weekly boxes, and the £13 amply does our family of six. Last week I carefully weighed each of the 10 vegetable varieties in my box and set off with clipboard to Waitrose and Tesco to do a price comparison, veg for veg. You can see the answers here. My finding was that the Tesco box cost a wee bit more than the local box, and Waitrose cost about 20% more. QED – I have now proven it is that it is cheaper to buy vegetables locally than from supermarkets – organic at least. To make sure I have a good sample I will repeat the test every three months over the coming year.

Interestingly, whereas Ashurst gave me a half kilo bag full of the sweetest small tomatoes that burst in our mouth like edible fireworks, Waitrose was selling a plastic-wrapped flat pack of eight such tomatoes on the vine for a whopping (sorry, love that word) £2.17; according to their labeling that was 27p per cherry tomato. I had to discount that item to £2 to be fair to Waitrose…

Price aside, there is nothing to beat the freshness and pure life zing of veggies that were mostly picked that day, on rich green-sand soil up the road in Plumpton. Ashurst Organic Farm is an incredible place, where workers are paid decent wages and volunteers are given a hearty lunch. All the local organic farms are legally bound to be based on old-fashioned values such as respect for the soil and all parts of the growing system: crop rotation, no industrial pesticides, fertilizers and so on. And all this for little if any profit as supermarket competition screws their prices down. So cheapness is not an issue to the eater, NOT buying locally means deliberately favouring corporate food above local food – is this what we really want?

Study of vegetable price supplies to Lewes, East Sussex, in week beginning 13 October 2008
Weight	Veg	Waitrose per kg	Waitrose (£)	Tesco £ per kg	Tesco cost (£)	Ashurst
275g	Mixed salad	9.90 (not org)	2.70	10.00 (not org)	2.75
411g	Kale	11.06	4.52	6.45	2.65
103g	Red pepper	11.62	1.16	1.58 for 450g	.35
513g (30)	Cherry toms	27p per tom	8.10 (£2*)	3.92	2.07
96g	Mushrooms	4.83	.48	4.30	.41
361g	Parsnips	1.99 (not org)	.72	3.16	1.14
500g	Carrots	2.50	1.25	1.28	.64
250g	Leeks	5.49	1.37	4.45	1.17
1,400g	Potatoes	1.20	1.68	.827	1.16
39g	Chilli pepper	£11 (not org)	.44	£20 (not org)	.78
	Total		£16.32		£13.12	£13
Given that 2-3 items in both supermarkets were not available organically, both Tesco and Waitrose total would be higher if all organic. *note: at 27p per tomato, the cherry tomatoes would have totaled £8.10 for 30 tomatoes; I’ve reduced that to £2.