Category Archives: peak oil

GM potato? I prefer blight-resistant beauties

Posted on March 23, 2010 | 10 comments

I love the look of these potatoes and their healthy interesting purpleness.

They have just had their own launch in London at the sustainable London restaurant, Konstam.

Bred by the Sarvari Trust, these Sárpo potatoes are

  • blight-resistant thus reducing pesticides
  • high-yield
  • deep-rooting
  • have weed-smothering foliage
  • low-carbon footprint
  • and can be stored unrefrigerated.

Vegetable heroes, they are on the front-line of battle against the Genetic Modification industry.

Modification? Too mild a word! Manipulation would be better.

You may have heard. In March 2010, the European Union rode roughshod over the people’s wishes and approved the first GM crop in 12 years.

BASF’s GM Amflora potato carries a controversial antibiotic resistant gene which could enter the food chain.

The EU-funded pro-GM GMO Safety website says of the GM Amflora potato.

“In this potato the composition of the starch has been altered so that it is better suited for certain industrial purposes.”

Lovely. A GM industrial potato.

Crikey. It’s enough to make me want to join anti-Europe UKIP. (Only joking).

Luckily, there is an alternative.

The Avaaz petition aims to get 1 million signatures in order to officially request the European Commission to put a moratorium on the introduction of GM crops into Europe and set up an independent, ethical, scientific body to research the impact of GM crops and determine regulation.

The funding of GM science is driven by multinational agribusiness. GM is a money spinner perfectly suited to control-freaks because once a plant is genetically modified, it can be patented.

Monsanto sues farmers in North America for having unlicensed GM seeds – even if the GM seeds arrive on their fields (as seeds do) by wind, animal or insect.

Some scientists get excited about GM, genuinely believing the technology has the possibility of helping the world.

But GM science is out-of-date, based on the belief that Genes are King.

You can’t take a genetic characteristic from one organism, put it another and tra-la-la, create a GM plant in our best interests.

The Human Genome Project proved life is far more complex than that. We disturb the gene sequence at our peril.

Scientists,  if you want to explore the frontiers of life, there is plenty of mystery in the life we already have.

Defra has to decide whether to license two GM potato trials in England.

Come on Defra! Instead of putting my taxpayer money into unproven, disaster-in-the-making technology – why not put the research money into the beautiful blight-resistant purple potato?

What do you think?

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Copenhagen 2009 – green book signing

Posted on December 20, 2009 | 8 comments

Book signing last Tuesday. Said a few words, quoting my mate Robin, quoting his mate, Tony Juniper:

“Whatever happens at Copenhagen, it’s people’s cultural change that’s crucial.”

Cultural change: such as the way we eat food.

So blessed in Bristol with independent shops and local organic farmers.

We made food bought from Scoopaway, La Ruca, Saxon’s Farm at Bristol Farmers’ Market and Better Food organic supermarket.

The recipes are written by co-writer Patricia Harbottle who came to sign books.

I copied Pat’s choice of recipes from the book, which Pat had cooked for the Dorset launch.

Spicy pumpkin seeds roasted and crunchy in egg white masala.

Pea, leeks and courgette fritatta.

Hey, I now know the secret of making fritatta, thanks to Patricia’s recipe.

You finish cooking omelette and vegetables by placing under the grill.

 (Thank you, Lynne, for loan of fritatta pan that goes on the stove AND under a grill – otherwise leave your frying pan’s plastic handle sticking out away from the heat.).

And we also baked Courgette cake.

For 100 people. I repeat: a hundred.

Patricia was a top London caterer before she retired to Dorset. She helped me “scale up”.

I have decided not to be a caterer when I grow up as I had low-level fear of food poisoning and had to taste everything and not die first.

I am indebted to Ros and Charlotte for patient and relentless weighing, mixing, chopping, stirring and spreading. Not to mention style counsel.

And Chris Johnstone, author of Find Your Power, for inspired dulcimer-playing.

The best bit of the book signing was when people in the audience

spontaneously suggested ways to help Make More of Squash, and Make More of Beans & Peas go far and wide.

As well as giving nutritional info, the Make More of Vegetables series show you how to grow from seed and cook from scratch

– profound ways to create a healthy, vibrant, low-carbon, resource-saving green world

…because it’s no good waiting for our business-as-usual politicians to do so.

Stop press: I checked with Tony Juniper if it was OK to quote him. He replied:

“Thanks Elisabeth. Of course I am delighted for you to quote these words. The only thing I might add is to flag up the 10:10 campaign, which seems like a logical reaction to what just happened in Denmark. I was there – it was truly shocking.”

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Time to transition – now

Posted on October 7, 2009 | 8 comments

French film crew for Transition film

Last Sunday, the doorbell rung. Turned out to be a French camera crew wanting to film the allotments from our flats. I was the only one in our block who had answered the buzzer.

“Entrez,” I said. It was a random meeting but I recognised fellow media-types.

When the director came into my flat, I noticed he had a copy of The Spark under his arm.

“Tiens, voila,” I said, and introduced myself as its guest editor for the summer 2009 issue.

I gave him a copy of The Source, explaining I was now its food editor. (Never one to hold back on networking opportunities, moi. Even on Sunday morning).

He laughed. “I have just been reading that.”

He said he had really liked our features on local food:

Rachel Fleming’s take on UK food security policy and my review of Local Food, the great new practical action book by Tamzin Pinkerton and Transition co-founder Rob Hopkins.

Guess what? It turned out Nils Aguilar, the director, and his cameraman, Jérôme Polidor, were filming a movie on Transition. People in France are asking: how shall we eat when the oil runs out? Industrial food production relies on oil-based chemical fertilisers and long-distance transport.

The film is to introduce la belle France to Transition, the vibrant international green movement.  Transition encourages practical grassroot local solutions NOW – rather than waiting for the proverbial sh*t to hit fan – and works with existing green groups to achieve it.

Fortuitously, I had just seen the movie In Transition, premiered by Sustainable Redland. I liked it because it shows an amazing range of sustainable projects for food, transport etc which are already up-and-running.

The director agreed: good to be positive.

I had seen The Age of Stupid the previous Sunday at Coed Hills festival in Wales. The human stories were heart-breaking but seemed to link more in my mind to the destruction caused by oil wars and pollution rather than climate change. I can connect them in my head but not in my heart.  (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth woke many up but made me go to sleep – all those graphs).

Is it because – despite my green beliefs – I am in denial too?

What I am trying to say is my meagre grasp of the science does not affect my drive to save the planet.

It is common sense to save our precious non-renewable resources and reduce CO2 emissions to stop the ice caps melting – to search for another way of living.

To paraphrase a comment on George Monbiot’s post about climate change denial:

If you believe in climate change, you end up living in a just and caring world. If you don’t believe in climate change, it’s business as usual: exploitation, pollution, disease and oil wars.

Or as climate change campaigner George Marshall says: the facts are not enough to effect change. You need belief too.

Stop press: I just read a comment on the Transition blog from a woman in Wales whose spring is running dry for the first time in over a hundred years.

Climate change is not an intellectual debate.

Wake up. We need to wake up.

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Coed Hills magic and more hemp

Posted on October 2, 2009 | 4 comments

Wind turbine Coed Hills ++

What is it about living outdoors that feels so good?

Last weekend I was camping on a Welsh hill outside Cardiff.

End of September autumn solstice and time for a mini-festival at Coed Hills, the off-the-grid 20-strong arts community.

A fine excuse to live outdoors in a festive atmosphere with 200 other people with similar interests: music, healing, eco-education, meditation and other forms of consciousness-raising and eating delicious healthy mostly organic vegetarian food.

Coed meal after sauna

I went to some great talks including from BBC5.tv, saw The Age of Stupid, and gave two writing workshops myself, sitting in a yurt with talented students.

And followed the art trail in the 100-acre woods.

Indian summer autumn light but unseasonable climate-change warmth.

Being close to nature seems to open my heart. It hurts to take stock of our wasteful world.

But here at Coed Hills, people are living the dream, putting planet-saving sustainable ideas into action.

I loved the compost loos where poo is not flushed away to join our water supply but will go to feed the soil, and the willow reed beds that clean the site’s waste water.

Inspiringly, the site runs on sustainable energy including the wind turbine (see pic above) that presides over us.

Festivals are green networking cities – if not synchroni-cities.

Or just good timing.

Before leaving, I don my hat as hemp ambassadress and present a packet of Amaru Hempower porridge to the Coed community.

Richard, the cook from Lost Horizons, and Coed communard, says I must meet Derek.

Soon – in festival-chaos style – I am sitting next to Derek Bielby, hemp consultant, on a deckchair in front of an open fire between the wooden sauna and a teepee.

Hemp keeps crossing my path, first at Shambala and then at The Organic Food Festival.

Incredibly nutritious, hemp is also perfectly suited to the UK climate.

Fast-growing , it is ready for harvest after 100-days of growth – and good for the land.

Hemp is super-sustainable – growing hemp for paper gives four times the yield than trees, Derek told me.

It also has many uses including for eco-building, paper and textiles.

As Derek showed me:

The many uses of hemp

1. In the plastic bag on the left: the woody chips, or hurd.

2.The thing that looks like a round goat’s cheese? That, and the fibrous block it sits on, is hempcrete.

Forget the C02 criminal of the building world – use hempcrete instead.

3. Above are squares of hemp felt, a natural fibre. No more toxic fibres when you insulate a roof.

4. Next to the hemp felt, a ‘log’ of hemp waste for burning – this could be used to power the on-farm hemp-processing machine, or primary processor. Talk about sustainable.

5. ‘Woodchip’ made from hemp with a garden pot made of hemp. Plus boards of resin, also made from hemp. And swatches of hemp fabric.

I did not want to leave the magical world of Coed (pronounced coid, Welsh for wood ) where you live outdoors, treading the ground unmediated by cement,  and lit at night by fires and candlelight.

But I did.

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Hemp porridge knowledge

Posted on September 8, 2009 | 14 comments

Hemp porridge and The Source (small)

I went to Shambala festival and got turned on by hemp. Every morning I would emerge from my tent to tramp across a field for hemp porridge breakfast.

Its creator, Eddie Callen, told me how he makes it: mixes it 50/50 with oats, by grinding 1/4 of the oats with all the hemp seeds, from Yorkshire Hemp. Once emulsified with the seed oil, the rest of the oats grind-in easily. Then water, hot or cold, to make the porridge, and a host of sprinkles: nuts, goji berries, agave syrup, cranberries, for taste and nutrition.

(I used pecan nuts and sultanas for my hemp breakfast back-home, see pic above).

A fount of hemp-knowledge, Eddie told me how hemp can grow abundantly in the UK without pesticides and fertilisers.

Hemp plants are so productive too: omega 3-rich seeds, and textiles, rope and paper. More sustainable than paper from trees – and cheaper.

We want hemp! ‘Tis the the earth’s most sustainable material.

Although hemp belongs to the same plant family as cannabis it has NONE of its mind-altering properties. It got a bad rap all the same and got outlawed in the 1930s but now it’s legal to grow although most UK hemp ends up as animal bedding.

Hemp-evangelist Eddie Callen was cheffing for the Community Medical Herbalists.

I had gone to see one, John E. Smith, for some remedies and it was he had told me about Eddie’s hemp-prowess.

Festivals are like that – it’s green networking city. I bumped into colleagues, past and present, as well as the legendary Simon Fairlie, editor of The Land. Its summer issue focuses on the  enclosures of Britain’s commons – historical events I have long been fascinated by as I see the roots of our present-day ills in the past.

People’s right to grow food or forage was taken away by force or legal stealth from approx from 1300s to end-18th century. Just as indigeneous people are deprived of their land today.

O I am in the mood for digression. Last night I saw Winstanley, an amazing film. Set in 1647, shot in black and white, British weather featured strongly, with only a camp fire and thatched tents to protect the Diggers from the incessant dripping rain. (As a recent camper, I identified).

Gerrard Winstanley wrote: the earth was “a Common Treasury for all”. He tried to reclaim the top of a hill in Surrey with his fellow Diggers but was beaten by the establishment.

I read about Gerrard (am on first name-terms as he is new hero) in the Land and talking about magazines, note my pic above and the latest issue of The Source.

I am SO proud to be writing for The Source, the southwest’s great green magazine.

In this issue, The Source reviews the new Transition book, Local Food, and asks:

What will we eat when the oil runs out?

The answer is green, local, organic, healthy food…and hey – this means the freshest tastes too. Talk about win-win-win-win solutions.

The Source also carries the programme for The Organic Food Festival, taking place THIS weekend in Bristol.

Organic is farming for a green future.

I am with the Shambala witches on this one.

Da witches have no Plan B (2)

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Kitchen fairy at Lost Horizons

Posted on July 21, 2009 | 11 comments

backstage at Lost Horizons with yogurt

I went to Buddhafield festival and became a kitchen fairy.

I was sitting in a Bedouin tent, as one does, listening to Martha Tilston on stage at Lost Horizons, the legendary travelling café and wood-burning (mostly naked) sauna.

I heard a cry above the music:

“Can someone stir the milk? In exchange for a chai.

Can someone stir the milk?”

“I can stir the milk,” I said.

In the field kitchen, backstage at Lost Horizons, a wooden spoon in hand, I stirred a cauldron of milk coming to the boil.

A dramatic creature with blonde curls, tight trousers and a rocker’s face appeared.

“Turn it off when it comes to the boil. Do you know when it’s cool enough to add the yogurt?” he asked.

“You say Hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare hare rama hare rama rama rama hare hare,” he said at such speed and with such authentic inflections that I did not recognise it.

He turned out to be the legendary and talented artiste, Prana, from the Bindoo Babas.

But I got the gist, and the yogurt got made ready to set

albeit with Nyam myo renge kyo a chant I do remember.

I also did loads of washing up.

The combination of working outdoors as the rain bounced off the canvas and being part of a crew gave me unusual washing-up energy.

My reward was a bowl of spicy hearty aduki bean soup with mostly organic ingredients cooked by Richard, the chef.

Richard, Lost Horizons kitchen chef

“Aduki and mung beans are the only ones that don’t need soaking,” he said.

I noticed a chalkboard sign calling for kitchen fairies.

I arranged to come back the next day.

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Harvest supper with Grofun

Posted on July 14, 2009 | 4 comments

Grofun - 12.7.09

Sunday 6pm. Everything in the picture was grown on our community allotment: the beetroot, turned into slivered (use a potato peeler) salad, and the spiced Mumbai potatoes, both decorated with courgette flowers, and the green beans in their bag – all on the table in the evening sun, waiting to be eaten.

We have GROFUN, Growing Real Organic Food in Urban Neighbourhoods, to thank for this miracle.

Nadia Hillman, GROFUN’s 33 year-old Bristol-based founder, was on BBC’s Gardening World at Easter helping Birmingham set up a similar scheme.

Is your garden overgrown? Would you like help getting it fit to grow organic vegetables?

GROFUN volunteers pitch in and in return for their impressive labour they get reciprocal gardening-help either in their own garden or at the community allotment in St Werburgh’s, Bristol.

We are learning how to grow. And everyone involved gets invited to the harvest meals.

“The best thing for me is the connecting of people” says Nadia.

We sat around the fire into the evening. Mel played a haunting song on the guitar.

It sounds a moment of peace. And it was.

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My mother’s tongue

Posted on July 8, 2009 | 7 comments

My mother' tongue

My mother heaved the 2-pound tongue onto the serving dish and I offered to skin it.

I eat mainly vegetarian food but I skinned that tongue like a pro, feeling elemental and respectful like a hunter.

My mother foraged for it in Waitrose. The label bore two marks: UK and EU.

My mother went to the customer service desk to check its provenance.

“Cured in Bedford,” said the assistant, “so it must be British.”

“But where did the animal come from?” said my mother.

He checked with the buyer who sent word the animal was UK-bred.

“So why the EU label? It’s still a mystery,” said Ingrid Rose when my mother told us the story as we ate.

My mother said she used to pickle tongue with saltpetre. Now it’s hard to find.

Pickling salt beef and tongue are traditional ways to preserve meat. No refrigeration in the shtetl.

My mother’s tongue – a childhood memory.

My mother talked about the cooking of the 2lb tongue (for £8, 8 servings).

She disagreed with the label’s instructions: to throw away the water after bringing the tongue to the boil seemed a terrible waste, she said.

She and Evelyn Rose are of one mind: wash the tongue well in cold water – there is no need for waste.

Cooking salted/pickled/cured tongue: water to cover + garlic + 1 onion skinned and cut in half + peppercorns + bay leaves. Simmer and cover for 2 hours and 30 minutes. Then drain and skin.

The potato pie: mashed potatoes + 1 tablespoon of goose fat (“My mother used chicken fat,” says my mother) + 2 eggs + salt and pepper plus my mother’s latest addition: chives.

Back to the meat.

What do you want to preserve?

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Slow food and fast dancing

Posted on June 30, 2009 | 3 comments

Son Tropical

I love these guys. A nine-piece band, fresh from Havana and en route for the Barbican, London, brought to Bristol last night thanks to Bristol Slow Food.

The venue was Jesters on the Cheltenham Road. Tickets were £10 and the Cuban-style dishes, devised and prepared by Chris Wicks of Bell’s Diner were about £8.50.

Mike and I had the shrimps and avocado.

There was no mention of organic even though Cuba is the great organic inspiration. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and no more cheap pesticides and chemical fertilisers, Cuba went organic. Many public spaces in Havana are now given over to growing organic veg. ie State-supported agriculture without fossil fuels. Don’t you love it? Just shows it can be done.

The shrimps were plump, grilled and well-tasty and the fresh pea shoots (part of the salad dressed with lemon juice) looked enchanting and tasted earthy. I have never eaten pea tendrils before – and why not? They are delicious.

The dish was the size of a generous starter but actually perfect because I needed to be light on my feet to dance.

I forgot to take a picture of my plate but I got several pictures of the band.

It was so groovy because these guys in the band were middle-aged (i.e. about my age) and older.

And they rocked.

If I wanted to nitpick about the evening, I’d say Jesters could have sold twice as many drinks with more bar staff. My sister said you needed to apply in triplicate for a Cuban cocktail – but when it came, she said: It was worth it.

They could have sold twice the food too.

But I don’t think Bristol Slow Food knew how rammed the event would get. Apparently they only confirmed Son Tropical two weeks ago. And then bookings went ballistic.

Which shows that great music and dancing may be the missing ingredient to Slow Food.

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Vegan nettle pesto and brown rice

Posted on April 13, 2009 | 7 comments

nettle-pesto

Nettles came to the rescue today when the cupboard was bare.

Abundantly springing up on our path. Luckily we had Mike’s gloves.

We pinched off fresh tips and dropped them into a foraged plastic bag.

At home I planned to make pesto, having seen a recipe last week.

But vegan as I now eschew dairy for the sake of my delicate gut.

The following came under the force of my hand-held blender:

3 shallots fried in a tablespoon of olive oil

40z nettles drained after plunging in boiling water to de-sting

bit of cinnamon bark

handful of raw sunflower seeds

balsamic vinegar

olive oil

and salt.

I whizzed, obtaining a seriously delicious green sauce.

Served with brown rice (leftover from last night and stir-fried with shallots and ginger) and some freshly soaked and simmered-for-one-hour-till-soft haricots beans.

Ray Mears, author of Wild Food, says Bosnians sold nettles to eat during the war.

But don’t wait for disaster to discover their nutritious qualities.

This is the spirit of  Transition: prepare for climate change by leading a green life now.

Oh dear. I am such a dilettante. How can I transition without my electric blender?

Not to mention the balsamic vinegar…

What would you miss/embrace in a low-carbon world?

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