Food, food, food

I am becoming obseessed with food! Not that I am eating all the time, but I seem to be constantly thinking about all sorts of food issues.


First of all there is the food waste project. This week it was all about planning your shopping and making use of the stuff you already have before buying more. It worked well in the way that I actually sat down to plan the dinners for the whole week and did the shopping accordingly. It was a very good reminder of how planning can help keep stress away because everyday I knew what I was cooking, rather than panicking at 4 o'clock. It also meant I didn't go to the supermarket almost every day, which was very nice, both for my stress levels and for my purse. However I have to admit I didn't do the suggested full scale planning that the project suggested, that includes planning for lunch as well. That was far too complicated. Asking everybody in the family to decide for the whole week which days they are having packed lunches, school dinners, lunch meetings etc was too much - not to mention how difficult it would be to keep track of the answers. So the planning element only covered dinners.

I am not sure it had a huge impact on the foodwaste. We still wasted food on a similar scale to last week, because again we mainly seemed to have an issue with not too tasty stuff. (one day I managed to cook a dinner that was almost inedible, even though I had followed every detail of the recipe...) So from a foodwaste point of view not a major impact, but from a stress busting point of view quite successful.


Another food issue that has been popping up is my cooking talents (please note that the above mentioned inedible meal was an exception, I am usually not that bad...). We are still having 2 vegetarian days a week and it works, but we have reached a point where we need to extend the repetoire of vegetarian dishes, and I feel my cooking skills are needing an upgrade. This is not because vegetarian dishes are more difficult to cook, but they need a different mindset that I haven't got, because most of the cooking I do include some form of meat. I need to find somebody who is vegetarian who can show me what they actually eat during a normal week- I am sure there are loads of great veggie dishes out there, I just don't know that many of them.


Similarly I have been doing a lot of thinking about the whole buy local, buy organic, buy seasonal thing. Organic food is great, but from a carbon footprint point of view not always the best - an organic apple that has travelled all the way from New Zealand might be low on chemicals, but it has caused a fair bit of CO2 to be released during transport here. Hence the reason we should be eating local food to save on CO2 emissions. But if we only eat local food (local even just meaning British) there are lots of things we wouldn't get - despite global warming we still can't grow bananas or avocados or lots of other common stuff on this island.


Even if you do manage to get food produced in Britain, it could easily be intensively grown green house vegetables, that are very unhelpful for the CO2 levels as well, so not a great option either. That is why you are supposed to be eating seasonal food, and not think it is normal to eat strawberries in November.

The thing is if I was only to cook with ingredients grown locally, in season and preferably organic I would be down to a very small range of items, that I wouldn't have a clue how to cook. I mean, I struggle to be creative doing vegetarian dishes, but if I was limited to the stuff that can actually grow in this country, my family would very quickly go hungry. Not only would most of my cooking books be obsolete, but I would need a series of cooking lessons to figure out how to make kale and turnips exciting.

So despite being an OK cook, I am finding it really difficult to make big changes to our eating habits. To feed a family it is not enough to know 4 different dishes, there has to be variety, and because we are now so used to everything being available all year round, most of us don't really know how to cook with only local ingredients.

So in my confusion and frustration about all these food things I turned to my own garden again. (obviously I can't grow bananas or papayas, but at least I can do local and organic) This weekend the weather was actually dry, which has been fantastic, so I kind of saw it as my last chance to do a bit of garden work. Despite the fact that the only really successful thing in the garden this year has been parsley, I still seem to have boundless optimism, so today I planted a plum tree and some blackberries. I have also ordered 2 apple trees which will hopefully arrrive by the end of the month. It is amazing how a bit of gardening can lift the spirit and pottering about in my wellies I felt certain that next year I will definitely be able to 'harvest' lots of stuff. Long may this feeling last (!), then I just need to learn how to cook with all these local vegetables...