nant peris book club conversation 18.11.20 - becoming “locavore”!
After reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book, ‘Animal Vegetable Miracle’….
This is what we should all be thinking about now, and how we should be thinking about the way forward with the planet. This year having recently retired, with covid we’ve been planting vegetables and I feel very inspired. We’ve had sprouts tonight and cabbage tonight from our garden. Obviously I’ve got my little farm and I feel very privileged and we can’t all live like this. I’ve always thought oh if you don’t buy French beans from Kenya I think you are taking the livelihood from those farmers. But she has answers to all those concerns.
I’ve become obsessed – I’m going to become a “locavore”. I picked up my packet of coriander and went ‘no its all the way from morrocco’! Coriander all the way from morocco, how obscene is that? It is absolutely totally bonkers. So I’m definitely going to start doing more local…
You think of something in a huge container travelling all those miles. I tried to find out where my Hovis bread came from [laughs]. I’m going to buy north wales bread forever. I do buy local bread, I buy different ones, but it varies and now I’m only going to buy north wales bread. And I’m going to get mackerel off Rhona. We don’t eat meat. But I’m totally obsessed. Its just brought home really, the reality of big business. And the reality of money and how its not always to our advantage. Someone is making huge profits and its not always to our advantage.
The whole thing about big business and the corporations and food coming from so far away. New Zealand lamb and Wales seems about the craziest thing because that is so far away. I can just look out my window and see the sheep. Reading the book has made me think even more about what I buy. I’ve been growing vegetables this year at quite a large scale actually – the back of the garden there is what, about 10 raised beds. But the last few months have been a bit like watching it all die, its sad. Its all going and there’s nothing left, just a few sprouts and some kale as we head into winter. But its been great growing stuff and cooking it and going out each day into the garden and harvesting, oh what are we going to have for dinner tonight, oh what have we got? That’s been really great.
Its been a really great book to read at this time.
The question about could we do this locally? Well there’s fish. Dominic has pigs. Lauren’s got lamb. They come in waves, lamb boxes, a dozen will come along and then nothing. Turkeys in Llanrug…. [Decision made to create our own local directory for ‘locavores’]
We don’t eat much meat but when we do we want to get it locally.
The whole thing is that its the factory farming, the intensive farming that we are against really. But a lot of people can’t afford to be, and I think this all sort of addresses the fact that we are getting cheap food and it is all subsidized by tax payers money so its not really cheap food, we pay for it ultimately.
The people who are getting subsidized are not usually the farmers, its going to big business, to big companies and yeah I think I don’t want to eat much meat but I’ll eat it occasionally. And at the beginning of the year we’d just eat a few bits of bacon a week. Its where it comes from is really important for me, particularly with meat, where it comes from.
If we want a banana or a mango or an avocado we can do it occasionally, especially if you grow your own veg to make up for it.
It has inspired me with my own vegetable plot and what I might want to do with it in the coming year.
I’ve grown one or two things this year, in our amazing cobbled together greenhouse – we still have a couple of tomatoes in there, woooo! In November. Lots of people are concentrating on this – especially so with the lockdown, and the realization of transport and the practicalities and the realities of is it necessary, the locality of it.
This summer I have been growing a lot more because I turned our front garden into a vegetale production. My raised beds at the centre, I’ve got onions, broccoli and cabbage growing, and I’ve still got potatoes there. And I’ve been looking more and more at where I buy things from and one of the things I’ve suffered in the shut down is I haven’t been to a big supermarket the whole time, but I’ve been doing click and collect. So you don’t get to go in and see what you are buying, you just sort of get what’s on offer. Which I’ve found a bit frustrating, and it’s a bit frustrating because everything seems to be grown abroad.
On our farm when we were kids, we would always collect the seeds. But all the seeds you buy now are F1 hybrids so they won’t grow. But you can get non-hybrid seeds – like from the real seed company in Pembrokeshire. They give you instructions for how to harvest and grow them. So you won’t have to go back again! Its like the opposite of a marketing strategy which is all about getting customers to come back.
Yeah there are places locally – tyddyn teg and moel y ci – you can get boxes or drop in and get what you want.
I think farming is going through a really hard time. Maybe it’ll get better for pig farmers because of the problems in Denmark. That’d be great because the Danish pork is really poor quality
It doesn’t matter that you don’t do everything, you don’t all need to have a small holding or farm as long as you do what you can. I’ve been doing my ordering from Tescos and I find it hard to see where it comes from. It is possible to do that, but it just takes forever. I got as far as this: Tescos Fine Beans. OK, I was about to order them because I quite like them and I clicked through to the information about this product page. It says ‘product of Egypt Guatamala Kenya Morocco Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania’ because it depends on where they get them from doesn’t it. Braeburn Apples ‘Hand picked from carefully tended orchards bla bla we believe – seasonal produce – freshness - quality - partnership - trusted growers across the world dur de dur dur de dur and it goes ‘produce of argentina, Austria france Germany chile ‘ and it goes on. It’s just like an atlas. So I emailed them to say that I think at least what they can do is say where it comes from on the page you actually select them. Because a growing minority of your customers will want to know where their stuff is coming from.
It’s about awareness. So its about doing what you can.
I’ve definitely stopped wasting as much food as I used to. Everything I have left now is pared down til I’ve used the final bit. I’ve never made so much vegetable soup in my life.
I remember staying with my French pen friend and every bit of food was a separate course. They’d take all evening over it – the sitting room only had a dining table, there weren’t any sofas. And each course was really small, so they didn’t eat too much, but they took their time over it. And that was a completely different relationship with food.
We’ve lost our connection between food and the land.
Its one of the things that’s suffering now, children and younger people have not learnt how to cook, so they see food as expensive because they only buy the ready made or prepared almost to the stage where they can eat it, they don’t prepare food from scratch. And I think that’s one of the problem with family economy – they can’t make their money stretch far enough, because you can’t if you buy everything already made for you. But if you buy the vegetables and the meat if you are going to eat it, and start from scratch by peeling it chopping it, you can make lots of food for very little.
People say they haven’t got time to cook, but they have time to sit for half an hour on the internet on facebook and the like
I’ve managed to do some veg this year, we’ve made some beds because it kept paul occupied when he couldn’t go on site this year. It’s been great because we’ve been able to grow some, but it was like an experiment. The rest of the garden – and I used that term loosely – has got a lot of brambles. Which is great because the brambles this year – I’ve got so much, a freezer full of berries that I’ve been making jam out of and all that. Because I’ve been sat at a computer working, fiddling around with stupid paper work, its an absolute relief to go and make a pot of jam, and it reminds you of doing it with your gran when you were knee high to a wotsit and its lovely. And it’s a shame that younger people don’t have necessarily that memory. I don’t know if that’s the case these days actually , but maybe there was a gap in the middle, where unless you were lucky, and your family was structured like that, you probabaly didn’t have that.
There’s still an argument out there that on a budget you can’t afford to eat healthily. But it constantly amazes me because the price of a mars bar or a cake compare that to how much is even a banana now. Almost nothing. Or veg soup. How much veg soup can you make for virtually nothing? If you know how to make it. Or porridge.
I went to the food bank in the church in Llanberis. And the things that are in there are things like packets of cheerios and things. I’m not saying you should dictate what people should eat but you can buy things like pulses and porridge for a fraction of the cost. You can live on very cheap food if you can cook. But they were asking for things they were short of to go in the food bank and asking for tins of curry, tins of ravioli and sugar.
One time we got stranded on Bardsey. And we were running out of food. And we began foraging. And we found the most fantastic mushrooms – not magic muchrooms! They wre as big as dinner plate. And it made a meal. And we went brambling. We had some flour but we’d run out of yeast and we din’t have any sugar or salt, so making bread was a bit of a problem. So first of all we went to a neighbour and bartered for some yeast, and she was so pleased to get some toilet rolls in exchange! And we looked in the cupboard to see what else we had instead of sugar we used honey and instead of salt we used coriander. And we had the most gorgeous loaf of bread. It was all about the community coming together to share things we needed, so that was quite a good experience.