This years Big Tent Festival will be hosting a Food Village featuring the very best local produce, including (amongst others) a vegetarian cafe from Pillars of Hercules, burgers and sausage-dogs from Fletchers and Puddledub, Ice Cream from GGs, plus cookery demonstrations from Geoffrey Smeddle (of the Peat Inn) and chefs from Jamesfield Farm Cafe.

And to drink? Organic and Biodynamic wine-tasting sessions and a fantastic beer tent from the Black Isle Brewery (okay its not Fife but they are a great organic East coast co.) All organised with top chef and author Christopher Trotter, the Food Village will be a chance to showcase and sample some of the best Fife produce.

After enjoying your nosh and a beer, you can listen to some of the finest folk and world music around (listed as the Top Folk Festival in the UK by the Guardian).

To book your tickets in advance, or to organise your Eco-Camping go here now.

There were also be a chance to hear presentations from Colin Tudge, a report from Cuba on their organic urban agriculture systems and a range of great food speakers in the Talks programme.

This Saturday 10 May from 12 - 2 we have a meeting to discuss the future of the Fife Diet aimed at people who want to reflect on their own involvement so far, want to be more involved or want to take part in specific projects (like the Falkland Community Garden). The first part - recording questions on the why, what and how of the project will be followed by a second half, on ‘what next’?

Go here to visit Ed Harris’s site - Ed will be facilitating the discussion. 

Please come to the Center for Stewardship, Falkland Estate, Falkland, Fife. From the village High Street carry on past the fountains, past the violin shop (on the right) and along the narrow windy street till the road bends left - here take a right following the signpost for ‘Cricket Club’. Through the gates there is a car park on your right. The Stables workshop is round the back of the first building you come to. 

All Welcome.

I’m not sure where this is from originally - it was sent on (thanks Nick). It features families from round the world displaying what they eat in any week…

Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07

 United States: The Revis family of North Carolina

Food expenditure for one week $341.98

Italy: The Manzo family of Sicily

Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11

Mexico: The Casales family of Cuernavaca

Food expenditure for one week: 1,862.78 Mexican Pesos or $189.09

Poland: The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna

Food expenditure for one week: 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27

Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53

 
Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo
Food expenditure for one week: $31.55

Bhutan: The Namgay family of Shingkhey Village
Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03

Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Ca mp
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23

First sign of the Spring is not the Cuckoo, its the Rhubarb. 

Okay, this recipe has loads of non-Fife ingredients but we’re feeling risque.

Our garden has a great rhubarb patch, so there’s plenty more where this comes from. Choose one of the two fabulous Fife Ice Cream makers to serve this with.

10 sticks of rhubarb
4 tbsp water
8 tbsp caster sugar
1 tsp powdered ginger
110g/4oz butter, softened
110g/4oz demerara sugar
180-200g/6-7oz flour

1. Preheat the oven to 350F/Gas 4.
2. Cut the rhubarb into 3in long sticks and place on an oven tray, sprinkle with the water and caster sugar and roast in the oven for 10 minutes.
3. Once cooked, remove from the oven, sprinkle over the ginger and mix well.
4. Fill an ovenproof dish about 1½in deep with the rhubarb.
5. Rub the butter into the flour and sugar to make the crumble toppping. Sprinkle over the rhubarb and bake in the oven.
6. Remove and allow to cool slightly before serving with ice cream.

Many thanks to Sharon Gordon who emailed us pointing out the excellent vegetable garden plans put together by the Royal Horticultural Society (here).

“At 4 of their sites, RHS has designed model food garden plans to go in a 10×10 foot space. Several are in a L shape with a 4×4 foot bed at the corner of the L”.

As we’re about to launch our very own Fife Diet Community Garden Project (of which more plans very soon), this was a welcome suggestion.

We’d like to hear ideas for our garden, the RHS site suggests: “Try sowing some unusual vegetables such as salsify, Hamburg parsley, or scorzonera, both root vegetables still eaten a lot on the Continent.”

Scorzonera anyone?

US scientists have unveiled a new, high-resolution interactive map which tracks patterns of CO2 emissions coming from fossil fuels burned daily across the country.

The maps and system, called Vulcan, show CO2 emissions in more than 100 times greater detail than was previously available. Until now, scientists say, data on carbon dioxide emissions was reported monthly at a statewide level…

From our Canadian friends…

Just got sent this great radio site - Climate Change Radio - with programmes from Chris Goodall, Mark Lynas, George Monbiot, Julie Brown and Caroline Lucas and many more. Listen online or download MP3.

This is all in the same family as George Marshall’s inspiring and cutting analysis at Climate Change Denial.

I was thinking this about the plans for Eco-Towns. It’s so wrong. Its as if other towns will be non-eco towns. In the same way organic food remains an exotic item you get only in specialised shops. The issue circles like a vulture. Ecology and restorative practices can’t be exclusive processes.

This article from Grist addresses the same issue: “Why Michael Pollan and Alice Waters should quit celebrating food-price hikes”…

“If grocery-store prices rise high enough, will consumers suddenly see the wisdom of spending the same amount of money on healthier options at farmers’ markets? That’s the logic that some sustainable-food advocates, including renowned author Michael Pollan and restaurateur Alice Waters, seem to be putting forth. But Tom Philpott sees it a different way - and says the solution lies in making sustainable food
more accessible. See how Washington State and others are getting it done, in today’s Victual Reality.”

More here.

Ignore the chef (!) and enjoy the recipe. We made this soup with purple sprouting broccoli the other night and it turned out brilliant…

Every day journalists churn out stories that are at best worthless and at worst dishonourable propaganda. Mostly it’s just the banal moron culture of ‘news’ about Heather Mills / Britney Spears and so on.  Last Sunday the Observer published an article about the ‘myths of food miles’ which was difficult to define (you can read it here) but was so chock full of misinformation and wonky analysis that its worth responding to. My guess is that this is part of a concerted fightback from the corporate food world against the implications of the growing demand for local eating. Lets be charitable to Robin McKie and Caroline Davies, the authors and assume they’re deeply naive and not just abit thick. 

Here’s a point by point rebuttal of the articles argument, such as they are. The authors argue:

1. “There is growing evidence to suggest that some air-freighted food is greener than food produced in the UK.” Is there? What is that evidence? Certainly none is presented in their article. Of course if I try and replicate exotic fruits in Caithness that’s going to be expensive and ecologically unsound. Nobody involved in the Fife diet argues that, as was explained to these journalists. All we are presented with is a series of ridiculous straw men.

2. “Mike Small argues that we should eat local produce and save the planet, an idea that has obliged his family - and a growing number of adherents to his cause - to eat meals of local lamb, pork and a great many dishes based on parsnips, beetroots, kale, potatoes, leeks and all the other root vegetables that typify the agricultural output of this wind-swept corner of Scotland. ” I haven’t obliged anyone to do anything. What’s windswept about Fife? Did Robin and Caroline visit and have a windswept experience?

3. “They even have their own name for themselves - locavores - and insist that their way is the only one to save the planet.” No we don’t insist any such thing. They’ve just made this up. We realise that food is just one way that we are all going to have to change our culture and our economy. This was explained to them.

Locavores is a pretentious sounding name we’ve never used.

4. “The idea that ‘only local is good’ has come under attack. For a start, food grown in areas where there is high use of fertilisers and tractors is likely to be anything but carbon-friendly, it is pointed out.” Well this is bloody obvious isn’t it? That’s why we use and advocate the use of organic food.

5. The they reel out a series of obscure ‘experts’. “‘The concept of food miles is unhelpful and stupid. It doesn’t inform about anything except the distance travelled,’ Dr Adrian Williams, of the National Resources Management Centre at Cranfield University. Cranfield University no less! Well of course miles by themselves is on aspect of a wider set of analysis you can apply to any food, but we’ve never argued any different. Cost is one other major issue, articulary so that poorer families can feed themselves decent food and organics move away from being an exclusive brand to a mainstream staple.

Writing in the observers sister paper, the Guardian, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, says the era of cheap food in the UK is over, and that the nation is “sleepwalking into a crisis”. He points out that the UK has an especially poor record on producing its own fruit and vegetables. “Ninety-five per cent of fresh fruit is imported. This is ludicrous in a country with 2,000 varieties of apples,” he says. More on an exciting urban agriculture project in Middlesborough here.

6.  There follows an entirely spurious idea to persuade us that flying beans from Kenya is actually, somehow a good idea: “But a warning that beans have been air-freighted does not mean we should automatically switch to British varieties if we want to help the climate. Beans in Kenya are produced in a highly environmentally-friendly manner. ‘Beans there are grown using manual labour - nothing is mechanised,’ says Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones of Bangor University, an expert on African agriculture. ‘They don’t use tractors, they use cow muck as fertiliser; and they have low-tech irrigation systems in Kenya. They also provide employment to many people in the developing world. So you have to weigh that against the air miles used to get them to the supermarket.’

As I’ve just said, we advocate organic agriculture here. Behind this seems to be the suggestion that we are here to serve the market, not that the market is here to serve us.

But now we’re getting to the possible agenda that’s being pursued here: “In the words of Gareth Thomas, Minister for Trade and Development, speaking at a recent Department for International Development air-freight seminar: ‘Driving 6.5 miles to buy your shopping emits more carbon than flying a pack of Kenyan green beans to the UK.’ Is that true? I’d like to see how that calculations was made  (!). But then, as was explained to the journalists, we advocate taking part in vegetable box delivery schemes and don’t drive about to collect our food. Though even if we did - we would be doing the same journey as someone driving to a supermarket to buy their Kenyan green beans.

7. Finally, they write: “Even if you could get a carbon label that accurately reflects a product’s impact on the environment and identify products that have high footprints, would you be right in boycotting them? In many cases, such as brands of coffee, these products come from struggling third world nations. Using our Western concerns with the climate as an excuse to increase poverty there has dubious ethical consequences.” Our Western concerns??? Not only is the West historically culpable but is also by far the greatest contemporary ‘carbon criminal’ and yet is is the developing countries who suffer the most from climate chaos now. This attempt to characterise concern about climate changes as some sort of fashionable Western fad is pathetic and entirely misleading.

In short this article is drivel. The issue of global warming and the imperatives of changing our world remains essential, despite industry, politicians and pliant journalists efforts to pretend otherwise. Should we have expected otherwise? Maybe not. This was after all in the Observer, the newspaper who’s last piece on the Fife Diet described it as being based in “Fife, a small island off the North-East Coast of Scotland.”

10 Reasons Why Organic Can Feed the Worldand 10 reasons GM won’t - see Lobbywatch here.The following articles come from the SPECIAL REPORT: ‘The Death of Food as we know it’ in the current issue of The Ecologist magazine.The premise of ‘The death of food…’ is that an entire culture of cheap mass-produced food is about to be brought to a grinding halt. Various contributors, including Vandana Shiva, Joanna Blythman and Tim Lang, explore what will take its place. More information at the Ecologist here. Although the information in some of the articles is heavily orientated towards readers in the UK, there’s still lots of detailed information of general relevance. For instance, in the section on greenhouse gas emissions from organic agriculture, the authors note how easily methane from cows can be dramatically cut simply by changing the pasturage on which they graze. This is of particular note given the various attempts to genetically engineer plants, or even genetically engineer cows, as a means of tackling this problem.

A special thanks to Charmaine and everyone involved in organising yesterdays superb meeting in North Queensferry. Thanks to to Ryan Nelson (Nelson’s Farm Ice Cream, Blair Mains, Culross, Fife KY12 8JW ) who came and served some of the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted. Ryan was inspired by a trip to Italy where every village had superb ice cream and asked himself, why do we have to eat yellow coloured synthetic rubbish? You can buy it at Culross Post Office and at Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy Farmer’s Markets.The Sunday Herald has launched its Eat Local campaign as a response to the growing global food crisis saying: “Scotland could have a particularly important role to play in future as global warming damages the ability of other regions of the world to grow food. But as well as helping the world’s poor there are sound health, environmental and financial reasons for changing our diet and concentrating on seasonal produce.” You can see the start of the campaign here. Today’s paper promises links and a wider ‘local eating campaign’ which I don’t see yet…

Fife Diet is teaming up with the Transition Towns Movement, Leith Wholefood Co-op and The Forum for a meeting in Edinburgh on Sunday 16th March at the Friends Meeting House, Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh.

There will also be a seed swap, so bring your spare seeds, take a few away, share resources.Come along, all welcome!

Where: The Quaker Meeting House, Victoria Terrace (off George IV Bridge).
When: Sunday 16th March, 7.00 - 9.00pm

This from our friends: The East Fife Allotment Association, which is based in Upper Largo, has made a submission to the National Food Policy consultation in a bid to put home grown produce further up the political agenda.

Chairperson Iain Anderson said: “The association acknowledges the main focus of any future policy should be building a successful commercial food and drink industry.

“The association feels, however, that some emphasis in future policy should be directed to encouraging people to grow their own food. “

“We do not think this would be in conflict with commercial interests but would complement the development of a healthy food culture, providing more choice and contributing to the broader sustainability agenda.” More at Fife Today.