Beetroot and Carrot Salad

I used to think beetroots had to be cooked. Now I am wiser, I know they can be  raw. And may be more nutritious as a result.

Grating beetroots makes crunching effortless while an oil and vinegar dressing adds luxury. Carrots, also grated, are a perfect companion.

You know what they say: eat for colour: orange, reds (and more), each colour containing different immune-boosting nutrients.

I first came across the beetroot/carrot combo at the Better Food Cafe about seven years ago, and copied the idea, working out a version at home. 

Then turned it into a recipe for Grown in Britain Cookbook. I wish I had name-checked my inspiration so glad to be doing so now. My beetroots came from  the Better Food Company, too.

I peeled the carrots and beetroots, above. Grown organically, slowly, biologically, they are chemical-free and needed only scrubbing, plus the skin has nutrients. (But I am not perfect and peeling is faster).

I was taken with the yellow, white and purple carrots, as they used to be before 17th century Dutch growers went monoculture orange to praise William of Orange. Poetically, these 21st century rainbow carrots were grown in Holland.

I had bought my Dutch rainbow organic carrots at the Bear Fruit stall (above) in the Bear Pit, Bristol.

The Bear Pit is, by the way, an example of urban regeneration from the grass-roots-up. A dingy subway on a busy city roundabout now transformed by locals into a lively market and meeting place.

Beetroot and Carrot Salad – ingredients for four

• 600g raw beetroot
• 600g raw carrots
• 50g sunflower seeds
• Dressing: 4 tablespoon olive oil + 50ml balsamic vinegar
• oil for frying/toasting + soy sauce for seeds
• Salt and black pepper, to taste
• Fresh herbs (parsley, coriander) or snipped salad cress.
• 1.1. Scrub/peel carrots and beetroot, and trim tops and tails. Keep carrots whole for grating. Peel the beetroot and cut in half. Grate the raw vegetables, using hand grater or food processor. Combine in large bowl and add olive oil and vinegar dressing.2. If not serving immediately, don’t add dressing yet. Instead, store covered in fridge. Remove 1 hour before serving to bring to room temperature. Then add dressing (below).

  3. For the vinaigrette, put the oil and vinegar in a screw-top jar, put the lid on tightly and shake vigorously.

  4. Gently heat olive oil in a small frying pan and toast the seeds for 3–4 minutes over a moderate heat, stirring to prevent sticking. Add the soy sauce at the end of the cooking, if using. Most of the sauce will evaporate, leaving a salty taste and extra browning for the seeds. Store the toasted seeds in a jar with a lid if preparing the day before.

  5. When ready to serve, add the chopped herbs to the grated beetroot and carrot. Shake the screw-top jar with vinaigrette, then pour over the vegetables, and season to taste. Toss the salad gently until everything glistens. Scatter the toasted seeds.

Hello Kitty cake

It’s not often I go mainstream but basically my eldest daughter asked me to make a Hello Kitty cake for my granddaugher Tayda’s fourth birthday party in December (this blog is well-overdue) held at St Werburgh’s city farm.

A few days before I got baking, my eldest daughter had a nightmare about the cake-making.

I said: “Good. Prepare to be disappointed.”

I felt I had to manage expectations.

However, it turned out well. The cake tasted good and actually looked like Hello Kitty.

For the latter, I must thank the opportune arrival of my middle daughter who took over cake-decorating just as I was getting bored. She talked me down from “getting creative”, insisting we adhere to its original design.

So here’s the Hello Kitty birthday cake-making story plus recipes.

I started by looking online for a clear image I could print and trace.

I ended up on GirlyBubble, a website for “girlyness and cute stuff”. Yes, I was in alien territory but fearless in my quest for a clear image of Hello Kitty.

I printed the image and traced it by hand. I admired the clever simplicity of the design, neither round nor oval, and its trademark bow and whiskers.

I owe decoration-detail to Coolest Birthday Cakes where readers have submitted their Hello Kitty cake designs. How grateful am I to the web and its culture of sharing?

Then it was time for real-life cake-decoration shopping at my local sweet shop on the independent-tastic Gloucester Road  (one of the last independent high streets in the UK).

Scrumptiously Sweet is a traditional sweet shop offering attentive service and saintly patience as I agonised over icing tubes, jelly beans and marshmallow pipes.

We used bootlace liquorice to outline Hello Kitty’s head and ears, her bow, whiskers and nose.

We squeezed out Dr Oetker Designer Icing to fill in the red of the bow.

And encircled the lower base of the cake with pink marshmallow Flumps (you can see the join in the pic below).

Hello Kitty Cake and Icing recipes

I owe everything to All Recipes.com and its Foolproof Sponge Cake. It is truly foolproof for I am the fool, and here is the proof.

I made two sponges, one square, one round.

The deeper square one (above) was sliced through its middle and filled and covered with pink buttercream icing.

The smaller sponge (above) was baked in a round flan tin, requiring only some trimming with a sharp knife to become Kitty-shaped. This sponge had white icing to contrast with its bigger pink base.

Recipe for Foolproof Sponge Cake

No need to cream butter and sugar. Instead, sieve the flour and mix in the other ingredients. I used organic ingredients for health of people and planet, and butter not marge. It seemed strange to cook a sponge for a whole hour – but it worked. Brilliantly.

Serves: 12

340g (12 oz) self-raising flour | 280g (10 oz) caster sugar | 280g (10 oz) butter (or margarine) | 5 eggs |3 tablespoons milk (or soya milk) |

1. Grease and line two 20cm (8 inch) square or round tins and set aside. I used an 8 inch square tin and an 8 inch round flan tin, and did not skimp on the greaseproof lining paper.

2. Pre-heat the oven to 150 C / Gas 2, or 140 C for fan ovens.

3. Sieve self-raising flour into a mixing bowl, add the sugar and butter, then the eggs. I used my electric hand-blender, adding one egg at a time, blending after each one, until all ingredients were amalgamated. Once blended, some extra fast whizzes. The result: a thickish smooth batter.

4. Pour into the tins, place in centre of oven and cook for about 1 hour 15 mins, to 1 hour 30 mins. All Recipes says test with skewer: if it comes out clean, the cake is done.

Thank you All Recipes.com. Now a huge big shout-out to HonieMummyBlog for Perfect Butter Icing - perfect indeed! - and a genius selection of different quantities. Again, gratitude.

Honnie Mummie Perfect Butter icing

250 g / 8 oz butter | 500 g / 1 lb icing sugar | 4 teaspoons milk

For base (not Hello Kitty face), we carefully added drop-by-drop red colouring for a pinky effect, and mixed before adding the next drop.

I made the cakes on the Thursday, the butter icing on Friday, and assembled it all on Saturday – party day. 

And did not disgrace my family.

Here is the cake nibbled down to its essential Hello Kitty-ness.

And here’s a under-1-minute video of the cake at Tayda’s party.

In Bristol’s green heart, we trust

Green party councillor, Gus Hoyt, says Bristol’s mayoral Cabinet has a “green heart at its core”. (Image credit Bristol 24-7)

Previously city councillors had voted for their leader. But the Coalition government gave ten of England’s biggest cities the option to vote for its own. Last May, Bristol people voted in a referendum to elect their own mayor, the only city to do so. In November, independent candidate, George Ferguson, became the city’s first “directly-elected” mayor.

Does a directly-elected mayor give more power to the people because they (rather than councillors) are voting? Or does the new role give too much power to one person, the mayor? But that’s another story.

Last November, Gus Hoyt, Bristol North’s first Green party councillor, got a late-night call from newly-elected mayor, George Ferguson, inviting him to join the new mayoral “rainbow” cabinet.  Gus Hoyt explains in his blog why he accepted.

It’s a question because the Green Party is opposed to the cuts - yet the Bristol mayoral cabinet is pledged to cut £35 million. The intention of the cabinet is to minimise hardship, says George Ferguson. “I’m trying to minimise the effect on services,” he says.

Personally, I don’t get this cuts business. For a start, the UK is one of the most powerful countries in the world. To my mind, Austerity Britain is a marketing slogan to cover up the reality which is: “Stop giving money to the poor, so the rich can get richer.” But I digress.

Last night at a Bristol Friends of the Earth meeting, guest speaker, Gus Hoyt – focusing on food and energy – described the positive things the cabinet hopes to achieve.

Green Bristol food vision

• Make it easier for local food producers to sell their produce, building connections with local supply chains

• Turn Bristol into a bee capital (Paris has over 400 hives)

• Establish a “nuts-and-bolts” food market at Bristol Temple Meads railway station new enterprise zone - if successful it could be replicated in areas of deprivation

• Aim to declare Bristol a zero waste city hopefully working with green-friendly Labour MP for Bristol East, Kerry McCarthy, who introduced a food waste bill in parliament

• One fruit tree to be planted for each Bristol child born so apples and nuts can be harvested at will, and children can learn where food comes from (it really does grow on trees.)

• Edible beds in public spaces and food production in parks so food can be picked for free

• Turn Bristol into a food capital. The city already hosts several food festivals – let’s host more

• Enable more schoolchildren to learn how to grow food to eat and how to cook it.

At this point Gus Hoyt referred to the horsemeat scandal, and how we must bust the myth that affordable food has to be rubbish. When people cook from scratch, food can be healthy, fresh – and affordable.

At this point, let me invoke my mother invoking her mother:

“The secret of good cooking is quality ingredients. The first step to learning how to cook is knowing how to choose quality raw materials.”

My grandparents lived in poverty in the East End – but they knew how to cook. The UK media delights in making healthy food a class issue, as it sneers at middle class obsessions about organic food. Hello?! The true class issue is companies producing rubbish food and spending millions on marketing it to poor people.

Back to last night’s meeting. There was a discussion about the Blue Finger, a stretch of local land perfect for growing food. At the start of the 20th century, Bristol was ringed with market gardens which fed Bristol. Now we buy tasteless produce in supermarkets trucked in from far away.

And should the negative effects of climate change and fuel shortages take hold, making Bristol more self-sufficient in food makes a lot of sense. And more pleasant and healthy, too.

At the Friends of the Earth meeting, Phil Haughton of Better Food Company said that plenty of local farmers would be happy to lease/sell a field the land: what is missing, he said, are entrepreneurs. Meanwhile Joy Carey, author of Who Feeds Bristol, said to make Bristol food-secure, eight main things need to happen including composting, growing, learning to cook and supporting small shops and producers.

Bristol Food Policy Council (the first in the UK) is developing a food plan with those eight components. Bristol, be proud.

Green Bristol energy vision

• Bristol to become the go-to-city for renewable energy 
• Make Bristol a truly solar city
• Bristol can be “a living university ” for green institutions
• Aim for Bristol to become the European Green Capital
• Invite aeronautical businesses to use their expertise to create tidal technology (rather than bomber ‘planes) -  a kind of “swords into ploughshares” idea
• Secure £10 million to make council houses more energy-saving
• Work with institutions such as the NHS and universities to make energy more affordable with ‘Energy Partnerships’
• Wind turbines at Avonmouth are due to open in December
• Bristol to be 100 % “fracking” and nuclear-free.

So, dear reader, does this gladden your heart? It did mine.

Katie Stewart: Marmalade 2013

Oranges snow today

The cookery writer, Katie Stewart, died earlier this month.

There was an outpouring on Twitter from those including me who had learned to cook from her cookbooks.

Then Guardian food and wine writer, Fiona Beckett, suggested a Katie Cook (#katiestewart) day and others on Twitter took up the call, followed by Alex Renton in The Times. This is my contribution.

I have been following Katie Stewart’s helpful, practical recipe for making chunky marmalade since 1980 from The Times Calendar Cookbook. Having decreased  sugar bit by bit, I now use less sugar than fruit.

Katie’s original amounts: 3 lbs/ 1.1/4 kg Seville oranges | 6lbs / 2.3/4 kg sugar | 5 pts/ 2.3/4 litres water | juice of 2 lemons.

I use organic Seville oranges. They cost twice as much this year as non-organic ones because we live in a nutty world where wholesome food is more expensive than junk food. Still, added expense worth it because:

1. Organic oranges have more pronounced taste because they are smaller and denser (basically less watery) than non-organic oranges
2. More nutrients in organic too: “conventional farmers (drive) down nutrient levels via their pursuit of ever-higher yields,” says Charles M. Benbrook
3. By paying the extra, I am doing my bit for healthier soils and water, and feeding the world. Think of it as a charity donation.

Talking of which, Katie Stewart’s family has asked for donations (rather than flowers) for The Kids’ Cookery School. The charity’s mission is to give every child in the UK an unique fun cooking experience to help them make informed choices about food. You can donate online.

My marmalade 2001 blog post talks about the young US soldier, Bradley Manning, Wikileaks whistleblower. Currently in pre-trial court martial proceedings, on Thursday he was refused the whistleblower’s defence: motive.

The marmalade: Katie Stewart’s recipe for Chunky Seville Marmalade, her invaluable tips, my amounts and spin on my Marmalade 2011. Apologies not metric – any help with converting amounts welcome.

Marmalade 

5lbs organic Seville oranges

4 lbs organic cane sugar

2 lemons

4 pts of water + 1 pt for extracting pectin

Top Katie Tips

• Place a few saucers in freezer so boiling jam can cool quickly when testing to see it has set
• Put weighed sugar in a preserving pan in low oven to warm
• Clean jars thoroughly with hot water and dry them in oven
• Add lemons at preserving pan stage.

Five stages of making marmalade

1. Clean oranges + simmer to soften

Scrub non-organic oranges and remove stalks. Cook in a large pan or two smaller ones – with lids – in 4 pints of water and simmer heartily for about an hour until peel is soft. Orangey aroma fills room…

Drain cooked whole oranges and preserve cooking water as if it were a precious liquid (it is).

This process can be done earlier, or even the day before.

2. Extracting pith and pips for pectin

Pith and pips (left)

Pectin, extracted from the insides of the fruit, is the setting agent. Cut cooked-and-cooled oranges in half. Scoop out with spoon the oranges’ insides – the pith and pips (pith and pips pith and pips - say it quickly) .

Add pith and pips to large pan with the 1 extra pint of water. Simmer for ten minutes then drain: this pectin-rich liquid will help jam set in Stage 4.

3. Slicing peel 

Flatten softened peel with your hand, and cut up peel of oranges (and lemons), thinly or thickly, as you like.

4. Sugar boiling drama 

Fast-boil for imminent set

Add the sugar (warmed from the oven) to a preserving pan. Strongly suggest a preserving pan is good investment – otherwise use two of your widest pans.

Add the precious-liquid (stage 1), drained pectin-juice (stage 2), and cut-up peel (stage 3) in with sugar in preserving pan. Start boiling…

You must not overboil or you can lose that magic-setting moment. It really is as terrifying as it sounds. But you know what they say: the other side of fear is excitement.

It takes about 20-30 minutes to get it to boiling temperature and then you have to watch it like a hawk.

Start timing your 15-20 minutes when the jam is boiling like mad i.e. not just bubbling but when liquid goes into a furious fast-boiling glucky whirl – then start timing those 15-20 minutes.

So, after 15 minutes, take the pan off the heat and drop some hot jam on one of those icy-cold plates.

Let jam-droplet cool, tilting plate to encourage cooling, then push droplet gently with your finger. You are looking for tell-tale wrinkles and jelly-like character. (The opposite of an ideal lover? My 2011 joke).

If droplet is still runny, carry on boiling the big pan for a few minutes then test again. And so on.

Stage 5. Marmalade in jars

The marmalade droplets are now unequivocally set. Let jam cool in pan until not-too-hot nor too-set for pouring . Next, the sticky bit. Use newspaper to cover kitchen surface, use a ladle or a small cup. Good luck.

Recipes say use waxed discs to keep out condensation and mould but, cutting-corners-cook that I am, I have not not done so for years, with no adverse effects. Wipe jars from stickiness and proudly label.

Katie Stewart: Pots de Crème au Chocolat (chocolate pots)

Yesterday I received an email from the Guild of Food Writers with sad news: the cookery writer, Katie Stewart, had died.

“…a long-time Guild member and the recipient of our 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award. Katie was taken ill on Friday and died on Saturday” said the email.

My mum gave me The Times Calendar Cookbook (my edition published 1976) and I have used it since the 1980s. I also had the privilege of meeting Katie Stewart when she received her Guild of Food Writers’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.

I tweeted the sad news, and soon there was an outpouring of tweet messages from fellow food writers who, like me, had learnt to cook thanks to Katie Stewart.

I believe generosity of spirit, and the heartfelt desire to communicate and share, really does transmit, to create classic cookbooks.

Yesterday Fiona Beckett, Guardian food writer, suggested on Twitter we have a day/weekend when we cook one of Katie’s recipes. What a great idea. More and more food writers thought so too. (Wow. Social media in action. Love it!).

I suggested we have a #katiestewart hashtag, and explained why at my other blog.

Alex Renton, The Times food writer got in touch. He is doing an obituary piece in Thursday’s edition for Katie, who was The Times cookery columnist.

He did not have a Katie recipe, so I offered to write one down.

I know the page number for pot au chocolate – page 77 - by heart.

My additions in brackets.

Pots de Crème au Chocolat

6oz/175g chocolate chips or plain chocolate broken in pieces

1/2 pint/3 dl. (300 ml single cream)

1 egg

pinch salt

1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence (optional)

Katie says: ‘Put the chocolate in the globlet of a blender. Heat the cream until just under boiling point, then pour on to the chocolate. Cover, switch on and blend until smooth. The heat of the cream will melt the chocolate. Add the egg, salt and vanilla essence and blend again quickly. The mixture at this stage will be quite thin. Pour into six small individual pots, or failing this, small glasses. Chill for several hours or overnight until the mixture is quite firm. Serves 6 ‘

As you will see from my pic, I have played with this recipe over the years, and in 2012, made a raw chocolate version with chilli and orange zest.

Her book, The Times Calendar Cookbook, follows, without fanfare, seasonality: “Fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and game mature according to the seasons and over the year offer us a wide variety of fresh foods to use in recipes,” writes Katie Stewart in her introduction.

The pic of spring vegetables (heading up this blog) is a photograph from the book illustrating May. The vegetables come from Petersham Nurseries, still going strong.

I fear I am jumping the gun a bit because our #katiestewart, or Katie Cook Day as Alex coined it, is really at the weekend.

So please, please all fellow Katie Stewart fans near and far – get cooking at the weekend, share your recipe and…pass it on!

God bless Katie Stewart. What a life-enhancing legacy.

May her soul rest at peace.

2012 in review – my stats

WordPress.com has prepared a 2012 annual report for my Real Food Lover blog.

According to WordPress 2012 annual report:

5,000 people attended the Aspen Food and Wine Festival. This blog had about 42,000 views in 2012. If each view were a foodie, this blog would power 8 festivals.

So, Real Food Lover had about 42,000 views in 2012. I published 12 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 203 posts. There were 56 pictures uploaded. That’s about a picture per week.

The busiest day of 2012 was 29 February with 396 views. The most popular post that day was What is Tesco Real Food?.

Click here to see the complete report.

Celeriac salad

Celeriac’s brutish appearance belies its tender nature.

This winter root vegetable makes a fabulous nutritious raw salad in minutes.

Here is the celeriac peeled, its dirty shavings discarded and its whiteness revealed, ready for grating.

After grating it, I dressed the organically-grown celeriac with yogurt, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and lemon juice. All organic because I want less of the bad stuff, more of the good stuff.

Nigel Slater’s classic celeriac remoulade is made with cream and mayonnaise. He points out dressed celeriac goes soggy overnight so eat it freshly-made.

Celeriac salad goes well with many dishes such as fish

- and is also just great on its own.

La Pirogue – stolen fish and refugees

“Y’a plus de personnes ici, y’a plus de poissons.”

“No more people here, no more fish,” says one of the characters in La Pirogue, the Senegalese film directed by Moussa Touré, selected for Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2012.

Here’s a clip from La Pirogue.

Illegal fishing on a fierce industrial scale is robbing West African coastal countries of its fish, often the only protein source for millions of people.

Instead of being used for local, sustainable fishing, the painted pirogue is used to transport desperate people on a perilous sea journey. The film is dedicated to the thousands of Africans who have died crossing the Atlantic to Europe.

If they had their fish, they would not risk crossing the ocean in a wooden boat.

Much of this stolen fish ends up in Europe, says the Environmental Justice Foundation in its recent report, Exposing Pirate Fishing: The Fight Against Illegal Fishing in West Africa and the EU.

Everything is connected. The would-be migrants who try to enter Fortress Europe are suffering from the illegal trade in seafood sold to Europe.

La Pirogue opened the Afrika Eye Film Festival on the 9 November 2012. I was helping the sixth Afrika Eye Film Festival with its social media, and saw a connection for another client, Charles Redfern’s sustainable canned fish brand, Fish4Ever.

He in turn saw a link with the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) and sponsored their stall at La Pirogue’s screening.

Here is Charles Redfern and Kate, a marine scientist, who ran the EJF information stall at the Afrika Eye Film Festival, at the Watershed, Bristol.

Charles has family links to Sierra Leone, also ravaged by illegal fishing.  In 2011, he raised £9k to help the EJF buy Sierra Leone a new monitoring boat. This boat featured in an Al Jazeeera video investigation as it chased two South Korean trawlers fishing illegally.

David Dravie-John from Sierra Leone, and Charles, connected at the opening night. David Dravie-John wanted to interview Charles on his Bristol-based radio on Ujima 98 FM, but as Charles is Reading-based, I agreed to be interviewed instead.

Positive change starts with awareness. I have to communicate the problem because it’s part of finding the solution.

The Zimbabwean film maker, Afrika Eye Film Festival co-founder, and director of Robert Mugabe – What Happened, Simon Bright, says in my interview for Bristol247, “Film has the power to transform political events”.

…”so that the beautiful African pirogues will never again serve to transport human misery,” as a blogger wrote.

Fish4Ever’s ethical sourcing policy refuses to buy from long distance foreign fleets fishing in the coastal waters of developing countries.

And here’s a picture of Charles eating lentil soup I made with Fish4Ever anchovies, + cut-up sweated small cubes of fennel, leek and swede (a veg trio inspired by healthy-food-on-a-budget Square Food Foundation’s chef Barny Haughton).

Delicious sustainable fish, and food security for poor countries.

Have I helped join up the dots?

Organic nourishment from Neal’s Yard Remedies

As an organic fanatic, I apply the same quest for uncontaminated naturalness to skincare products as to food.

I don’t want to rub parabens (preservative linked to cancer) into my skin.

I don’t want my unctions laced with Sodium Lauryl Sulphate (chemical used in paint stripper linked to skin irritation and allergies), thank you very much.

About half of what you put on your body goes in your body.

Thanks to campaigning, the European Commission is considering a restricted ban on parabens.

However, worrying evidence already exists. Which is why organic standards have already banned parabens.

This is what I like about organic standards: they are based, o so sensibly, on the Precautionary Principle.

Does this ingredient pose a potential health risk?

Is this risk necessary? If not, then…

– don’t take it!

Thanks to the Precautionary principle, organic standards have already banned, as I said, parabens, and Sodium Laurel Sulphate. (And many more).

Factory-made chemicals with potential health risks are cheap to produce – they are in the small print on the packaging. The beneficial ingredients are in bigger lettering, shouted on the packaging, sounding as if they make up most of the product.

Organic skincare products avoid ingredients with health risks and have more active ingredients than non-organic products.

I am always happy to promote products that are as honest as they can get.

I work in PR but I’m also a campaigner. And luckily (could it be any other way?) I do both.

I have been working with Neal’s Yard Remedies, a campaigning (my favourite type) brand.

Please check out its up-to-minute information resource: NYR Natural Health News now edited by previous-Ecologist editor and investigative journalist and author, Pat Thomas.

This blog describes Neal’s Yard Remedies’ eco-factory at Peacemarsh, Dorset.

Neal’s Yard Remedies was founded 30 years ago by pioneering Romy Fraser.

Determined the company would not fall to greenwashing corporates, she sold it in 2006 to environmental campaigner, Peter Kindersley of Sheepdrove Organic Farm (which supplies Neal’s Yard Remedies with organic herbs). The organic products are now all 100% Soil Association certified.

Mini-digression: Romy Fraser makes soaps for Neal’s Yard Remedies, and runs courses on Trill Farm, her must-visit organic farm in Devon - with Daphne Lambert (for the-most-nutritious food education – and food).

Last month, we had a great evening at Neal’s Yard Remedies store in Bristol for Organic September.

We invited Bristol bloggers interested in organic products for babies.

Lovely people and what a great supportive blogging community. And yielding such fresh honest responses to the evening, such as from Tigerlilly Quinn’s night out, ShipShape’s review , Purple Ella, Knitty Mummy, and Circus Queen (moon cups and all!),

Brilliant to meet people previously only-met online. Despite being a social media maniac, I believe: Nothing. Beats. Real. Life.

Max from Neal’s Yard Remedies in Bristol gives Bristol blogger, Purple Ella, a hand massage.

Fantastic to have support from Neal’s Yard Remedies HQ in Covent Garden. Nicola Nolan gave a great talk about the company, and its Bee Lovely campaign to ban the lethal bee-harming and totally unnecessary neonicotinoid pesticides – please sign the petition.

Also, from Covent Garden, Jane Killingsworth.

Organic cheeses provided by Sheepdrove Organic Farm – its Butcher’s shop is just across the Whiteladies road.

The best of organic Mediterranean produce from artisan farms and cooperatives – breads sticks, dip-in spreads, olives. Thank you, Organico. (My fuzzy pic)

Me bee-hind the Bee Lovely campaign and Bee Lovely organic products stand.

Neal’s Yard Remedies is like an old-fashioned apothecary – rows of healing herbs and spices.

Thank you to all the Bristol bloggers and Tweeters.

Thank you, Nadia Hillman, for above fab photos – do credit her if you use them!

I took this one of Nadia!

Organic September: Eve Balfour

A coincidence. I was planning this post on Lady Eve for Organic September when environmental journalist and historian, Erin Gill, passed through Bristol.

“Eve Balfour,” said Erin Gill, emphasising the word, Eve, as we sat in the Better Food Company cafe today.

Eve is what her friends and family called her. The title was expedient, thought Erin. Certainly useful when campaigning for counter-culture sustainable farming. (Eve’s title was inherited from her childless uncle, Arthur, the first Earl of Balfour, responsible for the Balfour declaration).

But I feel frustrated! Why are these perfectly sane, common sense ideas deemed unorthodox in the first place? As Shell prepares to drill in the melting Arctic, I despair about this terrible struggle for long-term care to prevail over short-term profits.

It’s not through want of vision.

Eve Balfour wrote The Living Soil, published in 1943 – a synthesis of emerging thoughts linking sustainable farming to health – and co-founded the Soil Association in 1946 to spread the word.

Organic historian, Philip Conford, author of The Origins of the Organic Movement, and The Development of the Organic Network: linking people and themes (1945 – 1995), wrote in the Soil Association’s Living Earth in 2003 (when I was editor):

“To the general public, the Soil Association’s name may seem narrowly focused: surely soil matters only to farmers and gardeners. The answer is no, it matters to everyone who eats and all who are concerned with health.”

The reasons, he writes, are given in

Eve Balfour’s book, The Living Soil (reprinted 2006).

The book helped kickstart the organic movement – a rising tide of hearts and minds from both the left and right of politics which questioned quick-fix chemicals, animal factories and the monocultures of factory farming. Their prophetic vision foretold a depleted soil with negative knock-on effects.

The organic pioneers called for biological and ecological sciences to underpin farming, not the increasingly-dominant chemistry one (which sadly gained more sway from developing munitions in two world wars).

To me, these organic pioneers were inspiring, standing up for nature against the increasing industrialisation of the west.

Eve Balfour speaks my language.

In the first edition of the Soil Association’s magazine, Mother Earth (1946) Eve Balfour wrote about those who questioned the status quo:

“…They are beginning to understand, for example, that health is something more than than just not being ill, and that the right approach to health consists not merely in the prevention of disease but in the promotion of vitality in both organism and environment, for the one cannot be studied apart from the other.

“These people have begun to see life on this planet as a whole, and Nature’s plan as a complicated system of interdependence rather than one based on competition.”

Soil health equals human health, as this Huffington Post film review of the Symphony of the Soil (we helped organise its London premiere), shows.

However, despite its benefits, organic farming receives little UK government support compared to other countries in Europe. What a terrible shame – organic food should be available and affordable for all, for the sake of soil, water conservation, animal welfare, bees and other wildlife, wild flowers, and our health.

Everything is interdependent.

Post Script A recent review from Stanford University indicated organic food may have less pesticides but is not more nutritious than non-organic food.

The review  (and the ensuing media frenzy) is rebutted by US scientist, Dr Charles Benbrook.

This article on the NHS website also looks at the Standford review’s methodology.

And, a great response from food writer, Michael Pollan.

I like this rant from Riverford Farm about organic food getting knocked just when it’s never been better.