A good healthy smell!

One of the residents of Hackney City Farm.

One minute it seemed that I was up to my eyeballs in the intricacies of work, on the busiest press day for some considerable time, and yet almost the next, it was a bright, sunny Saturday morning on Broadway Market, and I was sharing the crumbs of my breakfast sausage roll with a starling, who was hopping around below, metallic livery glistening in the light.

There were other things to revel in as the morning unfolded. Now I could just walk down the road toward Broadway Market, but I rarely do.

It’s much more interesting to cross that road and walk alongside the Regent Canal, at the back of an estate.

This isn’t a towpath side, and the bank is fenced off.

It’s a tip in many ways, but for all the careless trash that has been thrown in with the weeds, it’s also bursting with life. Squirrels are often visible, leaping from tree to tree. Yesterday, one was running around with what appeared to be a slice fruit loaf in its mouth, stopping every so often to have a proper munch.

Above, a great tit was on watch duty. Still higher up, smaller birds sang their songs.

And it’s a stretch where the changing of the seasons always seems so subtle yet obvious: from spring buds on trees that drape beyond the rusted railings to reddening leaves in the autumn. It always seems that I spot the changes here first.

How different it was this morning, as day came up to reveal a canopy of featureless grey.

But the week ahead not only beckons – things were required of today.

I toddled down to Columbia Road for the first time this year, pausing in Haggerston Park to admire more evidence of the turning of the year; pale green strings of bells, tinged pink in places.

Les was in his shop – so I was able to organise potting compost and, as he suggested, organic seaweed feed. He’ll bring those up later in the week.

But there was no joy on the subject of something to dig into the heavy, clayey soil at the back.

“What you really need,” he said, “is proper manure”, and went on to say that it was a pity I didn’t have access to a car, since nearby Hackney City Farm would probably give (or sell) me some.

Oh well. Wandering back along the market, I mused on whether I could get anything appropriate from Bradbury’s ironmonger at the top of Broadway Market.

But then, since my journey could easily take me past the city farm, I thought I’d pop in to enquire.

In the tiny shop, the ladies heard me out and suggested I look in the farmyard for someone called Stuart.

The yard itself was a bustle of hens clucking around, while one volunteer worked in a stall at the far end of the cobbles.

The smell – ah, the smell!

I remember that smell fondly from all the childhood visits to farms. It is, as my (honorary) Uncle John would say, “a good healthy smell!”

There were also signs everywhere, warning that it wasn’t a good idea to pet any of the cats you might see, since they’re working farm cats and can ‘get a bit grumpy’.

Stuart, as it happened, was busy in the kitchen; a vast man with a bandana around his head. After hearing me explain my mission, it also became clear that he was entirely the wrong person.

But he led me to an office where two women were on duty, with various of those grumpy, hard-working farm cats sleeping around the place in various spots.

It was a superbly productive conversation.

Later this week, I’ll pop down – it’s just a short walk through the park – and they’ll give me as much manure as I need. I get it free because, living so close by, I count as "community". And they'll lend me a wheelbarrow to bring it back too.

Now that’s going to be serious metropolitan sophistication!

But nothing could be better for what I want.

Fortunately, the weather looks decent over the coming week. Tomorrow and on Tuesday, in between trying to find a boiler engineer, waiting for my mini greenhouse to be delivered and making marmalade, I’m aiming to weed and sift the rest of my patch.

It’ll be backbreaking, but it has to be done. And once it is, then everything will get a bit easier.

Once the manure is dug in, it’ll get to rest for a couple of weeks. And then I should be able to start sowing directly into the bed.

In the meantime, I’m reading Felicity Lawrence’s Eat Your Heart Out: Why the food business is bad for the planet and your health.

I’ll go into more detail at a later date, but it doesn’t make for pleasant reading – even when you don’t actually eat vast amounts of processed food.

But it’s yet another swathe of information that makes me wish for a simpler life – and also convinces me of how worthwhile it is to grow as much of my own food as possible.

My little experiment in the car park is actually rather more than just a bit of messing around.

While it gives me pleasure in and of itself, and while the mere exercise of gardening is probably good for the health, the more I learn about the state of our food industry, the more I realise that it’s good for me in other ways.

Okay, let’s not go over the top with what I can achieve in such a small space, with limited time and very little knowledge or experience.

But if knowledge is power, then knowledge about food also gives an edge to such exploits: an edge that says that it isn’t just a bit of playing around.

The next few days should be busy and a bit testing and also fun.

The coming months will be fascinating.

What's your dinner doing to you?

Standing at the bus stop one morning last week, it was impossible not to overhear a conversation between two other women.

“I’ve lost loads of weight in the last three weeks,” said one.

“Oh god! What have you done?” asked the other. What was this miracle diet?

“I’ve just stopped eating takeaways and processed food,” said the first one, by way of explanation.

Nothing else, apparently. No running a marathon every evening. No skipping meals – not even any of that calorie counting malarky.

Just cutting out processed and fast foods. And replacing them with fresh food.

I didn’t catch any more of the conversation at that point, but after my own Mars bar moment, I’m more than ever convinced that processed food is a big, big problem.

Later, in an Italian deli where I was getting breakfast, I was chatting with the owner as he made me a sandwich (egg mayo, made on the premises).

“I wouldn’t even have such things [Mars bars] in the shop if I could get away with it,” he said, after I’d told him how it had made me feel. “But it’s a business and people want them”.

He went on to tell me about a relative, whose young son was putting on weight – despite playing football seven days a week and eating an apparently sensible diet.

“I told his mother to stop giving him two cartons of Ribena a day, and sliced bread spread with margarine,” he said. “That’s all”.

His mother thought the Ribena healthy – and everyone knows that marg is better for you than butter.

She took action, though – and the boy’s weight problems were solved.

My egg may sandwich may have taken a world-record time to make, because with nobody else in the café at that time, it was perfect for conversation.

Not for the first time, we touched on organic foods. According to a study of many studies by Stanford University, it has been ‘proven’ to be of no greater health benefit to you than ‘conventional’ foods.

Well, perhaps: if you ignore the findings that organic foods will contain an average of 30% less pesticides than non-organic foods.

And less antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

And if you think that those things have no health implications.

But you can just forget those sort of things – as the headline writers did when covering the story.

Actually, we touched on something totally unmentioned too – taste. Buying organic food will get you better tasting food.

Now I’m not personally convinced that this is because the food is organic per se, but more because it’s not been grown in an artificial manner.

The celery and the cucumber I get from Broadway Market is not organic, although the farmer uses only the minimum of pesticides etc that he needs, but it’s growth is not forced or artificially sped up. And it has scent and taste.

Anecdotally, I’ve yet to find any supermarket celery that’s really worth paying out for – and to get cucumber that’s worth the effort, you have to look at organic, in my own experience.

Just as with fruits, they’re always going to taste much, much better if you only harvest them when they’re actually ripe and ready for eating.

Obviously that’s not easy for shops, but seasonality can help, as does eating regional produce. In other words, things don’t have as far to travel to the table – and don’t have top be picked so much earlier.

It’s not that supermarkets can’t grow, source or sell food that actually has a taste – they just tend to charge more for ‘flavoursome’ varieties; an acknowledgement that much of the rest is the antithesis of that.

I do wonder if part of my reaction to the Mars bar was because I’ve spent three weeks when I’ve eaten pretty much nothing that has been processed in the way that we use that phrase.

I don’t go to France with a plan to ‘only eat completely non-processed things’, it just happens.

It easier – not least because the bread from the boulangerie isn’t Chorleywood; stuffed full of extra yeast so that it can be produced quicker, and full of chemicals to keep it ‘fresh’ for days.

And when we eat all these things, what are we doing to ourselves – and what are we doing to our taste buds too?

It seems to me that there’s a catch 22 in operation too: people end up eating poor food that does nothing to give them pleasure, so they rather understandably then want to pay less for their fuel.

Or they buy food, stuffed with sugar and salt and artificial flavours, that gives an easy hit that they enjoy – and then seek again.

It’s perhaps no wonder that Britain’s favourite smoked cheese has it’s ‘flavour’ poured out of a bottle.

If you look at this, you’ll see that the organic smoked Cheddar – the one that’s naturally smoked over “Cornish oak chips” costs more than the one that has the flavour added from a bottle.

The Bavarian smoked cheese is probably a better product in terms of ingredients, but that’s not the cheapest.

Nope: the cheapest is the one with ingredients including: “Smoke Flavouring, Paprika.”

Which is rather depressing, really.

Three weeks in France, as reported in the blog, saw me regularly buying food in small local shops, at the market – and at the local supermarket, a Carrefour (one of the world’s big four).

On one occasion, I pointed out to The Other Half that, even in that Carrefour, there’s no aisle of potato snacks. You’ll hardly find any at all in the little alimentation I used most regularly – both because it was closest to where we were staying and because it was so good.

No shelves heaving with crisps – but a small deli/butcher counter.

I know which I prefer.

Huge amounts of the fresh produce came from France – most of the fruit was from the Roussillon, the region we were in.

Now obviously France is enormously fortunate geographically in terms of being half in the north of Europe – and half in the south, giving it an incredibly wide variety of indigenous foods and, in effect, longer growing and harvesting seasons than we have.

But it’s more than just that: it’s an attitude toward food and an attitude toward life.

It’s worth noting that, although I wasn’t counting, I suspect we spent less on food for eating in that we would have at home. Where I did make a fleeting mental note was in observing that fish and poultry were slightly less expensive than I’d get them for on Broadway Market.

And a little more food for thought too, via Joanna Blythman on Twitter: a scientist in Australia – backed by scientists in the UK – has found that a GM wheat variety could cause liver failure. (Story)

Think about the possibility that increases in various food intolerances are down to aspects of food processing. And then ask yourself in whose interest all this is being done.

BBC report on organic food and health.
 Rebuttal of study and reporting of study.

My green and salad days

I have never been much of a fan of salad. And you can stop with the sniggering before you start – I don't mean I'm the stereotypical 'salad dodger'.

Actually, I need to be a tad more specific. My idea of a decent salad was something such as the one I picked up years ago from a running magazine, in the days when I pounded the pavements.

It involved slices of apple, sultanas (or raisins), chopped celery, walnuts, pasta shapes and a dressing of plain (low fat) yogurt thinned with orange juice and seasoned with black pepper.

Now that was a tasty salad.

One of the few recipe books I owned was an M&S book of salads – salads like that. Looking back at it now you realise how much we have changed in food terms in the intervening 30 years. What was considered ‘exotic’ then is hardly so now.

But a salad made up of lettuce and tomatoes and cucumber was, generally speaking, to be avoided.

In recent years, travel has broadened the mind on many things – and not least, on this matter.

Tomatoes in Collioure that taste of the sun have left me with year-long yearning for exactly that.

And salad pretty much anywhere across the Channel has been a revelation.

There was the one I had in a restaurant in Barcelona once (twice actually – going for a repeat the next year). It was a plate piled high with leaves, strawberry halves, nuts and more leaves, all dressed with the lightest touch.

I remember it, six (and five) years later, because it was so, so good, and because it introduced me to mesclun, the mix of small salad leaves.

There was the one in a café for office workers in Perpignan; another pile of leaves, this time with pine nuts and three different cheeses.

Everywhere we’ve been, what sticks in the mind is not complexity, but the freshness of the ingredients; these are leaves that actually have a taste and meaningful crispness.

In France generally, even the most cursory garnish is usually worth eating because at least it will be crisp and fresh. But this is far from being just a French thing.

In Brugge, it was the peppery cress that was almost obligatory – but, as we realised on the first taste, was far from boring.

Indeed, I eventually worked out what that was (thanks to George) and have subsequently sown a bowl of American land cress in the garden.

Many years ago, my first encounter with anything organic (insofar as anything labelled as such) was cucumber. An organic shop had opened in Lancaster. I was curious. Looking in, I was bemused by the range of what seemed to be rather scraggy looking fruit and veg.

This was in my pre-foodie days, but salad the sort of ideal, no-calorie stuff to fill up a constantly dieting individual. I bought a cucumber.

It was wrinkled and looked unappetising. But back at home, cutting in to it, I was astonished that it had a smell. And then it had a taste.

I don’t think it was the fact of being organic that gave it smell and taste. I suspect it was rather more to do with it not having been grown at an artificially fast pace. In recent years, I’ve bought my cucumbers from a farmer’s stall; they’re not organic, but the growth process is not artificially accelerated. And they do smell and taste good.


In fact, they taste so good that suddenly a cucumber sandwich becomes a pleasure.

But back in the UK, I rarely buy leaves and I almost never buy lettuce. Why would you? Water would be cheaper and taste about the same.

Last weekend, however, I spotted some small, tight lettuces on the Chegworth stall at Broadway Market. Organic, as it happens. I picked one up and sniffed. A smell!

I can’t remember what I paid for it, but it was gone by the following evening and I was pining for more. Not only had it had a smell, it had crispness and real taste too.

It wasn’t insipid stuff, pointless except as padding and a desultory nod toward five a day.

I managed to find an organic one during the week; that went in no time. Then another one at Borough Market yesterday. Gone quickly. Fortunately, Chegworth had a supply this morning. I came away with two.

My impressions about leafy, green salad have been changing – hence the planting of various salad crops in the garden. Although the baby salad leaves were destroyed by a snail, the nasturtiums are well on the way, the sorrel has recovered from the extremes of the weather, the lamb’s lettuce is developing and the land cress is starting to fill its pot.

The radishes and the spring onions appear to be on a go slow, but we shall see. The former have certainly not be helped by snails.

That’s without mentioning the tomato plants, which are soaring, with stalks thickening and flowers just beginning to develop.

And in the longer term, I hope to grow my own lettuce too.

Then there are the herbs, and the realisation that a few sprigs of mint or some basil can contribute so much to a salad.

My own salad days, in the Shakespearean sense, might not have involved much in the way of green salad – but I am experiencing a whole new period of salad days now.