Week One at Loaf Cookery School

Well last week saw Loaf’s first week of doing business. We started on Thursday evening with a ‘Handmade Pasta’ workshop. Five people came along (six is our maximum class size), and by the end of the evening had successfully mastered kneading, rolling, and shaping fresh egg pasta, and made three classy sauces to accompany their handiwork. Alongside a nice Chianti, we enjoyed seasonal vegetable tortellini with a butter and blue cheese sauce, paperdelle puttanesca, and taglietelli carbonara. Oh and we made some orechiette with the scraps and a quick gnocchi demo. Phew, it was a lot of fun and the talented students picked up the techniques extremely quickly, without even using a pasta machine!

Saturday saw the first full day ‘Bread:back to basics’ course, and it was a sell out. We had a fabulous day, and produced some great breads.

bread course

Despite the weather we were dashing in and out to the earth oven to bake our white and multigrain loaves, in which we had earlier made our own pizza’s for lunch and fougasse to show off! We covered a couple of different kneading techniques and made some stunning ciabatta’s too. We covered the principles of sourdough baking, and I’ll be seeing some of the students next year when I do a Friday eve/Saturday morning ‘simply sourdough’ course – should be great fun! We finished off making brioche dough, and each student left with a bit of dough to refrigerate overnight, and bake at home. Check out this review of the day on the No Love Sincerer blog, and see our upcoming courses here.
All in all a great first week, knackering stuff though!

Local Fruit and Veg delivered to your door

Just a quick post to highlight the latest exciting addition to our local food directory – Barrow Boy. Barrow Boy are a great new service operating in the Moseley and Kings Heath area, that deliver fresh fruit and vegetables directly to your door. The friendly face of Barrow Boy is Pauline Findlay, who collects class 1 produce daily from Birmingham wholesale market, much of which is grown locally (especially the veg), and drops it off (in her Morris Minor) to you at your convenience. She even gives 15 minute time slots so you don’t have to stay in! There is a huge amount of choice, and the quality and prices are reportedly amazing. You can find out more on the Barrow Boy website or by calling 0121 777 0344. Please mention Loaf when you get in touch.

Loaf Needs YOU!

Loaf has recently got through to the second stage of an application to the National Lottery Local Food Grants scheme, for our application to fund a local food campaign in Birmingham. This is great news, but we haven’t got the cash yet, there’s a lot of work to do before that happens.

My hope is that the little funding that we’ve applied for will kickstart a social movement around local food in Birmingham. I’m convinced there is people out there who care about food, and want to do something about it. If that’s you then I’d love you to be more involved – I want to get together a campaign group who will bring drive, enthusiasm, and action to help kickstart this campaign. If you want to get involved please send me an email to tom@loafonline.co.uk. I envisage meeting up once every month or two to share ideas, plan stuff, and of course, eat and drink local refreshments! When there’s a few people involved I will set a meeting date for end of November / beginning of December. If you don’t want to come to a meeting but want to support the campaign in another way, get in touch too!

Loaf hits the headlines – part 2

We’ve been featured in the local papers again, this time in the Birmingham Mail. We were on the front page of the Mail’s Food and Drink section on Thursday 29th October, with another half-page inside that section. It’s all good stuff, and the earth oven features a bit more prominently in the print version, and there’s a bigger photo on the online version too – you can read all about it here.

Green Drinks and Real Bread

In less than a weeks time I make my speaking debut representing Loaf, where I have the pleasure of ranting about my favourite subject, food, at Birmingham’s inaugural ‘Green Drinks‘ event. I am titling my talk ‘bread and the environment: towards a greener loaf’. The event takes place at Locanta Resaurant in the Jewellery Quarter, from 6.30pm on Tuesday 3rd November. Full details at the bottom of the post.

I have a strict 10 minute time limit to introduce the topic, and my job is to spark off some lively debate. I’ll be talking about the problems with manufactured bread from the big bakeries to set the scene, and be profiling some alternative ways in which we can get our daily loaf, hopefully slightly ‘greener’. I’ll be talking about Sustain’s Real Bread Campaign too, which you can sign up to here if you haven’t already.

Green Drinks is a loose international network encouraging people who live in a certain locality, and who work or are interested in environmental issues, to meet up once a month to debate, network, drink, eat, and socialise. There are over 600 green drinks groups across the world. Find out more at www.greendrinks.org. Birmingham’s Green Drinks is being organised by Malcolm Currie of Globally Local. Here are the details:

Date: Tuesday 3rd November. Time: 6.30 for 7pm

Venue: Locanta Restaurant, 31 Ludgate Hill, St Pauls Square, Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham B3 1EH

Other stuff: You can eat in the restaurant whilst we talk, or just come for a drink. Ekran, our host, will be putting on some tasty fare, and I’ll be bringing a couple of loaves of sourdough for you to try if you never have before. It’d be helpful for Malcolm to know numbers beforehand, so if you’re thinking of coming along, drop him an email at dmc@globallylocal.net.

Roasted Uchiki Kuri Squash with Chilli, Rosemary & Garlic – recipe

I had a great time at my first 24 Carrots Farmers Market in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter on Saturday, it’s only been going since July, but it’s already a decent size and was still fairly busy when I arrived at 2pm. I quite like a market when it’s starting to calm down after the midday buzz, it gives you plenty of time to chat to the producers themselves, and often literally ‘shake the hand that feeds you’. I had a good hour at the market chatting to Kiss Me Cupcakes, Holly and the Ivy, the Big Pan Man, Brynmawr Farm and the 24 Carrots organisers too. I also had a brief chat to Hopesay Glebe organic farm, near Craven Arms in Shropshire (sadly just outside our 40 mile ‘local to Birmingham’ radius). The farmer (sorry didn’t catch his name) sold me a beautiful onion squash, otherwise known as uchiki kiri squash, with a glint in his eye. He described to me it’s soft edible skin, sweet flavour (not dissimilar to sweet potato apparently), and chestnutty earthiness, with the pride of a man that remembers the very day he planted it’s seed in the earth. On his recommendation, I decided to try my best to bring out the sweetness and nutty qualities by roasting it with some complementary flavours. After a muddle around in the store cupboard and garden, I lumped for some dried rosemary (from our sadly departed rosemary bush), last-of-the-season fresh chilli, garlic, some pine nuts and finally pumpkin seeds (to remind me from whence this beauty came). Here’s what I did (serves six as a side dish/accompaniment):

Ingredients:

Extra virgin olive oil

1 large uchiki kiri (onion) squash, skin on, seeds removed, cut into 1-inch thick half-moons (requires a sharp knife and a strong arm)

2 small red chillies – finely chopped, seeds and all

3 cloves garlic – finely chopped

Tablespoon of dried rosemary

Tablespoon of pine nuts

Tablespoon of pumpkin seeds

Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Preheat your oven to gas mark 9 (240C). Drizzle a decent layer of olive oil all over a large flat baking tray. Lay out your squash segments on this, avoiding piling them up on each other too much, and drizzle a bit more oil on top of them – don’t be stingy, this squash absorbs a fair bit of oil, and can dry out if you don’t give it enough to drink. Dash all your other ingredients liberally across the tray, and rub them in a little to the squash segments. Place the tray in the hot oven for for 45-55 minutes until tender to the knife-prick and starting to caramelise round the edges. I served it with a simple herby wholemeal cous-cous accompaniment, which worked well as a simple supper. I also used the leftovers to make a risotto that was utterly oozy and irresistable, with a beautiful saffron colour.

How d’ya like them apples?

It’s the season for orchard fruits; plums, damsons, and sloes seem to have been everywhere in the last two months, and now, apples are abounding, as are the festivals that celebrate them. In this post, guest writers Dacier Outten (of the excellent Tales from under Black Hill blog) and Mary Horesh, describe the Big Apple in Much Marcle, and later I plug the forthcoming Apple Day at Kingstanding Leisure Centre.

The Big Apple is a great little festival in the middle of an important fruit growing area. Every year the seven parishes of the Marcle Ridge country south of Ledbury in Herefordshire celebrate their heritage of apples and cider, and pears and perry.

For the avoidance of doubt both cider and perry are made by crushing and then pressing the fruit and the reason that most people don’t really know of perry is because the output of perry pears is usually consumed by the local demand. Perry was big in the fifties in the form of Babycham but real perry, whether still or fizzy, is a fuller bodied drink. Purists like us are annoyed by the appearance of products under the name of Pear Cider which is a contradiction in terms but it is presumably intended to create a new drink for people taken to be incapable of understanding the difference. Drinking either can of course make you incapable of anything especially with some hand crafted farm versions going to 8% ABV or above. If the drink is made from 100% pears then it is perry but if pear juice has been added to cider we would claim is a pear flavoured cider. Many mass produced products will fall back on imported concentrate when supplies are tight but not the genuine products you can find at this event.

A few years ago there was a lot of concern with all the orchards being grubbed up around Herefordshire but we can report that the cider business is growing and on the way to Much Marcle the sight of lots of orchards being re-established added to the glorious views of the Malvern Hills, Marcle Ridge itself and beyond to the Black Mountains. Such is the growth of cider that despite a hugely reduced acreage we are drinking record volumes of the stuff. This productivity has been achieved by growing traditional varieties as dwarf trees with high yields easier harvesting.

The big name producer in Much Marcle, the centre of the festival, is the family run firm of Weston’s Cider. Their works are well worth a visit especially if you take the tour of their modern cider mill/factory. We would claim that their Stowford Press Ciders and their traditional perry are right at the top of the mass produced roll of honour. Their traditional fizzy perry makes a sound substitute for many white wines at a fraction of the cost so a trip to their shop is both a bargain and an education all in one.

At the other end of the scale is Greggs Pit which is found at the end of a farm track and situated in a cottagers plot with its small orchard of traditional fruit trees. The production process is what we would call ‘artisan’ with the result that award winning perry and cider is produced here. A custom built barn for the vats with an open front for the crusher and apple press never fails to prompt dreams of creating such a unit on our own hillside plot. The old cottage orchard has cider trees as well as cooking apples, damsons and other fruits. Not all is used for cider and perry but we are happy to report that redwings and other birds don’t let anything go to waste. Apples and pears are also bought in from nearby farms so that single variety brews can be created. If you have never tried top quality ‘champagne method’ ciders and perrys this is the sort of place you need to track down. At Lyne Down Cider you can try your palette at more traditional brews as well as fresh apple juice straight from the press.

On the Sunday at Hellens, the local ’big house’, they get their old crushing mill going with visitors helping to push the crushing wheel round in its trough; a task usually carried out by a horse! Hellen’s Perry is made from pears collected on the Saturday and as with all of the events you can usually by a bottle or two. The house itself is well worth a visit and is one of those places that always seems to have been connected with many of the great events down the centuries but it, and its residents, seem to have survived by good judgement and luck. A return visit to this house on a quiet summer afternoon makes a great outing. During the festival the adjoining barns are devoted to the sale of fruit (Flight Organics) and the study of apples and pears (Marcher Network) and there are helpful experts who will try and identify the mystery apple tree in your garden. The variety of local food is usually well displayed at this event. Added to all this bustle was the appearance of the Leominster Morris dancers who drew a large crowd.

An essential visit during the afternoon is to the Memorial Hall where you will usually find an art exhibition as well as ‘a cup of tea and a slice of cake’ as Wurzel Gummage would describe his favourite refreshment. One year we were in front of a novice ‘Big Appler’ who asked whether they had any apple cake? Yes, came the reply, about fifteen different choices! We bought about five different types and sampled pieces from each. We have our own popular recipe which was found in a book on Yorkshire cooking where it is described as ‘Somerset Apple Cake’. Althought not a local recipe, we do not find this hard to live with as we all have a fondness for counties where apples are a specialist crop and so whether it comes from the land of the Wurzels’, Gloucestershire, Devon, Kent or Cornwall, or our own dear Herefordshire, if it’s good, we’ll have it. Especially with cream, in moderation of course, as with cider and perry.

A short distance from the Memorial Hall is St Bartholomew’s Churchwhere local produce and crafts were on sale in aid of church funds. A brief rest beneath the 1,500 year old yew tree might just restore the energies sufficiently for a visit to Awnell’s Farm.

Awnell’s Farm is run by the Countryside Restoration Trust, this conservation charity aims to protect and restore Britain’s countryside with wildlife-friendly and commercially viable agriculture. The trust is committed to promoting the importance of a living and working countryside through education, demonstration and community involvement.

It has another farm just down from us at Turnastone Court where the National Hedge Laying Championships will be held this coming 24th October, hopefully ‘with a caterer in attendance’. This usually means a beer tent at the very least. Taking farming back to sustainable practices by working with nature is a welcome contrast to some of the industrial farming that can be found in Herefordshire such as the ever present expansion of growing fruit under plastic and the efforts the Potato Barons which sometimes results in our precious pink soils being washed away in heavy downpours.

Most years the event has attracted large parties of cyclists. This is an encouraging feature although we sometimes thought that their awareness of pedestrians could have been better. Was it perry they had stowed in their drinking flasks we asked? Now in its twentieth year the number of visitors cars can be a problem but it is not yet on a scale which needs major management, and a parking space is usually available somewhere. Bringing a bike to tour the various events is a good idea and means that the car can be left at some distance. I think we will try it next year, although a good set of panniers will be needed for our liquid purchases.

For a community run event the Big Apple just shows what can be done. This lengthy article is not just the perry talking but it comes from people who know how important it is for everyone to reconnect with nature, our traditional sustainable local produce and the communities who still have the skills and vision to bring it all from farm and orchard to your table.

Dacier Outten and Mary Horesh

Finally I’d like to plug a community ‘apple day’ this coming weekend in Kingstanding. here’s the low-down:

Sunday 25^th October 12pm-8pm, Kingstanding Leisure Centre, Dulwich Road, Kingstanding, B44 0EW

From 12-5pm there’ll be:

Live apple pressing, see and taste local apples turned into delicious juice with our amazing apple presses- why not bring along your apples to turn into juice
Apple trees, produce and plants for sale
Apple expert available on the day, bring a sample of any apple you would like him to identify
Traditional medieval Mummers play (3pm)
Display of over 50 varieties of apples
Fun apple games including Apple bobbing, Apple peel competition and Apple and Spoon race
Launch of ‘The Urban Orchard Competition’- enter for a chance to have a fruit tree dedicated to a special person of your choic

The event is brought to you by ‘PREPARE’ a project to harvest and distribute unwanted fruit in the Erdington area run by Artist in Residence Eleanor Hoad supported by Birmingham City Councils Community Arts Team.

For more information and Ceilidh tickets contact Kingstanding Leisure Centre on 0121 464 7890 or Eleanor Hoad on 07974 934 917 or eleanorhoad@hotmail.com

See the flyer for the event below:

Loaf hits the headlines

Loaf gained it’s first bit of press attention in today’s Birmingham Post. Three weeks ago, I had an enjoyable morning outside next to the roaring earth oven with Post journalist Richard McComb, who scribbled down almost every word I uttered, even the details of my wedding. The article could have gone anywhere, but I’m so glad Richard totally ‘got it’, and penned a fabulous piece of writing extolling the values at the heart of Loaf Social Enterprise much more eloquently than I ever could. Some of my favourite quotes are below (read the online version here):

“Tom is based here [Birmingham] for a very good reason: this is where the work needs to be done. There’s no point living in a gastro town, like Ludlow, as pleasant as that might be. He’d be preaching to the converted. This is where Tom’s revolution will have the most impact – his food revolution, that is.”

“He practises what he preaches, be it preserving or bottling, or baking 100 per cent bona fide crap-free bread.”

“He is a great advocate for real food, which he says is all about authenticity, traditions, cooking from scratch, ethical vitality and connecting with people, be they the people who you sit down and share food with or the “heroes that bring it to our plates”. Tom, and I suspect many people like him, myself included, see no reason why we should surrender our food heritage to the multi-nationals, the global buyers and the supermarket vultures.”

Michael Pollan’s Food Rules

Author of the excellent Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense Of Food Michael Pollan, recently asked for the public’s top ‘food rules’. In the NY Time’s latest ‘Food Issue’, he picks his top twenty. Here’s six of my favourites from those:

I try and follow as much as possible, what I’ve laid down in the Real Food Manifesto, not that it always works, or is always possible. My favourite is ‘shake the hand that feeds you’, which I stole from Pollan in the first place – although living in a big city, this is very difficult, something Loaf is hoping to make easier…!

What are your favourites from these or Pollan’s top twenty? What are your own food rules? leave a comment below…

Loaf Cookery School – poll results and plans!

Thanks to everyone who voted in our recent ‘what cookery skills you’d like to learn’ poll. The full results are at the bottom of this post, and they’ve been really helpful for me in planning what courses to start delivering. Coming out top is home brewing (you boozy lot!), near behind is breadmaking, dairy skills, and butchery, closely followed by preserving, british classics, vegetarian cooking, and wildfood. The results seem to have confirmed my hunch that there is a desire to learn forgotten traditional food skills – is this a sign of the recession, or is it just because they’re damn good fun?!

Breadmaking dates are already in the diary, so that’s a relief! There may also be a couple of evening workshops before Christmas too – I’m thinking maybe festive breads, cupcake masterclass, vegetarian Christmas, fresh pasta making – any comments welcome below. I’m also on the hunt for talented co-tutors in brewing, dairy, butchery, and preserving, so we can put together a nice programme for you in 2010. I have a few ideas for tutors, but if you do too, please leave a comment below. The British and vegetarian cooking will certainly feature, probably as evening workshops to start with, and wildfood and cooking will feature too, but probably not until summer 2010.

I’m also thinking about offering vouchers soon, in time for Christmas – what do you think? Make a nice prezzie?

I’ve also been wondering whether ‘Cookery School at Home’ might be an interesting thing to do. You invite a bunch of friends round to your kitchen, we lead an evening of cooking/bread/pasta etc. What do you think? Something you’d go for, or would you rather come to us? Any ideas/comments on the above or generally on the cookery school, are extremely welcome!

Better get ordering the matching aprons…

[poll id=”5″]

Simpsons vs Purity – matching fine food and real ale

Last time I had a pint of Purity Brewing Co’s Mad Goose, I think I was standing in The Wellington surrounded by the smell of sweat and salt and vinegar crisps. That’s probably a fairly typical accompaniment to real ale, but following a chance meeting between Andreas Antona (Simpson’s chef-proprietor) and Paul Halsey (MD of Purity) at the Taste of Birmingham festival, that might all be about to change…

Andreas and Paul decided to put together an evening to celebrate both artisanally made food and beer, and last week at Simpson’s there was a fantastic five-course menu on offer with a different beer to accompany each dish, including Purity’s real ales Pure UBU, Pure Gold and Mad Goose, and its imported beers Veltins Pilsner and Maisels Weisse. Although Loaf wasn’t there on this occasion (we found out too late!), reportedly the evening was a real success, with around 20 guests tucking into the delicious food and beer.

Purity also had Paul Corbett, the Managing Director of its hops merchant Charles Faram, on hand to talk to the guests about how the hops in its beers impacts upon the finished flavour. All of Purity’s hops are specially selected to produce unique tasting beers, making them a great choice to match to different types of food.

Paul Halsey was there to help host the evening and he said: “Andreas did a brilliant job of designing a menu that perfectly complemented our ales and imported beers. It’s great that people are starting to realise that real ale can be enjoyed with fine food just as well as, if not better than wine.”

Purity kindly provided Loaf with the menu from the evening – let this whet your appetite:

Course One – Terrine of ham hock, chicken & foie gras, sweet corn puree, truffle vinaigrette
(Beer Veltins Pilsner)

Course two – Escalope of salmon on a bed of sauerkraut, light mustard sauce
(Beer – Pure Gold)

Course three – Slow-cooked belly of suckling pig, ravioli of braised trotter, fennel compote, spiced baby pears, honey & cracked pepper sauce
(Beer – Mad Goose)

Course four – Caramelised banana, caramel parfait, peanut butter ice-cream
(Beer – Maisels Weisse)

Course five – Welsh rarebit
(Beer – Pure UBU)

Although Simpsons were unable to provide a specific example of supporting local farms through their delicious looking menu, they are stalwarts of the local food scene in Birmingham, buying from great Midlands butcher Aubrey Allen, and Staffordshire’s Manor Fruit Farm among other local producers.

A quick google search reveals there’s a lot of resources out there for would-be ‘ale sommeliers’. Try this CAMRA guide for a start, or if you can get hold of Purity’s excellent Ales (check stockists here, or buy from their shop), here’s what they recommend:

Pure Gold is a refreshing golden ale with a dry and bitter finish that is easy to drink. It would suit light savoury and spicy dishes, such as Indian, Thai and fish dishes, especially salmon.

Pure UBU is a distinctive premium amber coloured beer that is balanced and full of flavour making it a pleasure to drink. It would go well with any red meat in the form of casseroles, stews, steak and kidney pudding and also with most strong-tasting cheeses.

Mad Goose is a classic pale ale that is zesty and full-bodied. This light copper coloured ale would go with pork and lamb dishes. (what, not salt and vinegar crisps then?!)

These two great local businesses obviously hit it off, as they are hatching plans for a second date on the 12th November, where they’ll be matching game and beer. Stay glued to the site as full details will be published here when they are released.

Were you there? Tell us what you thought by leaving a comment below.

Nettle and Cobnut Pesto – recipe

This is a great wildfood recipe for this time of year, pick the freshest looking top four leaves from the stingers, gloves on, and make sure you pick above dog-weeing height if you’re picking in the city like we were (canal towpath). If you can find a hazel tree (there’s one on Lifford Lane in Cotteridge) then you can get the cobnuts for free too, but if not check out Augernik Fruit Farm at either Kings Norton or Moseley Farmers Market, who are selling great ones at the moment. This recipe makes a decent tubful.

Ingredients

100g (shell on) cobnuts

150g stinging nettle tops (about half a carrier bag)

1-2 cloves garlic

50g grated parmesan

80ml extra virgin olive oil (change amount to get desired texture)

salt and pepper

Method

Dunk your nettles in a deep sink/bowl of cold water and stir round with a wooden spoon to give them a rough wash. Scoop out, and add them straight to a pan of boiling water for 60 seconds to blanch them. Scoop them out and add to fresh iced water to stop them cooking and retain their vibrant colour. After a minute, scoop them out with your hands (they’ll have lost their sting by now) and ring out all the moisture you can. Chop roughly, and put in a blender/food processer. De-shell the cobnuts with a nutcracker, chop roughly and add these to the blender. Chop the garlic roughly and add this too, along with the parmesan. Add a tiny drizzle of olive oil, and whizz on max for 30 seconds. Then whizz more gently adding the remaining oil slowly, until you reach the desired consistency. Taste and season. Store in an airtight container, with a layer of pure oil over the top, for up to 4 days in the fridge.

PREPARE for a bumper harvest

After reading Hungry City, with it’s (rightly) sombre view of our current food system, I was in need of a bit of a pick-up; something to cheer the heart, warm the soul, and offer a little hope of a better way. Fortunately the next day I heard about PREPARE, a community fruit harvesting scheme to use surplus fruit from gardens and common land. When I heard it was in Birmingham, I nearly fell off my seat on the number 11 bus!

prepare apple PREPARE is the brain child of Eleanor Hode, artist in residence for the ward of Erdington. Eleanor says the aim of the project “is to harvest, process and distribute unused fruit growing in peoples gardens and on public land and to get it eaten! Either as fresh fruit or processed into juice, jams and pickles that are given away to local people”

Eleanor, who’s based at Kingstanding Leisure Centre, has got some funding from Birmingham City Council for the project and has got together most of the necessary equipment for harvesting (A bike and trailer, picking stick, 2 picking bags, sheet of plastic, storage boxes etc), and has had a positive response from local residents so far. However she can’t do it alone, so is on the look out for some keen fruit spotters, pickers, and processors, especially from the Erdington area. Of course there will be plenty of fruity perks for volunteers!

Later in the year Eleanor is planning to plant some fruit trees on 2 sites in the area and to throw an event for Apple Day on Sunday 25th October at Kingstanding Leisure Centre. There’ll hopefully be lots of activities, music, and some apple juicing on a press she’s planning to make. Loaf is planning to show our support, and will certainly let you know all about it on here. Eleanor is also on the look out for a top apple expert to identify varieties and share their knowledge on Apple Day, so if you fit the bill, or know anyone who does, get in touch with Eleanor (see below), or leave a comment on the blog and we’ll pass it on.

If you’re interested in similar initiatives it’s also worth checking out the ‘Abundance’ project in Sheffield that’s been doing similar things for a couple of years.

If you’d like to get involved with the project, you can email eleanorhoad@hotmail.com or get in touch with her on 07974 934 917. Eleanor also has her own page on the artsresidencies.org, and there’s a flyer below (click to enlarge):

Hungry City by Carolyn Steel – Review

hc_sidetop

How on earth do we get 24 million meals into and out of a city like London every single day? That, essentially, is the question that Hungry City tries to answer. It’s a book about cities and how we feed them, in which Steel casts an Architects analytical eye over modern and historical food systems. She finds a modern system that hasn’t learnt from the mistakes of the past, is essentially sick, and in need of major by-pass surgery.

Working systematically through the histories of how we farm the land, get food to cities, how it is sold, prepared, eaten, and disposed of, Steel paints a gloomy picture with few green shoots of hope; from the bloody furtherance of the Empire to find grain for Rome, to modern ‘eco’ developments with Tesco the only choice for grocery shopping (as they funded it anyway).

One glimmer of hope comes about halfway through when Steel describes the role of the modern cook:

“Cooking is about much more than chopping up a few vegetables and throwing them in a pan, or putting a readymade pizza in the microwave. Because cooks control not only what goes out of a kitchen, but what comes into it, they are a vital link in the food chain – the guardians of our gastronomic know-how. Only cooks know how to source raw food, tell its quality, make it taste delicious, manage and store it, make use of leftovers. Few skills have a greater collective impact on our quality of life. People who don’t cook don’t use local food shops, invite their friends around for dinner, know where their food comes from, realise what they’re putting into their bodies, understand the impact of their diet on the planet – or educate their children in any of the above.”

As cooks we have an enormous amount of power, perhaps that’s why the food industry has been trying to take the cooking out of cooking for the last 50 years! We could revolutionise the UK’s food system in a shot if enough of us took up our wooden spoons. After all, demand drives supply.

Despite painting a depressing picture, Steel finishes on a flourish, with some humbly presented ‘small answers’. Sitopia, she describes, is utopia grounded in reality, where cities are build with food at the centre – eligible ground is used to grow food, markets and local food shops thrive, food is celebrated, local producers are linked up with the city through a lattice-like food network, food from further afield is ethically sourced, new developments are built around food networks, schools actually teach kids about food, and new houses are built with large kitchens at the centre of the home.

Is Sitopia possible? Who knows, Steel acknowledges that in it’s purest form it is a Utopian vision, but any little move in that direction is a positive move. It’s certainly hard to see in well-established cities like Birmingham where our food systems are already set in a (cacophonous) rhythm . But there’s always chinks of light, and some of the great things we’re discovering, and planning on doing ourselves, are hopefully bringing us baby-steps closer to a Sitopian Birmingham. You can buy the book here, it’s a must read for anyone who cares what’s on their plate.

Jewellery Quarter Farmers Market – 19th September, 9-3

If you’re around in Birmingham this weekend, be sure to take a detour and spend some of your hard earned cash with the great local producers at the Jewellery Quarter Farmers Market – 24 Carrots. It’s only the second market since starting out and the site is already up to capacity. It coincides with British Food Fortnight, occurring during the Harvest Festival. They say on their website:

24Carrots is adopting British Food Fortnight as it’s theme for the second market! There will be a guest appearance by local resident OJ (Kerrang & TV) from 10am and live acoustic sets from 12-3pm from a number great local artists!

Definitely pay a visit to Loaf favourites Beez Neez Honey (lime flower is very good), Kiss Me Cupcakes, and The Tunnel Brewery. And whilst you’re there, pop by the community stall and say hi from Loaf, as sadly we can’t make it until October 17th. But there is a free cupcake awaiting us, so it’ll be worth the wait!