Presented by Rebecca Hosking it goes through all the key points in a clear and concise way, opening with the lines,

“An approaching energy crisis will likely force a revolution in farming that will change the British countryside forever. It will effect what we eat, where it comes from and even the alarming question of whether there will be enough food to keep us fed.”

From an interview with a geologist comes the conclusion that what matters is not the exact timing of the peak, but that whether it is in 1, 5 or 10 years there will be a peak in the production of oil after which oil will become more difficult to extract, more expensive and that this will have huge implications for every aspect of our lives.

She uses a simple example of a ham sandwich. The oil needed to power the tractors to plough the wheat fields, plant the seeds and harvest the grain and the petrol based fertilisers that helps it grow. Then on to the meat, with a single pig consuming nearly half a ton of grain it is even more energy hungry. Even the small pieces of salad are currently highly dependent on oil, whether because they are shipped from abroad or grown here in heated green houses before being transported around the country in lorries. She sums it all up perfectly with a great quote that says exactly what it is hard for people to see, “this sandwich, like so much of the food we eat today, is absolutely dripping in oil”

But what’s great about the film is that it’s not all doom and gloom. There are lots of people who have recognised this problem and are working in inspirational ways that offer an alternative for the future.

She visits the Dixons in Snowdonia, who run a small holding based on permaculture principles, and an experimental forest garden in Devon ran by Martin Crawford that just looks incredible.

There’s also Fordhall Farm an organic beef, pork and sheep farm that relies on the quality of it’s soil and grass rather than chemicals to feed the animals. This includes one of the saddest parts of the film. A clip of a film from the 80s of a tractor plouging a field followed by flocks of birds draw to the unearthed worms and wildlife is compared to a shot of a tractor on the same land now – nothing ,no birds, no worms, the soil is dead, surviving to grow now only with the aid of chemical fertilisers. Makes you realise what we’ve done.

All in all it’s a brilliant film. It’s powerful introduction for people who might not know about the issues of peak oil and food security, but also an inspirational piece for anyone already aware of the issues that shows what can be done. Highly recommended. Watch it here.

For more on peak oil watch the film ‘The End of Suburbia’ and for more information on the transition from an oil based society see Transition Culture.

A trip in a small boat to the floating markets of Cai Rang on the Mekong Delta was to provide the setting for the next of our adventures in fruit (WOOP! Just realised what I have just written – how cool this trip is!!) .

These markets are incredible. The river was buzzing with life. Hundreds of boats gather piled high with produce from pumpkins and cucumbers to star apples and jackfruit. Each boat has a pole with a sample of the boat’s wares tied up high so it can be seen from afar. We spent some time drifting wide eyed through the boats.

We hired a guide to come with us so we could ask any questions as we were bobbing along. He told us a lot of the people lived on the boats. As we looked we noticed some were set up barge stylee with pot plants and deck chairs.

I’m sure it’s not all quite the jolly boating holiday though. These people have little money and live very simple lives. To me on a visit this traditional way of life that has gone on for hundreds of years seems like a beautiful treasure to cling on to. But it is impossible to know how the people themselves think and feel about it. What might their aspirations be? How happy are they? It would be incredible to be able to spend some real time with the people talking about their lives. But for now we had to make do with floating along with our romantic ideas and Nikon camera.

We stopped off along the way to visit a rice noodle “factory”. This small family run establishment was housed in a coconut leaf roofed barn in a little village by the river. 4 people were working at the various stages of production. Rice powder was mixed with flour and water into a batter that was spread on large heated disks like a crepe. This was peeled of laid out on racks and took outside to dry in the sun. Once dry something like an over sized pasta maker was used to cut the disks into thin strips.

In an amazing use of resources the disk cooking the rice batter was heated by a fire of burning rice husks. The ash from the fire was kept and put back into the land to be used as a fertiliser to grow food. Any “waste” from this process was fed to the pigs who lived in the barn next door.

Further down the river we stopped at an orchard which grew a jumbled mix of fruit trees. Mango, jackfruit, star apple, rose apple, pineapple, coconuts, water coconuts, papaya, bananas, lemons, oranges, limes, lotus flowers all grew together in an area we walked round of about an acre.

As you can imagine the fruit we tasted from the trees was some of the freshest, most amazingly sweet and ripe fruit I’d ever experienced. The jackfruit was a new one on us. I think we’d eaten it before (maybe cooked?) but it was completely different to the fresh version. This huge fruit grows in abundance on trees through out the area. It can sprout from any part of the tree and a tree laden with hundreds of these gigantic monsters (which can weigh up to 36kg!) is quite a sight!

The flesh inside is unlike anything else I have tasted. Yellow fleshy segments are separated from pips and a fibrous inside. They have a mild taste and an almost chewy texture. The flavour? Well I suppose it is just like a jackfruit. Hard to describe. The cooked jackfruit tasted like chicken, this fresh fruit tasted like erm… maybe like a drier version of a mango or pineapple.

Lets hope the roads here don’t “improve” too quickly. Once the way to transport things quickly up and down the whole country is paved the supermarket chains will swoop and all this will be gone. There is a Co-op Mart down the road from where we stayed, we went in for a look around. They were selling cereals and packaged fruit, like they do in Tesco. People were going mad for it.

We had a 2nd class ‘Coupe’ compartment, meaning we had a small room with 4 beds in it, basically a set of bunk beds at either side of a small room. During the day the bottom bed is used as a seat, there is a small table and storage space below the bed. Apart from that there is nothing else in the room. The compartment measures around 6 1/2″ x 5 1/2″. We had no idea who we would be sharing this with.

There is a restaurant car to escape to if you fancy a break every now and then. Also the train stops every few hours for 20 minutes or so. During this time you can hop off and buy various foodstuffs from people on the platform.

It’s not a great idea to flash laptops and other expensive items around on the train, so this post will be a little different from the rest. I kept a diary for the time I was on the train, and this account of our journey is typed straight from there. I am not sure, but by the end I think I may have started to suffer from cabin fever.

12th January 2009

“Day One”

We are sharing our cabin with a quiet Russian girl and a very chatty Russian man who boarded the train with what looked like the Russian equivalent of Red Bull in his hand. He knew a few words of English so we had a bit of a chat with him, showing him through our little book of photographs of family and friends. We gave him a beer. He told us he was a Security Guard working in Moscow. He works there for 20 days and returns home for 10 days each month. Obviously a regular on the train. When the beers ran out he left us, heading in the direction of the bar, I expect he will come back very drunk later.

A very relaxed evening playing scrabble, backgammon and reading, currently Adulous Huxley “Doors of Perception”.

13th January 2009

“Day Two”

As expected the man came back after 2 or 3 hours last night very, very drunk. He plonked himself on the seat next to the girl, stripped his top half off, revealing a big wobbly belly and pair of man boobs and began gibbering. I’m not sure what’s worse. A drunk you can understand, or one who literally is speaking in a foreign language. At least this gave us some excuse not to join in with whatever ridiculous conversation he was trying to have with us.

He kept asking to shake hands then trying to kiss my hand. He kept touching the girls leg. She was amazing with him. I have no idea what words were being passed between them but she appeared to be being incredibly patient. She made him a cup of tea – which he promptly scolded himself on and spat out. She made his bed and told him to get in it. He did, but seconds later tumbled back down. A few stern words from train guard seemed to sort him out and he eventually settled and went to sleep.

The man left the train at about 1am. I think we were all quite happy he wasn’t going to be with us all the way!

Andy went out onto the train platform to buy us some breakfast this morning. He came back with a bag of small pieces of dry sweet bread. The girl, who’s name we have discovered is Natalia gave us a very strange look and offered us instead a boiled egg each and some beetroot salad. We had this on some bread we had brought with us.

A very tasty breakfast it was. Not sure if this is normal breakfast material, it seemed to be what she had brought for herself and we both enjoyed it, so I’m guessing it was. Very interesting to see what different people have for breakfast. It’s also amazing how much you can communicate between people when you have no shared language.

From the window we keep seeing huge areas of Dachas. These are like holiday homes for people living in the cities. They look a bit like a very fancy allotment. Lots of plots of land separated by wooden fences, each with a small house, space for growing fruit, vegetables or just relaxing. They are used as a base for forest walks and collecting wild mushrooms. How much would I love something like this at home?

Time on the train is odd. All timetables run to Moscow time, so all clocks show different time to what the ‘real’ time is off the train, or according to the light. We’re also moving across several time zones, about 1 or 2 hours a day. This is quite unsettling. A kind of slow motion jetlag. We will have gone forward in time 5 hours by the end.

14th January

“Day Two PM”

We went to the restaurant car last night for dinner. The menu was entirely in Russian. After some time scouring through it comparing each word to ones in our utterly useless phrasebook we eventually matched one up “Meat”. Eventually we managed to piece together a sentence meaning something like ” Do you have anything suitable for vegetarians” and took it over to the waitress. She read it out to the person who seemed to be running the restaurant, who smiled and said “NYET!”.

We finished our beers and went back to our compartment for a tasty bowl of instant noodles. Joy. John in St Petersburg had told us that the Russians call these things “Bomzh-paket”, which translates to “Tramps Packets”. Exactly.

The journey to the restaurant car is something of an adventure. Stepping into the gap between each train is a little like stepping out into Siberia for a few seconds. The door handles are coated in ice. The floor has a couple of centimeters of snow. It is really loud, dark and moving very fast. Scary.

Natalia left the train in the evening and a few minutes later the train guard appeared at our door, “scoobely joov” she said, and passed us a bag. A little confused we used our only Russian, “Spaceba” (“thank you”) and took the bag from her.

I can only assume it was from Natalia. She had made a few phone calls before she left and this pack contained home made things packaged very precisely in exactly the way all the food she had brought herself was – in small plastic bags. How kind. She must have been horrified at our diet of packed soup and tramps packs. The parcel contained bananas, bread, some homemade oat cookies and something that looks like a kind of cheese plait. Before leaving the train she had already given us more boiled eggs and some rectangular pieces of squishy white stuff, which between us we managed to decipher were made of sugar and egg white.

I don’t think we could have had two more opposite room mates than the ones we have had so far. The man, very chatty, but after beers very rude. He rambled on the whole time, had little concern for the feelings of the people in his carriage and was very noisy and falling around before going to bed. And this girl, sat quietly for most of the journey, signed a cross each time we passed a church, was very thoughtful and generous and prayed for at least half an hour before going to bed.

This cheese plait is gorgeous! The taste, a mix of smoke plastic, string and salt works very well!

In the evening our new guest arrived. This is very strange. It’s like having people to come and visit you, but you have no idea who, or when they will arrive. Our new guest is a Russian man in a suit who speaks quite a bit of English. It turned out his name is also Andrew and he introduced us to a Russian superstition. If you find yourself sitting between two people of the same name you can make a wish, and it will come true. I made my wish and hope it comes true. I like this idea. I think we will keep it.

We had a few beers, chatted abut our trip and he mentioned that some people in Russia follow a different calendar, so today was actually New Years Day.

“Snovem Godom!”

Time for a celebration and a few beers!

14th January 2009

DAY 3

Russian Andrew got off at 1am and no more guests arrive at the next station. We have the compartment to ourselves for most of the day.

Really getting into life on the train. Drinking tea with hot water from the Samovar, reading (Now Gogol, “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Nikiforovich”) and staring out of the window. It’s a beautiful day today. Clear blue skies, miles of leafless birch trees.

From the guide book, “From the train it appears as if there is a continuous forest in the distance. However, if you walk towards it you will never get there as what you are seeing are clumps of birch and aspen trees spaced several kilometers or more apart. The lack of landmarks in this area has claimed hundreds of lives.”

The cups on the train are great. Russian Andrew had told us that in the early days of the train they would be filled to the top to test the smoothness of the track. If one drop was spilt the person responsible for that part of the track would be in big trouble.

I’m beginning to think we don’t have enough time on the train.

Our new guests have arrived. 2 men in uniform.

They don’t say a word to us or each other. The younger one listens to terrible Russian pop music on his headphones. It is so loud! Must be deafening for him.

15th January 2009

Day 4

The boring railway men got off at 1am. We had the carriage to ourselves for the rest of the night. Nice.

Bizarre thoughts are starting to enter my head. I begin to wonder if I have gone insane. Maybe none of this is really real? I could be locked in a hospital room somewhere and this is all in my imagination. Is this why I haven’t left the train?

Apart from occasional odd thought flicking through my mind life on the train great. There is so much to do in our 5″x6″ room I don’t think I could ever be bored. There is no pressure to go anywhere. No pressure to do anything. Just relax and be. How long could I stay here?

3900km

Outside it’s turning gloomy. I can see snow drifting across the fields and whipping up in miniature whirlwinds at the side of the train.

Andrew has gone into full blown train spotter mode. He is taking photographs of of every train we pass and counting the carriages. I will buy him an anorak when we get back.

The radio on the train is controlled by the attendant. The music is played through all the corridor and we have a control in our room for the volume. Today lunchtime seems to be ABBA hour. I turn it up a little. We will start drinking VODKA soon.

There are two attendants in each carriage. Their jobs are: checking tickets, putting coal on the fire for the heating and samovar and hoovering the little carpet in each of the compartments once a day. Ours seem very friendly.

I AM NOT MOVING BUT MY BODY IS

I haven’t won a single bloody game for around 24 hours now. Andy has even beaten me at scrabble. I’m going to throw the cards off the train.

German Whist – lost – 20-1
Shithead – lost – 2-1

Our new guests have arrived. Boo. We were going to have a party.

A Russian couple. The posh looking lady changes her clothes for a fetching blue and white shell suit. Her husband has gold teeth.

Being in the room with these other people is strange. Both couples are independently having conversations with no idea what the other is saying. They may as well not even be in the room.

I feel like they are just in my brain. Someone is talking in my ear. Are they really there? They could be completely imagined. No interaction has taken place between them and anyone else. Not even the guard. They haven’t spoken to anyone..

The lady hasn’t been to hoover our carpet today. How disappointing.

Only 12 hours until we get off the train. I don’t think I am ready to leave.

I have invented a new variation of scrabble. 10 extra points for every word on a theme. Eg todays theme is animals. I have:

Beef
Hog
Beavers
Lion
Bee

I will never play this game again. Not only has Andrew worked out how to play properly, but he has also memorised ALL of the 2 and 3 letter words. This is very bad. Dza = a small boat?!! I don’t stand a chance. I don’t have the inclination to do the same so I can compete. So all is over. I suppose these differences are what make us interesting. But for now GRRR.

I have a theory that words chosen are related to what is on your mind. Psychology and awareness studies show you are more likely to answer designed questions with certain words if primed earlier. The main ingredient of KVAS is Rye.

I just lifted my pen to play a move in scrabble. The letters seem to slide around on their platform.

This game of scrabble is over. Andrew claims he has won, but he has clearly forgotten the animal rule. I gain +60 points.

The lady in our compartment is asleep.

We have found a secret compartment. Next to the toilets, no one is in the room. We have left the lady to sleep.

We have taken 57 photos.

What I started with was an idea for quite a simple spread sheet. I wanted to create a table which would work out how much a certain recipe would cost by calculating how much a specific amount of each ingredient would cost according to the amount used and price per kg and then add them all up to give the price of the recipe.

So off I went to the shops with pen and paper in hand, happy that my life style now allows me to indulge in these odd ideas as and when then enter my head rather than just thinking “Hey wouldn’t this be great!” only to forget a few minutes later as I get distracted by some important task… such as picking the dirt off the bottom of my mouse… erm.

I tend to buy my shopping from a variety of different places but they are all quite spread out so I decided that the easiest thing to do might be to just head to the local supermarket and write down the prices from there. After all, all I was really looking for at that time was a vague idea of how much things were, so I could give a guide to recipe costs. But it was here that things began to get complicated. I was overwhelmed with a range of different options, each with wildly differing price tags.

I realised things wouldn’t be quite as simple as I imagined. The prices I chose could have a huge difference to the resulting cost of the meals that the table would work out. Should I go for the things I would buy or the things I thought other people would buy? Or maybe make an average price of the options available? I also noticed that the prices for somethings were miles away from what I would normally pay elsewhere. This would not be good. I wanted the spreadsheet I produced to be useful to people. It should be able to be used as a aid to meal planning, helping you plan meals according to a certain budget, and maybe also compare the cost of making things yourself as compared to those pesky little pots of slop labeled ready meals which can often seem like the cheap option. If it was to be used in this way it would need to reflect the users shopping habits and if I picked items at random I might as well just completely make them up for all the use they’d be.

What I’ve ended up producing, while obviously still limited, should hopefully be a much better guide. I decided to survey 4 different things which are independent shops and supermarket for both organic and non-organic produce. I’ve also included in the sheet a blank column for your own shop with all the formula in place behind the scenes so all you’d need to do is insert the price you would pay in your own shop. The results are fascinating. There are links below to the spread sheet, but first here’s a few observations I made as my mission developed.

The first thing I realised as I walked through the doors of the supermarket at the end of our road was the enormity of the task I had set myself. “What am I doing?!” I thought, ” This shop must sell over 10,000 different items! I’ll need more paper!  My pen will run out! Arrrgh!” But as I wandered around I calmed down as my first observation sunk in. Most of the contents of the shop were complete crap! Aisles and aisles full of rubbish, most of which I wouldn’t feed to my dog (including the dog food).

I couldn’t believe it. I have obviously been to a supermarket before, several times, but never really paying as much attention as I did on this trip. Even if I did do all my shopping at this supermarket I would say that out of the 30 or more aisles that are there I would only ever need to use about four.

So what is the rest of the shop full of? Processed food mostly. Ready meals, hundreds of them. Jars of sauce: pasta sauce, curry sauce, cheese sauce and ready made gravy(!) Prepared vegetables, chopped up pieces of cauliflower, broccoli and ready made mashed potato (!!!).  Crisps, biscuits and a thousand other snacks. Cans of everything: soup, chili, curry, macaroni. Frozen pizzas, frozen chips, frozen pies and hundreds of bags of mashed up reformed chicken. What would happen if Jamie got his way everyone started cooking their own food? They’d be out of business in a week. And he certainly wouldn’t be getting anymore celebrity endorsement work from them. As I looked around my first blinding truth was uncovered. The last thing this place wants you to do is cook. Is this, I wondered, where the health problems of our county’s diet stem from? The place most us buy our food from does not want us to eat healthily.

If this seems a little cynical take a closer look at what they sell. The herbs and spices for a start are ridiculously overpriced. I’ve written before about the way the leading brand of herb and spices package their wares in jars which are all but impossible to get the spices out of and crazily expensive. These jars and the supermarkets similarly badly designed jars are really the only options available. There are a limited range of bigger “re-fill” packs, which do offer better value, but still the prices are a strangely inflated for what is essentially a very cheap basic product. Check out the price of the chives as compared to buying elsewhere! It is NOT a tying error. If you wanted to buy 100g of dried chives from the supermarket it would cost you £139, from Unicorn, an independent organic shop, it would be £3. Apart from the price, just the fact that they are only really sold in these small containers points to the fact that they are not expecting (wanting?) people to want to use the contents very often.

The amount of aisle space devoted to wholefoods is another more obvious pointer. The list of ingredients on the spreadsheet I have produced, while obviously tailored to my own diet, only contains around 150 items. I can’t believe that even if you got ten people who prepare all their own food and have a massively varied diets that you would need to even triple this amount, yet the number of products on offer is enormous. I wouldn’t like to guess how many are in that particular store, but in the UK in general the amount of different products carried by a single supermarket has risen from 15,000 in 1980 to around 50,000 today.

But choice is a good thing right? In principle yes. However I’m beginning to think that if anyone ever brings up this “choice” argument it should be your first indication that that person is about to say something you need to be suspicious of. The breakfast aisle is one of my favorite/most scary places in the supermarket. It is full of choice. Huge rows of different coloured boxes containing corn, rice and wheat and the like smashed into various shapes and sold at a couple of quid a pop. If you search hard enough somewhere on the bottom shelf tucked away in the corner you might be able to find a bag of porridge oats, the price? 69p/kg. I have plans to go into the prices of cereals in more details in another post but, just to give you a taste of things to come, another much easier to find choice would be a multi-pack of “Oat So Simple”. You know the kind of “just add milk” packs with little pieces of shriveled up fruit, added sugar, salt, stabilisers and other bits and bobs. These come in at £1.99, or… £6.70/kg! No wonder they don’t want you to find the porridge. They can make so much more from this processed food it is not really in their interests to promote the healthier, cheaper option.Would you really chose this if you thought about it? Or might you buy your 69p bag a couple of bananas and few apples and have ten times the amount for the same price and not have to eat all the other rubbish they throw in there?

The supermarkets pricing of  organic goods is a disgrace, on most things it was around twice their non-organic equivalent. I haven’t got a problem with paying more for food if I know for example that that means the farmer is getting a better price, or that it is organic. It’s well known that supermarkets drive down the prices they pay to producers with threats of canceled orders if they can’t stretch to prices that barely cover the prices of production. Unfortunately I’m sure this same practice goes on with their organic suppliers, and even if it doesn’t and the resulting cost price is slightly more than for non-organic veg do they really need to add these crazy mark ups? I just can’t believe it cost them an extra £2 per kilo for broccoli for example. If this price difference really is because their organic veg cost them that much more to buy then how can it be that a small independent organic shop can be selling organic vegetables at a fraction of the price they are here? It just doesn’t seem to add up.

In the particular store I was looking at, which in size I would say was average to large in supermarket scale, the range of vegetables was pretty limited too. They had basic things, potatoes, carrots, onions, but if you wanted anything as fancy as a nice seasonal swede or celeriac and you wanted it to be organic, you were stuck. They don’t even sell beetroot! November, no beetroot. What is going on there? I began to realise how much more in touch with the seasons since I’ve been avoiding these awful places.

Also anything slightly out of “normal” range was expensive in supermarkets. Sure the carrots and potatoes are cheap, they even do special bags of value “Class II” value vegetables (not actually any worse quality, just maybe a bit of a perceived odd size) which really are cheap. But for anything as outrageous as an aubergine expect to pay well over the odds in your supermarket. Things like this often had their prices disguised. Aubergines in the supermarket were 99p each (no organic option available). In the non-organic independent they were £1.96/kg, organic independent £2.09/kg. So which is cheaper? An average sized aubergine weighs around 250g, so the supermarket was charging the equivalent of £3.96/kg! Nearly twice as much as anywhere else.

One of the main things that wound me up about the organic vegetables was that they were all heavily packaged. Everything was either in one of those horrid plastic trays, wrapped in cellophane or bagged. Apart from being a bit of a waste and an unnecessary use of polluting oil based plastics, this means that you can’t pick your own either. What if you just wanted one apple? What if you wanted your potatoes a certain size for a particular thing, or not that one with the big black bit on it that’s hiding at the bottom of your bag? Grrr. Is this really what people who are buying organic for environmental reasons want? It seems to ignore the core ecological ideals and instead plays to some fancy notion of buying organic which would wash only with someone who isn’t really thinking things through, allowing the supermarket to tick a few boxes and make posters with grass on them.

I can only think they must need this packaging for their till systems. They couldn’t possibly ask you whether the veg you’d chosen was organic or non-organic and trust you to tell the truth… as they do in Beanies in Sheffield where they similarly have a range of both organic and non-organic veg, none of which is in packages. Big systems can’t handle this kind of small scale human interaction. Or maybe they think we’ll all run in and mix all the organic and non-organic veg up just for fun.

I think that’s enough of a rant for now. There were definitely a few things I picked up on my research I want to write more about in the future, but I’m at risk of making you all switch off soon if I don’t give you a break, so I’ll stop and leave you with a quick round up of price comparison findings.

In general the trend seems to be like this. Independent shops are cheaper than their supermarket equivalent, so independent non-organic is cheaper than supermarket non-organic. This is most obvious in the organic ranges where supermarkets do very badly, I would even go so far as to say that only people who really didn’t care how much they spent could afford to buy organic at supermarkets. Their limited range of overpriced vegetables are enough to put people off the whole idea.

Supermarkets have somehow managed with their offers and advertising to make people believe that they are cheaper than other options, however it seems that if you really want to save yourself some money you would be better off if you stop shopping in supermarkets. Although they don’t have the resources to shout about it, independents are generally cheaper and you won’t be tempted into buying some self indulgent half famous celebrity’s auto-biography or buy one get one free jars of slop called sauce you could make much more cheaply and nicely yourself like you would at the supermarket.

Many thanks to the people from K+N vegetable shop and A&H (spices, dry products etc) in Birkenhead for helping me to compile the prices for independent non-organic things, and also thanks to Unicorn in Chorlton, Manchester who provided me with most of the prices for the independent organic options.

I hope you find this price comparison interesting, I’d really appreciate any feedback and ideas about how it might be developed in the future. Oh yeah, and you can also use the spreadsheet to work out the cost of meals if you like.

Notes on using the food price calculator (Please read first)

Download an non-editable example meal price calculator here, example shown, lentil soup.

Download the editable xls meal price calculator

Download an editable version to copy and use yourself (you will need a google account to use this)

After some debate over whether what we were finding really were chantarelles, or the similar looking, but rather less tasty and occasionally hallucinogenic false chantarelles we have finally given them a go. We’d gone to visit one of our friend Viv’s old lichen hunting grounds near Glen Coe and were clambering around old mossy woods near a disused crypt when we found a few good patches of them hiding in amongst the fallen autumn leaves. Luckily with our edible mushroom expert to hand we were able to confirm they were the real thing and gathered a few dozen to take home with us.

Chantarelles have to be one of the prettiest mushrooms there are. So brightly coloured, they can be hard to spot as they are alsmost the same colour as the leaves they hide in. They have a very distinctive fruity smell, like apricots. There are a few other distinguishing features, the gills separate into twos or three and occasionally rejoin, I believe doesn’t the false chantarelle gills ever rejoin. They also are a more irregular shape, although until I’ve seen a false one I’m not sure how obvious this would be.

As yet I’m still cooking the wild mushrooms I find simply so I can understand what they taste like before complicating things with sauces, so I just fried these in a bit of butter with salt and pepper and had them on scrabled eggs on toast. I believe they would be excellant for a risotto, or stroganoff, so next time I’ll give that a go. Hopefully we’ll find some more soon, although down on the Wirral we’re still experiencing a mushroom drought. I’m sure they’ll come soon. There’s been weeks of dry weather, but after I mentioned the other day I was hoping for rain to bring mushrooms it came. In fact it’s been pouring down a good few times a day ever since. I’ve heard this is ideal to set them off, so fingers crossed.

This is the final post from the UK tour, things will be back to normal from here, less of the random traveling waffle and a return to recipes and rants. Colonsay was the last island stop on our tour, we had intended to go further, but the WWOOFing season finishes earlier than we expected, we couldn’t find anywhere to take us on the whole western side of Scotland except for one week at the very end of September meaning we’d have a two week gap to fill. Unexpected stays at B+Bs, and a lack of wwoofing opportunities meant we were flying well over our budget, the weather just seemed to get worse and worse, we kept getting attacked by ticks, both picked up a nasty cough and decided something was trying to tell us to go home. Only a little earlier than planned and it means hopefully Andy should be able to get his thesis written before the new year, so it’s all good. Plus it’s been sunny down here. Hurrah! Although all I want it to do now is rain so the mushrooms will come, a woods we’d visited a while ago which was full of them was completely dried out, nothing but a few battered old russulas and big squishy brown things to be found. Boooo. Seems silly to be wanting rain after cursing it for weeks.

Anyway so Colonsay, absolutely lovely place. It’s quite small, so you can really feel at home after just a couple of days. We were wild camping (there are no official camp sites there at all) and the first night camped at Kiloran Bay at the top of the island, which is absolutely beautiful. A huge golden sandy beach, crazy cave systems which go on for miles and we only saw two other people there. I spotted a pond of watercress, which I’ve never seen growing wild before. We tried a bit which was very tasty, so spicy I don’t think you could eat too much of it, but it was incredible to see it all there. Considering you’d usually pay a pound for a small bag, here was a huge pond full of hundreds of pounds worth of the stuff. We also found some mint by the river that runs down to the beach and used some to make some mint tea. Something strange seemed to happen to us after we’d drank it, Andy was telling strangers to drive their car through the sea and we both got a bit giddy, kept giggling and pulling faces at each other. Very odd, good fun though. Must be special mint, maybe it’s like when you give cats cat nip.

watercress pond

It’s described as one of the last great wildernesses. It’s a fair size, yet only has 200 inhabitants who are outnumbered 25:1 by deer. There’s just the one road, running across the bottom and up the east of the island and nowhere else. If you wanted to go anywhere else you’d have to walk over rough ground. It’s not like the peak district, there’s no paths or styles, you just make your own way and will most likely get eaten alive by ticks if you do. Given all this it’s amazingly quiet and peaceful. The bay by the main (only) town (1 hotel, 1 shop and a distillery) is quite protected by surrounding land so the waters are really still. If you stop walking you realise the only sounds you’ve been hearing are your rustling jacket and footsteps. Quite eerie. At one point while I was wandering around on my own I started feeling like I was living in an episode of Twin Peaks. The mist over the water, the  hotel, the steam from the whisky factory, I though Bob was going to come and get me.

The world’s third largest whirlpool the Corryvrekan can be seen off the top coast of the island. We did attempt to go, but only realised when the road suddenly stopped that it was still at least a 6 mile trek to the top of the island to see it and we were totally unprepared for it. An excuse to go again. It would make a great weekend, you can drive up to the end of the road then set off with your camping gear, you’d pass by George Orwell’s house on the way and there are big cave systems near the whirlpool you can stay the night in.

One big plus about he place is that the campsite is free! Woop! The Jura Hotel very kindly let you camp in their garden, there’s shower and laundry facilities and it’s right on the coast. Beautiful. They just ask for a donation which goes to a local charity.

What’s that? You thought this was a food blog not a travel guide? Erm… oh yeah we had shaggy ink cap pizzas for dinner, well sort of it was a poor man’s pizza (cheese on toast with tomato base and other toppings). I’d found a clump of about 5 of them by the path near the community gardens in Islay, so we picked them and cooked them up for our dinner when we arrived. They were ok. Aparently they make nice soup, will give that a go next time we find some.

ink caps

ink caps on toast

Just across from Kintyre, Islay is probably the biggest island we went to. We spent a fair amount of our time there in a B+B as Andy was ill and it rained everyday. It was strange being in a B+B when we’d been used to either tent or random hospitality from strangers. I realise this is how some people make a living, but the concept of having to pay someone £165 just to sleep in a bed for three nights and eat beans and scrambled eggs once a day seemed crazy. It must actually cost them all of about £5 per day. I don’t think they were really doing it to make ends meet as some places clearly do either, the house was well posh. AND they charged us £5 to do some washing! I wouldn’t mind if they’d have told us before were gong to add it the bill. Actually I would. Maybe we’ve just been spoilt as we’ve met so many kind people we weren’t ready for these money grabbing capitalists. Maybe we upset them. When she said I could use the kitchen to make some soup maybe she was expecting I’d just throw something in the microwave rather than start chopping leeks, potatoes and preparing a pile of wild mushrooms we’d gathered earlier in the day. I dunno. Anyway at least it was cosy. Actually it was a really nice B+B, 4 poster bed, use of a nice lounge and it was really kind of her to offer that we could use her kitchen, it’s just we missed being around interesting people who really did want to talk to us rather than just making polite small talk because they felt like they have to so you’d enjoy your stay and pay them.

Wild mushroom soup, made in B+B kitchen

So Islay, really good for Whisky (there’s at least 8 distilleries) and birds (over 200 species). Unfortunately I don’t really have an interest in either. Hmmm not going well so far is it? The island is a weird shape too, it’s at least a 20 mile trip between any two places, so really you have to drive. With petrol at £1.20 or more this was not a good thing. This is all getting rather depressing. I’ll probably also get some hate mail from Islay lovers too if I’m not careful so I’ll get back to the positives.

They have a brilliant community garden. It’s huge and appears to be really well looked after. They have a small shop to sell the produce and the schools are involved in some kind of a project to help them distribute the food, some kind of box scheme is being developed I think. The garden is in the grounds of Islay House and used to be a kitchen garden just to supply the house. However I think the owners got skint and it seems everything fell into disrepair. I guess the house has been sold on now and in 2005 the completely overgrown inaccessible garden was taken on as a community project. It’s hard to believe how much they have done in this short time, it looks so well established, has huge amounts of fruit and vegetables growing and two fantastic polytunnels full of squashes and tomatoes. We bought quite a bit of stuff from here. It kept us going for most of our time in Islay and a bit more for only about £6.

community garden shop

The other good thing is Islay Ales. They have a shop at the craft centre in Bridgend. You can try all the different beers they make, and also they do a small tour/talk if you ask. Very friendly. It was here I found out that Leann is Gaelic for Beer. How appropriate. I wonder if my parents knew this when they named me. Hello, my name is Beer. Brilliant.

Oh nearly forgot, the first night we were in Islay we decided to give wild camping a go. In 2003 the law in Scotland changed meaning everyone has a statutory right to camp anywhere in Scotland. There is a code of conduct including things like keep out of sight of houses, arrive late leave early, generally being considerate, but basically you can camp anywhere you like. It’s great. Well it would be if unlike us you don’t end up camping near to what turns out to be the main route from the ferry to the town. Oops. Huge Whisky lorries going past all night waking us up every hour probably contributed to the illness that then kept Andy in bed for the next 3 days. We’ve since had better luck with our choice of sites and it really is a great thing if you need to save a bit of cash, or go places with no camp sites (ie Colonsay or long distance hill walking). The only problem being that there obviously are no facilities. We probably made a suspiciously large number of visits to the public toilets on our trip, and didn’t have a proper shower for nearly 4 days at one point erlgh.

Here’s the recipe for the stew we made to celebrate our first ever night of wild camping on Islay made with some of the veg we’d bought from the community gardens.

Lentil and Spinach Stew

• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 5 cloves garlic, crushed
• 175g red lentils
• 1 can chopped tomatoes
• 4 tsp stock powder
• 1 tbsp Henderson’s relish
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 medium carrot, cubed
• 250g chopped spinach
• 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1. Gently fry the onion until soft then add the cumin seeds and fry for 1 more minute.
2. Add the garlic, lentils, tomatoes, stock powder, hendersons and about 1 litre of water. Bring to the boil then simmer for about 20 minutes untilthe lentils are falling apart.
3. Add the spinach and carrots and cook for a further 15 minutes until the carrots are soft.
4. Serve with rice or bulgar wheat.

You might notice from the picture we’d also added courgette to it this time, but that was just because we’d been given it at the gardens, normally this stew doesn’t have courgette in. It doesn’t really matter, it’s lovely either way.

Mushroom season is here. Hurrah! I’m not sure if it’s normal, but the floors up here seem to be carpetted with them too, hurrah! We’ve seen over 55 different types so far. I’m thinking of starting a new section on here devoted to my little friends, so if I can work out how to do it I’ll be posting all the different types we find plus notes on edibility, habitat etc.  But obviously don’t believe anything I say, we use three different books, which though generally a good mix, cross referenced say different things sometimes and I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s poisoning.

The books we are currently using are the Collins Gems “Mushrooms”, which is great, has good, clear pictures, pretty much all the common things you are likely to see and references similar mushrooms things can be confused with, then “Mushrooms” by Roger Phillips, which is really comprehensive, but maybe a little too much so when you’re just starting out, it’s best to look for things in the little book first and then check there’s nothing else simlar in this one. We also have the River Cottage “Mushrooms” (all these people clearly spend days trying to think of original titles), which is great for all the edible species, has recipes and the author John Wright has a few amusing mushroom stories to tell which makes it a livelier read than most of the guides.

It’s been a few days now since we dared to eat something we found and we’re both still alive, so let us be your guinea pigs, puff balls are indeed safe to eat. We spent a couple of days on a campsite in Kintyre at Point Sands campsite and the morning after we’d arrived realised we were surrounded by little puffball mushrooms, so picked maybe a couple of dozen, peeled off their skins, fried them in some butter and garlic and had them with pasta for our tea. How exciting!  To be honest they weren’t the most amazingly tasty mushrooms I’ve ever had, just maybe not as strong mushroomy taste and slighly fluffy texture, but they were ok, and definitely good for a cheap meal.If you fancy trying them you just need to make sure they are all completely white all the way through. The name puffball comes form the fact that as they mature their insides turns into dark spores which are then puffed out of the top of the mushroom. They don’t do any harm to you in this state, it just doesn’t taste nice.

There was also maybe five or so rings of what looked like fairy ring mushrooms on the same field, but we weren’t sure and were too scared to try them. But anyone who could identify them could pick themselves a real feast at that campsite. It’s also an incredibly beautiful place to stay, right on the beach, you just walk out of your tent onto the white sandy beach, which is really long and looks out west to Islay and Jura, providing one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve seen. We took our table and chairs out to the water’s edge and had cheese and biscuits and a bottle (oops two bottles) of red wine to watch it.

Among the other interesting things we have found so far were the Fly Agaric, hundreds of them in the woods on the walk back from the Glenashadale Falls in Arran. Due to their hallucenogenic properties they’re often said to be poisonous, they are not deadly though, they’ll just make you a bit sick then you’ll be fine apparently, I still don’t fancy it. I read they affect your judgement, so if for example you tried to jump over a small branch you would really leap high in the air to clear it. They have the same effect on deer, who love eating them and then leap around the forrest like nutters.  I find that pretty hillarious, maybe we should all take guidance from the deer and go out into the woods and have fun leaping around.

I saw a clump of chantarelle mushrooms, but didn’t pick them. It was pretty obvious what they were too, so not sure why I decided not to, bet they would have been nicer in my pasta than those blinking puffballs.

Inside the Chantarelle

Andy spotted a Destroying Angel, a  beautiful, delicate but deadly poisonous mushroom. Luckily it’s pretty unmistakeable, however I think it may be the type that poisoned the Horse Whisperer author recently. It causes liver failure and survival rates are pretty low, by the time the symptoms start most of the irreversible damage has been done. Scary.

Destroying Angel

We’ve also seen a shaggy ink cap, blushers, amethyst deceivers, egghead mottlegills ( I love the names!) and lots more. Here’s a few more photos and watch out for the new mushroom section coming soon.

When I first stopped eating meat it was mostly for health and because of problems with intensive farming. Everyone will probably now have seen something about the terrible way many animals are kept. Chickens seem to be on the TV all the time now. And if you care to look the internet is full of information about the ways our animals for food are kept which some viewers might find disturbing.

There are so many problems, and this post would be more like a book if I went through them all properly now, so instead here are a few of the problems and some links. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll go through a few issues and witter on about what I think about them specifically in more detail.

I didn’t really like meat that much anyway.

This is an easy one. If we had a roast dinner, my favorite bits would always be the vegetables. Although there are a few seafood things I miss and I used to enjoy trying new different types of meat at restaurants, or for special meals, I generally wasn’t that fussed. Faced with a growing concern for all the nasty things people were doing so I could eat meat, I thought it would be best if I just stopped.

Chickens (Widespread accepted animal abuse, for your lunch. Lovely)

http://www.vegsoc.org/info/broiler.html

“Each bird has an area of around 0.05m², similar in size to an A4 sheet of paper. As the birds grow, conditions deteriorate and the sheds become increasingly crowded until the shed floor becomes a solid mass of chickens competing to reach food and water. The birds’ natural behaviour to perch, walk, run and fly are obviously frustrated in the shed environment.

Standard intensively farmed broiler chickens are reared to their slaughter weight of around 1.8 to 3 kg within just 6 weeks of being hatched (chickens are normally fully grown by 5-6 months). By selective breeding, the length of time broiler chicks take to grow to 2 kg has been halved in the last 30 years. As broilers are bred to grow as fast as possible this has lead to them becoming more inactive. Their frame cannot support their own weight and this affects the way they walk and puts additional stresses on their hips and legs. At just 6 weeks old, they spend 76%-86% of their time lying down. Birds severely crippled and deformed die of starvation and thirst, unable to reach food or water. Other birds may only be able to move by using their wings to balance”

Most chickens in UK are kept in this way, I mean you can’t really expect them to be wandering around in a nice field in the sunshine pecking away at grubs and seeds for at least 6 months like they would naturally take to reach full size, if you want to pay £2.50 for a whole bird. Not only is this bad for the chicken, but it’s bad for you too. They are fed on an unnatural high energy diet, which unsurprisingly means their meat is not made up the way it would naturally be, contains an imbalance of fats, and is probably another one of the reasons why we have such high rates of diet related diseases. Maybe even more importantly than the damage to individuals health is the problem that the food that feeds the chickens is increasingly soy, which is itself farmed intensively. Huge areas of rainforest are being destroyed to meet demand, with serious environmental implications.

Cows (are meant to eat grass, not corn. And rainforests should grow trees, not corn)

I recently started reading another of Michael Pollan’s books, “The Omnivores Dilemma” , you can read an except from it here. I’m only part way through, but so far it’s mentioned some pretty interesting stuff I’d not thought about relating to cattle farming. He talks about how cows are now almost exclusively fed on corn based diets. This is not their natural food and they can only survive on it for so long before they start developing problems, so they are pumped full of various drugs and bred to combat this.  Again this means the cows lead an unnatural unhealthy and short life and their meat contains an imbalance of fats which means we probably do too. Again there is the problem of where all this corn is coming from.  Even when rainforests are not being destroyed it is probably not the best idea to convert huge areas of your land to mass mono-cultures. This destroys bio-diversity and makes crops susceptible to disease which means more pesticides and more chemicals indirectly in your diet.

To create 1kg of meat it takes 16kg of grain. If we ate the grain or soy or whatever rather than feeding it to the animals we wouldn’t need to destroy as much of the world to produce the amount of food we need. Economic factors seem for some bizarre reason to effect peoples behaviour more than environmental issues,  and if we don’t all kill ourselves by killing the planet first, this misuse of resources will start to effect people more and more as population increases and the price of oil, which all food production relies on, goes up or if oil *shock horror* runs out and we will no longer be able to ignore the real source of our meat.

Dairy products (Eek!)

I’m not vegan. I eat eggs, milk and cheese, in fact I love cheese, it’s one of my favorite things. Also I eat it knowing it is probably not vegetarian and infact contains rennet, which is definitely not vegetarian. Sometimes I think this is a sign that I’m not really all that committed the everything I’ve been saying. Maybe it does. But any kind of reduction is better than none. Do what you can and be aware of what you are doing, but there is no point having a terrible life. Ultimately we should all kill ourselves if we wanted to stop harming the planet and it’s animals and I don’t want to do that. It’s not good to focus in on the negative details of something positive you or other people are doing. It might make you give the whole thing up as a pointless effort if you’re not quite perfect, which is just not true. However one thing I do need to make more effort on is making sure the things I eat are organic (which sets much higher welfare standards as well as stopping the animals being pumped full of drugs) or at least free range. Eggs get snuck into loads of things and you can pretty much guarantee they are from caged hens. Cakes. I always forget when I am buying cakes, you get distracted by the cream. Which probably came from a cow which got lame and developed mastitis (infected, swollen, painful udders) to produce the milk for my cream cake. Lovely.

http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2007/06/dairy-farming/
http://www.milkmyths.org.uk/report/sufferingsilence.php
http://www.cvmbs.colostate.edu/ilm/proinfo/necropsy/notes/udderlesions.htm

Fish (Vegetarians do not eat fish)

Nuff said really. But this has to be the most commonly asked ridiculous question. “Oh you’re a vegetarian… Do you eat fish?” No.

http://www.vegsoc.org/fish/

Erm, maybe I’ll start eating meat again.

I recently had a short stay Wwoofing on a smallholding in Cornwall called Plan-it Earth. Originally I had thought I wouldn’t go anywhere that kept animals for food, but this was an environmental project and sounded really interesting, so I thought I’d see what they were doing.

They kept a small number of animals for their own use and were also able to get well reared meat from friends in the local area. All the animals were well kept, out doors, had lots of space and varied diets.  They killed them and prepared them themselves, which they admitted was always a difficult upsetting process. But rather than a mindless over consumption of cheap meat in every meal as many people tend to eat, this meant they and their children had a great respect for the animals. They would have meat maybe a couple of times a week, used every part and generally had a more real relationship with their food and the animal it came from.

This made a lot more sense to me and made me realise that maybe it wasn’t just eating animals in itself that I had a problem with in some kind of karmic reasons, but that mainly it is because of environmental and animal welfare issues which in the current system makes eating meat unethical, and that it is possible to farm animals for food in an acceptable way. Perhaps in the future you will see me gnawing on pork chops again. I was certainly tempted like never before when I could see the pigs in the field outside. Actually that just made me feel a bit odd. Maybe I’m not ready yet, but you know.