Skip to main content
A Question of Spice

A recent email conversation with Tristram raised some interesting points about spices:

From: Tristram Stuart
Sent: 24 October 2006 14:55
To: Sarah Dixon

Dear Sarah,

Hooray for 100 mile diets! That sounds really interesting. I sometimes wonder if one could make a fair case in favour of importing high value, low volume items such as spices. I haven’t looked at the figures for wealth generation at point of origin, or tried to balance them against emissions from the international trade; but at least I think there’s a stronger case for buying those things than say, imported low value high volume items such as courgettes or rice. I guess crops such as coffee/tea/chocolate would probably be borderline on this scale.

Pickles; very nice. I’m always a bit torn when I use sugar (and gas) in huge quantities as a preserving agent (as I did last night for quince cheese); chutneys and pickles using vinegar is probably more eco-friendly; and best of all is bottling which doesn’t need any agent except for a bit of heat and the kilner jar (though sometimes best with a scoop of sugar).

love
Tristram
Labels:

Comments

  1. spider4:35 pm

    From: Sarah D
    Sent: 26 October 2006 12:02
    To: 'Tristram Stuart'

    Hey tristram,

    If you know of any local sugar or oil suppliers (or any other local food sources) that would be very helpful. I know what you mean about the values of spices etc. of course it can be good to balance and not be too strict.

    This kind of thing is what I am hoping to learn more about through this experiment, and to have the chance to get information and to have discussions and think about boundaries etc. I don’t see 100 miles as an 'ideal' way to live, but a way of learning more about the way we do live and
    how on a wider scale we could adapt that in a practical way and to find out what direction is a good one to go in.

    Also I hope we get some publicity. I went to a meeting on climate change at the ZSL on Tuesday and the Met office were there and the WWF and their projections and reports are rather bleak, so the more consciousness we can raise in our small way (but also we are in a very rich, powerful area of the world - Richmond I mean - so maybe it will have some good impacts) the
    better - because it is very urgent and we may have to all adapt to local diets anyway if transport and supply is disrupted by climate change as seems likely,

    love
    sarah

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:35 pm

    From: Tristram Stuart
    Sent: 30 October 2006 11:35
    To: Sarah Dixon

    By the way, have you thought about sourcing fish from Thames upstream? Might be fun to find a pike?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown7:31 pm

    There was a programme I caught on telly a while ago (some bored Sunday evening) about a guy passionately trying to find native brown trout within the M25 in Thames tributaries. It was a programme really about the condition of our urban rivers, which while the water quality of the Thames has apparently improved, people still dump a shocking amount of crap in (shopping trolleys and items of that ilk). Eventually after much disappointment, and a few underground trips up buried rivers such as the Fleet, he caught a trout out by Rickmansworth, just inside the M25. Meanwhile, however, he caught some less sensitive fish in several tributaries. Mmmm... tasty.

    ReplyDelete
  4. spider10:33 am

    I was reading a recipe for heron last night. Apparently it has a wonderful medicinal 'fishy' liquid in its bones but it shouldnt get into the meat or the flavour will be unpleasant. Perhaps it would be better to eat the heron than try for the fish.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life Returns to Notment - and my soul

It has been such a long time, we had so much cold and rain and snow this winter that I have hardly been down to the notment at all. A couple of weeks ago I did go, and collected some baby Alexanders , which went down very well with the family. They are very herbal, like fennel, aniseed or celery but stronger and with a distinct flavour. They work very well chopped up with mashed potato or in an omelette. Then yesterday I went back for a propoer look at the spring life. Many of the fragile little seedlings planted last year in their fleece-poo blankets are still alive if not exactly thriving - including a sage, some fennel cuttings, a feverfew and calamint. Sadly though, the huge ants nest has gone since the breeze blocks were sold to alocal builder who has been able to reuse them. I had been hoping to provide a new home for the ants, but failed to act in time and so now just have to wait and see if they managed to survive or not. I am fairly ignorant about the habits of ants, but
5 comments
Read more

Water, Water, Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink

Water, water, everywhere, and it's all a lot of poncey crap from Italy and France, beautifully packaged and carefully marketed, that wends its way into the receptacles of Londoners who use it as prop to help them make believe their city is chic like Paris when it is nothing of the sort, it is just the grubby old capital of a country that obtains its water from across the sea. The point I am trying to make, through this un-dignified rant, is that water is indeed everywhere and it all tastes the bloody same. Perrier, for instance, though I could have easily picked out Badoit, Barisart or Pellegrino, arrives on the shelves of our abundant supermarkets in sexy looking, stylish bottles that are pleasing to the human eye. There is little wrong with this, beauty has its place. The home should be filled with gorgeous things. But it's the human tongue that counts here and mine says the only dissimilar thing its buds can gauge between the continental waters and our very own mountain spri
3 comments
Read more

Snow and Honey

Monday was a day famous for Snow, but for me it was also about honey. I visited Linda who has recently started keeping bees. We processed some honey and she very kindly gave me a pot of golden sweetness at the end. I learnt about mites, and deaths, and bee dancing and pollen and nectar and propolis (the red stuff in the pot - very sticky and it stains the hands, the bees make it from tree resin), and how the bees tenderly care for the grubs and feed them bees milk, and how the worker bees come out of the growing chambers and do housekeeping first for a few days, and then nursing, and then they guard the entrance, and then they start foraging only after all that. The pics show how we scraped the honey out of the combs, avoiding letting pollen and nectar into the honey, and let it drip through a net to separate it from the wax - collecting the was crumbs for melting down and further separation from the honey that is left; propolis; and the honey pots that were filled. 20 in total, from a
4 comments
Read more