Last weekend I visited a shop that had been turned into a farm… in the middle of London!

The Farm:shop, on Dalston Lane, is a treasure and a model of imaginative thinking. Its creators, Paul, Andy and Sam, responded to an invitation by Hackney to propose uses for empty shopfronts, and landed a small grant for basic materials, and a year of rent-free access. They’ve established partnerships with local businesses who are funding different rooms and hope to be able to turn to commercial application some of the ideas being given room to grow.

You enter a hallway that is mapped and pegged with small shelves.

This is the Bacteria Wall, which local artist Synnøve Fredericks is using to explore the possibilities of shared fermentation. She’s using kefir grains she found on Freecycle

to make other fermented beverages – ginger beer at present – that can then be shared and cultured by others, and plans to map them on the wall.

The front room is bright and foggy-windowed from the fish tanks, which will soon be stocked with tilapia; they aim to feed these with the larvae of soldier flies which they’ll nurture on their own compost. On the lower right are tanks for freshwater prawns who will feed on the fish waste. The white pots on the left will be filled with hydroponic plants that can be turned on their poles to catch even light. Racks on the right have hydroponic salad greens. The whole system is connected by pipes but is really, as Sam put it, just a differently-shaped pond.

The demonstration fish are enjoying the space.

Hydroponic greens

The propagation room will soon become a cafe so that people can watch the seedlings grow while they have a snack which may or may not include farm shop-grown food. Part of the point of the exercise is to show how much space is needed to grow food: all the food produced in this farm shop will not supply its cafe.

Seedlings are propagated in cubes of rockwool and plastic composites.

The green wall in the stairway…

The “late summer room” includes tomatoes and peppers grown in light and heat conditions that promote fruiting. The lighting system is cooled by air; the ducting will be used to send heat into other rooms.

The basil wall will soon be joined by a parsley and a mint wall.

There’s a polytunnel in the back, which will be used for winter greens, and many more things in the summer. They’ll be getting pigs – only small ones – who will be given a run along the side of the tunnel and fed leftovers from the garden in exchange for some rooting and composting work on their parts, before they leave again for the fields.

And then there are the chickens on the roof, which sixty years ago were a common feature in London gardens. From their vantage point they can see the tops of double-deckers running along Dalston Lane. There are only four of them, so not a huge volume of eggs expected. They live on a layer of leaf mulch which gives them something to pick through and ends up as a nice bit of compost.

After stopping at the co-op cafe on the corner for a fortifying bowl of sweet potato and squash soup (with some excellent bread, and a bottle of a surprisingly delicious dandelion & burdock beverage)

I stopped in at the Eastern Curve Garden

which has been going since July and provides a green oasis for locals,

as well as a meeting space

for architectural students among others. They’ve offered a number of programs for children and adults which have proved very popular.

There were planters that had held both ornamental and food plants during the summer

and some planted with winter greens.

Some of the Eastern Curve’s peppers that had needed warmth and shelter are now residing uner the Farm: shop’s polytunnel.

Shame on Stephen Harper, yet again. Here’s a message from David Suzuki:

Keep Senate from subverting democracy

Stephen Harper has done what he promised never to do: allow the Senate to go against the will of the majority of Members of Parliament and the Canadian public. On November 16, after a surprise vote and without any debate, unelected Conservative senators killed the Climate Change Accountability Act.

The Act would have made government accountable for putting in place the solutions to reduce global warming emissions to safe levels – in line with targets that leading scientists say are necessary to avoid the devastating consequences of uncontrolled climate change.

It was overwhelmingly supported by and passed in the elected House of Commons, thanks in part to the support of Canadians from across the country. This decision by Conservative senators to avoid debate and call a snap vote shows disrespect for our democracy and for Canadians, who time and again have told our elected representatives that we want the federal government to act on the most serious threat facing our country and the world.

Please call or write the Prime Minister and your Member of Parliament to let them know that we expect them to live up to their responsibility to be accountable to the will of Canadians and our democracy. Consider also sending a letter to your local newspaper to let others know how you feel.

Oh it *is* lovely to be in a country that actually has trains, it really is. But when said trains are 90 minutes late due to signalling failures which mean the train you’re on has to back up and re-route itself through the Midlands which means you miss your connection to Edinburgh by, oh, two and a half hours, and that means you have to hope your driver is willing to turn up nearer 11pm than the 8.20 originally planned, well… it’s not so much fun as it sounds. Still. You get there in the end, more or less, swearing an oath of never again take a train that involves connections, and there’s your kind driver and he takes you to your room in the B&B; that is also a sheep farm

and you and your hosts can finally get to bed a little later than planned.

And all that brought me to Bread Matters, the recently relocated (from Cumbria) cooking school run by Andrew Whitley

who is part baker, part bread messiah, part raconteur, part food activist. (Doubtless a few more parts in there but that will do for openers.) He’s also one of the founders of the Real Bread Campaign which advocates for better bread – and better bread labelling – in Britain.

Eleven of us had come from all points of the compass – the north of Scotland to the south of England – to learn some skills in whole grain bread baking. It was a congenial group and we were, I think, all pretty pleased with the skills we picked up and the bread we took home.

We made, over the course of a two-day workshop: Seeded Spelt Leaven Bread (enlivened by 9 different seeds)

Yeasted Wholemeal Bread (tin

and plait

Cracked Grain

Borodinsky Rye (with a flaked coriander seed top and bottom)

Bran Sponge Loaf

and Chollah (plaited with 8, 7, 6

or 5 strands).

Those with the means and time to do so had followed Andrew’s instructions on building wheat leaven and rye sourdough starters, and we spent a good deal of time learning about these and using them in different ways. In fact the only ‘straight’ yeast breads we made were the wholemeal and the chollah.

We spent a lot of time practicing different kneading techniques and learning to handing some nice wet dough.

And we were fed extremely well thanks to the multi-talented Veronica Burke and her helpers, who provided wholesome and elegantly sustaining snacks

delicious lunches and a wonderful dinner that included choices like this lovely fish cake starter followed by boef en daube with beets, greens, carrots and hasselback potatoes.

We left weary and sated with our enormous bags of bread, our Real Bread aprons, a pair of scrapers and a copy of Andrew’s excellent book, Bread Matters. Which is another weighty if welcome tome to add to the cumulative weight of all the slim volumes of verse I’ve been attracting. I guess I’ll be helping the Royal Mail to build its Christmas profits before I leave…

The one concert I went to in the London Jazz Festival was a pretty obvious choice: Jazz et Cuisine promised a “tasty fusion of food and music.”

What we got was a treat for the ears and nose: British musician Andy Sheppard playing clarinet and guitar, and wonderfully imaginative Italian percussionist Michele Rabbia playing just about anything – tinfoil, marbles, shopping bags, his face

– as they improvised around the Gallic bustlings of Ivan Vautier

as he whipped up oddities like Pan-fried foie gras with green asparagus, topped with an egg soft-cooked inside a pastry wrapper and served with raspberry butter,

or Fine pastry onion tart served with lobster, onion sorbet and crispy bacon pieces with sharp cider butter.

He made nothing I’d particularly care to eat or attempt to cook myself (even if I had some of the molecular gastronomy kit he was using), but it smelled wonderful and was engaging to watch.

And just as well it wasn’t to my taste since the curious British obsession with Health & Safety meant we weren’t allowed so much as a nibble, since the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall isn’t a licensed kitchen, and is therefore presumably considered toxic.

What we did get was a “special offer” to show our tickets at the cafe, and receive the opportunity to buy a plate of French cheese and a glass of Merlot for “just £7.50”. I passed, in favour of a nice piece of orange & lavender cake and a mineral water for about half the price. Hmph.

We have good fish in BC – as long as you limit your desires pretty much to salmon, halibut, salmon, oysters, salmon, spot prawns and clams. But Britain is, I think, a fish-lover’s paradise, for variety and freshness. Well, Suffolk certainly is. In London the price is such that many of the offerings are for special occasions only: the price of quality in an expensive city. And a fishmonger’s view of sustainability is, like that of any vested interest, fraught with contradiction and self-protection.

So it’s interesting to look at what’s on offer, and consider what ethical repercussions there are for fish consumption, here in the land of End of the Line, whose seafood widget is actually a link to information from the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch – so most relevant to American consumers. Though fish are poor respecters of national boundaries, you can cross-check your choices using the Greenpeace Red List, or the Marine Conservation Society‘s Fishonline Purchasing Guide. Canadians can consult the SeaChoice database.

Here’s an example of what kind of information you’ll get if you ask your fishmonger (which you should, anyway, so they know you’re interested in where your food comes from). I was at a farm shop in Suffolk last week, where a new sustainable seafood shop had opened earlier in the year, which promises to stock only fish supplied by skippers who catch in a sustainable way.
I noticed skate on sale and asked about it, because I had an idea it was endangered.

Yes, the woman told me, it is endangered, but this is not skate, it’s ray. We just label it as skate because people know it as such. The catch is controlled, she added. So I asked the fishmonger in London, on Turnham Green Terrace, who also had skate on sale. Rubbish, he told me: skates are from the ray family (Rajidae), so there’s no distinction. And not in the least endangered; plenty of them about, especially this time of year.

Consult the sustainable seafood guides, and you find a much more complicated story. Greenpeace has skate on its red list because its numbers are threatened (they breed and mature very slowly), they are caught by unsustainable fishing methods (most are bycatch in otter or bottom trawling), and are subject to pirate (illegal, unregulated and unreported) fishing. They do not appear at all on the FishOnline purchasing guide, and when you search for information on skate, you find that common skate (Dipturus batis) is considered critically endangered; the number of remaining stocks is unknown; and since January 2009 it has been illegal for fishermen to retain and land common skate caught in EU waters.

FishOnline does allow that other faster-growing varieties of ray are considered sustainable at the moment: but only if you deal with a reputable fishmonger, whom you can completely trust to know the source of the fish he’s selling. But look at the age of the fish considered as fast-growing (common skate takes 10 years to mature):

Avoid eating skates and rays unless you are certain they are one of the smaller, more sustainable species such as spotted, cuckoo, or starry rays from the North Sea and Celtic Seas. Avoid eating these species below the size at which they mature: spotted ray males mature at a length of about 54 cm and females at about 57 cm (both between 3 to 8 years old); cuckoo ray males and females mature at between 54 to 59 cm in length when approximately 4 years old; starry ray males and females mature at a length of about 40 cm (between 4 and 5 years old)
(Source: FishOnline)

SeaChoice puts seven species of Atlantic skate – including those very subspecies spotted and starry skate – on its Avoid list (a High concern rather than Critical at this point), adding other common names: raja fish, imitation scallop, briar skate, common skate, summer skate, hedgehog skate, tobacco-box skate, leopard skate, smooth-tailed skate, prickly skate, eyed skate, big skate (and in Latin: Dipturus laevis, Raja eglanteria, Leucoraja erinacea, Leucoraja garmanii, Malacoraja senta, Amblyraja radiata, Leucoraja ocellata).

Though it used to be routinely discarded, nowadays skate is used for food (skate wings or imitation scallops) as well as bait, mainly for the lobster industry. If obtained as bycatch from trawling (which accounts for 97%+ of skate on the market), you run the risk of buying a fish that is undersized and/or was harvested dead, and may be subject to ammonia taint.

Aldeburgh ended with a lecture and a reading. At the crack of noon-thirty, our English comprehension was sorely tested by Don Paterson‘s speed-readings of a selected few of Robert Frost’s poems (West-Running Brook; Design; and To Earthward). He peppered his talk with a few high-falutin’ bits of terminology (autopoiesis, domain theory, thematic domain, emergence) which seemed to be summable as: Frost’s poems are highly crafted and admirably self-contained with imagery so integrated the poems are unimaginable in any other form. Well, quite: but much better said in a talk which we can only hope will soon appear on Paterson’s website where we can enjoy it at a slower speed.

We sprinted out for some fish and chips

and were back in our seats – after a quick and admiring visit to Lawson’s Deli

and a sudden drenching by the changeable weather – in time for the final reading. We heard from Lars Gustafsson (Sweden), Marie Howe (USA) and Bill Manhire (New Zealand).

A couple of days’ rest and fasting in London ensued. Yesterday I roused myself and joined a small throng of sustainable foodies

to travel to a different part of Suffolk for an Ethical Eats farm visit to Longwood Farm, run by Matthew and Louise Unwin. We were accompanied by Alison Mood from Compassion in World Farming, who gave a short presentation – somewhat hampered by technological glitches during the showing of this video on the treatment of farm animals.

After the talk, we were fed an enormous lunch featuring chicken and vegetables raised on Longwood Farm. We hoisted ourselves to our feet and with organic farmer and butcher Matthew Unwin

as guide, set off on a tour of the farm, which includes beef,

turkeys, chickens, sheep and geese (and an excellent farm shop stuffed with organic vegetables and grocery staples).

An organic pig farmer leases land on Longwood Farm as well, operating on a four-year rotation. This encourages soil fertility and the growth of forage crops for the other animals. The pigs are moved onto new ground as they’re weaned, so the process takes about six months each year.

A warm interlude in the chick barn, where week-old fluffballs were basking under a heat lamp and listening (no lie!) to The Archers. Where chicks are reared like these ones, without the medications routinely administered in conventional animal farming, organic farmers expect to lose a small percentage, particularly in the first week or so (he’d lost 14 of the 400 we saw). They are kept indoors and warm until they are about 3-4 weeks old, and given some heat until they are about 6 weeks old, after which they can spend the rest of their lives freely ranging (to meet regulations, two-thirds of their life must be lived free range). They live in sheds on runners, so they can be moved around the property, and at their earliest age can fall victim to a surprising list of predators: seagulls are the worst offenders, but rats and crows can also go after them.

We had a sobering lesson in fowl behaviour and the gruesomely literal imposition of the pecking order when we reached the farthest chicken barn. Most free range chickens like this are happy and peaceful enough, but every few years, says Unwin, there’s a savage lot – probably only one or two troublemakers who manage to rile the whole flock. They start fights that end up with one of their number killed, and then eaten (like pigs, chickens are not vegetarians – which we witness less queasily in their fondness for insects). He has been trying to identify the perpetrator but so far hasn’t found it, and in the meantime regularly finds corpses. These chickens are being reared for the Christmas market so will be slaughtered at 16 weeks when they are good and plump, so the problem won’t go on much longer for this group.

The turkeys were numerous and curious. Organic pasture-raised Kelly Bronze turkeys like these command about £12.50 a kilo. They take 6 months to rear and are then hung for 3 weeks. Their flavour, of course, is excellent as a result, and they are free of the medications that intensively farmed turkeys are administered from day one.

Unwin has a lot to say about the differences between organic and intensive farming. When discussing the price of his turkeys, he drew what I thought was a very apt comparison: while people are willing to pay a premium for quality in cars, acknowledging for example that there are good reasons why a Rolls-Royce or Ferrari should cost so much more than an everyday beater: but when food-shopping by price alone as we’ve been taught to do, consumers don’t recognise the comparable difference worth paying for in food. Which is endlessly ironic in this one consumable that we so literally consume.

(In comparison: intensively-farmed Broad-Breasted White turkeys – bred, as we all surely know now, to be so top-heavy they’re unable to breed naturally – are typically brought to slaughter weight at 4 months. Having legs too weak to support their weight, and being reared in overcrowded conditions, they do not develop a normal muscle structure, so the flesh of the Broad-Breasted White is soft and watery (partly due to processing which means they are soaked in a water bath, and may absorb up to 5% water as a result) and heavily oriented to white meat.)