Skip to content

food festivals

A Saturday at the Aldeburgh Food Festival

A busy place, the Aldeburgh Food Festival. Only in its third year and utterly mobbed as the organisers sought to top the 15,000 visitors they had last year. I am blessed by friends who had sussed this little corner of foodie heaven out and took me along to see this year’s offerings.

There were some honey-sellers there and we stopped for a short chat. They asked me if the African Bee had been seen in my neighbourhood (nope, not so far, so far as I’ve heard) and told me they’d successfully experimented with the icing sugar method of varroa mite control. They also said that borage had been a great source of nectar up until this year, when the Suffolk growers lost the oil contract to China. So no borage planted, no flowers for the bees, and a great deal less honey. Another blow for monoculture…

We paid a happy visit to Emmett’s meaty stall, where the seller presided over acres of what I hear is gorgeous black (from the treacle cure) bacon, and was dishing out irresistible samples of imported chorizo. We weakened and he handed one over, apologising for having run out of bags, and suggested we walk around with it hanging from the string. I asked about storage – having had a stern lecture from a French sausage seller earlier in the month about the evils of refrigerating dry-cured sausage like this, and our man agrees there is nothing worse for the flavour and texture of the sausage. The best storage for chorizo is (pats stomach); otherwise, hang it from its string in a cool, dry place (my kingdom for a larder). If it gets mouldy, cut the mould off. Consume at a swift but leisurely pace as it will gradually dry out which impairs the flavour somewhat. And makes it hard to slice.

Another old friend: Suffolk Gold cheese (with Suffolk Blue in the background).

On to the celebrity chefs. We caught the end of Tom Aitken

and were sooner into the scrum for a taste of the lobster risotto than this group were. We also got in there while there were still spoons. Hah.

A little later we saw Mark Hix scoring a giant puffball from the man from the Red Poll Beef stand who we’d seen earlier harbouring several of them …

and he explained how you really have to know people to get hold of these monsters as they’re hard to find in the shops (though our local wundershop sometimes has them around this time of year).

Then he sliced a slab off and fried it up to sit under some game he was preparing, with creamed corn, under the watchful gaze and microphones of Tom Parker-Bowles and Matthew Fort.

We had a grisly presentation from Fergus Henderson, working on the pig tail end of his nose-to-tail weekend (he gave a workshop on cooking a pig’s head on the Sunday, which we missed, alas). We were not convinced after sampling the finished product – braised, cooled, coated and pan fried – which just tasted a bit like, well, pan fried fat. But now we can move on and eat something else.

We didn’t choose crepes, although we were able to queue for something else in sight of the beautiful van.

And we dined al fresco. With everyone else. A beautiful day for it…

…and for a walk out to see the Creek Men afterwards.

Finally, home to superbly cooked partridge. Mmmm.

Organic Islands, featuring Percy Schmeiser

The Organic Islands festival took place last weekend, and we went for a sunny Saturday afternoon of tastings and talks and music. Found some Emmer (aka Farro, in Italy) an ancient wheat now being grown for the first time on Vancouver Island.

There were interesting causes to support, like this one where you can register your fruit tree and have others pick and use your fruit if you don’t want all of it.

A lost tree being tormented by small children.

One of the events we wanted to catch was the GE Free BC panel, featuring Yukon farmer Tom Rudge,

Powell River politician Colin Palmer,

activist Josh Brandon from Greenpeace,

and special guest Percy Schmeiser,

whose story I knew from CBC coverage and films like The Future of Food and Life Running Out of Control.

Schmeiser impressed me with his speaking skills. I hadn’t known he was a former MLA as well as a farmer. I did know he was a life-long seed developer who had spent $400,000 and 7 years of his life fighting Monsanto on the grounds of patent infringement when Monsanto found GM (Roundup-Ready) canola growing on Schmeiser’s field in 1998.

The rather alarming issue of GM canola crossing itself with non-GM canola is something Schmeiser talks a lot about: “You can’t contain nature” is his mantra, and the message he dearly wants to deliver to regions tempted to introduce GM crops alongside non-GM.

Canola, a Canadian cross-bred (not genetically-modified) brassica plant that was developed in the 1970s, is an important crop because it is used for vegetable oils (lower in saturated fats than any other oil) and animal feed as well as a rotation crop.

Canola has proven it doesn’t obey corporate laws of ownership and whether through wind, rain, pollen drift, flood or spillage, GM and non-GM canola have interbred right across Canada and pretty much killed the country’s organic production of canola (no GM crops or products are allowed in Canadian organic production).

Not only does being GM make the contaminated crops unexportable to the many countries which do not allow GM imports, it also – from Schmeiser’s experience – makes those crops, and their seeds, the property of Monsanto, since you have, willingly or not, and no matter to what degree, ended up growing a Monsanto-engineered plant. This is anathema to farmers who have traditionally saved seed from their own crops to plant the next year. But if you grow GM plants, Canadian patent law prevents you from saving and sowing or trading or selling that seed, since it includes Monsanto technology and is therefore not yours to do with as you please. To reinforce this message, farmers who buy the seed are required to sign Technology Use Agreements which forbid farmers from re-using seed, and require that they purchase new seed each year

Schmeiser also talked about the promises Monsanto had made: higher crop yields, better nutritional content, decreased use of pesticides (insecticides and herbicides), an end to world hunger. Instead, the crop yields from GM crops are lower, nutritional values from industrial crops are demonstrably down, and the potency of today’s Roundup is 4x what it was ten years ago because glyphosate-resistant strains of weeds (superweeds) have evolved; the content of new herbicides currently used in Saskatchewan includes Dioxins, which have toxic effects on human health and are largely passed to humans through the food supply.

Standing ovation…

Also discussed by the panel was the point about there being no research about GM crops aside from what Monsanto itself funds, selects and publishes, and how that just might be a problem in terms of credibility and human safety.

The GE Free BC campaign aims to make BC a GE free region. They’re also linked with campaigns to promote that seemingly elusive goal of requiring food containing genetically engineered substances to be labelled in this country, and another worth-while movement to ban Terminator technology, which would allow corporations to genetically sterilise their crops, ensuring farmers would have no choice but to purchase seed from them each year.

After that we needed a hot dog, from the eternally popular organic hot dog stand where we managed to get the last three hot dog buns on offer for the day.

Then we wandered beneath the attractive drystone arches of the Green Drinkery

for a glass of local wine

and a prime location to hear former Victoria resident Jeremy Fisher play us out.

Biodynamite

Saturday I overcame the weekend handicaps imposed by what are generously described as “improvements” on the Underground, and managed to arrive at Victoria coach station in time to welcome my classmate Jenn to London. Off we sped on the trusty number 11 bus, alighting beneath the shadow of St. Paul’s and walked unswayingly across the Millennium Bridge, and along the waterfront until we reached Borough Market,


in good time for the launch of Biodynamic Food Fortnight. We managed to source some fantastic snacks before events began: a toasted Montgomery cheddar cheese sandwich

(watching the cheddar raclette being assembled

made me so faint I was forced to take a native oyster or two from a seventh generation oyster seller.

Revived, we ascended many stairs into the massively crowded Borough Market boardroom. The celebration was all around biodynamic farming methods, which we’d heard about on our trip to Crete. Basically it is to do with sustainable agricultural practices – including respecting the natural seasons of what you grow; organic – chemical free – farming; humane animal husbandry; and some extras that have to do with moon cycles and spirituality which believers say puts the farming back into the earth’s natural cycles. It arises from the work of Rudolf Steiner.

With listeners spilling out the door we had a couple of lively welcomes from guest chefs Michel Roux (Jr.) and Cyrus Todiwala. Roux extolled at some length the beauty of the biodynamic produce and meat he uses, concluding that it was for him a science of respect for the living things we consume. And then Todiwala gave an endearingly sprawling talk which tied together biodynamic farming, Zoroastrianism, poisoned vultures and the omnivores of India. (The poisoned vultures theme was interesting: he was speaking about the use of the anti-inflammatory drug Diclofenac, which is administered to farm animals and which poisons the kidneys of vultures, whose ecological role includes consuming carrion so that wild dogs – who can spread rabies – don’t. He didn’t mention the fact that farmers also deliberately poison vultures, believing them to spread disease among their livestock; and they can be accidentally poisoned by hunters using poisoned bait for other purposes)

We were by this time perishing from heat and overcrowding and too long standing, so we plunged back into the market, which – holy overcrowding! – by now looked like this:

And pushed our way along, glimpsing wistfully a Comté cheese stand…

until we reached the oysters,

where we knocked a couple more back.

Then on to a whirlwind tour of Covent Garden, including of course Neals Yard Dairy, and a bite to eat at Food For Thought. And then through Chinatown and off into the wilds of Kensington to have a browse through Whole Foods, which – after the high street outside, and Borough Market, and just about everywhere else in London – really wasn’t that crowded. Lots and lots of everything there, but we left relatively unscathed.

Still Cheeselessly in Parma

If you’re a believer in signs, when you read my tale you will perhaps understand why I gave up my attempts to get to Cheese this morning.

First, the friend who was going to come with me had pulled out before I left London. Next, I found out on Thursday that the plans to visit a winery Friday morning with another classmate had changed – the rental car wasn’t rented after all and there was no way for me to get there without leaving on Thursday and staying an extra night — somewhere. I was busy to-ing and fro-ing with packages to the post office and various other errands and just couldn’t manage it, so decided to go on Saturday. Then arose the possibility of getting a ride with someone else to Bra on Saturday morning, but that fell through on Friday. So I went to the train station Friday night and bought a ticket for a train leaving at 5.53 this morning, which would have got me to Bra at around 10.

Got up 4.30, walked to the train station and arrived I guess at about 5.51 – with just enough time to reach the platform and watch my train pull out, in the full knowledge that the next train wouldn’t get me there until an hour after the start time of the talk I most wanted to hear.

I took all this to mean the cosmos was indicating my presence was not required at Cheese this year, so I turned around and walked back home, since it was still too early for the buses to be running. Well at least I got my exercise. And was spared a three-stage, four hour train trip each way. The way things were going, chances are excellent that I would have missed one of those connections and ended up late anyway.

I don’t know how many of you out there have tried to plan trips using Trenitalia‘s rather good website, but it does have one major flaw, which is that it doesn’t tell you the ultimate destination of the train you will be catching/connecting with or the platform you’ll need, which means you have to figure that out on the fly by checking the departure list posted on the platform, and then find the platform listed, and hope it hasn’t changed. A lot to manage in a strange station with sometimes only three or four minutes between trains.

Think I’ll go out and buy myself some… cheese.

Pausing in Parma

So I’m back in Parma, bracing myself for an earrrrrly train tomorrow. I’m going to Bra, which is not so very far but an absolute pig to get to by train. Four hours or so. Oh well. The destination will, I hope, be worth the pain of getting there: Cheese, glorious cheese.

I got here on Wednesday afternoon: left London where the generally fine weather I’d been grateful for for most of my stay so far had turned cold and grey with spitting rain. I sprinted down the street and got onto the airport bus with about three minutes to spare, made it to lovely Stansted in good time, and then killed it in various queues. The check-in queue was enlivened by a frequent occurrence at Stansted, namely the embarrassed departure of a pair of English holidaymakers who thought they were in the queue for Palma, Majorca. The endlessly unhelpful airport staff of course know all about the confusion – the word Palma is totally indistinguishable from Parma in the English accent over a loudspeaker – but make no concession to the weakness of travellers when making flight announcements. What fun!

My heart sank when I saw the number of Italian teenagers boarding the flight. We used to have to share buses to Colorno with this species on occasion, and in quantity they are among the loudest, most obnoxious and charmless creatures that walk this earth. But other than bolting out of their seats only seconds after a rather bouncy landing (and after a stern voice-of-god reprimand they hastily sat down again) they were surprisingly, gratifyingly well behaved.

Our welcome gift at the micro-airport was at the luggage carousel. The light started flashing, the beep sounded, and through the rubber curtain emerged… the guy who’d waved us into the passport control. He waved and smiled and then disappeared out the other curtain. I do love the way life can be so weirdly casual here.

All else in Parma is calm and quiet.

I have made lightning strikes on some of my favourite eateries – so happy everything is open again! Lunched at Sorelle Picchi and supped at La Croce di Malta (gorgeous torte of melanzane followed by a layered thing with potato and anchovy – interesting but a bit of a waste of a perfectly good anchovy I thought)

The meals have given me occasion to think about the matter of service in restaurants though. I’m thinking is it better to have friendly but inept service, which is more or less the case if you are recognised here, or snotty but correct service. Though usually the snotty service is also bad. So I’m settling for friendly. But it grieves me to see good restaurants losing points with new diners through simple ineptitude.

That having been said, I must praise once again my favourite chef in town, Davide di Dio, whose well deserved holiday seems to have given him some new verve; and I was pleased in the interests of his continued health and sanity to see he had more helpers on board at Ristorante Mosaiko. I hope they can keep up with him. I had a starter of Baccala on a wedge of what looked like a crouton

but turned out to be artichoke, drizzled with balsamico, yum: and I can honestly say I now see the point of Baccala. Then on to a primo piatto of prawns wrapped in crunchy blankets – Involtino di Gamberi Croccanti

with a puree of fennel and lemon cream. Perfect. And then Rombo in crosto di patate alla zucca:

some beautiful turbot, perfectly cooked in a potato crust, docked on a few perfect roast potatoes in a thick orange sea of pumpkin soup. Since it was a night for overindulgence, and as I hadn’t had tiramisu since arriving in Italy, I thought I might as well. Very very nice. I went home well fed and looking forward to my next, and probably final, visit in November.

Tonight will be a quiet night of packing and resting.

More Oxford

(**This post was lurking in my unposted half-finished back-(b)log and pertains to two previous posts from September 2007: apologies if it reaches and confuses current subscribers!)

We went round the mulberry tree on Sunday.

I don’t believe I’d ever eaten a mulberry, let alone picked one off a tree. I was surprised. They seemed very fragile, perishable nuggets, difficult to get hold of at the perfect moment of ripeness. Once ripe, these ones at least seemed to be already mouldy. Past their harvest date or inherently flawed? Further research clearly indicated..

The Sunday morning sessions were really interesting. I started with the panel on Foie Gras, poppies and cacao.

The Foie Gras Fracas: Sumptuary Law as Animal Welfare? presented by Cathy K. Kaufman, discussed the ethics of foie gras (duck) production as practised in New York state. Her starting premise was that “killing animals for food is morally acceptable provided that animals not suffer unnecessarily in their rearing or slaughtering”.

The argument she presented was more or less the same as I’d heard from a former chef. She observed that migratory birds have an inbuilt behaviour to store fats for the journey, and to do this practice a form of gluttony that is compatible with being fed the volume of grain that producers provide them; and that the force-feeding of birds, gavage, has been practiced for millenia: it appears on Egyptian tomb-paintings reckoned to date back to 2500 BCE. She also observed that tube-feeding is not a world away from the regurgitation/throat feeding practiced by parent birds on their young (i.e. although we would not want a tube down our throats, it’s not so different from having your mom’s beak pushed down there). The birds Kaufman was writing about were visited by veterinarians who found them generally less stressed and in better living conditions than factory-farmed fowl, as I guess you’d expect when they are raised in smaller numbers. Jeffrey Steingarten has a good piece on the same theme.

In Poppy: Potent yet Frail – Aylin Öney Tan gave the Turkish history of poppy production and the impact of foreign interference in local agricultures. She dated opium poppy cultivation back to Mesopotamia in 4000 BC. Her comments on the physical similarity between poppy seed heads and pomegranates were a revelation, as she showed a few illustrations that could be seen quite differently if you mentally swapped plants. She talked about the culinary uses of poppy seeds: in breads and baking, in both savoury and sweet dishes, and as a cooking oil, which contains no opiates. The oil is also used by artists and the paint industry because of its unique drying qualities. She pointed out that it’s a plant used in its entirety by peasant farmers, including the use of poppy seed pulp (left over from oil pressing) as animal feed (now that would make for happy animals..?). Although poppy production resumed in 1974, after being banned due to international pressure, the legal hoops that villagers have to go through limit the numbers of those willing to cultivate it.

Cacao in Brazil or the History of a Crime by Marcia Zoladz was a bit of a tangled web, covering an example of market manipulation in the late eighties and early nineties. Basically it was the story of a group that was aiming to change the economic and political power balance in Brazil by buying up cacao plantations and then destroying them by infesting them with a fungus known as witches’ broom (Crinipellis perniciosa). The infected plantations would then infect healthy ones and cripple the whole economy. Cacao was always an export crop, so there are question marks about its value in a healthy and self-sustaining economy. Brazil’s complicated social history – where slavery was abolished but replaced by a kind of indentured labour system – was part of the problem, and the reason for the act, as well.

Sunday lunch was organic chicken: local, seasonal foods, very good and extremely beautiful.

A further postscript: The papers presented at the 2007 “Food and Morality” themed Oxford Symposium are now available from Prospect Books.