knot your regular apple crumble

Two words to strike fear into the heart of any gardener: Japanese knotweed. This is a plant unparalleled in its thuggishness, more invasive than the Romans and so difficult to eradicate that it is actually illegal to put it in your dustbin.

Fallopia Japonica was brought to the UK by the Victorians who liked its ornamental appearance but did not realise that their descendants would forever curse them for introducing a plant that can grow a metre in a month and has the power to displace tarmac and even force its way through brickwork.

Huge sums of money are spent by local councils attempting to kill off this brute but it takes a place like Incredible Edible Todmorden to find a way of putting it to good use. Up at Incredible Farm, a brilliant social enterprise that is, among other things, training young people to become market gardeners, they’re harvesting the knotweed shoots and cooking them up for a new kind of gastro experience.

Helena Cook, herbalist extraordinaire and the brains behind Todmorden’s fabulous apothecary garden, goes so far as to call Japanese knotweed ‘the new superfood’. According to her, it has been used for centuries in eastern medicines to treat a range of ailments from heart problems to liver disease. Pharmaceutical companies use it to produce resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant that can slow the ageing process and reduce age-related illnesses.

New shoots of Japanese knotweed look a little like a pink version of asparagus but the taste is similar to rhubarb. I’ve tried them lightly fried in olive oil, which was OK, but tonight I thought I’d try one of Helena’s suggestions: a fruit crumble.

I had a cooking apple that needed using up, so I mixed that with some freshly picked Japanese knotweed shoots and Demerara sugar, scattered a crumble top over and baked it for about half an hour. It was absolutely delicious.

This is the recipe as best as I can remember it. The crumble top is in ounces because it’s my mum’s formula that she’s been using for more than half a century and to convert it into grams would seem a bit sacrilegious somehow.

Japanese knotweed and apple crumble

 Base
About 250 grams Japanese knotweed shoots
One medium cooking apple
About two heaped tablespoons of sugar, preferably Demerara for the crunch

Topping
5 ounces plain flour
2 1/2 ounces butter
2 ounces soft brown sugar

::Cut the knotweed into pieces about 4 cm long. Peel, core and slice the apple, mix with the knotweed and sugar and place in an ovenproof dish.
::Whizz the flour and butter in a food processor and mix in the sugar. Scatter on top of the fruit and bake in a medium oven for about 30 minutes.
::Serve warm, preferably with custard. Crème fraiche is good too but lacks the comfort factor.

 

Incredible Farm’s apprentice Jed wrote a nice blog about Japanese knotweed here. I’m looking forward to hearing what ingenious recipes Helena comes up with for Jed’s harvest.

Rules for disposing of Japanese knotweed can be found here.

And as Jed says: ‘The same caution should be exercised consuming Fallopia japonica as to other plants that contain oxalic acid.’ See www.netplaces.com/foraging-guide/becoming-plant-wise/allergies.htm

wild, free and not very safe

‘The future is given to those who are experienced in groaning. The future is denied to those who have been cynical and calloused and self-deceiving enough to rejoice in the present ordering and are unable to grieve about the ruin toward which the royal community is headed.’

Walter Brueggemann The Prophetic Imagination

 

I should have known from Kelley Nikondeha’s challenging and profoundly thoughtful blog that joining her reading group would be something that shook me up.

But I just wasn’t prepared to be affected as deeply as I have been by this month’s read: The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann.

I have been a Christian for more than twenty years but by the end of chapter two I felt like the disciples who, when they caught a glimpse of the radical reversal that Jesus had brought into the world, cried out: ‘But who then can be saved?’

With ruthless clarity, Brueggemann lays bare the hypocrisy, the smugness and the numbness of our dominant culture. And here’s the thing: for me he also laid bare my own complicity in that culture.

Brueggemann gives us a portrait of a God who is wild and free, who stands opposed to the dominant powers, which need us to be numb consumers if they are to continue to control us.

As much as I hate the consumer culture, a wild and free God scares me if I’m honest. I like order; I like to know where the limits are; I like to keep things well contained.

What’s more, as a white middle class woman in the rich west I have a pretty strong interest in things continuing as they are. As crazy as it seems, I hadn’t understood that before, not like I do now.

In reading Brueggemann I saw there is a choice to be made. People like me who are comfortable and powerful can cling stubbornly to the status quo, even as we claim to want it to change. We can keep ourselves at one remove from the real suffering there is in the world. We are so affluent and so satiated that we can, literally, eat our way around pain.

But this choice comes at a terrible price. It’s the price of being only half alive. It’s the price of dulling our emotions, narrowing our vision and drastically limiting our entire conception of what it means to be a human being.

It means settling for optimism instead of finding real hope; being content with superficial relationships instead of finding true community; worshipping a tame and benign deity instead of daring to engage with a wild God of furious love.

As I wrote this post I realised I had heard a version of this message about the need to choose hundreds of times. It usually goes something like this: you are a sinner and you need a saviour.

But I have only ever heard it communicated in such a privatised, individualistic way that it never sank deep inside me as it did this month while reading Brueggemann.

And very often I have heard it communicated from inside an institution that – like me – appears to have a lot more in common with the static, controlling, dominant culture than it does with what Brueggemann describes as an ‘alternative community’ – one that makes room for the freedom of God ‘to surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion’.

Brueggemann is clear that for people like me the alternative to the status quo is not easy. For him there is no real hope until we have faced the desperation of the world.  There is no new life until we have understood that the culture that brings us so many goodies and eases our path though life is nothing less than a culture of death. It is not possible to face these things without entering into grief.

And yet, and yet – beyond the grief there is true hope, the promise of a completely different future, a future characterised by amazement and joy, expressed in dancing and new songs, free from the weary hopelessness that characterises so much of human life.

I found Brueggemann’s writing about hope to be the most difficult part of this book and I need to return to it. But what I did understand is this: that it is rooted in the reality of a God who is making all things radically new and who wants to include everyone in that newness, no matter how complicit they have been in the cynicism and injustice of the dominant culture.

It’s the hope that rings out through the songs of the Bible, defiant songs that tell of God lifting up the humble, bringing down rulers from their thrones and filling the hungry with good things.

It’s wild and it’s scary and it doesn’t always look like good news to those of us who are rich and powerful.

But I want it.

 

 

seed freedom

I am packing up seeds today. One envelope contains too many for me so I am posting a few to my mum. We will smile when the seedlings poke through the earth in a few weeks’ time, each thinking of the other witnessing the same everyday miracle, connected through the shared act of growing food from the same source, even though at the moment we live far apart.

This sharing works horizontally as I post the little packages to her at the other end of the country. It is also a vertical process, connecting me to the past as I remember the way she taught me to sow: lay a bamboo cane on the soil; twist it a bit to make a groove; water the groove; sow the seed sparingly; cover with soil; do not water on top. A mantra she learnt from her mother and who knows when it began in our family?

This year my daughters, both of them facing the challenge of living well on a student budget, also want to grow food. If they move into their new homes in time, I will help each of them prepare a vegetable patch. I will take a bamboo cane and fast-growing salad seeds: mizuna, rocket, lettuce, land cress. I will show them how to twist a groove in the soil. I will remind them: water before you sow and not after.

This practice of passing on skills from generation to generation is as old as the human race. It goes hand in hand with the sharing of seed. It is part of the complex web of ways in which we nurture ourselves from one year to the next, exchanging recipes, comparing growing notes, meeting around tables for our rites of passage: birthdays, weddings, baptisms, wakes.

You could say it is part of what it means to be human.

The preciousness of seed is written into ancient stories from all parts of the world. Right at the beginning of the Bible, for example, we are told that God gave seed as a gift to every living thing:

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

Genesis 1: 29-30

Seed is sacred.

The sharing and spreading of seed, the saving of it from one harvest as an investment in the next – these practices are a gift from God that bind us to the land and to one another.

That is why I believe the huge corporations that patent seeds so that it is actually illegal to save and share them are committing a terrible profanity.

It is why I think the bureaucrats who want to dictate which seeds we can and cannot use are, at best, a paradigm for the fools who rush in where angels fear to tread. And people who are ruled by fools do not have much to look forward to.

But I am worried that most of us who will be affected by this are asleep.

In our little corner of history we have decided we prefer the hard work of food production to take place where we cannot see it. As a result we are ignorant in ways that would be unbelievable for most people at most times, in most places.

How do we think we will eat if we allow a few corporations to increase their already tight control of food production? What do we imagine we will grow when the legislators have abolished our heritage seeds, the very ones that might help us adjust to the challenges of a changing climate?

What do we think will happen to our relationships to one another and the earth if seed is no longer freely available but yet another commodity to ration, market, hoard and fight over?

We should be scared but instead we are sleepwalking.

We need to recognise seed patenting and seed banning for what they are: acts of sacrilege, attacks on our freedom and autonomy, a kind of war against humanity by the inhuman corporations and bureaucracies who want to trick us into thinking that ordinary people do not have the ability to feed one another.

And we need to fight back. I think we should be linking arms, mother to daughter, father to son, all the growers and the beekeepers, everyone who wants to know how to make food happen, all the people who still understand that the right attitude towards seeds is one of reverence.

For many of us the counter-offensive must begin in acknowledging our ignorance, whether that is ignorance of food production or lack of information about the way corporations are taking control of the global food supply.

Then we must resolve to learn.

The film Seed Freedom from the Gaia Foundation and the African Biodiversity Network is a good start. It’s only about 25 minutes long.

So is simply growing something, even it’s just a few pea shoots on the windowsill. 

And if you live in the EU, please, please contact your commissioner about this potentially catastrophic law they will be considering on 6 May.

Frog days

The frogs came this week. They are reclusive little things normally. Sometimes I hear them croaking from the crevices in our dry stone wall, or I might get a sudden jolt when I am weeding and one leaps unexpectedly from under a patch of damp foliage.

Once a year, though, they come into full view. For a day or two our tiny pond, less than a metre across, becomes a writhing, splashing melee of copulating amphibians. We counted fifteen on Tuesday, although I’m fairly sure that should be an even number.

Frog Day, as we call it, is the start of spring for our family, that and the wild garlic and celandines bursting into leaf down by the stream. Sometimes we manage to take photographs. Yesterday I was looking back through the albums from previous years and was amazed to see how regularly the frogs appear. The picture at the top was taken on Frog Day 2010 – it was 18 March, just like this year. Our other pictures are dated 13 March 2007 and 15 March 2009.

Frog Day 2009

It thrills me, the thought of these shy, mysterious creatures responding to some inner prompting and arriving in the pond almost as though they had marked the day on the calendar. I wonder about the ponds in nearby gardens: are they also experiencing the same orgiastic celebration of the changing season?

I feel connected to these frogs, for we share a common territory; they are mating in a pond that we dug as a family, sheltering in a wall that Julian built one chilly Sunday afternoon a few years back. And yet I know so little about them and understand even less.

I am especially sensitive to this dissonance this year, this sense of being both connected to the garden and yet through my ignorance also alienated from it. I read a book called Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible by Ellen Davis, and it turned out to be one of those texts that moves into in your brain, unsettling old ways of thinking and forcing your mental furniture into new arrangements.

I knew the Hebrew Scriptures were permeated through and through with references to the land but if I ever thought about that at all, I assumed that was because they were written in a pre-industrial age. Davis exposed the superficiality of that.

Her book showed me that it goes far, far deeper and that the Bible speaks of God always intending there to be a kind of kinship between people and the land. She demonstrates how in Biblical thinking the relationships we have with one another, with God and with the soil are all interrelated: in the Biblical story, violation of the land leads to the destabilising of everything else we depend on.

Davis’s teaching made me see for the first time that our little garden is profoundly important: it is land and in substance it does not differ from the grandest scenery you can imagine. The frogs, along with the ladybirds, the woodlice and every other facet of this patch are part of a vast ecosystem that connects them and us to the rest of the created order and what we do with it really matters.

In Biblical terms, it is a gift and we have a responsibility to it. Gardening is not just a hobby, something I pick up and put down according to my whims, but an outworking of discipleship.

In practical terms, as industrial agriculture continues to swallow the countryside, suburban gardens are rapidly becoming one of the most important habitats we have. For example, a report by the charity Froglife in 2007 found that eighty per cent of ponds in the countryside were of poor or very poor quality, often because of nitrogen-run off from arable land.

Davis’s book has spurred me to take our garden more seriously this year than I have in the past.  I want to work our land properly, finding ways to make it as productive and eco-friendly as possible, pushing through my natural reluctance to go outside when it is cold or wet and facing down the the boredom that sometimes sweeps through me when the garden is yet again full of weeds and the vegetable plants failing to produce as I hoped they would.

I am not saying we will save the world just by cultivating our gardens. But I do think paying serious attention to the land on our doorsteps is foundational to responding to the environmental crisis. Another book I read recently, Norman Wirzba’s Food and Faith, puts it well:

Gardening work creates in us an indispensable ‘imaginary’ that enables us to think, feel, and act in the world with greater awareness for life’s complexity and depth. Gardens are the concentrated and focused places where people discover and learn about life’s creativity and interdependence.

I think a lot of us need to develop this ‘imaginary’. In her book, Davis asks why we in the industrialised world are not ‘stricken to the core’ by the way we are relentlessly despoiling the earth. I think part of the answer is that we have become so desensitised to the natural world that we simply do not appreciate the enormity of what is happening.

One way of recovering that sensitivity is, I think, simply to get outside and grow stuff. I am hopeful that by engaging more deeply with our garden I will grow too and be able to live more intelligently at this critical time.

I am worried about the frogs, by the way. For two days after they came the night frost was so hard that the pond froze over. Then it snowed for 36 hours solid. I have taken it for granted that we will have tadpoles in the pond every spring. Now I am not so sure.

identity crises

When our oldest daughter was about five, she brought a pile of pictures home from school that she had to sort into ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ things. At first I thought it was a bit basic – surely every five-year-old knows that a cat and a car are fundamentally different, that one is alive and the other is not.

Then I remembered how my daughter would have long conversations with her toy trains, and how upset my friend had been when her young son pushed their cat down the stairs.

Perhaps the boundaries aren’t that obvious after all, at least not when you’re five.

For adults, though, it should be different, shouldn’t it? We would look away embarrassed if we saw a grown woman chatting to a toy, and we would be scandalised to learn of a man throwing a cat down the stairs.

And yet there have been some food-related stories recently that have made me wonder whether as adults we aren’t becoming increasingly confused about the fundamental difference between things that are alive and things that are not.

Exmoor ponies*

The uproar when it was disclosed thatsome burgers sold as ‘beef’ actually contained up to 29% horse was, for sure, partly about the fact that somewhere along the line the product had been dishonestly labelled. But there was something more visceral about it too. Because horse is not habitually eaten in the UK I think some of the shock and outrage had to do with the fact that people had to face the fact that burgers contain, um, dead animals.

We have largely managed to hide the connection between eating and death from ourselves. Especially in a supermarket, meat products are sanitised, neatly arranged on plastic trays and covered with cling film.

When I stopped buying supermarket meat and began to get it from the butcher instead, I was at first slightly revolted by the smell of raw meat and the fact that some of the butcher’s knives had blood on them.

Goodness knows how I would have reacted if I had seen a pig being slaughtered to provide me with bacon.

Actually I’m glad I don’t have to be present when animals are killed but I am increasingly worried about the profound effect on our lives that is the result of being so disconnected from the realities of food production.

Food is very big business indeed and it benefits the global corporations to foster this disconnect, to hypnotise adult consumers so that they become like kindergarten pupils, unsure whether what they eat belongs in the ‘living’ or ‘non-living’ pile.

Because if we remembered that food is life, we might get a bit uneasy about it being treated as a commodity.

We might think it was a bit weird to treat something that once had life in it – a hen or a tomato, say - as though it were just another widget on an assembly line.

The week before the burger scandal, people were shocked by a report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, which highlighted the incredible waste in our modern food system. There was, rightly, a particular outrage over the fact that in the UK up to 30 per cent of vegetables are thrown away because they don’t meet supermarkets’ strict standards on physical appearance.

But this kind of waste is inevitable if we buy into the deception that apples are just another consumer product akin to shoes or cars, rather than something that has to die in order for us to carry on living.

The shiny, uniform displays in the supermarket give the strong impression that apples emerge ready-made from a factory. They encourage us to forget that apples are alive, that they once grew in an orchard, that they have been wonderfully transformed from seed to flower to fruit as a result of complex interactions between soil and insects and weather, combined with the expertise of farmers and growers.

Future apples **

If we think of food production as something linear, like a manufacturing process, then we start to lose touch with the reality that living things – including ourselves – are part of a complex web in which all the parts depend on one another to function properly.

This lack of connection impoverishes our lives in all kinds of ways and has alarming implications for the way we live together in the world.

The food giants like to lull us into a kind of dozy inattentiveness that stops us from asking too many questions about what we are eating. If anything good can come out of these recent scandals, it might be that they jolt us back to reality and encourage us to think more carefully about how our meals end up on our plates.

* Picture by David Masters. Used under Creative Commons licence; ** Picture by Richard Wood. Used under Creative Commons Licence

knitting with chocolate

My husband has a proper Guernsey sweater, given to him years ago by his stepmother, a proud native of the island. You would hardly know he’d worn it, but it’s his go-to garment whenever he has to be out in the cold.

Detail of traditional Guernsey sweater

Like most islands, Guernsey has a strong fishing and seafaring tradition and this traditional style of sweater developed out of local sailors’ need for a garment that would resist fierce winds and freezing temperatures. It works because of the tight knit of the fabric, which traps warmth against the body even in the most ferocious weather.

During our Christmas shopping experiment, when we tried to use more local shops and avoid the retail giants that usually dominate our spending, I was reminded that we often draw on textile-related language to describe social interaction. We talk about ‘the fabric of society’ and about a ‘close knit community’. We might speak of a relationship ‘unravelling’, and of our hope that it can be ‘patched up’. Or we might say sadly that a group is ‘coming apart at the seams’.

The start of the experiment was quite hard. I hadn’t realised how much longer it would take to visit local shops than to click through a list on the Internet. I’d forgotten how much I hate struggling for a parking space, and how much worse shopping is when it’s bitterly cold and raining and your hands are so full of bags that you can’t carry your umbrella.

But as time went on, it was thoughts about social fabric that dominated. One story will serve as an example.

Late in 2011 I gathered sloes to turn into sloe gin and when December 2012 came around I realised I could decant the gin to use for gifts.

Blackthorn flowers spotted in the lanes near our home in April

Sloes ripening on the same bush in October

The crimson of sloe gin is glorious and I had a wonderful time pouring it into bottles and inhaling the astringent aroma of juniper (and yes, OK, having the odd sip to make sure it was fit for use).

Finding I could not bear to chuck away the gin-soaked berries, I did a quick internet search and uncovered a recipe for sloe gin chocolates.

We are blessed with a fabulous chocolate shop just two minutes from our house so I nipped along and asked the lovely owner for a packet of Montezuma’s giant chocolate buttons. Montezuma is a brilliant company, a shining example in an area of trade that tends to be even more exploitative than most, and the chocolate tastes just amazing. I mentioned to the owner that I was planning to melt them to mix with my left over sloes and she asked if she could try one when I had finished.

Making the chocolates was as easy as could be and the result quite delicious, although if I did the recipe again, I’d probably omit the orange zest as it was a little overpowering. They were also a great accompaniment to the sloe gin gifts.

Sloe gin and sloe gin chocolates ready to be given to a friend at Christmas

It was lovely to take a couple of chocolates round to the shop for the owner to try and I was rather proud that she liked them. Most of all, though, I enjoyed the strengthening of the connection between us (she recently introduced me to a colleague as ‘the sloe gin chocolate lady’).

How strange that we can be geographically close to people and yet not connect with them. What is a neighbourhood, really, if the people in it do not make links with each other?

In the book I’m reading, Norman Wirzba’s Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, Wirzba talks about the deadening effect of ‘impersonal shopping’, a perfect description of shopping at an out of town store or a large internet retailer. ‘Our affections wither in the face of so much anonymity,’ he writes. ‘We slowly lose the ability to be alive and responsive to the world.

‘Rather than interacting with a place and making deep, abiding connections, we become more and more passengers, always going through, but hardly into, a place.’

My interaction at the chocolate shop might seem like a small thing but I believe it is bit by bit, through connections like these, that our communities can be strengthened – just as the resilient fabric of the Guernsey sweater consists of tiny stitches, constantly repeated.

The occasional inconvenience of using local, independent shops seems a small thing in comparison with the benefits, especially at a time of global economic uncertainty.

After all, when the weather looks threatening, a tight-knit Guernsey sweater is a much better thing to have in your wardrobe than something loosely woven and mass produced.

one word for 2013

Can you really choose just one word as a focus for an entire year? In the last few days a positive rash of ‘words for 2013′ has been erupting all over the blogosphere, thanks mainly to this link-up. I read a few and realised that in many ways having one word as a touchstone, a prism through which to view life for the following twelve months, is a whole lot better than making a heap of resolutions and then forgetting them.

I prayed a bit and found there was a word that kept nudging me and just wouldn’t go away.

The word was HOPE. And it made my heart sink.

Oh no, I thought, hope is what you need when times get really tough. I must be thinking of this word because I’m going to have a hard year. Um, can I have a different word please?

But I kept seeing the word everywhere and as I mulled it over it began to make sense. I thought of all the reading I’ve been doing about the state of the environment and in particular about the way our busted food system continues to wreak havoc on the earth and in the lives of individuals.

It’s hard to pick from the abundance of grim facts out there, but here’s a couple that I came across just yesterday.

• In 2012, China bought up sixty per cent of the world’s soya beans and fed them all to pigs (story here). I’m not having a go at China in particular – for years the west has been destroying virgin rainforest in order to farm cattle for our beef addiction.
• In Ethiopia, a prime target for foreign land acquisitions yet also a major food aid recipient, an acre of land can be leased for less than $1 per year. (See this factsheet from the Earth Policy Institute.)

The statistics seem overwhelming. How can we respond to injustice and stupidity on such a massive scale?

We can despair – the opposite of hope – and there is a certain logic to that, but it achieves nothing and makes our lives meaningless.

We can ignore it. It’s easy enough in the midst of a busy and often anxious life: deadlines to meet, shopping to do, family to care for. But it’s the equivalent of sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting ‘la, la, la’. It changes nothing and sooner or later people will tell us we look stupid.

Or we can hope.

peony shoots: hope of glory

In 2013 I am choosing hope. This is quite a discipline. I am a natural pessimist with a tendency to depression. But I am choosing hope because it’s only through hope that things ever change.

I am choosing hope because I have seen, for example, how a handful of committed individuals set up an amazing movement called Incredible Edible Todmorden (motto: we don’t do negative) and now their town is being transformed from post-industrial decline to a place with a burgeoning local food economy that is building real community and creating proper jobs.

I am choosing hope because I believe the tomb was empty on Easter Day and that God is still active in the world, bringing good out of evil and hope out of despair.

As Tom Wright puts it: ‘Hope is what you get when you suddenly realise that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.’ (From Surprised by Hope. This book changed my life, no exaggeration.)

I am choosing hope because I believe that with this God it is never too late to change.

 

2013? Bring it on.