Food

Here's food. We like to eat it, cook it, buy it, grow it, talk about it, write about it. In fact we barely do anything else.


We present to you...

Our very first chapter, online for your downloading pleasure. We published this in November 2007, but it's not the final edit.

Otesha UK Handbook - Food Chapter

Here's what we've written so far, but it's by no means complete.

Step 1: Click on the link above to download the chapter (as a PDF) to your desktop.

Step 2: Flood our inbox with stories about food. They can be about any part of the process from plant to plate - share what people you know are doing, send in great ideas for things we can all do, or tell us how you got into food. We'll post your stories here for the world to see.

UPDATE: A new and improved food chapter is online, along with the rest of the Handbook, here.

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Your stories

Vegan fudge cake and some (less delicious) food facts
Here's a tasty recipe submitted by Sonal Assani, along with some info on pesticides and organic food:

Cake ingredients
200g (8 oz) Organic raising flour
50g (2 oz) Organic soya flour
150g (6 oz) Organic caster sugar
25g (1 oz)  Fair Trade cocoa
1 tsp baking powder
A pinch of salt
1 fresh pod of vanilla seeds
1 tsp of natural orange essence
1/3 tsp a few drops white wine vinegar
100ml 4 oz vegetable oil
225ml 9 oz water

Fudge icing
150g 6 oz icing sugar
40g vegan margarine
100g Fair trade dark chocolate
40ml soya milk

Directions
1. Put self raising flour, soya flour, baby powder, salt and sugar and cocoa in a bowl and mix well.
2. Pour over vegetable oil, vanilla Pods or vanilla essence, organic essence and vinegar
3. Mix with a wooden spoon
4. Cook for 30 minutes at 200c / 1400 F until cooked
5. When the cake has cooled, make the icing. Put the icing ingredients in a pan and by them to boil, stirring. Boil for one minute, then pour into a bowl. Beat the icing while it is cooling so that the lumpy crystals don't form.
6. You can add vanilla essence at this point if you like. Then spread it over the top of your cake and leave it to set.
Easy to make and very tasty.


Benefits of Organic Food

1) Includes improved taste
2) Reduced health risks
3) Efficient irrigation
4) Harmonising relationship with nature
5) Promoting diversity
6) Mainitaining commerce in rural areas

The Environmental Protection Agency now considers the following as potential cancer catalysts:

  • 90% of fungicides
  • 30% of insecticides
  • 60% of herbicides

To protect yourself from pesticides, make sure you buy the freshest veg and fruit in season. If your food isn't organic, then shave the tops and the very outskirts of cabbages, lettuce and other leaf vegetables that may contain pesticide remenants.