This month, whilst the freshest, crunchiest, fruitiest, deliciousest, localest produce is in abundance, we challenge you to hold a seasonal feast.
Find a friend with an allotment or a neighbour growing in their garden and beg some excess off them (we can almost guarantee that they’ll have more courgettes than they know what to do with). Visit the market and buy up as much British produce as you can carry home. Scramble in the brambles for some blackberries. Take all your bundles home and invite your people over for a feast of plenty.
We are heading towards The End of Days, and you’d better get yourself an allotment an unexpected piece of wisdom from that great environmentalist Jeremy Clarkson.
The book includes tips for safe and sustainable foraging and recipes from the Invisible Food Project.
We hope the recipe book will inspire you to get out there and forage. Foraging can be an amazing source of local, healthy, sustainable food for free. We also think that getting people outside, getting connected to their local green spaces and observing the nature around them no matter how urban they are, can only be a good thing.
If you like this you’ll love Otesha’s Wild Food Cycles, where we take an intrepid band of individuals on a cycle around London’s parks and impart our wild food knowledge at stops along the way, the ride ends with everyone getting together and enjoying a freshly foraged meal.
“Sitting between art and activism, performance and protest, this year’s festival is a chance to be part of artist led actions; tell your own revolutionary story, help eradicate an invasive species, go on a mass bingo bike ride, ask an expert about the future or exchange your own personal and political views for a free haircut.”
The festival kicks off on Sunday 12th June with Cycle Sunday at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney. We’ll be there leading a Wild Food Cycle from Dalston to the Lea Valley. The Wild Food Cycle is inspired by the work of the Invisible Food Project, which brings people together in their local green spaces to hunt for wild food, which they then cook and eat together. We too will be exploring urban green spaces, foraging and sharing food.
We’ve roped in Adam Weymouth, a walker, writer and storyteller to accompany us on this walk. Adam recently spent 8 months walking to Istanbul and is interested in slow travel, the hospitality of strangers, plant folklore and being nourished (literally) by a journey. Hopefully he’s going to tell us a story or two.
There may (or may not) also be drawing, sunny weather and the discovery of amazing things. There will definitely be walking, talking and eating.
If you want to join the Wild Food Cycle but you don’t, can’t or won’t cycle, contact jo@otesha.org.uk to arrange meeting us for the forage, which will all be done on foot. Otherwise meet us, astride your bike, at the Arcola Theatre at 3.30pm.
There will be a trailer load of other bike-themed events on the 12th, from pedal powered freegan smoothies, to bike customising and maintenance.
To celebrate World Fair Trade Day on Saturday 14th May, the Fairtrade Foundation (in collaboration with international Fairtrade licensing organisations) have created this short film, A Fair Story. It’s as sweet as a Fairtrade chocolate bar with the production values of the finest Fairtrade coffee.
The Wild Food Cycle is taking place on the 4th of June from 10.30am to 2.30pm. Join us and you can expect a day in and out of the saddle learning, discovering and eating all the different shades and shapes of wild food that are on offer in London. The ride will end with a communal meal prepared from all the lovely wild food that has been collected throughout the day, and it will be guided by Ceri who runs the Invisible Food Project.
Last year’s wild food cycle
The ride will cost £10 which includes food and drink, with all proceeds going to Otesha and to the Invisible Food Project.
Participants should be comfortable riding on the road and need to bring a bike helmet. If you don’t have your own bike don’t worry – the meeting point is near a Boris bikes stand so you can use a blue bike from the cycle hire scheme instead.
If a Wild Food Cycle sounds like your kind of thing, email james@otesha.org.uk to book your place.
I didn’t have a craft knife or mat and found that, contrary to the instructions, scissors were fine (all you need is: paper, scissors, ruler and some thread/string. Sorted). Good for bike bits. Good for giving as present. I find that the old wallpaper I got from a charity shop works well too.
I felt inspired by the Otesha HQ’s car park garden so for my next act of twee I will be planting garlic bulbs in old colourful shoes that are beyond repair (plantable now and foolproof, apparently) to brighten up my concrete back yard.
I’ve lived in the UK for over 3 years now and I gotta say – I’m a huge fan of a good plate o’ fish and chips. That said, the whole experience is making me squirm as I learn more about the issues around sustainable fish. It seems to be all the rage with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s program on Channel 4 “Hugh’s Fish Fight” and his personal campaign, Greenpeace and WWF getting in on it. The City of London has even been challenged to become the first ever Sustainable Fish City by an alliance of not-for-profit organisations already working on sustainable seafood issues. But it’s obvious that the fish fight campaign is huge and is calling attention to a massive problem.
After signing up for the campaigns, I wondered what more I could do in my every day life:
1. I will do my absolute best to only purchase and consume sustainable fish for example, products which are MSC certified.
Last May when we moved offices everyone got very excited about the courtyard we face onto. The letting agents think it’s a carpark, but we maintain that it’s a courtyard. And everyone knows that a courtyard needs two things: bike racks and greenery.
Said letting agents did actually get some extra bike racks installed for the cycling behemoth that is Otesha. They have frowned a bit about the greenery, but we have persisted. So much so that even in February we’ve been eating carpark garden grown salad in our lunches.
Together with our officemates My Bnk and Foodcycle we’ve begged, borrowed and found-in-skips enough pots and planters to meet our growing needs. We filled them with compost from Spitalfields City Farm and from our very own wormcafe. We scattered some seeds, sat back at our desks and watched them grow. Over the summer we ate our own tomatoes, chives, chillies, mint, green beans, basil, rosemary, nasturtium, rocket and mizuna. The wormery takes care of all food waste and teabags (the teabags far outweigh the food waste, either we’re not very wasteful or we drink too much tea).
We haven’t yet decided what to plant this year. The mizuna just keeps on coming, the chives are just popping their heads up through the soil and we’ve got a coriander sprouting in preparation on the desk. There’s talk of trying potatoes and strawberries, one of the interns wants to make strawberry mash!
Sarah has just completed the Gear Up programme *rapturous applause* and I really wanted to share her story with you guys, since she’s been an absolute star.
As a Gear Up intern at Hackney City Farm she helped out with their waste management project – monitoring the farm’s food waste, writing funding applications for a rocket composter (surely the coolest-sounding composter you’ve ever heard of?), and researching and making recommendations for a future waste management scheme. Considering Sarah’s love of waste management systems (to each their own), this was a perfect fit for Sarah and she described Hackney City Farm as an “incredibly inspiring place to work, full of nice people who love what they do”. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
Sarah also received training through the programme in sustainable food growing practices (and sustainable food consumption… some scrummy, sustainable food was had at the Rootmaster and Leon, pictured above). She also overcame her fear of roads and passed her Level 1 Bikeability cycling proficiency training with Bikeworks. Best of all, we helped her overhaul her CV and next thing you know, she has an interview for an internship with a great charity back home in Australia. We hope that this is just the beginning for our Gear Up participants as, after all, the aim of Gear Up is to help our young people stand more of a chance in this difficult economy, and grab one of those green jobs we’ve been hearing so much about!
We are really proud of Sarah for all she’s achieved with us and we’ll miss her down under! We can’t be too sad though – listen to her describe what her plans are for her back yard… very cool. Australia obviously needs her.
Currently the UK has higher animal welfare standards in farming than the rest of the EU, so if you are partial to the odd bit of meat you can eat local in the hope that it’s been relatively well produced. However, there have been moves to scale up industrial meat farming in this country due to farmers’ struggles with falling prices, rising costs and cheaper EU imports.
Having already fought alongside other charities against the introduction of a mega dairy in Lincolnshire, the Soil Association has objected to a planning application from Midland Pig Producers for an indoor pig factory for 2,500 sows and around 20,000 piglets, which they have been asked to withdraw by a libel lawyer. The Soil Association has scientific evidence which suggests that raising pigs on MPP’s scale could risk having a serious impact on human health and on the pigs.
The Soil Association needs your help. Support their “Not In My Banger” campaign and keep factory farming out of sausages in the UK.
