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Category > Past
Home Grown Pleasure
Growing vegetables in your garden is a pleasure, but is it sustainable or even worthwhile?
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Category > Present
An Unsatisfactory ‘Sausage’ Experience
Looking for something other than a cheese sandwich for lunch, I found 3 remaining vegetarian sausages in the fridge that had been left there by one of our daughters and needed eating. Now I wonder why I ate them. Linda McCartney’s vegetarian foods has been around for a long time; since 1991 the label tells […]
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Category > Present
Real world struggles played out in personal psycho dramas
Recent reports from the EU tell of European ministers pulling back from ecological policies in the face of demonstrations by farmers. There are two explanations I’ve read, both quite different, but both very powerful and insightful. Both very real. One comment explained that retailers, driven by the demand for cheap food, drive-down what they are […]
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Category > Present
A Thoughtful Tour of Britain’s Best
Rick Stein is back on our screens, this time with his eponymous Rick Stein’s Food Stories, which is now running on BBC iPlayer (February 2024). Twelve episodes set as far north as Argyl, east to Lincolnshire and back west to his beloved Cornwall, where it all started, give Rick the chance to ask the right […]
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Category > Past
A Brief History of the Organic Movement
A Brief History of the Organic Movement and Soil Association in the UK. About the original ambitions.
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Category > Past
Old Time Harvest Festivals
In times past harvest festivals were more of a pagan celebration. Apart from being a time for hard work, harvest was a time full of mysticism and ritual.
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Category > Past
Jasmine Tea
Jasmine flowers are picked in the morning before they open to release their scent.
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Category > Past
China Tea
Tea drinking and cultivation originated in China and for almost 2,000 years was grown nowhere else. Exactly when the Chinese First discovered the useful properties of the camellia sinensis plant is uncertain but by 200 AD it was undoubtedly under cultivation. In 1644 the first tea was sold to British merchants and over the next […]
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Category > Past
Not All Olive Oils Are Created Equal
An extra virgin is an extra virgin is an extra virgin? Not so. But before we venture any further, what is an ‘extra virgin’? In 1991 European lawmakers adopted what had been Italian standard regulation for almost a century: they designated as ‘virgin’ an oil obtained straight from the olive only by mechanical means, and […]
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Category > Past
Droplets of Blue Blood
Who would have known? Vinegar, created by an entirely natural process in which alcohol is turned into acetic acid, was once the wretched spoils of our home-made wine gone sour and the sad relics of the village winemakers’ failure. But here in Modena, in the heart of the region of Northern Italy that has given […]
The Culture Surrounding What We Eat