Nature's (genuine) Free Offers

This is one of the busiest times of the year for those who enjoy collecting nature's wonderful free food offers.

A couple of examples below, each from within a hundred yards of my house ...

A fine basket of shaggy parasol mushrooms - generally agreed to be among the most delicious of all wild mushrooms:  a simple fry-up in butter with salt and pepper produced one of the best panfuls of anything I have ever eaten.

Elderberries:  these came from bush frequently fertilised by our late lamented Labrador, Jonesy.  They're now brewing into a Jonesy Memorial brew.  Elderflowers make one of the nicest cordials and elderberries one of the best fruit wines, though it's very high in tannin and takes ages to mature.  Find a bush near you!

A nice variation on courgette soup

With varying degrees of buy-in from its highly carniverous membership, we have instituted a family meat-free day once a week. The logic for this move, at least as proposed by me, is a kind of equivalent of carbon offsetting - in this case an offset for the increase in meat-eating in developing countries.

(This increase is, among other effects, having the slightly comical consequence of making potash sexy.  At least, it would be comical if the hostile bids for various till now dull-as-ditchwater potash miners don't turn out to be the first skirmishes in a pretty serious resource war over agricultural inputs, as the Observer suggested last week.)

The first menu I served up under the new regime consisted of a couple of dishes from the River Cafe Green book of veg recipes - a mushroom frittata and then puy lentils with Swiss chard and Italian herbs. Pace Lady  Rogers and the late great Ms Gray, neither was all that great, if you ask me (and the assembled clientele seemed to concur).  The frittata had lemon juice in it - not a nice omelette ingredient in my experience, which you'll hear about in a moment - while the puy lentils could have done with that lemon in their dish instead. But the Swiss chard, which has done brilliantly in the garden this year, was very nice.

(My citrus-in-omelettes prejudice arises from the single most disgusting dish I have ever cooked.  This was a grapefruit omelette (made with tinned grapefruit). I was a student at the time, and had ended up in strange house after a very long night, but I still have no idea why I ever thought it would be interesting to find out what a grapefruit omelette tasted like.

At least I had a reason for the second most disgusting thing I have ever cooked, which was a sprout loaf.  This was in a cottage somewhere in the New Forest, and followed what was probably a similarly long night; but there was a glut of sprouts and nothing else at all, so improvisation was called for.)

But here - by way of another offset for those horrible things - is a nice vegetarian recipe I've done a couple of times when we've had visitors in the past few weeks.  It's a variation of courgette soup - handy for those gluts at this time of year, and what's more it uses sorrel.

It's a problem, sorrel.  Hardly a life-threatening one I grant you, but when I first planted it a couple of years back, I had no idea how vigorous and persistent it would be.  So now I have loads of it, and the problem is that a little of its bitter pungency - delightful as it is - goes a very long way.

Anyway, here's my Courgette Soup with Perfumed Rice and Sorrel Two Ways.  The rice is the thickening agent (which in most recipes is provided by potatoes, but I think this gives a lovely perfumed addition).  Should serve eight handsomely. All quantities approximate only:
Ingredients:

• 1 large white onion 
• 2 or 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 oz unsalted butter
• About 2-3 lbs courgettes - I used round yellow ones, which give a nice colour
• About 2 pints of chicken stock
•  A few springs of parsley
• 5 level tablespoons of a perfumed rice like Basmati or Jasmine
• Milk
• Single or whipping cream
• Sea salt and black pepper
• About 20 nice young sorrel leaves, any thick stalks removed

Method:

• Peel and chop the onion roughly
• Cut open the courgettes and remove the seeds and soft stuff around them, so you are just left with the flesh and skin
• Sweat the onion and garlic very gently in the butter for about 10 minutes
• Add the courgettes and continue to cook until their liquid starts to run freely - about another 10 minutes
• Season well with salt and pepper
• Add the chicken stock and parsley and cook another few minutes
• Add the rice and stir well to separate, then cook a further 10 minutes or so till the rice is completely cooked and fluffy
• Cool and then liquidise thoroughly, so that the soup is very smooth.  Add some milk before this if you want, or after, in order to give the soup the consistency you like.  I make mine fairly (but not too) thick (how's that for an accurate benchmark!)
• Add about half a pint of cream - again, to taste - and stir it in well
• Adjust the seasoning 

 Meantime:

• Cook half the sorrel leaves in a little butter so that they collapse like spinach.  Then add a bit of cream and stir to make a thick paste.  Keep warm
• Slice the rest of the (uncooked) sorrel leaves crosswise into thin strips (say 1cm)

Finally:

• Reheat the soup slowly so as not to burn the bottom
• Put a small handful of fresh sorrel leaves in the bottom of each soup bowl
• Ladle the soup on top
• Put a small dollop of sorrel paste into the middle
• Swirl some cream around this
• Scatter with chives if you like

The sorrel adds two variations of lovely bite against the sweet perfume of the rice.

Plum Tom Progress

Back in early May, when I planted my tomatoes outdoors, I wrote a distinctly pessimistic note about their prospects; suggesting that, as the prima donnas of the vegetable world, and whatever their early promise, they would inevitably prove a disheartening disappointment.

Well, inevitably, this year they are really going to town on me in prolonging the agony of awaiting their demise.  Not a single plant has died, so my usual rabid over-planting has resulted not in an ever-thinning collection of wilting individuals  but in a thick hedge bursting with sturdy health

 

while every truss of flowers has set and the branches are groaning with beautiful green plum tomatoes

It's not too late for their Italian treachery though!  Just when the weather needs to stay dry and warm it threatens to turn cold and wet; while the dense hedge they've made of themselves by not dying off in their usual hypochondriac fashion means that the slightest rot or blight is going to spread like viral wildfire.

We shall see ... I still back the Eeyore view

Catching Up (2): The Death of Death in the Afternoon?

The other story that interested me on my travels was the decision by the Catalan parliament to ban bullfighting (the link has some dramatic pictures, which the BBC is required to warn you that you might find "disturbing").

The arguments over this are well known, and if you take the view that bullfighting is a "sport", then it is manifestly clear that it's a cruel one.

All I can say is that no one who hasn't been to a bullfight can really have a valid view.  It is a spectacle, and an experience, completely unlike any other.  I leave aside the opportunity it provides to witness physical courage, though the courage of a matador facing a fully grown and properly bred and presented bull - a truly terrifying wild animal - is very real.  (You will probably recognise just how real only if you attend a novada,  where trainee matadors learn their trade against young bulls, and where you will often see the (generally)  hilarious but sometimes painful (and occasionally even fatal) results of a lack of courage in front of a bull.)

But what makes bullfighting truly unique is that it offers an opportunity to open yourself to the reality of death; a reality that every other strand of our culture persuades us to deny and shy away from.  It was this aspect of bullfighting that led Hemingway to entitle his famous book on the subject Death in the Afternoon and to argue against the view that it is any kind of "sport", but rather a drama - and a tragedy in the sense that it can have only one outcome for the bull - that connects us (literally) viscerally to the finality of all earthly existence. 

I don't know whether the opportunity to have that connection is worth the life of an animal: though it can be argued that the free-range life and fighting death of a fighting bull is no worse - and may even be better, in the round - than the life and death of an intensively reared farm animal.  But I do know that our drift into the shallows of cultural entropy would be accelerated by a wider ban by Spain as a whole. So let's hope that, as it appears, this is just Catalan politics with a hypocritical overlay of animal rights-ism ...

Catching up (1): The Joy of Bikes

A fortnight of low-connectivity travel in Africa and Europe and a week's holiday in similarly unwired Suffolk have kept me from the blog, but a couple of stories along the way interested me.

The first, which I read coincidentally on the plane (sorry...) to one of Europe's bike-heavens (Amsterdam), was by Andrew Gilligan.  On the eve of the launch of London's new cycle-hire scheme, he celebrated the two-wheeled wonder in the Daily Telegraph as the "perfect machine for our times - cheap, cheerful and carbon-free". 

As a Board member of the London Cycling Campaign from 2001 to 2009, and its Chair for the last three of those years, it's one of my prouder achievements to have had something to do with the huge increase in cycling in the capital in recent years.  Indeed, the Evening Standard even named me as one of London's top-5 environment "influencers" in 2007.  (Conversely, in my working life in the developing world, it's really sad to see capital cities around the globe making the same mistakes in prostituting themselves to the car as London is now having to reverse at such cost; but that's another story, and we will probably continue to wait in vain for an example-setting dictator who eschews motorcades in favour of cycle-cades as his preferred means of getting around town.)

At the end of my time as Chair of the LCC, I was arguing that its role had changed, from a campaign to persuade people of the various merits of cycling - which no one now disputes - to a campaign to ensure that vast amounts of money are not squandered on facilities dreamt up by people who don't have a clue about cycling and the needs and preferences of cyclists.  Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what's happening - as another piece by Gilligan evidences, a lot (indeed he argues most) of the infrastructure that's being installed for cyclists is crap.

The other thing the LCC has been trying to do in recent years is celebrate cycling as part of a way of life, and not as an aggressive urban sport for Lycra-clad, red-light jumping jocks. On that front, the really good news about the Boris hire scheme (apart from all the good leg-over jokes it afforded an opportunity for) is that they haven't succumbed to what I am sure was probably a pretty fierce lobby by "health and safety" types to force people riding the bikes to wear helmets. 

This is not just because there is evidence that, in an urban setting, helmets can actually create greater dangers for cyclists (because motorists view them as "protected" in some way and so behave more dangerously towards them).  More importantly, not wearing a helmet is both part of the relaxed-lifestyle-statement and a celebration of the real joy of cycling in a city, which is the sense of liberation that it brings from all the technical, personal and bureaucratic frustrations of urban life.

Let there be Sourdough

I made my first sourdough bread last week.  I used a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe, which worked a treat.

I say "last week" because that's how long the process took.  The first time around you have to make your starter, which involves getting natural yeasts in the air to start to work in a mixture of flour and water.  Once you get the fermentation process going, you have to feed the starter with more flour and water on a daily basis, till after about 7 days you get a wonderfully rich and fruity smelling goo that can be kept in the fridge and brought out whever you need to make a loaf.

The result was easily the best bread I have ever made:  with a great crust, a really rich flavour, and a firm but chewy texture with plenty of air pockets.  But this wasn't the greatest pleasure of the week.  That was rather the fact that the whole process had an elemental quality to it - you started with nothing but the flour and water, but by coaxing yeasts from the air all around, and then nurturing them over a pretty prolonged period, you had suddenly created what felt like something out of nothing:  a bit, I suppose, like rubbing sticks together to make a spark and then a fire.

What's more, the starter is theoretically endlessly recyclable:  when you take some to make your new loaf, you feed the residue with flour and water and off you go again.  One poster on the River Cottage blog claimed his father had a starter which he kept going for 30 years.  I bet that had some interesting flavours to it ...

Back to Basics

Well, well!

The largest ever study done on the subject concludes that using the techniques of "agro-ecology" increases agicultural yields by nearly 80% on average.

"Agro-ecology" turns out to be a fangled name for good old-fashioned common-sense practices like (as reported by the Daily Telegraph) "planting trees and crops together, mixing livestock and arable farming and using natural predators to control pests and diseases".

As another Telegraph article has pointed out, as well as creating better yields over time than intensive farming, organic farming creates jobs in the developing world - a far better way to combat proverty than providing aid to buy complex chemicals, machinery and seeds, or to import food.

"Going organic," says this report, "almost always boosts the incomes of small Third World farmers, because they no longer have to buy expensive chemicals.

This is vital, as three quarters of the world's poorest people depend on small-scale agriculture to eke out a living. Those that have land often do not have enough, so have to buy food as well; half of the word's undernourished people are smallholders and their families.

The landless are even worse off, and have to seek work as labourers. Again, a switch to organic agriculture can help, for it employs many more people, creating more than 170,000 jobs in 2007 in Mexico alone."



 

Inheritance

I just spent the weekend at a friend's Victorian pile in the Scottish Borders.  It was a wonderful and relaxed couple of days of blazing midsummer sunshine - till well past 10 in the evening - conversation, snooker, walks, tours, food, drink. 

The pile sits in the middle of a moderately extensive estate which was once home to a hundred workers, now reduced to just a few. In its heyday, this estate would have been its own self-sustaining ecosystem.  With its livestock and arable farm, its kitchen gardens and greenhouses, lochs and streams, dairy and laundry, water mills and workshops, more or less everything that it needed would have been produced or processed onsite.  Perhaps as many as 500 people would have found employment or sustenance.

My friend has the responsibilty - to her family and indeed the nation - of keeping the great house and its lands and cottages in some kind of working order, and for the first time I realised just how awesome that responsibility is when the inheritance is such an important component of the history and fabric of its surroundings.

I also realised, though, that estates such as this are just a microcosm of our own global ecosystem, and we all bear the responsibility of passing on that inheritance in as good or better order than we received it.  Right now, I'm afraid, we are acting like the claasic wastrel son, gambling and mortgaging the assets away in a haze of gluttony and intoxication.  We all know the end of those stories.  The creditors come knocking ...

BBC Debate on GM Crops

"You and Yours" debates GM. 

Even if you have absolutely no interest in the issues, you can just drift around in the silky vapours of Winifred Robinson's wondrous voice.

Make your own: delicious ginger ale

Just finishing some nettle beer I made about a month ago - a really grown-up flavoured drink that's very healthy, very refreshing on a summer's day and wildly outdoes champagne in the fizz stakes.  They should really use it to spray all over each other in those Formula 1 podium ceremonies.

Next up in the summer drinks line-up will be elderflower cordial and champagne, but meantime, here's a great, utterly simple recipe for home-made ginger ale that takes no time at all and will wow your friends around the barbecue.

The equipment you'll need is:

• A 2-litre plastic cider bottle (it must have been something used for well-pressurised  drinks, not just an ordinary Coke bottle or similar.  You can use the same one several times over, but not indefinitely because the pressure - see below- will eventually weaken it.  But a great re-use!)
• A funnel 

 Ingredients:

• 200g sugar, either white caster or unrefined if you want the ginger ale to be a bit brown
• A piece of fresh ginger root about 2cm square when peeled (you want to end up with about 2 tablespoons of ginger when grated)
• Instant yeast, 1/4 teaspoon (the kind they sell in supermarkets for breadmaking is fine)
• Juice of a lemon

Method:

1. Funnel the sugar into the bottle
2. Add the yeast and shake to mix with the sugar
3. Grate the ginger finely - one of those microplane graters is perfect for this
4. Squeeze the lemon, add the grated ginger to it, and funnel both into the bottle
5. Fill the container that held the lemon and ginger with water and then rinse this through the funnel so that all the bits end up in the brew
6. Half fill the bottle with with some cool/tepid water (about 20% if you have a thermometer), screw on the top and shake it to start to dissolve the sugar
7. Now fill the bottle to about 3cm from the top, cap and shake again till the sugar is well dissolved.  Pay attention to the bottom of the bottle where the sugar can collect
8. Screw the bottle cap on firmly and, if you have one, put the bottle in your airing cupboard for an hour or two to get the fermentation going.  This fermentation will naturally carbonate the drink, but you do need to ensure the brew doesn't get too gassy, so ...
9. Check the bottle periodically. When you feel the sides getting hard, unscrew the cap carefully to allow a little bit of the pressure to escape, then screw it shut again and leave for another few hours till the sides of the bottle have hardened up again.  All this should take no more than 12 hours, so if you make the brew in the morning it will be done by the evening
10. Put it in the fridge, which will stop the fermentation and chill the ale nicely
11. Drink within a day or two, either sieved to remove the ginger bits, or unsieved, which makes it stronger

Truly delicious!

A Professor Hits the Nail on the Head

Economist Ken Rogoff makes the link, which I have been banging on about in these posts, between our current failures to control technology in the financial markets and the Gulf of Mexico, and the risk of doing so in areas such as genetic modification.

Right on, Professor!

History Man

A very interesting and insightful profile of my old friend Richard Rabinowitz in The Atlantic, which cites him (deservedly) as "the premier public historian in America".

I first met Richard and his wife Lynda late one evening in the library of our hotel in the Outer Hebrides, in the early 1990s.  Other guests had all long since gone to bed, and they were reading Daniel Deronda to each other.  How could you not instantly like people who did that?

By far the most learned person I have ever met, Richard can speak knowledgeably - but more importantly, intriguingly - on almost any subject worth discussing, from baseball to malt whisky to the history of the Brooklyn Bridge.  He was kind enough to be nice about a little exhibition I once (amateurly) curated when I was running the Harris Arts Festival, and whose appeal to him this profile now makes me better understand.  I last saw him at a particularly tribal meeting of the Yankees and the Red Sox at the new Yankee Stadium; an evening full of interesting revelations!

American History Workshop, which Lynda and Richard run, has in recent years mounted some truly groundbreaking shows at the New York Historical Society.  Stop by if you're there.

Bees or mobiles - your chance to vote

As BP continues its increasingly farcical mud-and-golf-ball experiments with mile-deep engineering in the Gulf of Mexico, it turns out that rising waters behind the massive - and massively controversial - Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze in China are causing all kinds of unforeseen seismic activity, requiring hundreds of thiusands more people to be removed from their homes and ancestral lands.  More evidence that our opinion of our cutting-edge engineering prowess - in particular where massive interventions in nature are concerned - far outstrips our actual capabilities.

Meantime scientists in India claim to have found evidence that electropollution (or "electrosmog" as they call it), may be behind the failure of honeybee colonies, due to interference with the bees' navigation systems.  People seem dubious, but I wonder what would happen they turned out to be right, and that the only way to save the world's bees (and most of our agricultural output) was to shut down all our mobile phone networks?  I've absolutely no doubt that the response would be to keep the networks open, in the utter confidence that we could engineer a solution (by genetic modification perhaps?) to keep the bees flying...

Hunt for the green pint

Hurry, hurry, before they make you pay for it!  Further to my piece on water-intensity, interesting story in the Sunday Times on reducing water usage and emissions in the beer industry, especially in Africa.

Good to see CSR applied to something really important!

In the graphics that accompanied the paper story, it said that it takes 4.5 pints of water to make every pint of beer - down from 9 pints in the 1970s, and considerably better than my homebrewing ratio ...

Dr Venter and the Mustard Seed

Venter is a splendidly Dickensian name:  a character that would be full self-important, hyperbolistic and probably ill-tempered  gushings and geyserings and, well, ventings.  (Hard to believe that there isn't one, in fact, but that's what a quick Google seems to confirm.)

So Dr Craig Venter of "Synthia" fame, was rather a disappointment, I thought,  in the TV "flesh", seeming to be a mild-mannered and softly-spoken sort of fellow. But he certainly does the hyperbole well, while journalists who have met him report a lot going on in the eyes...

It didn't take long to see through the overstatements in his claims to have created a new life-form.  The best summation came from Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, reported in the Observer:

"The idea that this is 'playing God' is just daft. What he has done in genetic terms would be analogous to taking an Apple Mac programme and making it work on a PC – and then saying you have created a computer. It's not trivial, but it is utterly absurd the claims that are being made about it."

(Jones does, however, credit Venter with recognising that "[sequencing] the genome was not a problem of chemistry but a problem of computer power.")

Professor John Sulston, who has clashed wih Venter before over the intellectual property issues involved in this kind of work, revealed the business reasons for the hyperbolic claims -  a raid on patents which, because they are so widely drawn, Sulston says, would effectively give Venter a monopoly of entire branches of genetics.



The whole thing was brought into perspective for me when I was seeding a little batch of mustard cress over the weekend.  For each of these tiny, almost particulate-sized, seeds really is a miracle - containing not just the instructions for making an organism  millions of times more complex than the single-celled microbe whose DNA Dr Venter replaced, but also the delivery mechanism to bring it to life, which of course Venter entirely lacks.

This in turn reminded me of Jesus' parable of the mustard seed - the tiny speck which grows into a tree where "the birds of the air" can come to rest.  This parable is usually said to be about the all-inclusive nature of the kingdom of heaven, but it's always seemed a bit of a strange one to me, since mustard doesn't grow into a tree, but rather a spindly kind of bush, with a very dubious capacity for supporting birdlife.  Maybe it's a mistranslation of some Hebrew or Greek along the way.

The story is, however, a wonderful reminder of the (humanly) inconceivable complexity that even the tiniest of seeds represents, and the arrogance of our meddling with something we don't really remotely understand via genetic modification - see my earlier post/rant on this subject.

The really worrying thing about Dr Venter is that his research is funded by, inter alia, BP.  Now there's a company that obviously knows how to contain the fallout from cutting-edge technology when it all goes belly - or in this case, barrels - up!

Rivers which flow straight into your heart

This is an absolutely magical piece of writing by Michael McCarthy in The Independent.  It's on critical contribution of calcium carbonate to biodiversity, and in particular on the chalk streams of England, one of which is the inspiration for the title of this blog.

Here's the bit on chalk streams:

"But the rivers of the chalk are what I love best. The chalk streams, as anglers have named them, one word instead of two, are the most beautiful rivers anywhere on the planet. There are about 60 of them, from small rivulets to the queen of them all, the River Test in Hampshire, and they are characterised by the clearest and purest water in the natural environment, often referred to as "gin-clear". (The chalk filters it, and water companies are desperate to get their hands on it).

The chalk streams are immediately arresting. Their flow is stately, never sluggish, never torrential (the Test is like the Loire in miniature) and they are filled with a profusion of fish, of aquatic wild flowers like the ranunculus, the white water buttercup, and of aquatic insects of which the most magnificent is the mayfly, which is emerging just about now. Over the next month there will be clouds of mayflies over the chalk streams, the males dancing to attract females in one of Britain's most stunning wildlife spectacles, before mating and falling back to the water surface where trout will greedily gobble them.

Even a glance at a chalk stream lifts my spirits, and every time I catch sight of one I feel like offering up a prayer in praise of calcium carbonate. To some people it might be merely the stuff they use to powder the lines on tennis courts, but it also gives us the gentleness of the English landscape, the pyramidal orchid, the Adonis blue, and rivers which flow straight into your heart."

Vegetable Audit, mid-May

• Purple sprouting broccoli: just dug up.  Late to start but fantastic to eat this year, both because of the freezing weather.  What doesn't kill you makes you tastier!
• Peas:  slow to get going, because of the arctic May
• Runner beans: ditto, plus some frost damage last week when a ridiculously deep frost hit on Weds
• Pak choi:  doing well, if a bit pigeon-pecked
• Swiss chard and spring onions:  there, but struggling so far in the cold - even tho they are in the most sheltered spot in the garden
• Potatoes:  all showing.  Is this the best use of the veg patch these days, though?  May cut down to just a few unusual varieties next year
• First radishes should be ready in a few days, but last year's seed has had it, v slow and patchy germination.  Fab-looking purple variety just starting to show, wonder if it will taste as good as it looks?
• Spinach:  coming along nicely.  Supposed to be a non-bolting variety but we shall see...
• Red Drumhead cabbage looking a bit spindly.  Dry area of patch so must keep watered
• Calabrese:  lost a few to something or other, but 12 surviving so that should produce enough if even half make it through
• Several strips of rocket.  Thinnings will be great in salads
• Tomatoes.  30 or so planted.  Experience says maybe 5 might survive ...
• About 20 each of celery and celeriac planted.  Never tried either before
• Sorrel:  rampant.  What to do with this almost over-pungent herb??
• Over-wintered onions bulking up nicely.  Two recent prolonged downpours will help them really put on weight.   Amazing that these tiny bulbs, sitting on the surface, survive the frosts and snows!
• Broad beans:  doing brilliantly as ever.  First pods in maybe 3-4 weeks
• Asaparagus in full swing, eating daily
• Artichokes:  five of the plants grown from seed last year survived the winter.  Can take cutting from the most productive ones this year
• Sweetcorn doing well (among the onions that will be harvested before the corn gets anywhere near the elephant's eye)
• Horseradish:  looks like I dug out just enough in the autumn, with manageable amounts starting to reappear.  Great that to keep this invader under control you have a winter's supply of fresh horseradish roots in store!  They have kept really well buried in compost
• Lettuces / leaves:  growing all these now in reused punnets.  Better control of conditions and quantities.  Also coriander and basil
• All the other perennial herbs looking great after the cold winter.  15 parsley in the same bed as the toms so that should keep us well supplied
• Strawberries:  plants are in their final year.  Should probably have grubbed them up last year
• Raspberries rampant as ever
• Redcurrants:  first real cop this year
• Gooseberry:  much abused after two site moves, but maybe will get going this year?
• Apples:   Cox's has plenty of blossom, the cooker less so.  Might have over-pruned it last time?

The Green Coalition??

Who needs an exotic spice market when you've got the British countryside?

In celebration of the yellow Liberals joining the blue Tories in our new coalition (May Blessings Be Upon It) here are the raw materials - dandelion petals - for a batch of cordial and wine which surely rival anything in the bazaars of Bangalore or Fez.  Even in its cloudy early state the wine looks like liquid sunshine.

Let's hope the sun does indeed shine on the new setup.  But for those of us who are Green sympathizers, the prospects in that particular department don't look too bright, I'm afraid. How green will this coalition really be? Well, here's a visual aid:

This text is roughly the colour of green you get if you mix the RGB settings of official Liberal Yellow with a middling Tory blue of the hue they seem to favour on their website, in the proportions (40/60) of the votes that form the coalition.  

Not very deep or striking is it?

Let Her Paint an Inch Thick ...

An even finer example than marriage of the triumph of hope of experience is the planting of outdoor tomatoes in England.  Every year I do this, and every year I end up with dozens of dead plants and, at best, a couple of green golf balls with skins thicker than a Wall Street bank chairman's and an aversion to ripening even stronger than Gordon Brown's to leaving office.

Tomatoes are the prima donnas of the vegetable world - prone, as far as I can see, to every pest, disease, and blight known to botanical science and with the resistance and fortitude of wet cardboard. They parch instantly if the weather is dry and they rot it it's even the slightest bit damp. And if they do, by some miraculous combination of weather and absence of malicious wildlife, manage to reach something like maturity, they then need constant attention to a feeding regime so complicated that even a faddish New York diet-queen would blanch.

Probably it's something to do with being Italian and pining for the slopes of Vesuvius where they really belong; or perhaps it's some psychosomatic trauma to do with being taken for a vegtable when you're really a fruit.  Anyway, the whole business is like Hamlet talking to Yorick's skull -  "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her,  let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come": you know it will end badly but you've got to go through with it all the same.

Anyway, here are some of this year's victims, and at least they're environmentally sound.

The square pots are cut-down juice cartons - stab a few holes in the bottom to let them drain.  The variety is San Marzano, the classic Italian plum tomato, which I have never tried before; but I still know, I'm afraid, to what favour they will come...

Leveraging the Mung

There's always something sprouting about the place (though sadly for many years now it hasn't been my hair).  As well as the old standbys mustard and cress, there’s a whole range of more exotic sprouters available these days:  if you can't find them at the garden centre, try an online merchant like Thompson-Morgan. A couple of favourites are fenugreek - the heady scent when you start the seeds off is a delight in itself - or red cabbage with its dramatic colour. You can grow them in a warm place any time of year, and I use a bit of potting compost rather than kitchen paper:  a great way to use up things like those little plastic hummous cartons and similar bits of packaging.  They make great "live" presents too, at minimal cost.

Moving up the size spectrum, and my absolute favourite, is the humble mung bean. You can buy them at any decent supermarket, growing them is (or literally could be) child’s play, the taste is far more electric than any plastic-wrapped version, and there’s a rather elemental quality to eating something that’s actually alive as you pop it in your mouth – a kind of vegan version of swallowing a still-throbbing scallop.

First you need to assemble your sprouting kit - you can buy commercial sprouters but you wouldn’t want to of course, when you can use recyclings.

Here’s my highly sophisticated kit:

The components are:

• Two punnets, approximately 18x13x5 cm, one with holes punched at 1cm intervals (the sieve-punnet)
• Something a little bigger for the base
• An old linen napkin, or a piece of muslin (something that wont shed lint anyway)
• Some stones

Why the stones? Well, for some reason the beans sprout better if they are weighted down:  they're literally lifting weights down there in the sprouty gym, and they come up all the more muscular for it. You could use any other kind of weight, but you need about a half a kilo, equally distributed across the bottom of the punnet.

Here’s what you do:

• First, tip some beans into to the sieve-punnet so that they just cover the base in a single layer. For this size of punnet around 50g should be about right
• Rinse the beans and then leave them overnight in a bowl of water
• The next day, tip the soaked beans into the sieve-punnet and rinse them again. Soak your napkin or muslin and wring it out lightly (so it's still pretty wet), then fold so that it neatly covers the beans. Now place your weighted punnet on top of the cloth – it should fit nicely into the sieve-punnet. Put the whole assembly on to the base, to catch the water that will drip through
• Put the kit into an airing cupboard or similarly warm, dark place and leave overnight
• The next morning, rinse the beans in the sieve-punnet, rinse the cloth and again wring lightly, reassemble everything and put it back in the airing cupboard
• Repeat the above until the beans have sprouted to about 5-6cm (2”). This normally takes 3-4 days 

Here's your glorious harvest, fabulous for salads and stir fries, or just to eat by the handful as a snack:

 As an unreconstructed banker, I can’t help thinking of the amazing environmental and financial "leverage" you achieve by sprouting your own beans - leverage of the right kind, not the variety that brought the global financial system crashing.


Leaving aside the wonderful taste and health-giving properties of your completely fresh sprouts, here’s a calculation of that leverage for a 500g bag of mung beans:

• First, a mouthwatering financial return of 400% in a few days - each 50g of beans will have become 300g of sprouts. A 500g bag costs £ 1.20, but the equivalent in sprouts would have cost £4.80. You've used heat from your airing cupboard, so there are no additional costs except some water.  Your own time will have totalled 5 or 6 minutes.  Even the most aggressive denizen of Wall St doesn't make those kinds of returns any more!
• Second, you’ve saved the heating, plastic packaging, and transport costs on 10 packets of supermarket beansprouts
• Not to mention the scarce water if they were grown outside the UK
• And finally, your sprouting kit has not had to go anywhere to be recycled (another use for those pesky punnets that supermarkets are so obsessed with)

But there’s an even more philosophical fancy I have as I sprout my mung. For as they push up in the darkness under their heavy weight, they seem to somehow symbolize the oppressed of all ages - with every condition ranged against them, yet still irrepressibly alive and bursting out of their bonds, each a sturdy little soldier in the struggle against tyranny and injustice.

(And then, of course, I go and eat them.)

Agricultural Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Genetic modification of foods is to global agriculture what derivatives have been to the global financial system - recalling Warren Buffett's memorable phrase, a weapon of mass destruction just waiting its chance to go off.

This thought occurred to me as I pondered the line-up of senior Goldman executives at the Senate committee hearing this week on Fab Fabrice and the Abacus CDOs: a strange irony indeed that "Mr Fundamentals" himself should have been one of the white knights who rescued Goldman when the very "financial weapons of mass destruction" he had so presciently warned against had gone off and the bank, along with all the others, was about to collapse amid the poison and nuclear clouds.


For non-experts in finance, I should perhaps explain derivatives. These are secondary products which are derived from primary products such as home or small business loans, or which act as a proxy for the performance of such products. The main examples are “securitisation” (packaging of portfolios of  loans so that they can be sold on to people other than the originators) and swaps, where you either exchange one risk for another, or buy insurance against risk.

Now there is nothing essentially “unsound” (as Mr Kurtz might have said) about securitisation as a tool for sharing risk and expanding the availability of credit – provided it is transparent. If you buy a bond that represents a share in a portfolio of loans to, say, a number of specified companies, you can investigate those companies and assess their quality and risk.

This is where securitisation started out in the mid-90’s, but by 2007, the products on offer – the kind of deals Mr Fab Fabrice was cooking up - securitizations of securitizations, the so-called "CDO-squareds" or even "CDO-cubeds" – had departed so far from this necessary transparency that not even super-sophisticated computer programmes written by super-sized banking brains could any longer comprehend them. And if you can’t understand something you can’t manage the risk of it effectively - though of course the rating agencies and bankers claimed to be doing both.

Similarly, with swaps, there are many entirely legitimate commercial reasons to insure your risks - indeed they are a vital financial product.  The problems arise when swaps are piled on swaps, and bought and sold not for commercial reasons but for speculation.  And the swap market too was eventually brought low by lack of transparency:  there was no formal exchange, anyone could sell and buy them, so no one had any idea what was out there until they started to unravel.  Indeed, we still don't really know what's out there, more than three years later.


So why the analogy with GM?

Well, first there's the similarity of the apparent promise:   just as anyone via the miracle of the markets could have pretty much any amount of credit even if they didn't have any money to pay for it, so via the miracle of GM the world will mysteriously go from mass hunger to abundant plenty more or less overnight.

Next, there's the whole raft of conflicts of interest between clients and agents that lie at the heart of the Goldman issues the Senate started to investigate this week, and which are also present in the GM value chain.  The biggest of these is the creation of tied users; that is, farmers who, once they start to use GM seeds, become dependent on the products of what is effectively a monopoly, with all the attendant potential for abuse.

Mainly though, it's because the two main elements that constituted the toxicity of derivatives to the global financial system – their lack of transparency and the impatience they manifested with traditional, careful banking practice - are present in the GM value chain and technology too. 


So we might "know" that GM seed A is resistant to drought – just as we "knew" that securitisation A was rated AAA. But, just as with a "CDO-squared", neither we nor the GM producer has any way of knowing what else might turn out to be included in the deal. What are the effects on soil and wildlife? What happens when the GM plant crosses with a native? What happens if a resistant strain appears and spreads?

Likewise the impatience with the fundamentals of good, sustainable agricultural practice that GM represents. Modification has always been a part of agriculture and livestock rearing - and indeed one that's essential to progress in productivity and resistance to disease.  But there's a difference between crosses that take several generations, where harmful effects can be observed and corrected, and the introduction of modifications which go from point A to point Z in one step, without any opportunity for such observations or corrections.

And do we need this kind of high-tech approach anyway?  Anyone who has ever raised a crop knows that more or less everything comes back to the quality and health of the soil. As I’ve travelled around Africa and Asia, in some of the poorest countries in the world, what I’ve seen is the need for very basic improvements, not highly sophisticated engineering. Improved (unmodified) seeds, basic principles of organic farming (for example composting animal and even human waste to provide fertilizer) and simple water management measures could enable massive improvements in productivity and local food security.  So, indeed, would just bringing idle land into production for local consumption - a whole subject in itself, with some extremely worrying developments in terms of the acquisition of land for the production of food exports to the Gulf, China and elsewhere.

I’ve no doubt there is a place for GM in agriculture - just as there’s a place for transparent securitisations and currency hedges in the financial markets - but it needs to be used for proper purposes and closely regulated.

Otherwise for GM read "agricultural WMD", and for Lehman, RBS and Greece read financial exploitation,  pollution and ever more starvation...

Re-use: The Forgotten Green "R"?

Of the "3 R's" of responsible environmental practice - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - we seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the first and last (and perhaps even practising them to some degree).  But the second seems to me to get neglected.


As well as reducing the amount of packaging we use, I've been trying to make it a rule for myself to try to reuse as much of it as possible in some way before it eventually goes to be recycled or, if absolutely necessary, dumped.


This little series has a few ideas on uses for all that plastic...

First up, the wrappers on large Cadbury's chocolate bars (Caramel being  a particular weakness in this household) make excellent labels for plants or indeed anything else you need to identify outside - in the case in these pictures, air-drying sausages.

They're essentially the same as the labels you get on plants from garden centres.  Cut the wrapper in long strips about 15mm wide.  Turn over one end so it's doubled up and cut down lengthways, creating a slash.

Write the information you need with a laundry pen or similar (on the inside of the wrapper), then wrap the label around the plant (or whatever) and pass through the slashed opening to tie. 


They seem to be pretty strong against the elements, and the writing survives the rain fine as long as you use an indelible marker.

Nettle beer and the Kenya bean conundrum

One of the lessons of my increasingly wide-ranging forays into self-production is an appreciation of the amount of water that's consumed in making things.  This is something you never really consider when you pick something off the shelf, but perhaps we should start paying more attention (and asking for more information), because as this Guardian story demonstrates, there are serious implications for parts of the world that are already in dire trouble over water.

Take the nettle beer I have just bottled (and which I sincerely hope wont be exploding on me in a few days).  To produce just two gallons I have to do the following involving water:

• Wash the nettles (using 5 gallons of water?)
• Rinse out the pots I'm going to boil them in (using 1 gallon?)
• Boil the nettles up in two gallons (the only water that I actually end up consuming)
• Sterilise the fermenting tub - this involves washing it out, filling it with water and the sterilising powder, then rinsing it several times (10 gallons?)
• Sterilising the bottles - similar process (5 gallons?)
• Cleaning the fermenting equipment (5 gallons?)
• Washing and rinsing the bottles after use (3 gallons?)

So to make my two gallons of beer I have used 31 gallons of water, plus whatever water was used to produce the two kilos of sugar that went in - so say 35 gallons in all?  At least my nettles were growing anyway, or I would have to add whatever the water consumption was in cultivating them (as I would if brewing beer made with malt and hops).

The Guardian story on Kenya is the lesson writ large - first the massive environmental costs that we impose on countries that grow and produce things for us; and now the massive water costs in countries like Kenya where vast tracts of previously fertile land are now gripped by an apparently permanent drought.  Time to think through the employment arguments again:  what are we truly achieving employing farmers to grow beans for us when the effect of the water usage involved is probably to contribute to removing the livelihood of the herder down the road whose cattle now have nothing to drink?

In which I become a conceptual artist

My latest work, entitled Carbon Loaves and pictured below, is a meditation on the links between carbon usage and the production of food.

Technically, it is not a complex piece.  I created it by kneading and proving two ordinary white loaves, putting them into the hot oven of the Aga, forgetting to set the timer, and then going off to watch Liverpool FC lose to Atletico Madrid on the TV.  Going to the breadbin the following morning to cut some slices for toast, I discovered, like the tomb after the resurrection, that it was empty. A memory was stirred; the door of the hot oven of the Aga was opened - and there they were, in all their glistening black perfection, still gently smoking.

They have an odd Rachel Whiteread feel about them, having exactly the shape of the tins in which they were baked, but having shrunk by an inch all round.  Removing them from the tins, they made curious tinkling sounds, like tiny bubbles of glass being popped.  (Perhaps there's even glass in there somewhere, so completely have they been kilned?) 

Phase two of this serendipitous project is to leave them outside and see what effect wind and weather have.  Meantime, back to the mixing bowl ...