Food photography at the Irish Embassy with Alastair Hendy

Lovely party in the beautiful ballroom at the Irish Embassy in London, a house which used to belong to the Guinness family ...


























A group of bloggers was given a masterclass in food styling and photography by Alastair Hendy - author, chef, photographer, stylist (he doesn't seem to have a website so sadly I can't give you a link to his wonderful photographs).

Here's Alastair's "holy trinity" of things to think about: the look (ie the styling), the light (which will make or break any photo), and the lens (seduction by depth of field and point of focus). Suddenly I'm looking at Alastair's images in a different way.




















After Alastair's talk, we were given a chance to take pictures. Alastair provided the props, and the food was provided by BordBia, the Irish food board. Lovely produce, in four groups - seafood, cheeses, puds, booze.

Alistair takes all his pictures in natural light, avoiding bright sunlight, and never using flash. So you'll see bloggers working by the window, and using reflectors - not expensive camera shop reflectors, but ones made of cardboard and cooking foil.











































This picture was taken at some distance from the window, with a foil reflector to one side (similar to what's going on in the one above). Even before we get on to the question of artistic merit, it's no good - I didn't spot the creases in the tablecloth. It's an illustration of what, for me, was the main photographic lesson of the evening: the camera sees things differently to the way we see them, so images need to be planned, not casually snapped.



















The photograph below of black pudding appetizers with samphire sums up, for me, everything that is good about Irish food: wonderful livestock, great seafood, abundant oats. Mixed farming, in other words - something we have largely forgotten about on this side of the Irish Sea.

Shocking to hear from the Ambassador how far adrift UK food production has got from reality: Eire is 666% self-sufficient in beef production, whereas the United Kingdom is a net importer of beef. It's not just Ireland that has the longest grass-growing season in the northern hemisphere - but here, in the United Kingdom, we've sidelined grass production, and that hasn't done us any good, either as individuals, or as an increasingly broke nation.




















Amongst the other bloggers there were:

CookSister, Eat Like a Girl, Feast with Bron, Extra Relish, The London Foodie, Kavey Eats, 5amFoodie


PS most surprising photography tip of the evening: travelling food photographers should always take a damp cloth in a bag ... and within moments of starting work on our own pictures, what did we all need? yup, that's right

Feeding of 5k in Trafalgar Square

Lunch was an elegant protest in a flurry of snow in Trafalgar Square. Delicious fruit smoothies, vegetable curry, all the fruit you could find. Supermarket waste. And all of it would otherwise have ended up in landfill. Not even composted.
























This lovely fruit made thousands of smoothies, full of goodness. Why don't supermarkets TRY selling less-than-perfect fruit, and see what happens? Why don't they give the rest to homeless charities. And COMPOST whatever's left.














































They couldn't give these grapes away fast enough. No stalks, so no good to the supermarket, apparently. Daft world: I spent a few minutes earlier in the week taking grapes off their stalks to put in a sauce. But even if they don't want to sell them, they should at least PUT THEM IN THE COMPOST.
























Then on to Heywood Hill to pick up a book they'd found for me; and a walk round Shepherd Market. Heywood Hill really is the most life-enhancing shop, laid out a little like a library in a private house, and full of well-chosen books, both old and new. Always lots you want to browse, some you want to buy. Nancy Mitford used to work there; now there's a helpful young man called Ben, and a bevy of girls in the room at the back.
























And home, to find the house looks like this:

CWF's report, Eating the Planet?

As usual, commonsense from Joanna Blythman, this time on the meat vs vegetarian argument.

The absurd last-century idea that eating limitless piles of cheap, low-grade meat and dairy was some sort of democratic entitlement needs to be looked upon as an aberration in world history. We have to reverse the meat-and-two veg expectations of the last half-century. A correction is long overdue. Eating lower down the food chain and making the bulk of our diets more herbivorous and plant-centric is definitely where it’s at.

The full article appeared in The Herald last week. Here's a link to the Compassion in World Farming report Eating the Planet? There's a 20-page summary, as well as the 134-page full monty.

Time to up the meat-free days here ... but there's nothing harder than changing old habits.

Welcome

Welcome to new readers who have come via the forum at Taste Australian ... four and a half years ago, my apparently healthy husband had a heart attack out of the blue (on the tennis court). Soon after, I started this blog to keep notes for myself and my friends about the changes we were making to our diet. Less salt, less fat, more vegetables, more oily fish - easy to say, harder to incorporate into daily eating, particularly with a young family.

After all this time, my main piece of advice would be to take back as much control of your diet as you can from the food industry, by cooking from scratch as often as you can manage. You've got the best interests of your family at heart; the food industry doesn't even know them.

But, whatever you do, don't get worked up about getting there all in one day: baby steps, one meal at a time. And remember the 80/20 rule on bad days.

The sidebar has links to posts for people starting out on this journey ... also quick links to some of the best authorities on heart disease. Do feel free to email me if you think I can help


PS that heart-shaped stone ... my youngest, then aged about four, lugged it up a cliff from a beach in Brittany. At the top, he took it out of his rucksack, and gave it to me. It's been on my mantlepiece ever since.

Suivant les marchés - or the 100-mile diet?

Here's a thought from Jane Grigson, a challenge to the fashionably dominant idea of localism:

Suivant les marchés, that current phrase of the good restauratuer, that guarantee of honest cookery ...

The market is no small concept. In the Middle Ages our northern ships were taking salt cod down to the Mediterranean and Portugal, bringing back wheat, spices and dried fruit - dried fruit in such quantities that the people who produced it wondered what on earth we did with it in the north. I think everyone would agree that Portuguese and Mediterranean cooks do far better things with salt cod than Scandinavians, and that the British know far more about using currants and raisins than the Greeks.

Food and ideas about cooking it have been passing from one part of the world to another ever since the neolithic revolution began in the Middle East. They were part of the spread of civilization though, since people will change their tastes in painting and architecture much faster than their tastes in food, knowledge of what was eaten is far sparser than knowledge of the houses that were lived in or the clothes that were worn. Cookery books were few before the 17th century - and how close is the general diet at any period to the cookery books published? Change owed more to the movement of people, of armies, merchants, chefs, wealthy landed travellers, than to books. Before canals, the railway, good roads, most places ate what could be produced within a 30-mile radius. Ports did better of course, if they were on a big trade route. For most people food was essentially regional food and not always enough of it either. Even in good areas, peasants ate a meagre diet, since most of what they produced went for sale at local markets. Only wealthy men could buy special seeds to grow exotic vegetables, or employ gardeners who understood how to grow fine fruit unfamiliar to the place they lived in, or afford chefs trained elsewhere to provide variety and elegance at mealtimes.

Actually, it's more than one thought, as I've given you more than I planned ... but such interesting ideas, worth pondering.

How lucky we are. Long may it last.


* this comes from the introduction to The Observer Guide to European Cookery, published in 1981. It's not a great book by Jane Grigson's standards, in fact, I think the introduction is the best bit.

Caffeine drinks: a warning

from today's Times ... we're talking Red Bull (80mg caffeine per can*), Relentless (160mg), Cocaine (240mg per can) ... also Coke (35mg), and to some extent coffee (although you sip that because it's hot, whereas these cooled drinks are gulped, often several times a day):

Scott Willoughby, of the Cardiovascular Research Centre in Adelaide, Australia, recently showed how the sugar-free version of Red Bull can cause the blood to thicken, raising the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

In his study, Willoughby assessed the cardiovascular systems of 30 young adults one hour before and one hour after they had drunk a 250ml can of sugar-free Red Bull. He describes the results as "remarkable". Sixty minutes after drinking the Red Bull, the subjects displayed the kind of cardiovascular abnormalities that might be expected in a patient with heart disease, including an increased stickiness of blood.

"If you add in other risk factors for cardiovascular disease - stress or high blood pressure - this could be potentially deadly," Willoughby says. "The can comes with a warning of its own. But if you have any predisposition to cardiovascular disease, I'd think twice about drinking it."


*Caffeine stats from Professor Roland Griffiths, of The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA. He found 505mg of caffeine in an American canned drink called Whoop Ass.

There's not much official UK guidance on this - according to The Times, just two pointers: any drink containing more than 150mg of caffeine per litre has to say so on UK labels; & the FSA advises pregnant women not to consume more than 300mg/caffeine per day.

Links: diet, spam, and the Roman Invasion

I subscribe to a BBC news roundup email, giving headlines in particular areas that interest me. There were four stories I want share - and I'll start with two interesting stories from the health section:

The first is a report on an eight year study of the Mediterranean diet, which shows that very small changes to the diet (a little more olive oil, OR perhaps a little less red meat) give protection from certain types of cancers. It sounds like stuff we already know, but here we have some proof.

The second is about the effect of junk food eaten by pregnant rats on their offspring. Predictably terrifying.

The computer security firm McAfee ran an experiment to see what happened when fifty people around the world surfed for a month without any sort of protection for their computer. Doesn't bear thinking about. BUT ... fascinating national differences.

Finally - well I'm a historian, so please forgive me. The headline said there was doubt over the date of Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain. Not 55BC??? Actually, it turns out that we are talking about whether it was the beginning or the end of one week in August 55BC. Wonderful stuff.


PS if you get to the fourth link, you'll see that my photo of the White Cliffs of Dover is courtesy of the BBC

One Local Summer: a little theory

First a new word to describe local eaters, now a university study. It's not - as far as I can see from a summary I've skimmed - about pioneer locavores, it's more about projected total population change. Early-adopters are, in the nature of things, likely to have been drawn in because they've already changed their diet away from industrially-processed offerings. This study is more about outcomes if and when large populations start to change their foodprint, as the only way individuals can make a real personal difference to global warming.

The argument is that what you eat is more important than where the food came from. It would be better, so the argument runs, to eat less beef, even if it was only a switch to chicken (rather than to, say, lentils or vegetables). There's a frighteningly well-informed discussion in the comments, well worth taking a look, despite some of the usual angry partisan stuff from people who think their way is the only way.

Here's a short extract from the Ethicurean post to give you the general idea:

“All Local” vs. Dietary Shifts

As a thought experiment, the authors examine how an “all local” diet — i.e., a diet that has zero emissions between producer and eater — compares to shifts in diet in terms of GHG emissions. Since that is nearly impossible to achieve, they found that one could achieve equivalent reductions through the following changes:

* Reduce red meat expenditures by 24% and spend the savings on chicken
* Reduce red meat expenditures by 21% and spend the savings on a nondairy vegetarian diet
* Reduce red meat and dairy expenditures by 13% and spend the savings on a nondairy vegetarian diet

The authors also use a automobile comparison to illustrate how changes in diet compare to changes in driving. Using a 25-mile per gallon car as their baseline, they provided the following estimates of mileage reduction through diet shifts:

* An “all local” diet is equivalent to driving 1,000 fewer miles per year
* Shifting one day per week’s calories from red meat to chicken/fish/eggs is equivalent to driving 760 fewer miles per year
* Shifting one day per week’s calories from red meat to a vegetable-based diet is equivalent to driving 1,160 fewer miles per year
* Giving up red meat and dairy in favor of chicken/fish/eggs is equivalent to driving 5,340 fewer miles per year
* Switching to a completely vegan diet is equivalent to driving 8,100 fewer miles per year


For me, the difficulty is that greenhouse gases (or GHG, as I see we must now call them) are only one part in a complex range of issues that fuel my interest in locavorism. For me, one of the best things is the human scale: I know the butcher, the farmer, the cheese-maker. No hope of personal contact at the supermarket.

I'm one of about 140 people taking part in One Local Summer, the challange to prepare one meal each week for three months this summer, using only locally-grown ingredients - the exceptions are oil, salt and pepper, and spices. It's thought-provoking and delicious in equal measure - and it's the best way to grapple with these issues, really grasp the nettle. There's a huge range of experience involved in this project, some of us are beginners, some can produce an all-local meal without having to think particularly hard. I'm hoping to be able to think more clearly about this by the end of the summer.

My challenge to YOU

DO think about joining us in this project, even for one week - registration has closed for a whole summer of one local meal a week, but I'm inviting all bloggers to the challenge of producing one whole local meal this summer, and I'll include you in the weekly round-up of the main challenge. I've found - and I know I'm not alone - that the first meal sparked off a lot of thought about the food we eat here, where it comes from, how it gets here, who produces it and how much they are paid for that work. There's a bonus for you - so far, the food has all been delicious!



Related posts

One Local Summer, week three
One Local Summer, week two
One local summer, week one round-up
OLS, Saturday lunch in the garden
OLS, first thoughts
Introducing OLS


Related links

The Ethicurean, Food miles vs food choices
Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States, by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews

my thanks to Kathryn at Limes and Lycopene for my original link to this research


Links to One Local Summer:

Farm to Philly
Amberism
Leafy Cooking
Garlic Breath
Rural Aspirations
Diario
Karen's Home on the Blog


Useful links for locavores in the South of England

Rapeseed oil from Gloucestershire
Wessex Mill

Broad beans

I've just podded a couple of handfuls of broad beans, for the first time in years. And the beans are all different sizes. Which makes me wonder: what do frozen food processors do with the rejects when they package broad beans, because they're always all the same size??? Does anyone know the answer?

A rant about air-freighted food

There's been a backlash in the British press, and indeed in one or two blogs I read, about sourcing food locally. Some people are taking excessive comfort from the news that, for example, air-freighted beans use less fossil fuels than those grown under glass in Britain in winter. They are using this type of information as an excuse not to think and not to act.

If you source food locally (even fairly locally), you are probably no longer dependent on a supermarket for fresh food, even if you still use one (as I do). If you source food locally, you are almost certainly eating seasonally. You are almost certainly opting out of agri-business foodstuffs fed on highly polluting nitro-chemicals. You have almost certainly worked out that, whilst the production of Kenyan beans as a cash crop for spoilt Westerners may provide jobs for a few, it is also using more than its fair share of water, a resource which is so scarce in some places (but, generally speaking, not in the West) that many predict it will be the cause of war.

And all that's before we get on to the subject of airfreight itself. Don't listen to people who say it's hypocritical to stop buying airfreighted produce whilst still flying to holiday destinations ... babysteps. Small changes in behaviour by many many people are hugely powerful. You've got to start somewhere, and deciding that you will no longer eat food with jetlag is a bit of a no-brainer. Even if you don't manage it every single time.

Of course it's complicated. But both the world and individual humans were healthier before agri-business got going on a truly global scale. And we should all remember that the most inefficient part of the food delivery system is the bit where we get into our cars and drive to the shops.

Related links

The Fife Diet's response to the same drivel in The Observer

Processed foods: some nutritional info

Once you start reading the labels on industrially processed foods, you've taken the first step towards healthier eating. I mean, who wants to eat a chemical cocktail they can neither pronounce nor understand? My rule of thumb is not to buy processed food containing things I either don't or wouldn't have in my kitchen.

The Food Standards Agency has some nutritional guidelines for those reading labels: don't buy processed food containing more than: 20% fat, 5% saturated fat, carb sugars 10%, and 0.5% sodium. Useful - although they've set the bar pretty high: the definition of a low-fat food is 5% overall fat, so I suspect less carb sugars and less salt would also be a good thing.

The Observer Food Magazine yesterday printed extracts from something called the Good Nutrition Guide: best and worst of various types of processed food. Here are a couple of examples, taken from the kinds of processed foods our children like to eat:

Breakfast cereals:
Lowest salt: Nestle Shredded Wheat; Quaker Oats; Ready Brek, Sugar Puffs
Highest salt: Kellogg's Corn Flakes; Kellogg's Rice Krispies
Lowest sugar: Nestle Shredded Wheat
Highest sugar: Kellogg's Coco Pops; Kellogg's Frosties
Highest fat/saturates: Jordan's Original Crunchy fruits
Best overall choice: Nestle Shredded Wheat

Sad, really, because NOTHING is ever going to make me like eating those bird's nests. Porridge, no salt, a little soft brown sugar, skimmed milk. Mmmm

Biscuits:
Lowest sugar: McVitie's Original Digestives
Highest sugar: McVitie's Jaffa Cakes
Lowest fat: McVitie's Jaffa Cakes
Lowest saturated fat: WeightWatchers Oat Crunch
Highest fat: Cadbury Milk Chocolate Biscuit Collection
Lowest salt: Baiocchi hazelnut and cocoa filling
Highest salt: Fox's Butter Crinkle Crunch
Best choice: McVitie's Jaffa Cakes

When they say Best Choice, they surely must mean Least Worst Option ... but good to know, all the same.

Crisps:
Lowest salt: Doritos Lightly Salted Corn Chips
Highest salt: Walkers Sensations Oven-Roasted Chicken with Lemon and Thyme
Lowest sugar: Hula Hoops
Highest sugar: Golden Wonder Wotsits
Lowest fat: Jacob's Twiglets
Highest fat: Pringle's Originals
Best choice: Kettle Chips lightly salted

Again, this is a pretty weird thing to be finding in a Good Nutrition Guide, but this is useful information for some members of this family (!)

Pasta sauce:
Lowest sugar: Loyd Grossman Carbonara
Lowest saturated fat: Dolmio Original Light
Lowest salt: Loyd Grossman Puttanesca; Loyd Grossman Carbonara; Bertolli tomato and basil
Best Choice: Dolmio Original Light

Pizza:
Lowest sugar: Goodfella's Loaded Cheese (frozen)
Lowest saturated fat: Pizza Express La Reine
Lowest salt: Goodfella's Loaded Cheese; The Pizza Company Thin and Crispy cheese and tomato
Lowest calorie: Pizza Express Sloppy Giuseppe
Best choice: Pizza Express American/American Hot/La Reine/Margherita/Sloppy Giuseppe

Horatio and Alfred will breathe a sigh of relief at these findings, since they are addicted to Pizza Express midnight feasts!

Related posts:
Our basic rules
Pyramid plan for healthy eating
HFW's slimming diet
80/20 rule

Useful links:
The Good Nutrition Guide
The Observer Food Magazine
OFM nutrition article

David's rant about fat and cornstarch

Reading the labels on industrially processed "food" is the most powerful thing you can do for a healthier life. It's something I often rant about. Here's part of someone else's rant on the same themes ... step forward David Lebovitz!


Please stop using that phrase "Fat is flavor".

Espresso, ground cinnamon, marshmallows, red wine, maple syrup, fresh ginger, Ranch Gordo beans, arugula, soy sauce, cranberries, Château Yquem, Concord grapes and sea salt are delicious and absolutely loaded with flavor. Yet they have zero or just very trace amounts of fat.

Fat is not a hero nor is it a villain.

But if you think fat equals flavor, eat a spatula-full of Crisco vegetable shortening and let me know how it tastes.


If you're worried about eating high-fructose corn syrup, then don't eat it. Simply stop buying processed foods and eating fast-foods.

Now...Isn't that easy?

Let's face it; the people making bottled salad dressings with all that junk in it don't really care to change their formula. And if you're interested in healthy eating, don't buy processed foods.

Read the labels. Don't eat items like Hot Pockets, sweetened yogurt and frozen pizzas that contain corn syrup. It's all there on the label.

The big food companies will respond to consumers since their sole goal is to make money: If people stop giving them money and buying that stuff, they will stop making it. If you're worried about corn syrup in foods, read the labels (or visit their website) which list the ingredients. Then put those items back on the shelf if they have products in them that you don't want to eat. Write a letter to the company and let them know why you made that decision.

And yes, no matter what your economic means, you can make your own cornstarch-free foods, like homemade powdered sugar by whizzing regular sugar in a food processor. Or grind it in your mortar and pestle, a tool which the least-affluent people in the world use for cooking.

Free Rice game

Just in case you thought this morning's post was too serious, here's a game you can play - and whenever you get it right, 10 grains of rice will be distributed through the UN. It's paid for by the advertisers on the site, and the idea is to improve people's English as well as alleviate hunger. It's called Free Rice, and it's horribly addictive.

Thanks to Culinate.

Keeping it real: What the World Eats

This morning we're all worrying about the new report issued yesterday by the World Cancer Research Fund ... but we're the lucky ones, lucky enough to worry about what we're eating, rather than whether we're eating at all.

Peter Menzel's book, Hungry Planet, shows what the world eats: 30 families on 24 continents photographed with a week's worth of food. It's sobering: ... how little some people have to survive on ... how much the developed world depends on industrially processed food ... how much more appetising the Far / Middle Eastern and Sicilian diet looked than all the others ... & to see the global reach of the Coca Cola Corporation.
















I'm grateful to my new friend Joanna - yes, another one - at My Vegetable Blog for providing me with the link to Peter Menzel's work.