The four things you need if you are cooking lunch on Christmas Day (and not one of them is a recipe)

 
Around now, as we race towards half-term, families all over the country are starting to make plans for Christmas.  Some prefer to flee the country to escape the madness; others like to keep it low-key, with a favourite ready-meal and a good film.  But plenty of us embrace the season and the chance to get together with family and friends on one of the nation’s few remaining collective feast days to share a good meal. 

The Sustainability Minefield: How we can make better choices

We all know we should be making more responsible choices when it comes to buying food, but it’s a minefield out there. Is it better to buy organic beans which have been air-freighted in from the other side of the world, or a non-organic alternative which hasn’t? Is it better to buy British tomatoes which have been grown in heated poly tunnels, or ones from Spain which have been transported by road? Should we stop eating meat? Is farmed fish a better choice than wild?

Here’s an essay I wrote for the Wholesome Food Association, which might help answer some of these questions. It was published back in 2012, but I see no great shift in the political landscape since then and the challenges facing consumers are still the same.

The vegetables are Revolting

A brassica writes:  Dear British Public.  We’ve put up with a lot from you down the ages.  Remember the Carême years?  You try standing out when you’re sitting next to a piece of boned and rolled Angus all shiny with veal reduction, and you’re set in aspic.  Then there was all that post-war abuse – the dehydrating in the Vesta factories and the boiling to death...