The other night I was doing a bit of thinking - dangerous a thing as that may sound. I’ve been doing a fair bit of procrastinative (totally a word) reading lately, avoiding almost everything I probably should be doing. There’s been time spend with cookbooks, blogs and the excellent autobiography of one of my favourite chefs, Raymond Blanc. Throughout each of these culinary reads there is an underlying motif: fresh, local and seasonal.
Back at the start of the year I set a few goals; one of which was to make a greater portion of the food I buy local and seasonal. I don’t think I’ve done too badly so far, but it’s fair to say that there’s still room for improvement.
These two trains of thought came together the other evening and really got me thinking. What could I do to get a better idea of where my food is from? Clearly this needed more thought. So I made a snap decision.
Surely the best way to get a grip on where my food is coming from is to start writing it down. Yup, ever the bio grad, I’ve decided that anecdotal evidence is not good enough and it’s time to get some hard and fast data. But what does this really mean? Well, for the month of May I will be taking note of every country of origin label, every ‘product of’ sticker and every producer’s note. At the end of the month I will total them up and see just where my dinner comes from. There will be some stuff that just isn’t possible to trace, but where possible I’ll make a note of each and every ingredient. I won’t weight it by size/price, I won’t put in a crazy algorithm (that’s too much like maths), I’ll just record each and every ingredient’s origin plain and simple.
At the end of the month I’ll total everything up and let you know just how shameful (or hopefully not) my cupboards and shopping are.
Mad? Possibly. A good idea? Well, that we’ll find that out in about a month’s time!
What do you think?
Edinburgh-dwelling, baking and food-obsessed, twenty-something adventure enthusiast. Runs on liberal amounts of coffee, cheese, cake and gin; bribable with same.
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May 2, 2013
Sounds like you could come back with interesting results - I’m pretty guilty of mindlessly buying things from the supermarket. I could do with trying to find more local brands!
May 2, 2013
I am pretty guilty of that as well, it’s very easy to do. We’ll see what happens - watch this space!
May 4, 2013
Now that’s an interesting project – I’m looking forward to a snazzy infographic at the end of the month…
May 16, 2013
Ha ha, we’ll have to see about that, but you never know your luck (I’m only just replying because my spam filter was a little over-enthusiastic).