100 Miles and 2 Mouths

In the summer of 2015 Holly Black and Jo Barker decided to only eat food from within 100 miles of their home city Bristol, for an entire year to find out what it truly means to eat local. See if they made it...

A BlackBark Films documentary short, this film follows their journey through the highs and lows as new feasts are foraged, old traditions explored and tantrums are thrown at the loss of comforting eating habits.

When life gives you lemons…

First published on Going Local Going Green and Medium.

When life gives you lemons, don’t worry. Even if you can’t begin to imagine what lemonade looks like, never mind what it might taste like, don't worry. If you lose your lemons, it's okay - they are still out there somewhere, and in all likelihood, they’ll turn back up on your doorstep when you least expect them.
In 2015 I lost my lemons, so to speak. And when I say lemons, I really mean 'my shit'. The past 12 months have been full of ups and downs and roundabouts - a bit like Milton Keynes. It all began with Going Local Going Green.

On reflection

Going Local Going Green is this research project I’ve been working on looking at health, food, nature, economy, land use and food in the city of Bristol - not, as you may have thought, my lemons. As part of our Action Learning methodology we’ve had to meet once every four weeks or so to reflect on the past month and plan for the month ahead. This process is intense. It involves speaking for 20 - 30 minutes in a stream of consciousness about both the things we have achieved and would like to achieve, and also how we are feeling. In all of my 31 years of life I have never been in a situation like this before. To sit with 3 other people and to be given an opportunity to express how I feel about my life. The process began with speaking about work related to the research project, and it ended with a mini life crises. Being allowed an open and supportive space to express myself felt incredibly difficult at first. Although I like to think of myself as emotionally intelligent (or something along those lines) it turns out, when we started this back in April 2015, I was not. I was going through the motions but there was something blocking me, and this became more and more evident as the monthly sessions passed by. Some months I turned up hidden behind a stone cold wall - refusing to get any deeper than a list of actions and events for the past month, avoiding questions about emotions. One month I turned up and pretty much refused to speak because I felt so angry and sad. One member of the group who is much more learned in the ways of Action Learning said that this moment was when they thought they were either going to lose me, or break me. It turns out, I was ready to break. And break I did.

Feeling my way

I had a bout of depression for around 6 weeks, with days full of inconsolable tears and a sense of hopelessness I haven’t felt since I was a teenager curled up on the bathroom floor. I felt as though I couldn’t see the way out of how I was feeling and started to worry that this is how I would feel forever. I started seeing a counsellor who practices gestalt psychotherapy - connecting me with my body and my feelings in a way I hadn’t been aware of before. Who knew you could just feel emotions? I’m such an analytical soul (I blame academia) with an ingrained internal process of; emotions turn up - analyse critically - put in box - file in psyche - never think about again. I didn’t realise that with emotion comes acceptance and responsibility. There is a sense of intention and self care - and most importantly an understanding of yourself and of other people. Who would have thought? Certainly not me 12 months ago.

Pressure points

With this fresh look at my mental health, came a slow look at my physical health. I’ve been having migraines about once a month since my return from Mexico in March. I started seeing another therapist - an acupuncturist, to see if I could alleviate some of this pain. His work has also been around my emotional health, helping to ‘open up some of my channels’ which may have been seriously blocked since I was a wee bairn. Or at least since I was a teenager struggling to handle my emotions (the beginning of the box situation as above). Acupuncture has been a revelation to me. I don’t understand it. I know it works, because I can feel it. Different meridian points have made me feel different things. And the migraines are beginning to alleviate, which is incredible as they’ve been haunting me each month for the best part of a year now. How? I don't know. Sometimes you just need to trust that something works.

Menstrual times

Closely associated with both of the above is my new found menstrual literacy. When I started blocking my own communication in Action Learning, and making a note of when my migraines came, I realised it’s all related to my menstrual cycle. So, as one of my Going Local Going Green pals suggested, I started looking into what this could mean in terms of my menstrual cycle and the changes that my body goes through each month. It would be fair to say this is sort of a positive pandora’s box for me. Everything has been flying out, but it hasn’t all been bad. It’s been one of the most profound experiences of my life. We live in these bodies yet we know so little about them. It turns out we’re cyclical beings in a cyclical world that is pretending to be linear (and wants us to pretend to be linear too). It’s complicated and completely simple at exactly the same time.

So, now I’ve turned into one of those people who talks about lemons. There is a lot more to this, as you can imagine. I can feel my life changing every day. I’m trying to do the things that make me feel good more and to confront the things that don’t make me feel very good. I’m learning about what intention means. I feel like I’m a bit late to the mental health and wellbeing party, but I’m glad I’m getting there in my own time. I’m doing things like this; saying out loud the way that I’m feeling. It’s amazing and terrifying. There are still hard days and there always will be, but now I can allow myself to be honest with when I’m having these days and do the things I need to do to be kind to myself - whether it’s stretching my bones out or challenging my mind. I still find all this openness a minefield and I’m extremely thankful for my friends and family helping me to navigate through this. And I apologise in advance if I verbally vomit about any of this stuff, because I think it’s all brilliant and scary and I need all of your help to make sense of it all - and I hope I can help you in return.

Right now, my lemons are doing alright. I hope yours are too.

The Period Poem

The Locavore Diet: Week 5 - Failure, the guilt of failure, and more failure.

The Locavore Diet: Week 3 - Getting drunk and deep.

The Locavore Diet: Week 2 - Beans, the M5 and a cup of tea.

The Locavore Diet: Week 1 - freaking out.

The locavore diet: all peaches and cream? Not quite…

First published here.

A quick look at how I felt about Day One (July 20th 2015) of the locavore diet. It wasn’t all peaches and cream, needless to say. In fact, not even close.

Breakfast

Today was Day One of the diet and already I've stumbled and fallen. Me and my partner in crime, Jo, agreed that we could eat any perishables still left from the previous week - a transition week, if you will. All the fruit and veg left over from last week are fair game. Great. I, however, live with a person who is very strict when it comes to commitment - and is especially serious about food. Although we've just returned from a weeklong trip to Pembrokeshire - eating very locally (fish, potatoes, laverbread, cockles, salmon, cheese, butter... the list goes on), on Day One he still refused to eat a breakfast of Welsh bread, Welsh butter and Welsh cheese. So we went without. The hardest part for me was not waking up to a hot cup of tea. I stared forlornly into the tea and coffee cupboard, wishing that we'd worked out how to grow those special plants in our climate en masse. Instead, I found a few measly looking mint and lemon balm leaves in the yard and covered them in boiling water - which, in hindsight, is probably a really good practice for the mornings. Drinking a cup of hot water to flush your system – surely my skin will be glowing in days?

Lunchtime

When lunchtime arrived we ate halloumi, red pepper and cucumber wraps with a twist of lime. Nothing local about that - but it was within the proviso of using up perishables, so we relaxed into the idea of being in a transition week - at least we has a lemon or two left in the veg basket. 

Then, slowly, as our hunger grew, we started to freak out.

I told him not to worry, I had a great idea. A new organic food shop had opened just down the cycle track from us. We put on our waterproofs and got on our bikes (which felt very fitting when visiting an organic food shop). When we arrived it smelled like incense and was full of people just hanging out - which immediately made my boyfriend leave. He's not one for sandalwood. Sweating in the humidity I asked one of the employees for local produce. Just those, he said as he pointed to a pile of 6 courgettes in a basket. We’re about organic, not local, he said. (cue the benefits-of-organic spiel - from which I felt I shouldn't - or couldn't interrupt). When I explained the project he showed me their stock of various fresh produce, all from Lancashire (all organic), just outside the limits of the research. He said they did have some British quinoa, but he wasn't sure where it was from, and there was currently none in stock. He said maybe a barter system would be good, or growing my own. I sulkily pointed out that this was an experiment and it's possible I might fail, to which he sympathetically smiled and told me to wait until August and September when the shelves will be full. The one thing they did have, after a rummage for watercress and bean sprouts, were eggs. Local eggs. I greedily grabbed the last two boxes, wanting to walk out the door feeling triumphant after all. However the overarching dismay was as wet as my rain sodden hair, and the shopping bag felt extremely light as we plodded on.

The supermarket

Next stop - the local supermarket to see how we'd do there. The fruit and vegetable aisles provided surprisingly good results. Mushrooms from Somerset, Strawberries from Herefordshire, potatoes from Suffolk (might need to check that's within 100 miles actually), tomatoes and spring onions from Worcestershire - and lots of courgettes again. I did buy quite a lot of things that are ‘UK produce’ in my desperation; cider vinegar, rapeseed oil, milk, yoghurt and oats - which I will research now and potentially forfeit once the transition week is over.

On leaving the supermarket I hurriedly called the grower from Sims Hill Shared Harvest - the veg box scheme of which I’m a member, leaving a rushed message asking for a bigger box, and perhaps a swap of some produce which isn't local, for those that are – followed swiftly by a call to another farmer friend who runs the salad bag scheme Edible Futures to sign up (life saver) and a last call to a mate who is the Animal Manager on a therapeutic working farm just up the road, Elm Tree Farm.

"I need your eggs," I whispered, "All of them."

Fortunately these good people talked me through the farmers markets and shops in Bristol to get my local food, complimented by encouraging messages of support.

Maybe it's not going to be so bad after all. Only time will tell.
Read more from Holly here.

The Locavore Test

Blog first published here.

As part of the Going Local Going Green research project we’re embarking on a 100-mile diet – or the ‘locavore diet' as I have come to call it. In other words, only eating food that has been grown, processed and sourced within 100 miles of Bristol.

From the moment we start, I will adopt the locavore test to see if what I'm consuming is local or not. When I walk into a café I will conduct the locavore test. When I head to a friends house for a cup of tea – I will ask the inevitable (and occasionally annoying) questions of the locavore test. Before I bake a cake – I'll locavore test the ingredients. It may become a thing. (It also may not become a thing because I fear I’m slowly becoming that person – the difficult one that claims to have a wheat intolerance, or not eat animal products, or who can only eat raw, fallen foods from the trees of Eden and so on.)

How are we doing it?

We’re not crazy – although we may appear to be slipping into some version of mildly odd to the untrained eye. We’re undertaking this project to help us work out what we mean by ‘local’. After all, we are doing a research project that falls under the label of ‘Going Local, Going Green’. When we talk about local, be it the local shops or the local area, what is it that actually makes it local? Is it the fact it’s in walking distance, that it’s familiar to us, or is it more than that? When it comes to food it gets even more complicated. Did I buy it locally?  Was it processed locally? Was it grown or bred locally? Were the seeds local/ heritage/ native to the country or region? Where did the soil come from? These are all things we have to think about (maybe not the soil bit for now). Taking inspiration from the Canadian couple Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon in their book ‘Plenty’, and the amazing food hubs emerging throughout the UK with the Open Food Network, we’re slowly developing a feeling of what ‘local food’ means in the contemporary sense of the word.

What have we done so far?

So far we’ve set dates to start the diet. Then changed them. Then set them again, then changed them again. My initial lassaiz faire attitude is starting to back fire on me as the fear and the list of ‘can’t haves’ slowly builds. We’ve been keeping food diaries in order to start thinking about where our food comes from. We’ve been researching certain products, such as flour, oil and tea to try and find UK born and bred versions of these, which we will report back on as we go. We’re going to keep video diaries, blogs and reviews on how we’re doing once the diet is underway. We’re compiling the aforementioned list of ‘can’t haves’, which will hopefully eventually become a list of ‘substitutes to’.  And we’re mainly talking about it. A lot. To anyone that will listen. Friends, family, strangers and people who might know things that we need to know – like Graham from Bertha’s Pizza who travelled the west coast of the USA in hope to find the best blend of flour for his pizza, or Jo Elliot from First Great Western on why they’ve decided to source from 15 miles around the train tracks in the South West for the food supplied on the train.

But - why?

There are loads of reasons to experiment with eating locally from supporting the local economy to understanding where food comes from. I know there are important elements like carbon footprints and food miles – but my main concern is that we’re supporting farmers that look after the soil beneath our feet. And that the food we eat is tasty.

My reasons:

1. I want to support local farmers and growers

2. I want to be aware of the rich diversity of food in our local area

3. I want to understand the implications of globalisation on our food system

4. I want to reconnect with my food

What do we think will happen?

Who knows? Maybe it will be easy. Maybe it will be really hard.  I’m guessing it will be more of the former due to our location – we’re not based in the Sahara Desert after all.  Yet I do still keep getting these waves of fear. What about coffee? What about tea? What if I can’t find any oats for my daily porridge? What about my hangover cure of a Big Mac Meal with a Coca-cola and packet of salt’n’vinegar crisps? WHAT ABOUT BOOZE?

Below you can find a list of rules we will stoically stick by…. and a couple of caveats. There needs to be some exceptions to the rules, right? Follow us on this blog with the locavore diet tag, or on twitter@goinglocalgreen and we’ll let you know how we’re getting on.

THE RULES

• All food and drink must be grown and/or produced within 100 miles of Bristol
• Cornwall is included in the 100 miles (it basically is anyway…)

• All elements of the food or drink product must be from within 100 miles: if it is bread, the flour, water, oil, salt and any other inputs and ingredients must be from within 100 miles.

• The same goes for booze. All ingredients must come from within 100 miles of Bristol.

• If we can’t get the information needed to determine where the whole product is from and we’re buying it from a shop – it’s not allowed.

• If travelling further afield than Bristol, the 100 miles starts with where the individual is located.

• Household ingredients that have already been bought are not allowed to be used for the trial period of month one (then we'll see...)

• When housemates or lovers are cooking for us, the meals are subject to the diet.

• Coffee shops mean consuming strictly only local teas/ coffees/ drinks. Sorry.

EXCEPTIONS

• Food at work meetings that cannot be avoided. ie. crew catering at Glastonbury or a work meal provided for you.

• If you are eating out, try to go for the meal and drinks with the most local ingredients. This doesn't mean we get to eat out every night. We promise. 

• If we can’t get the information needed to determine where the whole dish is from and we’re buying it from a restaurant, but over 50% of the plate is local – it’s allowed. 

• Family gatherings/ friends for dinner - try and discuss before hand and explain the project - forfeit some food if you know it's not local. 

• At the pub - only drink locally sourced beers/ wines/ whiskeys etc – don’t forget all of the product’s ingredients are relevant here – some research of ingredients in advance might help. But it might not.

Wish us luck - this might be tougher than we think. You can follow us here, or on twitter:@GoingLocalGreen

Going Local Going Green

I'm working on a research project. You can find out more about it here or at http://www.goinglocalgoinggreen.info/

I'll be posting up things we learn, blogposts and other updates. But for now, this is what we're doing. 

Going Local Going Green is a website and project dedicated to exploring what it means to go 'local' and be 'green' in our home town,
 the mighty city of Bristol.

On this blog you will find articles and information detailing the various experiences of going local and going green in our city of Bristol. You will hear from Jo, Tim, Cai and Holly about the areas in which we are exploring under the overarching themes of nature, food, land, health and economy. We will also explore what exactly 'local' and 'green' means to us, and using our chosen methodology (action learning) we will amble along, digging up information now and then to share with you, and hopefully inspire and connect you even more with the city around us. 

Follow us on twitter for all the latest news: @GoingLocalGreen