The recent appointment of a Food waste Czar is a belated recognition by the UK government of the need to tackle the scandal of food waste. According to WRAP, the organisation which campaigns on sustainability issues, each day in the UK we throw out a staggering 4.4 million potatoes, 20 million slices of bread, 1.2 million tomatoes, 0.9 million bananas and 0.7m oranges, to list but some. Globally, 1.6 billion […]
This recipe, for potato and mint pakora with spicy chickpeas has been created for Suma Wholefoods. I have been proud to have been associated with Suma since 2014, and I was delighted when Suma recently invited me to put our partnership on a more frequent footing by creating one new recipe for them every month. This series of new recipes, using products from Suma’s extensive range of organic and ethically […]
I do hope I can tempt you to try my new recipe, a wonderfully tasty vegan comfort food dish – bean and vegetable casserole with pistou. On the subject of succumbing to temptation, I believe it was Oscar Wilde who first said, “I can resist anything apart from temptation”. A recently published study suggests that this is a human failing we all share. Our inability to resist temptation is also […]
To kick off the new year on this blog here’s a healthy, quick and delicious dish of pak choi and broccoli with soy sauce and garlic. This is a time of year that is full of good intentions, when many of us making resolutions and many of those resolutions are about improving our diet. Whether you are someone who has signed up for “Veganuary” (a month of meat-free and dairy […]
I eat soup most of the year round, but during the dark, cold nights of midwinter it becomes more out of a necessity than choice. This seasonal, hearty and nutritious kale and sweet potato soup really hits the spot. All of the ingredients in this recipe are organic and free from artificial chemicals, which is more than can be said for much of the food we consume in the UK. […]
This week’s recipe is for parsnip, cranberry and nut roast, a delicious vegan alternative Christmas dinner. An enormous amount of meat will be consumed, and discarded over the Christmas period this year. Aside from ethical considerations about the slaughter of other sentient life, there is no doubt at all that our current levels of meat consumption are contributing directly to climate change. The government’s own Committee on Climate Change is […]
A recent study entitled “What are the barriers to eating healthily in the UK?”, led by the Social Market Foundation, concluded that 10.2 million people resident in the UK are living in what the report calls a “food desert”. It defines a food desert as an area where residents have severely limited access to fresh fruit and vegetables, usually in the form of a local supermarket. The findings of this […]
I spent three weeks in India at the start of this year. It was my first visit to that wonderful, extraordinary country and I brought back many great memories. Hair-raising tuk-tuk rides through the crazy Bangalore traffic, the vibrant hustle-bustle of the huge Devaraja fruit and vegetable and flower market, beautiful lakeside sunsets up in the hills of Wayanad, tea plantations gracing the slopes around Coonoor, sailing a converted rice […]
After this year’s long, hot, dry summer in the UK it’s hard to remember that just a few months earlier a spell of snow and severe weather (the “Beast from the East”) closed roads and led to some supermarket shelves being emptied of bread, milk and fresh fruit and vegetables. This loss of stock was due in part to panic buying but also reflected the supermarkets’ own weather-related transport problems. […]
The Gaia hypothesis, conceived by Professor James Lovelock, contends that the Earth is a self-regulating mechanism. According to Lovelock, this means that the planet as a whole is able to calibrate a highly complex set of interdependent relationships. These relationships are between living organisms (animals, plants, micro-organisms) and inorganic entities (air, water, soil). In fulfilling this regulatory role, the Earth’s ultimate objective is to achieve “steady state”, in other words […]