Kitchen Garden Forum

We were reflecting over lunch today how our food has changed over our lifetime.

When I first started the "grow yiur own" adventure as a young bride. I started with beans, tomatoes and old fashioned salad crops like radishes and round leaved lettuce. I,d never come across peppers, chillies and aubergines to eat, let alone try and grow them , Even garlic was a foreign unknown.

How my grandparents would marvel at the foods we now grow,! Travel certainly broadens the mind!

Where next I wonder as climate changes increasingly impacts? Orange groves in Kent? . Mango and avocado orchards in Dorset?

And are there yet any undiscovered foods that we,ll be experimenting with growing here in the future? ( that is if we haven't covered over our remaining agricultural land with solar power or windfarms or additional hiusing for an increasing population?)

Even wine. If it was grown at all in the south fo England I expect it would have been a rarity, now it's fairly common.

As a child in Scotland there were many veg I'd never tried until I moved to England as an adult - parsnips, for example, and more recently things like celeriac and kohlrabi. (If I get them in the supermarket it happens quite often that the shop assistant on the till will ask what on earth to do with these things.

I think we had a much more limited choice - potatoes, carrots, swedes, cabbage, cauli, brussel sprouts (at Chistmas). I don't remember much more.

I think we'll have a different approach to meat. We're already eating considerably less of it because of environmental concerns (as well as health). I think we'll have more lab grown meat. I eat a lot of vegetarian food but I generally don't like vegetarian stuff that's designed to look and taste like meat. A couple of exceptions - I like veggie sausages and also soya mince. You need to cook it nicely with plenty of seasonings/spices. I've cooked vegan chilli bean for a big crowd and very few people even realised it was veggie, never mind vegan.

Insects too. We've eaten ants in Thailand. They just tasted of garlic and chilli. I also bought - from a UK mail order company -a few packets of crickets to take to a party in Kyiv. No one liked them.They were like like smokey bacon crisps on steroids. The crickets themselves might have been OK but the flavouring was overwhelming. Not nice!

I go to a history group and we had a lecture from a food historian once, I forget the subject. I suggested the committee got him back to do "Food before 1492", I imagined him starting with a couple of flip charts and asking "what did you eat this weekend?" Nothing came of it. So what's the real Mediterranean diet?

That would have been an interesting talk Geoff. My husband once gave a talk on the history of brewing for our U3A science group and that went back a very long way as I recall, and dug up some dubious concoctions. Humans it seems have always liked a touch of alcohol, not matter what its original source..

The world continues to get smaller but I bet there are some things used in isolated nomadic tribes, that has not yet been shared with the world. The biggest abnormality to me is Pescatarian's, won't eat meat but more then willing to eat fish which are in decline in many area's of the ocean, but they have a vital role in maintaining the oceans. Not as cute as a cow or sheep, but way more important as can't be cloned yet & the current ventures into fish farming has not been great for the eco systems around the farms, even affecting the PH levels.

Not to mention all the dried insects which seem to be an increasing feature in some diets. I can't see a " grow your own slug farm" being a popular pastime except for a few frustrated growers!

Errrr, Primrose……yuk.

I've just unearthed, from the baggage we're still going through, "The WI Diamond Jubilee Cookbook" edited by Bee Nilson 1975. No doubt this was a charity shop purchase. I had a quick look inside as I'm tring to weed all the books I have. I'd expected the WI book to be of some historical interest, but no, many of the recipes are likely to appear in cookbooks of today.

I'll never give away the funny little paper cookbook I found at a table top sale in the local village hall. It was about Greek cooking & had some interesting things which I doubt many Greeks would recognise, but was from South Africa. I think I was lucky to find it as I'm sure someone would want to burn it now as the ads in it were obviously from the bad times over there, but they are a part of social history & some recipes were really nice even if a mesh mash of cultures.