Lockdown Love, Episode 1 - FOOD!

Lockdown has been in place here in the UK since the middle of March and had a huge affect on our activities. We had to improvise quick, like everyone, and adapt to a rapidly changing context of how we live, where we live. 

Over the early weeks, our growing core group found our niches and put what energy we each had into developing outward facing projects to help our community, both near and far, using networks nurtured with love for over 10 years. 

Over the next few days, we'll be posting what's live and how you can get involved. We'll be sharing projects about public space and building community with more posts cooking up.

Never know, Transition Town Tooting maybe fertile ground for collaboration with you!

This episode is all about food and offers four projects: Vegetanuary! - an online group focused on celebrating and sharing vegetarian and vegan cooking; Foodival2020 begins! A callout to share food growing stories and a date for the diary as we stretch to imagine our annual food festival in September; Tooting Community Garden has been sharing the wonders of nature in Spring and looks to future projects and our Neighbourhood Seed Swap in direct response to a huge spike in interest in growing your own. Do read on...

Vegetanuary! meets... Wicked Vegan!

As part of Vegetanuary this year I've been going along to meet the Restauranteurs of the area who are focusing on either vegan or vegetarian food to ask them some simple questions about why open that kind of place and what the feedback has been... first up, Wicked Vegan on Hildreth Street in Balham. You must go, its delicious casual food for hanging out with your mates. I heartily recommend it.

Wicked!

What is Vegetanuary??

Vegetanuary! is our annual, month long sharing of vegetarian and vegan food. Anyone can join in, you'll find lots of new recipes, ideas and articles being shared about food. Come join us on the Facebook group HERE

Open 7 months ago, Wicked Vegan is run by businessman Gurkan Bozdere, but as he says, "I'm not a vegan, but I'm trying! My Sister in law and wife encouraged me to do something ethical", so he opened a vegan restaurant. I think that's awesome and the kind of change this exciting to see. Gurkan explained how he was excited about how the food business is changing, with lots more vegan restaurants opening. "I'm a businessman, motivated to be making money, but why not be ethical at the same time?" Yes! Yes! Yes! Earn a living and be ethical, let's do that!

Gurkan, his wife, Betty and sister in law, Necla, enlisted some expert help by the Stokey Veg & Vegan Chef Daniele Aloi to develop the menu, test out ideas and discover what Wicked Vegan has become - a restaurant full of super tasty, indulgence food in the shape of burgers, salads and wraps, washed down by smoothies, local beers and juices.

Gurkan on the left and Head Chef Robert Drajna. Check out that menu!

I continued by asking Gurkan, do you now eat more vegetarian and vegan foods as a result of opening the restaurant?

A Magical Festive Feast

St Marks United Reformed Church in Balham festooned with vine leaves, fairy lights and candles, offered the perfect backdrop for a magical festive evening at TTT’s Christmas Dinner last night. The invite to “Norah’s Magical Feast” promised a festive culinary celebration and what a feast it proved to be!  Norah won the overall Top Tooting Cook competition at Tooting Foodival in September scoring not only for the taste and look of all her entries to three categories, but also for her exceptional use of locally sourced ingredients including fruit, vegetables, eggs and honey.

In true MasterChef style, Norah delighted the guests with a sumptuous three course meal starting with a platter of sharing plates of courgette and haloumi fritters and three different kinds of homemade vegetable dips. Generous mains of roast salmon, lamb shank or a winter vegetable tagine followed. Dessert was a splendid affair of sticky fig pudding with salted caramel & coconut topping, roasted fruits with black cherry sorbet or a selection of artisan sheep & goats cheeses served with a variety of chutneys and oatcakes.

Aided by her assistants Dani and Chris, Norah gave us a Christmas dinner to remember for years to come. If you want to sample the delights of Norah’s Kitchen please get in touch with her here. 
Thanks to Bryony Williams #findmeintooting for her photos.

Pumpkin Party Sunday October 28th

Come and join our autumn festivities in Tooting Community Garden!

click for pdf poster

Following on from our normal open gardening session (11am-1pm) this Sunday, we will be celebrating all things pumpkin – you can carve your own creations into the pumpkins, help make some fresh pumpkin soup and learn how to make delicious damper bread over a fire. All activities are free and suitable for children and adults. And once you’ve enjoyed our campfire feast, you’ll be able to head to the annual pumpkin parade on Tooting common!

We look forward to seeing you!
Sunday 28th October, 1-3pm 
Tooting Community Garden, 5 North Drive, London SW16 1RL

Foodival Poster 2018

TTT is running its 11th sustainable food festival - the Tooting Foodival - this September!  This year's Foodival poster celebrates the core elements of growing, cooking and eating!  If you are a connoisseur of any of these activities we urge you to get involved in this year's festival either as a grower donating some home grown produce, a cook helping to produce tasty locally sourced meals for the masses, entering the Top Tooting Cook Competition, or as a taster of these wonderful dishes on the day.  Perhaps you could be all three?!!

 
If you interested in finding out more about Tooting Foodival 2018 EMAIL US or check out the links below:

Download poster here
Latest Press Release here
Stalls Application Form here
Foodival Website here

Exploring Food and Travel in your carbon footprint - stories from May's 'Carbon Conversations'

TTT's 10th local Carbon Conversations series continues - the free weekly local facilitated meetings where participants can explore their own practical options for low-carbon living.

The sessions are not only about 'counting carbon' and understanding our carbon footprint; they are also about exploring our own values and preferences in a safe and facilitated setting with a small group. Understanding the meaning of our choices.... the 'why' as well as the 'what'.... means we are more likely to take steps which we can sustain over time.
Quoting one of the participants in this series:

"The beauty of Carbon Conversations is 

the optimism, creativity and ideas

that are shared and emerge"

Each of the six meetings has a theme - for example home energy, or waste. We reported on the first two sessions in this blog - read it here, and below two more participants describe the discussion points and feelings raised by the third and fourth meetings: about food and travel.


1 Food: probably the issue that goes to the core of our identities more than any other.
We did an activity reflecting on all the aspects of food production that worry us most. One of the group shared a really heart-rending story of playing a game with a child where they had to mime different animals. They wagged their tail like a dog, pranced like a horse, but when asked to enact a chicken they curled up into a ball on the floor. This child only knew a chicken as a dead body wrapped in clingfilm on a supermarket shelf. It was a poignant moment...

We also played a board game to figure out the carbon emissions embedded in all the different stages of the food production process: growing, processing, packaging, transport.

It was illuminating, but it also made us realise the complications of solely judging things based on carbon emissions. What is something is 'really low carbon' but harmful in other ways? There are lots of factors to take into account.
It also made us reflect on the foods we eat. As one group member said: 'it does make you think....what ARE we eating?!'

It's International Compost Awareness Week! Here's lots of ways to get involved for 52 weeks & more

Over seventy years ago the 

organic agriculture pioneer 

Sir Albert Howard stated :

 "The health of soil, plant, 

animal and man 
is one and indivisible"

Taking care of the soil where we grow our food, making compost, reducing waste, healthy eating, exploring the 'circular economy' of growing plants, beginning to understand the web of beneficial organisms that exists below and above ground:  

our gardens, kitchens, eating and shopping preferences are the forums for all of these.

We can all learn more and make our own contributions even more valuable, right here in Tooting.

Wandsworth Borough Council has published a post in its website about food waste and composting, and we're copying some of the links here because they are accessible and practical ways being offered this spring and summer to learn more and share experience.

• Firstly, there's the Wandsworth Composting Project - all the details are here in this flier. TTT and other partners are contributing too.
• Secondly there's a practical workshop on composting skills on June 4th at Bramford Community Garden - here's the flier.
• Thirdly, there's the Grow Your Own at Home! gardening classes sponsored by Be Enriched, taking place near Tooting Broadway and starting on June 10th. Here's the flier.

In June and early July there are further public compost advice sessions planned - when the dates are fixed we'll share them.

Home composting may look like a dark art: 

these events will share the skills to demistify it for local residents.

The Wildlife Gardening Forum has a website that's a treasure house of experience, including a good web page on soil and fertility: click here to read it.

Home composters provide a community service as well as benefiting our own gardens by returning organic material to the soil. We remove kilos of kitchen waste per household every week from the borough's waste transport and processing. That borough service has a carbon cost as well as a financial cost - we can reduce both costs by working with our waste to recognise it as a valuable resource.

Producing A Steak Takes A Lot Of Water

One of the reasons some of us are trying vegetarianism for January is the environmental impact of keeping animals for human consumption. The practice of rearing animals to provide food for humans is an ancient one and has been going on for at least 10,000 years. I'd argue that this has only really become a serious problem in the modern age when world human population has increased massively, ever larger swathes of land have been set aside for animals to graze at the expense of forest, and industrial production of animal product has become central in the human food chain.
Some of the effects are obvious: more carbon emissions, fewer carbon sinks, excess water usage, changing climate. Taking just one of these factors I'm amazed to see that according to Mekonnen and Hoekstra (2010) the water footprint of bovine meat is 15,415 litres of water per kg, compared to 322 litres/kg for vegetables. For beef cattle 98% of the water used up is with respect to their feed.

For more info on Vegetanuary, check out the facebook group.

Chuck's Vegetarian Risotto Tonight

Can You Give Up Meat for a Month?

When TTT co-chair Richard mentioned he was going to go vegetarian for January, it made me think could I? 
Not eating meat and what it means, touches on so many of the environmental issues that TTT has tried to tackle over the years. Land and water use, global warming, animal welfare, population growth, the carbon cycle, the changing climate, human health and well-being all seem relevant. It sparked my interest. Then I saw an ad for veganuary on the tube, a campaign to encourage people to become vegan for a month.  Could I, a lover of bacon sandwiches, lamb karahi, fillet steak and recently copious amounts of turkey join in with such an endeavour?

I think I can but... how? What will it be like? What about fish? Is anyone else out there interested? There's only one day to decide ... DT

Building on the 2016 Tooting Foodival at home - home-made pasta recipe, plus seed sprouting

There are new posts on our Foodival blog (click on that link) which follow up on two of the fun events at this year's Tooting Foodival: celebrating local food together as a community.
One post gives Minestra Supper Club's recipe based on Elisabetta's pasta-making demonstration.
The other shares all the how-tos of our grow-you-own home seed-sprouting crusade.
Do enjoy both. Maybe you can combine the two...?
Let us know how you get on!

 

Both these posts celebrate local Foodival themes which have been London-wide campaigns in September: Urban Food Fortnight and Zero Waste Week
Click for more information.

Growing Tooting

TTT is delighted to launch Growing Tooting, a new project to promote community gardening in Tooting and nearby neighbourhoods. This is a year-long project which aims to attract more people into growing healthy local food.

You may be familiar with some of the benefits of community growing, for instance:

• Socialising with a shared interest 
• Improving your health via gentle physical exercise and eating fresh, highly nutritious fruit and veg 
• Helping the environment by reducing food miles 

Whether you are completely new to growing fruit and veg, or whether you are an experienced gardener wanting to develop your growing skills, this project can help you. Having a garden isn’t necessary: we can also give you ideas about growing on a windowsill, windowbox or balcony. If you’re a school, community group or club, or a local enterprise and you’d like to set up a growing space or develop an existing one, we can help too, with ideas about crops, composting, encouraging wildlife, etc.

In the coming months we’ll be holding a number of community events, so please follow the Growing Tooting posts on this site. In the meantime, if you’d like to contact the project: call Martin on 07980 095 152 or EMAIL US

We are very grateful to Wandsworth Borough Council Big Society Fund for their support of this project.

Foodival Stories

Over on the Foodival blog we have been rounding up the stories from this year's sustainable food event in Tooting.  There's a Balham woman who grew bananas ...

Bananas grown by Susan in her Balham back garden

And Sophie was the new face winning the prestige title of Top Tooting Cook 2015 with her beautiful culinary creation.

Top Tooting Cook Sophie with her prize winning dish

Pooja produced the tastiest dish according to the judges and Jenny Shand from SHARE Community Garden managed to cultivate the ugliest vegetable!  There's more on the prize winners here. 

Dave says: "Gimme Fracking not Solar!"

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister tried to persuade us that subsidies for those dodgy polluting, diminishing, ever harder to reach fossil fuels are much more important than those for renewable technology.  Indeed this government plans to make community solar power generation unviable by slashing solar feed-in tariffs.  Sign the petition here to try to get this folly debated in Parliament.  Thanks to Furzedown Low Carbon Zone for highlighting this issue.

Then there was the mysterious Giant Pea spotted up and down Tooting High St and featured in this Wandsworth Guardian video. 

Children show off the Ugly Vegetables - the red pepper was voted the winner!

Keep an eye out for more stories from the Foodival, some great pictures and a video over the coming days.
Meanwhile what did you think of this year's Foodival?

Annual Tooting Community Garden Open Day Sunday June 14th 11am - 5pm

All welcome to our free Garden Open Day!

There's plenty to join in with:
> For the third year running we're part of the Open Gardens and Squares London-wide weekend.
> Aesop Grimm is telling intriguing stories.
> We're linked in with the local Furzedown Festival, and the Furzedown Oak Community Project will start to shape a sculpture.
> fanSHEN come to the Garden with the June Tooting Field Day: we'll be cooking on charcoal, and fanSHEN will perform their show The Apple Cart.

And: you can simply relax, chat and enjoy the space. 

Timings and details:  

For more details on the Field Day arrangements for preparing treats to cook, please click here

We'll be posting any late news on the Open Day on our Tooting Community Garden pages on Facebook.
Any queries? Please email us here

To download the Open Day poster, please click here.

Here's where we are
Off Tooting Common on the south side at 5 North Drive, SW16 1RN:

We look forward to seeing you!

Number 12 in TTT's '12 tweets to Christmas'

Here is tweet number twelve:
No.12 tips for Xmas. Celebrate Xmas eve with some English wine from Kent or locally brewed beer from By The Horns! 
pic.twitter.com/A1c75HsVtt

And...that's the last of our twelve seasonal sustainability tweets: each one from a different person, saying something she or he wants to share that fits with this time of year. We hope that each of them gives you something to think about, or follow up.

We hope you enjoyed them too, whether you saw them on twitter as they came out during the past 12 days, or if you are seeing them gathered here on the TTT blog.
We'll list them again in our next TTT monthly mail out. 
Thanks for following!

Food: Carbon Conversations Meeting 5

We're continuing the glimpses into what we're covering in our current series of informal Carbon Conversations. Here is the fifth...
Participant Ben has written his own response to this week's meeting, all about exploring carbon reduction in our Food.
Ben's comments:

" Monday evening in Tooting....cold, damp with a mid-summer mist clinging to the trees across the common.
And here we are, huddled around Jane's dining room table for our fifth Carbon Conversations session.

This evening’s topic is food. As ever, the discussion is thought-provoking and far-reaching.

We discuss our personal relationships with food. We feel that food can be the source of positive things (pleasure, socialising, creativity) as well as negative (neuroses, ethical dilemmas, health concerns).

Then we play a board game where we assess the carbon footprint of different food items. I’d never thought about food production in such an atomised way (production, processing, packaging and transport are all very distinct parts of the production line from plough to plate).

The game throws up some surprises.
Frozen chicken nuggets flown to the UK from Thailand are bad all round – high carbon at every stage of the process.
But because 48% of food's carbon emissions are embedded in the production part of the process, a piece of Irish cheddar comes out pretty high in C02 emissions as well (the production of cheddar involves the rearing of cows, their feed, methane the cows produce, etc, which is all very carbon-intensive).

It is also interesting to note that something that’s travelled from afar isn’t necessarily bad –slow, long distance transport of non-perishable items by ship can be quite low in carbon. So, a few surprises here!

 

Very Local:
British-grown, good for you!

Very Very Local:
Sown, grown and
eaten in Tooting!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What are the prospects of making lifestyle changes on the basis of all this?

 

The prospects are good I’d say. Low-carbon food tends to be healthier and cheaper. Indeed, the best food of all is stuff you’ve grown yourself: low-carbon, super cheap, and super healthy. So, the moral of the story? Dust off your gardening gloves, grab a trowel, and get planting.

The future of food consumption is local produce.

It’s a no-brainer."

Thank you very much, Ben!

Next week is our 6th meeting: the finale of our 8th Tooting Carbon Conversations. All welcome to join us next time we offer the series.

STOP PRESS:

A very relevant article titled: Planting potatoes into policy: why town planners must think about local food' was in The Guardian on 14 May. Read it by clicking here.



Foodcycle Tooting

TTT Co-chair, Belinda Sosinowicz blogs her first experiences of the new Foodcycle venture starting this month in Tooting.


According to Foodcycle (2013) an estimated 400,000 tonnes of useable surplus food can be saved from UK supermarkets each year [1], or in other words, 400,000 tonnes of food is wasted by supermarkets that could otherwise be used.


To be doing something practical about this fits with our transition values which aim to tackle the big issues of climate change, peak oil, sustainability and scarce resources at a local level.  So recently I found myself being drawn into finding out how I could do more to address the issue of food wastage at my local level by joining Foodcycle.

Foodcycle is a UK charity that combines volunteers, surplus food and spare kitchen spaces to create tasty, nutritious meals for people at risk of food poverty and social isolation. They run 14 Hubs across the country: volunteer-powered community projects serving nutritious meals for people at risk. Working with community partners they provide communal meals in a warm and welcoming environment to older people, mental health service users, homeless people, low-income families, asylum seekers and refugees, and the long-term unemployed. Since May they have reclaimed over 74, 000kg of surplus food from food retailers.

‘Seasonal Food and Seasonal Wellbeing’

Our monthly ‘First Tuesday’ meeting on 7^th June met at Mushkil Aasaan - with many thanks for the use of the hall.

Belinda, Tim & Charles used games and discussion to explore some of the interrelated features of the food we buy and grow – its nutritional value, its availability locally-grown, its ‘carbon footprint’, its degree of government subsidy or supermarket ‘shelf shout’, and food’s relationship with our own wellbeing.

We shared some favourite seasonal recipes, local picnic locations, and ideas for outdoor cooking and eating. We looked at packaging and waste – and linked this to composting, and to the satisfaction of growing our own food.

 Some of our discussions in more detail:

April 5th Food Event - Call for Tooting Photos!

With Spring fast approaching TTTs Food Group have been busily preparing for the new growing season! to celebrate this the Food Group are having a community food and growing event on Tuesday the 5th of April at Mushkil Assann on Upper Tooting Road between 7 and 9pm. For the event we need lots and lots of photos of Tooting -both the space that's wasted as well as the space that is used in fantastic and innovative ways. If you'd like to submit some pics for the event, please email all JPEGS to colour_ride@hotmail.com.

More details to follow and see you on the day!

First Tuesday Food & Seed Swap

Tuesday's food and seed swap event attracted a good crowd and provoked a wide range of food growing discussion. Giles Read reviewed TTT's past Foodivals, talked about plans for Foodival 2010, showed a film and gave away a collection of tools refurbished by inmates at Wandsworth Prison.

The Tools Shed project takes broken tools collected at Neal's Nurseries, a garden centre opposite the prison, and elsewhere, which are then given a new lease of life and returned for use in schools and community gardens.  The project helps prisoners' rehabilitation and also teaches them new skills. 

We also heard about urban growing from Toni Scott of Food Up Front before thronging around the seed swap table to pick up some interesting new seeds to try out.  This correspondent has already planted Borletto and French beans courtesy of Springfields Hospital SHARE garden project.  Thanks to everyone who brought seeds and plants, to Bob Winter at Tools Shed for the tools, which were quickly snapped up, and to Peter at Neal's Nurseries for his discount offer.

The next "First Tuesday" on May 4th will be a Well-being Event with Jenny Griffiths as guest speaker.

SEED SWAP! - A Call For All Things Seedy!!

Just a quick reminder about next Tuesday's Food Event and Seed Swap.

After looking at last year's Foodival there'll be a short film on the "Story of Food" and how you can grow for this Autumn's festival.

To get everyone kick started there will be some FREE tools to give away and also a Seed Swap at the end of the night.

I'm bringing half a pack of carrots and half a packet of tomatoes as I've not got enough pots to use all the seeds - anyone got any radish seeds I could swap??

Any seeds you have, either full packs or just lone seeds would be ace for the swap - I just hope we don't wind up with a hundred packs of brussels sprouts.... ;)

Have an amazing Easter and see you there!