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...

Tooting Speaks! The big dilemmas of local food

30 passionate Tooting folk came to The Selkirk (thanks so much Ben and the team!) on Wednesday night to join our 4 fantastic speakers, Kemi Akinola, Robert Biel, Robyn Knight and Sue Sheehan, in wrestling with the big dilemmas of sustainable food systems and what we can do locally. Our title was "Local Food is an Expensive Luxury" and the discussion was hosted by TTT's co-founder Lucy Neal. If you're interested in these gatherings, they're part of our monthly Green Drinks at The Selkirk on the third Wednesday of every month, details HERE.

Local Food is an Expensive Luxury

But what was it that contextualised food as "local"? Our first speaker, Sue Sheehan (Incredible Edible Lambeth) opened the account with the hyper local - food grown by you as being an active form of protest - claiming the land and building personal resilience for healthy, home grown, cheap veg and against the power of advertising and convenience, after all, gardening is the most "therapeutic and defiant act as you can do" according to the ultimate Guerrilla Gardener, Ron Finley, watch THIS and "plant some shit". Switch to our second speaker, Dr Robert Biel, Senior lecturer at University College London and author of Sustainable Food Systems - the role of the city and we learn as recently as 1985, with population at 56 million, the UK produced 95% of its food from within its shores... a poignant and powerful statistic, particularly given the risk of a no deal Brexit and the threat that presents of us not being able to feed ourselves, which you can read more about in a recent article by Jay Rayner HERE.

Read on for LOADS more...

I Grew This 2018

Yesterday was another memorable one in the Tooting Foodival annals.  Full reports with myriad pictures will be posted on our blogas in the coming days but firstly thank you to our fabulous growers who donated home grown fruit and vegetables.  Without you the event is not possible.
We give you I Grew This 2018!

Annual general meeting and celebrations

Here at Transition Town Tooting we love a chance to celebrate - and we don't mind a good birthday cake either!
Last month was our annual general meeting and party, the perfect opportunity to reflect on the past year, look forward to the future and celebrate the now.
We had feedback from some of our main events and projects of the last year and it was lovely to hear from some new faces.

The projects represented were: Foodival (Mal), Future Tooting (Eleanor), Restart/Sewstart (Jeni), Vegetanuary (Sharon), Tooting Twirl (Lucy & Richard), Carbon Conversations (Peter), Caras (Jeni & Egle), Outdoor Learning (Sharon), Tooting Community Garden (Christine) and Green Drinks (Richard).


This list shows the diversity of our community activities - some long standing partnerships, some one-off events - and of course covers just a snapshot of the many things TTT is involved with.

We then moved to the formal part of the evening - reports from the treasurer, secretary and co-chairs and the reelection of the officers. Your chief officers remain: Sharon Gray & Jeni Walker, co-chairs; Eleanor Glen, secretary; and David Thorne, treasurer. We look forward to hearing from you!




Time for a fun activity - we asked everyone present to write down some ideas for future TTT projects or wishes for Tooting on a 'cookie' and these will be stored in our TTT Cookie Jar to be enjoyed when we have a lull in our calendar - there was certainly plenty of food for thought.

A quiz followed, put together by David, which provoked much debate and brain-straining and then we rounded off the evening with a gorgeous chocolate cake to celebrate TTT's 10th birthday, some delicious snacks and many enjoyable conversations.
Huge thanks to everyone who came and contributed to a great evening. We look forward to seeing you at next year's party, or before then at any of our TT activities. Just email us on transitiontowntooting@gmail.com to find out how you can get involved.
Sharon

Foodival Growers Poster

Here is this year's montage of growers from the Tooting Foodival 2017, the 10th TTT Foodival - wow, the first one only seemed like the other day!  We are really grateful to all our donors of fruit and vegetables without whom the festival could not happen.  More on the Foodival blog about this years event back in September. 

Can you spot yourself or someone you know?!

In this picture we should be able to pick out some of our individual donors: Jon, Kath, Hilary, Debbie, Richard, Indrajit, Heide, David, Mal, Jane, Richard, Barbara, Maggie, Judy, Kelly, Chris, Esther, Eleanor, Chrsitine, Lucy & Helen!

Thanks also to Tooting Community Garden, Paradise Co-op, Doddington & Rollo Community Garden, SHARE Community Garden, Abundance Southfields & Tamworth Allotments for your amazing contributions!

We really love Foodival and hope if you came along to this year's street festival version that you had a good time, whether eating sutainable home grown live cooked dishes, getting involved with our Craft or Green Stage activities, or chilling by the Sound Lounge stage.  Maybe you even had a rant on the Soap Box?!  More on the festival here.

Roll on 2018?

Foodival Starts Today

Tooting Foodival 2015 starts today with the collection of home grown fruit and vegetables at Mushkil Aasaan at 222 Upper Tooting Rd, next to Nandos!  If you can contribute even the tiniest carrot to the Foodival cause, we would love to see you!

Have your photo taken in the I Grew This frame or enter your misshapen marrow in the Ugly Veg competition.  Perhaps you could enter the Top Tooting Cook competition?  Volker Nissen from Volker & Quinn will be doing cooking demos and you'll be able to taste what he cooks.

The produce will be gathered and given to local restaurants and cooks for tomorrow's big day out at Samaj Hall where there'll be music, stalls, a Giant Pea, lots of locally cooked, locally grown dishes to try and we'll find out who really is the ugliest veg of all - competition winners win meals for two at local restaurants, so why not join in for a chance to win.

We hope you enjoy the Foodival weekend!

#seedtofeast #uglyveg #Foodival2015