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...

Happy New Year! How to start the year with Wellbeing

Happy New Year! Happy New Decade!

This is the decade for climate action. The year ahead is gearing up for it with greater collaboration and connection between organisations working towards a regenerative future.

And it all starts NOW! This Saturday, 4th January, TTT will be hosting 2 talks at "Come Together" - a well being day for the community at Tooting Methodist Church on the corner of Longmead Road and Totterdown Street.

The event has been put together by Katies Pilates and has a mixture of free and paid activities focusing on personal wellbeing, practical tips for a more sustainable life (how do you make a wormery?), nutrition and how we make change happen at the community scale. There's loads of people and organisations involved, including A Greener Tooting, BYO, Tooting Healthy Streets, Get Juiced and Be Marvellous, should be really good. Here's the line up:

We're doing 2 sessions:

• At 11.30am, a participative talk exploring Wellbeing in all of our Community, using NEF's Five Ways to Wellbeing as a framework and...
• at 1pm, we'll be launching Vegetanuary! for 2020, our annual month sharing vegetarian and vegan recipes, articles and thoughts ending in a social dinner at the end of the month. 

Do come along! Should be a fantastic day!

Richard

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?

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

Vegetanuary

Chuck's Kale

So some of us went vegetarian for the month of January and, for me, it proved surprisingly fun to try an alternative, more mindful way of feeding myself. 80 people shared experiences and recipes on the Vegetanuary facebook group and a celebratory feast was held at Vegan Express last week. 

Vegan Express Celebration

Dipa's vegetable pastilla with feta

It would be great to try this again, maybe even risking Veganuary or Veganpril and I am sure there must be a recipe collection in here somewhere???  It's also a great way to kick off thinking about the 10th Foodival later this year.  

Well done Richard for organising this inspriring initiative and thanks to everyone who or joined in. Not sure I'll ever salivate over a bacon sandwich in quite the same way again!

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