The project is open to all and we are again looking for a great spread from highland to lowland and from urban and rural Scotland. You can look back at last years event here: http://www.blasda.org.uk/

The Fife Diet is co-ordinating the project in collaboration with the Hiddens Gardens, which will be delivering the ‘Culture Kitchen Relay’ - a two week journey around Scotland in August, taking recipes from one community to another celebrating the local ingredients and regional dishes that make up our unique food culture. The Seed Truck project is also offering visits to run free workshops on growing your own food – ‘sowing the seed of a better food system’. The combination of these two touring projects will – we hope – bring more cohesion and links to the network.

We are looking for projects who want to be part of this. We are especially keen to make contact with projects from Aberdeen or Aberdeenshire, Dundee, Perth and anyone who wants to be involved in a collective event in Edinburgh or Glasgow.

If you are interested in getting involved and coming to a planning meeting in Glasgow next month, contact: Clementine Sandison, Culture Kitchen Creative Producer clem@thehiddengardens.org.uk, or Mike Small, Director, Fife Diet mike@fifediet.co.uk.

1) Connect the way we grow, produce, distribute and consume our food with our climate change targets

2) To connect the environmental policy framework to our health and well-being initiatives.

3) To look afresh at the values that underpin how we organise our food economy.

We have a food market monopolised by a handful of companies and health and nutrition targets that we’re struggling to meet. These ideas are all about creating more joined up thinking in how we grow, consume and distribute our food and a more diverse economic model. It’s also about creating some real urgency about the real problems we face in our health and in our environmental challenges in Scotland. At the moment there are some great things happening in the sustainable food movement, in community development and in environmental protection. But we suffer from operating in a society of silos: where the crops in our fields and the food on our plates are completely disconnected.

The purpose of the  manifesto is to try and help build a food culture in which communities can begin to be part of a restorative practice for a better food system.  We propose ‘food sovereignty replacing ‘food security’ as the guiding principle of our policy, and explore the opportunities for collaborative gains between the agendas of community food and health, affordability and sustainability.  We are looking at four themes: low carbon communities, culture & education, health & wellbeing and innovation & enterprise.

Here’s 20 ideas to change the way we eat…

1. Soup Test – no child to leave school without knowing how to make a pot of soup [CULTURE & EDUCATION].

2. Right to Grow – opportunity from the Enabling Communities legislation and the Land Fund [LOW CARBON COMMUNITIES]

3. A Seasonal 5 A Day – a joint national environmental and health campaign through schools, blogs and GPs / health centres / cafes exploring what a Scottish 5 a day would look like. [HEALTH & WELL-BEING]

4. Sugar Drink Tax – a small tax on the most unhealthy fizzy drinks as has been applied successfully in France[i] [HEALTH & WELL-BEING]

5. Elevate Food to the Climate Change Agenda: develop specific Food Emissions targets. see also Waste & Composting – see the Zero Waste Plan for Scotland] [LOW CARBON COMMUNITIES]

6. Moratorium on Supermarket Expansion (focusing instead on is CSA, urban agriculture and food co-ops) [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

7. Decentralise our Food Infrastructure – encourage and enable development of differing scales of mills and abattoirs [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

8. Blasda [ii]– a Terre Madre[iii] for Scotland – exploring the vision of food sovereignty [CULTURE & EDUCATION]

9. A Food Leadership Team – to draw together the strands of food policy, make sure it works and drive it forward. It would also look at wider policy and develop strategies for international issues like palm oil, and bigger challenges like refrigeration. [LOW CARBON COMMUNITIES]

10. Public Procurement – build on East Ayrshire model, making sustainable public procurement ta key corporate objective for LS’s, schools and hospitals.  [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

11. Plastic Bag Tax – hypothecated tax going back in to community food initiatives [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

12.Regional Food Mapping – building on the work already being led by SOAS

13. New Food Indicators – what indicators other than export-growth should we be using to chart ‘success’ in food policy? How many new farmers we attract into the sector? Vitamin intake, soil quality, expansion of organics, food mile reduction, resilience in local economies? [CULTURE & EDUCATION]

14. Farm Apprenticeships – building on work being led by Nourish at Elmwood College [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

15. School Farms – part of the curriculum for excellence [CULTURE & EDUCATION]

16. Farm Corps, Garden Corps – a chance for gap-year, NEET and young people to get work experience [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

17. GM Free Scotland – we should maintain and champion Scotland’s GM-free status [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

18. Queen of the Sea – celebrate and foster our fishing heritage – research project and publication to celebrate our seafood culture.[CULTURE & EDUCATION]

19. Scottish Orchard / Fruit – large-scale co-ordinated re-planting and boost of plant diversity [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

20. A New Food Economy – connecting people with the potential of a food economy (social enterprise in food, sustainable catering and cafes) [INNOVATION & ENTERPRISE]

Thanks to everyone who has offered advice to the work including: Professor Annie Anderson, Patrick Mulvany (Practical Action), Jo Hunt (Nourish), Andy Wightman, Donald Reid (The Larder), Sascha Grierson, Laura Stewart (Soil Association), Douglas Watson (SAOS), Justin Kenrick (H350), Bill Gray (Community Food & Health), Kate Campbell and Eve Keepax (Eco Schools), Robin Gourlay, Joanna Blythman, Peter Brown (QMS), Pat Abel and others. We’d really like your feedback and thoughts and we’ll be creating opportunities for this to happen, but please leave comments below.

The manifesto is the culmination of five years action research in Fife and beyond, trying to get an understanding of how food can be part of restorative practice across health and well-being ecology and community. We intend to discuss these ideas over the coming months with as wide a group as possible, hold them up to scrutiny and explore ways they can be brought to life through collaborations, existing and future legislation. We list our top twenty ideas to change the way we eat, then give some more detail on the top ten.

The purpose of the manifesto is to try and help build a food culture in which communities can begin to take charge of creating a better food system. We propose ‘food sovereignty replacing ‘food security’ as the guiding principle of our policy, and explore the opportunities for collaborative gains between the agendas of community food and health, affordability and sustainability.

The policies are ordered in four themes: low carbon communities, culture & education, health & wellbeing and innovation & enterprise. [If your browser cannot read the SCRIBD file below go here instead]

We’ll be publishing our annual review, giving out details of our brand new Seed Truck project, launching our perpetual calendar, launching our new food manifesto and publicising our growing project in Kirkcaldy and our other work across Fife.

In the meantime if you want to send us photos of your Easter lunch, or get in touch about working with us in the year ahead, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

You can get all the details about how to contact us here: http://www.fifediet.co.uk/contact-us/

From our annual review we’ve:

• SAVED an estimate of 851.7 tonnes CO2e by our members this year.
• Gained 16126 NEW MEMBERS – if you are one of them – welcome!
• HELD 133 members events & workshops

(that’s why we’re having a wee lie down)

Thanks to all our members, volunteers and supporters, have a Happy Easter…

170g (3 tablespoons) double cream

170g (3 tablespoons) yogurt

75g (2 tablespoons) jumbo Fife oats

75g (1 tablespoon) light muscovado sugar

About 2tablespoons (1/2 teaspoon) Aberdour runny honey

500g (6-8 juicy strawberries) mixed berries such as brambles, raspberries and strawberries.

Preheat the grill to hot and place the oats and sugar on a sheet of foil, then toast under the preheated grill. Watch them constantly, removing and shaking them about, or forking them through every 10-20 seconds or so. After a couple of minutes, the sugar will have caramelised and the oats will be golden. Remove and leave to cool.

Meanwhile tip the cream into the bowl and add the honey. Whisk the cream lightly until it just starts to thicken. Then add the yogurt and stir lightly.

Once the oat mixture has cooled, loosely break up the mixture between your fingers as you add it to the cream.

Add your favourite berries to the bowl and gently stir.

Serve in a lovely glass with a berry on the top – and a drizzle of honey, if you like.

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tin chopped tomatoes

500ml veg stock

1 large onion chopped

1 leek sliced

Half a swede cut into chunks

1 parsnip cut into slices / chunks

1 carrot cut into slices

Handful of pearl barley

Salt (optional)

1. Saute the onion and leek in the oil until soft (about 10 mins), add the carrot,

swede, parsnip, tomatoes, and stock and stir well. Stir in barley.

2. Cover and place in preheated oven at about 180°C/350°F/gas 4 for 90 mins. Or cook stove-

top for 40 mins.

3. Stir halfway and check to ensure vegetable are covered by liquid.

4. Check after 45 mins that barley is soft and then serve.

1l boiling water

100ml vegetable oil

1kg fine oatmeal

10g salt

Makes four large trays of oatcakes

1. Mix oatmeal and salt in large mixing bowl

2. Add boiling water and the oil and stir well

3. Leave for 15 minutes

4. Roll out to desired thickness

5. Bake in oven at 150°C/gas3/300°F, turn them over when all water mark is gone

6. Allow to cool, and eat with whatever your heart desires

Makes 12 (6)

80g (40g) unsalted butter, melted and cooled, plus 10g for frying.

1 (1/2) onion, finely diced

2 (1) tsp grated nutmeg

1 (1/2) tbsp oil

300g (150g) pumpkin.

250g (125g) plain flour

2 (1) tsp baking powder

1/ 2 (1/4) tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 (1/2) tsp salt

2 (1) eggs

275g (137g) yoghurt

40g (20g) pumpkin seeds, toasted

Heat the oven to 200C/400F/ gas mark 6 and line a muffin tin with 12(6) paper cases.

Peel and dice the pumpkin. Place in an ovenproof tray and drizzle with some oil. Place into the oven and roast for around 25 minutes, turning the pumpkin occasionally. Leave to cool for 5 minutes then use a hand blender to blitz the pumpkin to a puree.

Whilst the pumpkin is cooking warm the 10g of butter in a large frying pan and sauté the onion until soft, about 10 minutes. Cool.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, nutmeg and salt. In a jug whisk the melted butter, eggs and yoghurt. Pour the wet ingredients over the flour and stir with a spatula until just combined. Lightly fold in the cooled onions, pumpkin and the pumpkin seeds.  Spoon into the cases and bake for about 18 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.

Squash can be used instead of the pumpkin and try out different seeds and nuts as an alternative to the pumpkin seeds.