So there are delicious decisions that are made in the short term that lead to lovely trees and have beautified our garden which was a blank grass square when we moved into this house.
I have recently started to follow Jay Rayner on twitter and he posts all sorts of links that are food related and interestesting, illustrating the state of discussions about our food futures, which it seems to me reflect our discussions about our futures in general. What kind of a society do we want?
There was a story he linked on twitter that suggested one of the "cures" for food poverty was urban free food gathering. And another suggesting that all the answers lay with GM production, both from the US . These provocative pieces to set the mind racing.
And here, we have the dichotomy of the fancy food farmers markets, at Borough and Muswell Hill and across London, which I love and am seduced by, but do not answer the developmental need for cheap produce, which is answered by the more basic food markets which I also love, and which bring us food from around the world.
And then this week I went to Hampstead, to the Community Market. And while it probably does serve the community of Hampstead as a whole, where property prices are extraordinary, so the average householder is more likely to be an actor or banker than a shop worker or an academic: This was a street market stall charging Farmers Market prices. The service was very pleasant and polite, and more like a Greengrocer (he chose my produce for me, and packed it up). Yet it was really like playing at buying from a market stall.
Something about Hampstead as a whole feels a little like a pastiche of its former self. Unless that is simply me getting more cynical as I get older; when I first got to know Hampstead in the 1980s it was still a haven of the European Intellectuals who had fled the rest of Europe in the early 20th Century. It is still beautiful sitting as it does on the edge of the Heath, has a theatre and a cinema a few small galleries, plenty of pubs and cafes.
My Hampstead as I knew it, was somewhere students could rent rooms from bonkers opera singers, who had inherited houses, and whose tenants got arias along with their rooms. Where you might see a member of the Freud family walking down the street. Which was culturally interesting, including conversations in pubs with strangers. This was when I was first getting to know London, my college friend had come into London to do his MA and I was still flirting with London like the late teen I was sitting around the edges in Hertfordshire. So I sat in Hampstead the other day with my teenage daughter and saw it through her eyes. She, urban born and brought up, to her it was just another place.
How did we ever get to the point where the solution to food poverty got disconnected from the whole notion of poverty itself? That the problem is not that we do not have enough food in the food supply. Look at all the overconsumption and food waste in the West. Where is the intelligent look at development meaning human development, where the solutions are not bigger more concentrated control by transnational corporations contrasted only with going back to picking food up off the streets. Where are the long term plans? Where are the apricot seeds that someone has the naivety to expect to grow? Where is this conversation?
Carsten Holler is on at the Haywood, a disconcerting look at disorientation in the face of decision making, how you can be thrown into the dark, thrown into
a visual migraine of a forest, and spun joyously down a tube as a result of your decisions to participate or not. I went with my smallest child and my oldest friend. My smallest child facing big changes and decisions, my oldest friend who is having to face a serious decision, caught as she is in the changing laws of French Pensions. She did not go down the slide.
