I’ve just eaten the perfect pear, and it came from our local butcher’s shop. If I had bought this in France, Italy or Spain, it would be unremarkable, but in the context of the UK, I think it points the way to a possible future for our food system. Our local butcher (Tom) runs a…
Category: food
The future of milk – the vending machine.
We always think we will recognise the future when we see it – but we don’t. A couple of years ago on a work trip to Zurich, I met @FlurinConradin and his milking vending machine @stadtmilch, a localised milk vending machine. In the slightly rarefied atmosphere of an organic deli in Zurich this seemed to…
Losing the rural local state
About 10 years ago I met someone who had become the owner of a significant piece of infrastructure (a port) as a community interest company, previously they had a been a charity and a community group, they ended up buying the port because no one else would take it on and consequently it was very…
The Future of Cities is Urban Agriculture.
{First published in 2017] For many years, the future of cities has been a sort of noir, an ever-increasing array of buildings, concrete and glass that serves to emphasize that the urban is not the countryside. If we turn to the ur-text of so much of contemporary urbanism, ‘Bladerunner’ the ‘Director’s Cut’ ends with the…
Organic 3.0 – The future is participation (2)
[From 2016] My first example of this tendency towards participation in food is in the Orto Loco project in Zurich (see also this blog post). This Farm is a community supported agriculture scheme (CSA) based on an organic farm. Although a small farm, it is very diverse with a broad range of enterprises – fruit,…
Green Shaving – Razors and hope
I’m currently without a beard, and the entails the daily chore of shaving. One of my resentments has been the ridiculous situation of having to buy clearly non-recyclable products and pay dearly for them. With the help of this blog post, I’ve made the decision to return to the good old-fashioned safety razor, which is, of course,…
Organic 3.0 – How the future of organic food is in participation (1)
[From 2016] Last week I gave a presentation at a Seminar at Warwick Crop Centre, and as per usual it appeared on the CCRI slide share, but that I realised that the discussion had led me to say much more than in the slides, and afterwards a few new points came to me. The following…
Rise up food citizenship – grab your forks
This is a blog about food, which will argue that you – yes you reading this text now, should take more responsibility for the food that you eat, that you make part of your very being. It will argue that in return you will be gradually freed from a food system that is broken, bland…
Reading for DD313
Most of the time our knowledge of International relations is served by the general media – what is brought up on the TV or headline programmes of the radio, which may (or not) be sufficient for daily life, but your studies will get a considerable boost by plugging into a more comprehensive set of media….
Terraces, soil and innovation
[April 2016] Early in the twentieth century, there was a series of books that investigated how previous forms of agriculture had sustained both the soil and the people dependent on them. From the Inca ruins in the Andes, the Hunza in the Himalayas or the variety of forms of intensive agriculture in China, it became…
The Ruralist 