What Did You Eat?
The year is up. For some of us who started in late October 2007 a full calendar year has almost passed and we want to get your responses on how you have got on. Whether you’ve been doing this since then – or just started – share your views on what you ate and how you got on…
The questions we are asking are:
• What food did you eat?
• What exceptions did you make?
• What foods did you miss most?
• What food did you not miss?
• What were your favourite recipes?
• What are the biggest gaps in the Fife food market?
Send in your responses and we’ll run one blog entry on this subject over the next few weeks and see what experiences people have had. If you’re only a few weeks or months into trying to do the Fife Diet – you can still chip in.
October 7, 2008 at 11:27 am
This first response just in from T & J Groundwater. What’s realy great is that everyone has found different ways of doing this, we didnt eat any ‘game’ really, dont know why. Anyway here’s what they ate:
“We’ve been doing the Fife Diet from the start of the year though only went to one meeting. We started slowly concentrating on one thing at a time.
• What food did you eat?
Food from Fife where it was available. Fife has wonderful fish and venison. We also had pheasant, pigeon and partridge. Delicious! Veg from a local farm backed up with fruit and veg from our garden. We got local organic
eggs.
But then we weren’t too strict. For example lemon juice isn’t available
here. We just bought it anyway. Overall we ate 70% local, 20% from the UK and 10% possibly from further away.
• What exceptions did you make?
Where food wasn’t available easily from Fife we went for Scottish and the UK if not. We bought spices, tea and coffee from further afield. In winter
Spannish oranges were lovely. As there’s no fruit in Fife then that’s fine
with us.
• What foods did you miss most?
None. Local food is very fresh and full of flavour.
• What food did you not miss?
Bananas.
• What were your favourite recipes?
Roast pheasant. Summer salads from the garden. Soups.
• What are the biggest gaps in the Fife food market?
We didn’t find any milk, butter or cheese marked as from Fife. We got ours from Bridge of Allan.
You never asked this, but one of the greatest bonuses is that we never had any colds or flu in the year. Not a sniffle. Local food seems healthier. Possibly as more vitamins are retained as the food is fresher.”
Thanks!
October 13, 2008 at 5:53 pm
We’ve been doing it for six months and found it hard at first, but now find it actually fairly easy.
What food did you eat?
Fife fare, with the odd exception but never outside Scotland. For eg it was impossible to get any decent dairy. Even the new Ensther cheese, I didnt like.
• What exceptions did you make?
Tea, coffee, occasional chocolate
• What foods did you miss most?
Becks for me. Coke for Jane.
• What food did you not miss?
Neither of us really missed ‘exotic fruit’. Pineapples are overrated.
• What were your favourite recipes?
Old favourites: Mince n Tatties
Dave and Jane Thomson, Dunfermline
October 14, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I struggled to do this despite my best intentions.
It’s hard with a family of older kids and with so much of society and the shopping system going against you. You’d go into shops and find nothing from Fife. So after trying my compromise was to cook four meals a week from Fife – by planning ahead each week. We’ve been doing this since June. This actually worked quite well but I’d like to hear how others did it and how I can reduce food miles and eat local more successfully.
I love the blog and the international articles you don’t read elsewhere in the press but I need more practical help sourcing and cooking too. Are you doing a recipe book?
October 22, 2008 at 1:10 pm
This from Catherine & Richard in Kinghorn (for which many thanks):
“Listening to Mike and Karen’s brilliant Food Programme piece on Radio 4 this week, I blanched at the interviewer’s enquiry as to whether or now they felt they were ‘cheating’ by having certain non-Fife sourced foods in their house. What attracted me to the project in the first place was the sense of exploration in it – the fact that nobody was out to prove it could be done ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Nonetheless, the fact remains – I feel a bit guilty for not having done it ‘better’. After all, weren’t we photographed in a field of stubble with three freezing piglets and our two angry daughters, offering ourselves up as the ideal Fife Diet family? Hypocrites!
Yet when friends ask if we’re ‘still doing that Fife Diet thing’ I do feel that the answer’s ‘yes’, although I’m not sure we have tested the model to its limits. We have a household that runs along the old fashioned line of working dad/stay at home mum, so I am the main shopper and cook, with a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old to feed and pacify at the same time. And every meal and every shopping trip is most definitely Fife Diet based, or at the very least, Fife Diet informed. Here are some notes on how we’ve found it:
- The two girls are fussy eaters at the best of times and it proved too difficult to get them to eat a balanced diet within the Fife Diet. Eggs, meat and dairy were easy but seasonal veg definitely needed supplementing with fruits, which we inevitably ate too. UK sourced produce gave way to European before long. They grew so sick of porridge that we felt sorry for them and allowed Shreddies over the threshold. And baked beans. And, um, pink milk powder. Really we’d have to say that the girls were the outlaws to our Fife Diet regime, and the exceptions that we made for them had a nasty habit of staining our own ideals. But our tolerance of shop-bought convenience foods has been greatly lowered by the project, and we have challenged them with various earth vegetables and soupy things with good results.
- Our veg box has been great. It has most definitely provided the backbone of our diet and we’ve enjoyed the seasonality of it all the more for our reliance on it. Bellfield enclose a newsletter with their box delivery – a window into what was happening ‘out there in the fields’ that was far more meaningful than when we were supplementing our diet so greatly with supermarket veg. The week that they reported hand weeding the crops because the bed weeder couldn’t traverse the sodden fields really sat in my mind. It seems somehow silly to embrace the ‘limitations’ of seasonality yet not to be able to accept that leeks might have to drop off the menu because of the weather that year. (Though I’m grateful to those poor broken-backed labourers for their toils… the leeks are fab..) We are so spoiled.
- We’ve not had a very wealthy year and we aren’t very together on Saturday mornings so farmer’s markets didn’t feature hugely in our eating. The Burntisland butcher’s, Watson’s, stock local lamb which we enjoyed and their beef might even be Dalachy’s (?) Puddledub, being available in Kinghorn, were our darlings but actually we ate surprisingly little meat in the end – I think because we just got more resourceful, though probably also because we allowed more naughty stuff through the net as time went on.
- Because I don’t drive and because our children are still young, the extent to which we could go outside of the immediate locality was pretty limited. But that seems sensible really – why replace air miles with car miles? It was not long before we had the local co-op’s stock compartmentalised into stuff we could allow ourselves and stuff we couldn’t – along the lines of ‘it could have been grown in Fife and perhaps someday it will’ (mushrooms, cheese, sunflower seeds) or UK/Scottish produce. Sadly for our ideals I can’t resist a bargain and a good few reduced price goods found their way into my basket during my sanity saving six o’clock shopping trips. We also began to cheat wildly on tinned tomatoes during the tomato season. But it felt so good.
- Cooking stuff from scratch has always been a big part of the way we eat and we have done more of it this year, but truthfully I’m not sure that it has really enabled us to be more true to the Fife diet mainly because of the scarcity of some ingredients – flour being a prime example. We’ve always had main meals cooked from scratch but I was consciously making an effort to make more of our convenience/snack foods at home while vaguely wondering if I wasn’t being a bit daft. I do feel happy that we eat such a lot of home made bread but I can’t pretend that it’s Band A Fife Diet fodder. I made yoghurt a few times but then lost the lid of the flask and never got another one. Thinking, what’s the point? The shop yoghurt’s Yeo Valley but the milk’s Wiseman! The basic ingredients for the Fife Diet were the hardest to come by.
-
Generally speaking, I like to think we found our own level with the Fife Diet and that rather than being martyrs to it, began a relationship with local food that, far from being something that we abandon with a sigh of relief at the end of the allotted time span, develops and becomes more thorough with time. We hope to grow more food of our own this coming year and it would be great to get a bit more educated about storage – freezing, pickling, salting – whatever. I do regret that we weren’t more rigorous in a way, because I support the campaigning nature of the project as much as the personal journey, and we won’t merit much coverage doing the Fife Diet on our level. And I wish I’d catalogued more of the recipes* that we used. But between peeling the potatoes, soaking the wheat and kneading the bread dough, where the hell would you find the time for that?”
* on that last point Catherine – if people find time now please please send us in your recipes, we are collating them over the coming months and your input and energy is essential…(Mike)
October 27, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Sam from Rosyth emailed in her responses…
• What food did you eat?
pototoes, carrots, onions, pork, beef, venison, beans, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, pumpkin, ice cream, butter, oats
• What exceptions did you make?
cheese, butter, tea, coffee, cooking oil, chocoate, soya milk, gluten free bread & pasta, spices, stock, gluten free flour, fairtrade/organic – bananas, british apples – frozen peas – occasional take aways
when eating out had no choice, alchol – again more of a gluten free problem as cant drink beer
• What foods did you miss most?
tomatoes – tinned tomatoes, prawns, coconut milk, fruit
• What are the biggest gaps in the Fife food market?
cheese, butter, milk, obviously a gluten free option, easy eating out
options
my thoughts…I actually found the diet very restrictive – mainly because I really am not into vegetable enough! over the winter I ended up eatings chips which I really enjoyed until spring & then totally over did it on chips. I think having time to really prepare menus & food plasn would make this much easier & more pleasurable. I enjoyed the actually shopping a lot more & actually have significantly reduced the amount of food that i eat from supermarkets. I did find it really easy to eat Scottish & decided to eat short dated scottish meat if i saw it.
I really tried to stick to west fife – particulary with high fuel prices – & maybe thats way i struggled – only a montly farmers market, i live by myself & box schemes have never really worked in the long term, i like to choose my veg. there is one farm shop that opens between end oct & april & thats my options. Have discovered Craigies at Dalmeny & decided that they are actually closer to me than cupar farm shops so thought that was ok
conclusions – grew some tomatoes & lettuce in pots & this whole thing brought back my interest in growing my own again – used to have an allotment in edinburgh
i think we need to develop at system that incorparates both local & imports – as i think its quite hard to do this long term particulary over the winter – we do need fruit & also a bit of variety.
i think also we need to rework the distribution system, get more local/direct/community growing and less reliance on big corporates – somehow it would be nice to bring back local fruit & veg shops again – its quite desolate where i am
I think it helped to start enjoying the food cycle in the uk
outcomes – will stick to farm shop shopping & farmers market, will begin again to grow veg, will start the long haul on getting some project/interest going in my local area”
December 9, 2008 at 9:28 pm
What food did you eat?
• What exceptions did you make?
• What foods did you miss most?
• What food did you not miss?
• What were your favourite recipes?
• What are the biggest gaps in the Fife food market?
We found meat the easiest with Fletcher’s venison, Jamesfield beef and pork from a small holding near Kinghorn, also pheasant and rabbit when available. Vegetables from Bellfield supplemented by the Pillars and what we grew ourselves. Fruit locally when in season and often foraged. Eggs from our own chickens.
Exceptions were oranges which were delicious, milk and dairy, flour and breakfast cereal amongst other things.
We did not do the diet too strictly, thinking if it is available in Fife then buy it but if it is not available but is justifiable then buy anyway.
Favorite recipe depends on the time of year, venison casserolle in winter of course, mince and tatties anytime and raw carrot and beetroot grated just fresh out of the ground.
Biggest gaps which could be covered in Fife I felt were; unhomogenised milk, cheddar style cheese, butter, breakfast cereal which is not porridge, flour, sugar and molasses (when did the sugar factory in Cupar close?), fruit juices, pasta, sunflower seeds and oil, pumpkin seeds.
Things I would like slowly and thoughtfully imported would be; oranges, chocolate (obviously), pasata and other tomato products, Worcester sauce, soy sauce, olives and pickled gherkins. Mmm!
December 9, 2008 at 9:55 pm
This response is after about three months of serious Fife-dieting. We’ve enjoyed it tremendously, lost weight, eaten great food and learned to get on with Kale.
• What food did you eat?
Our Fife food is something like this – Meat: beef, buffalo, chicken, lamb, pork, venison from the farmer’s market. Fish: various fresh from Inverkiething, and St Monans kippers from St Monans. Veg from the veg box. Fruit from the farmer’s market. Also eggs, honey, cheese
• What exceptions did you make?
Tea, coffee, chocolate, spices, wine, pulses (none of us are willing to have an all animal/fish-protein based diet), olive oil are our obvious non-UK exceptions. Trying to buy Scottish we got milk, butter and oats. From the UK flour, salt, cooking oil, vinegar, mustard etc..
• What foods did you miss most?
The things we really miss are brown rice, tins of tomatoes and noodles.
• What food did you not miss?
We thought we would miss pasta, but have hardly given it a backwards glance. Buffalo mozzarella we thought would be tough as we have a daughter who can only tolerate buffalo milk. However, we have kept on getting buffalo milk from Edinburgh Waitrose (come on, Puddledub, milk those buffalo!) and learnt to make soft cheese. Now if someone knows how to make mozzarella, I’d love to know.
• What are the biggest gaps in the Fife food market?
Oats, wheat, dairy. I can see the wheat growing from our window (and we’re in the middle of Dunfermline!), but try to buy locally grown and milled wheat? Forget it. Apparently there’s a section in one of Adam Smith’s treatises about the economics of growing grapes in Kirkcaldy. He calculated that it wasn’t economically viable, but the times they are a’changing . . .
December 12, 2008 at 10:41 pm
According to The Fife Book the sugar beet factory closed in 1972..
December 18, 2008 at 9:04 pm
What Did You Eat?
Where did you get your food from?
The backbone of our diet has been a large vegetable box from Bellfield, delivered weekly (£20). We also get a dozen free range organic Fife eggs from them too (£3.80)
We have the milk delivered daily (4 pints) costing about £10 a week. Cream if we need it too.
Hutchison’s Flour Mill in Kirkcaldy supplied us with Plain, Self Raising and Wholemeal Flour. All milled in Kirkcaldy and using a mix of flour that’s as close to home as possible. They also gave us a batch of Polish Bread Mix to try which was a great variation.
HS Murray Fishmongers in Inverkeithing is where I’ve been getting the fish from. Douglas is incredibly knowledgeable about where his fish has come from and totally honest about what was suitable for us to eat. Again, we had this delivered to the house every couple of weeks and I would use half and Freeze half. We also used the Pittenweem Fish Vans which come through Burntisland.
We got our meat from a number of places. Burntisland High Street has two Butchers and Watson’s are very knowledgeable about where their meat comes from – much of the Beef from near Aberdour (the next town to us) and their lamb from St Andrews. David Sands Shop also stocks the Puddledub stuff – sausages and bacon which is great given that it’s just up the road. We also went to the Farmers market – usually just once a month combined with a visit to Kirkcaldy. We’d sometimes buy a chicken or beef there. And we got all of our jams from the farmers markets and car boot sales. And actually the best jam I had all year was apple and rosemary brought from a sale in Pitenweem for £1. We also got mustard there too. Chutneys were generously given to us throughout the year.
We got our honey from the fruit shop on the highstreet – from Aberdour and were also given some Perthshire honey. The Fruit shop also sold local greens and cooking apples and were very good at helping me source UK apples and pears in the Winter.
On the road between Burntisland and Kinghorn there is a small holding where we often stop by for turnips, beetroot etc just whatever they have.
In Kirkcaldy there is a Fruit Shop called First Fruits in the Postings which sold brilliant Cupar strawberries and raspberries all through the season at a good price. They also had local tomatoes.
We also used CF Lonies Bakers in Aberdour as part of a trip to Playgroup which does lovely bread, cakes and pies.
For alcohol we drank a fair bit of Cairn O’ Mohr Wine. Not Fife – Perthshire – but it was available from the Post Office on Burntisland High Street. So was Williams Brothers Beers – again, Clackmannanshire, but actually only a few miles away.
My treat has been a supply of Bouvrage – a raspberry soft drink made with Fife raspberries. Also lovely mixed with Glen’s Vodka – made in Ayrshire.
We avoided the supermarket by mainly using the HighStreet. Mad Murdochs until very recently, stocked recycled loo rolls. The also have toothpaste, toothbrushes, cloths and other kitchen-y things. We also went to Scotmed Herbs and Fair Shares for Ecover and Fair Trade cleaning stuff.
We are also part of a Food Co-op which meant that we could bulk buy big cleaning things like Washing up liquid and clothes liquid.
We grew a few things ourselves – courgettes (easy), different lettuces, we have some wee apple and pear trees, green beans, sweet peas, potatoes, squash and tomato plants took over the living room.
What Exceptions did you make?
Dairy production is a problem in Fife. So our policy was to get the next best thing we could.
Milk: delivered in glass bottles from the Wiseman’s dairy in Cupar. This was great as there was so much less plastic to recycle.
We switched from margarine to butter. Going for the most Scottish we could get. Local shops like David Sands stocking Rowan Glen, and also Grahams.
Cheese: Our standard was the Co-op’s Scottish Organic Cheddar. Sometimes we got a Mull cheddar but since the cheesemaking has started in Pittenweem, we’ve had that.
Yoghurt: The co-op stocks Yeo Valley plain. And eventually thanks to Zillah’s post – I got the hang of making my own.
At the beginning we were allowed to use whatever was left in the house: this included Arborio rice and red and puy lentils. We also eventually allowed back in olive oil, although we also sourced Rapeseed from the Borders. It now seems that there is a Fife Rapeseed Oil too.
For pulses I couldn’t get my hands on any Fife dried peas but did get some UK grown Yellow split peas and green dried peas.
All of the herbs and spices in the cupboard were allowed. The chilli we had lasted almost to the end!
I went the first month without any tea or coffee – it was too much! So we have been allowing Fairtrade tea and coffee usually from the co-op.
What Did you miss?
At the beginning I missed a lot of things. Especially fruit and fruit juice and ready made pasta and tinned tomatoes … the list was endless! But as time passed and I adapted to new ways of cooking and thinking about food this list got shorter and shorter. I am aware that there were a lot of things that I didn’t eat over the last year, but because we never went without and our eating experiences were generally really good, I didn’t feel deprived in anyway, and therefore didn’t really miss them.
I’d say the things I really did miss are probably bananas, olives, shop bought chocolate biscuits, takeaway foods, curry paste when it ran out, fruit smoothies and exotic juices. I also missed the fake meat products I’d usually eat like Quorn mince, Cauldron sausages. Oh, and just being able to go into a shop and buy some chocolate.
There are some things I thought I’d miss and actually didn’t. The most major of these was my bad fizzy water habit. Now gone. And the other thing was crisps. That was the first thing I ate when the diet had it’s ‘official’ end.
Karen
December 19, 2008 at 10:58 am
What’s so great about reading these comments, is the spirit of honest exploration, research and enquiry – it’s not a competition and no-one is bragging / beating themselves up.
I’m not a Fife dieter (well, I live in London, so it’d be a bit mad….) but I’m really interested in this cooperative enquiry that you’ve been experimenting with. Thanks for doing it.
I wonder about non-animal protein. What are the good plant-based pulses / seeds, which we could be growing and eating on our blowy and rainy islands? Peas which can be dried? Dryable beans of various kinds? What did our medieaval peasant ancestors eat?
Enjoy your Xmas lunches!
December 29, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Hi Penny,
I’ve been investigating the issue of non-animal protein, as that was one of our major ‘cheats’. The traditional Scottish solution would have been peasemeal – i.e. field peas roasted and dried. It’s quite hard to get hold of, as far as I know Golspie Mill in Sutherland is the only place producing peasemeal. We buy it in Edinburgh. I’ve tried it variously in the traditional Scots ways and using it as one would use chickpea flour. We were pretty successful in recreating north-Italian and Indian favourites (cauliflower fritters went particularly well, also I’ve posted my Fife-ish Farinata recipe elsewhere on the site).
When we lived in England we successfully grew borlotti beans, which can then be dried. Garden Organic have also recently done trials for growing chickpeas, but again they were more successful further south.
I’d love to know more if anyone else has experience of growing pulses in Fife, or using peasemeal.
Zillah