Art From London Markets, a-n feature

With my hand nearly back to normal by the end of this week I have started making again, I have been looking at some very unseasonal raspberries. So with a treat for my daughters taste buds rather than an eye on the environmental impact and inspired by the burgeoning greens around me, now that spring is here, I have been playing with the pinks of the fruit against shades of fresh green, and playing with the scale of the green and pink areas. Which of course got me thinking about how we have become accustomed to getting whatever we want when we want, and how this has been going on and increasing for a long time. The roots of British importation of food from beyond Europe go back to Tudor times and share roots with the start of the Empire. This same root that transformed us over the twentieth century with the dissolution of the Empire into a more modern kind of international liberal society, which at its best made room for cultural diversity and at its worst discriminated along the lines of difference rooted in supremacist ideologies that were used to justify the notions of Empire in the first place. Interestingly a lot of the foods we think of as quintessentially British have their heart in this trade: Sweet Spice as imports in the late medieval and early to late renaissance periods were status symbols. This is why much of our celebratory traditional foods are spicy and contain dried fruit, mince pies, simnel cake, wedding cake, Christmas pudding……. These rich foods mark celebrations because the ingredients were sourced abroad and were expensive, so saved initially for the elite and then once they permeated the rest of society were for special occasions. The ease with which we have been able to import fresh rather than dried or preserved produce over large distances is relatively new, and increased and expanded dramatically in the 20th century with faster ships, better cooling technologies and with flight. And since the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s there has been an IMF drive for export led development in less developed countries, adding to the variety of that supply. The pattern of this development “encouraged” by the IMF was frequently agricultural products first especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where balancing the need for overall economic development and food security for the local population was not always straight forward. (See earlier posts covering this). So we have unseasonal products in our shops and street markets because of this trade, and trade with Europe and Asia. What we do need to be sure of is that the producers are getting a fair price, a price that improves their lives, and that the investments in agriculture go a long way to increasing local food security and do not exacerbate local food price rises, which would of course increase food insecurity for the people in the community not benefitting from the trade. The current focus of the UN ZeroHunger campaign (@zerohunger)is for agricultural development with food security and sustainability of the local people at its heart: It is a shift in emphasis in response to the late 20th century emphasis on export and its failures. And as it is early March and tomorrow is international Women’s day, it should be remembered that in Sub Saharan Africa and in fact if you take the globe as a whole, most of the worlds farm workers are women, and that this is especially true in countries with farming practices which are labour intensive. The best development models of course take those women with them, the worst leave them behind. Which green shall I use here?