Combining my research with the school holidays I take my smallest child with me. My smallest loves street food, so this week at her request we visted Borough Market. It is her favourite of the markets she has come to so far, and we ate the most delicious Egyptian concoction, a small pot of rice with chick peas, tomatoe sauce and onions that was so savoury, so delicious, and as the Cathedral seems to have decided it nolonger wishes to be a picnic site we walked round the corner from the market to the replica Golden Hinde and sat and ate on the wall there under the sign that let us know that the church owns the wharf too. Later we managed to catch the last chance to see the Calder show at the Tate. Floaty suggestions of form with no colour or bright primary colours.
So the Golden Hind was part of a fleet of ships under St Francis Drake dedicated to undermining Spanish advantage in trade with South America.
The trade that brought chocolate, potatoes, physalis, tomatoes, maize, chilli,
tobacco, and amazing supplies of gold to Europe. Europe who exportedchicken pox, measles and a barbaric attitude to cultures other their our own. The food still informs the European diet………..
Any way that got me thinking about tomatoes….the dominant role of tomatoes in the cooking of Portugal Italy and Spain, and thier story in the development of global trade.
This trade was marked by piracy between Spanish, Dutch, Portugese and English ships, and it is really interesting to read the cleaned up language talking of “acquisitions”, and “interceptions” on the Goldenhinde.com website. It does not mention the role of the Drake family in the slave trade, or in piracy. This was one of the ships key in establishing Elizabeth I Empire, and that was not a clean or comfortable story. It is a bit like listening to some of the current coverage from Panama, out of control global elites interested in lining their own pockets and transferring wealth across the globe without regard to any one else, dressed up by some as “legitimate” business.
The pattern of global import and export is still under the influence of the legacy of the slave trade, the East India Companies of Britain and the Dutch, the slave trade and the Eurpoean Colonialisation of Asia Africa and the Americas. Tea originated in China, but is grown in India and South Asia, sugar cane originated in South and South East Asia but is grown across the Carribean and in the US. Coffee originated in Ethiopia but was grown in Asia and now across Asia South America and Africa……..the legacy of European trade lives on. This fact calls in to question some ideas about “localism” and National identity. In the Italian slow food tradition aubergines (India) and tomatoes (America) certainly feature, so what is local? When does our idea of a traditional crop start and when is something too new? Or really is it never too new, can’t newness be exciting rather than threatening?
And isn’t it a mistake to equate anti-foreign with slow food any way. Across Eurpoe our food has international roots. In London our population comes from all over the world, this is reflected in the variety of foods on offer, and given that the story of London is a history of its people, and the culture of London is cosmopolitan and always has been, London localism includes Kent apples and Lincolnshire beetroot, and chilli and garlic and ginger, enjera, cassava, bananas…..fejoa
And it got me reflecting on the first stories I collected and the memory shared of the tomatoes ripening in the kitchen draw, these plants with hundreds of years in the UK adapted by clever growers low tech solutions to the lack of sun. And then about the pregnant girl from New Zealand who lived here and craved fejoa, but found them too expensive.
That day in Borough market I found them for 80p, not cheap, they are small, but not so expensive she would not have been able to buy herself a pregnancy treat….
And as I write this and eat a fejoa which tastes faintly medicinal, (in fact it reminds me of the smell of germaline from childhood scrapes), it makes me think that there is something behind pregnancy cravings beyond the familiar.
Back to the point what makes a food local: Is it that it is grown locally? Is it that it has grown there for a hundred years or that it has always grown there? In which case do British people really want to go back to a diet or turnips and pidgeon? Is a potato grown in Lincolnshirenot English? Or is it that it is good, delicious nutritious and people in the locality like it and know how to make it? One of the greatest pleasures of living in a city like London is the capacity for a whole range of food from different food cultures from across the globe including the British Isles. My feeling is that it is important to protect food knowledge and traditions in an inclusive way. It is important to support diversity.
And I have been returning to some of the other stories picked up along my way, I am making a big pomegranate image, a reflection on nostalgia…..
The central icon, the pomegranate relates to a story shared about how the sight of pomegranates in shop fronts reminded a child of the Tunisian garden she had left behind…. and developing from that…..
the pomegranate also holds in its grasp our relationship with traders from the middle East during the Middle Ages, and……..
as it becomes a clearer image the compulsion I have to enlarge and clarify this image has its roots in the current situation in the middle East and the refugee crisis and my discomfort at our dehumanising response to it.
