The Home Front the Food Revolution: Scotland's Role the Food Revolution: Scotland's Role Words Vicky Allan Portraits: Steve Cox
Summary
THE food map of Scotland is changing. What we eat, how we cook it, how we grow it, how we buy it, and even the way we talk about it are undergoing a revolution. Though this has its roots in local producers and in farmers' markets, it extends out to the supermarkets, ever happy to take up a new idea that sells. "Buy local" is the frequent refrain. Get to know your friendly farmer and get on first-name terms with the chicken that graces your plate. But this change is about more than that. It is partly about nostalgia. It revolves around the idea that other cultures and other times knew far better than us how to eat. That is why it not only resonates with a return to old Scottish practices, but with influences from other cultures. To consume olive oil drained from a demijohn as they might do in Italy, to eat fresh crunchy rye bread, hand-baked by a German master baker, to infuse all we eat with garlic as those healthy Mediterranean types have done for centuries; this is to lead the better life. Across Scotland many businesses are responding to these desires and, at the same time, following their own urge to produce in this way. These are just a few.
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Extract
The Home Front the Food Revolution: Scotland's Role the Food Revolution: Scotland's Role Words Vicky Allan Portraits: Steve Cox
THIS year's tattie harvest is coming to an end at Craggie farm in the Cawdor Hills. There, Glen and Gilli Allingham are currently pulling up potatoes, just as the generation before them did on this land and probably a generation before that. Yet, in two weeks time, the workings of the farm will turn to a far less typically Scottish activity.
The Allinghams will start planting their garlic for next year, as they have done for the past eight years. It says a great deal about the evolution of how we eat in Scotland that the Allinghams, finding potato production was not reliable enough in the current market, turned to a new crop that whiffs ...See the full content of this document