In autumn last year I arranged to do a week-long food diary for Fortified Gazette, a substack run by Kate Morgan and Sinae Park in Glasgow, that they describe as “an irregular bulletin, where contributors are invited to share their eating over the period of a week.” It’s a wonderful space held for a variety of (non)writers and (non)cooks, and I was pleased to make a contribution. Please consider supporting their work, which occasionally appears in physical form too.
Below is the introduction I sent with the first installment, the the entire thread of my dispatches with a few of the images I also shared.
I would also love it if you would become a paid subscriber, not to unlock special content, but to help me continue self-initiated writing projects about fermentation, landwork and food anti-capitalism. Cheers!
For almost two years, I have been living in an ex-Steiner school near Ilkeston, Derbyshire, with a rotating group of artists, musicians, dancers, cooks and curators, working out how to (temporarily) breathe new life into a dilapidated building and live in harmony with each other and the deep ecology. Originally called DARP (Derbyshire Artist Residency Programme) the project began in December 2020 as a place for short artist residencies, and has organically evolved into Michael’s House, a space for experimental co-living, where all members co-organise the upkeep, visitors and happenings non-hierarchically and on the basis of consent. Everything is opt-in except the weekly group meeting and cleaning tasks, which provide a small amount of structure in an otherwise free-flowing project that aims to meet the needs of all members and make room to bask in the abundance of time, room, materials, nature and love.
Although we all have personal cupboards and fridge spaces in our large kitchen, as well as conflicting diaries and dietary needs, there are some elements baked into the project that facilitate the shared purchasing, cooking and eating of food. I believe that organising and socialising around food can be healing for people who have been indoctrinated with individualist culture (especially in the city), and part of my artistic practice has been creating functional frameworks that support this alimentary co-nourishment. For example, I built a communal pantry that houses wholefoods and bulk basics, as well as surplus fresh fruit and vegetables donated by the local organic farm and other ‘waste’ ingredients collected from bins or community food-saving apps. This makes it far easier to organise group meals – for celebrations, particular events, or just for the hell of it – and also means that if anyone is ill or broke, there is always something available.
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Monday 9 Jan
We have a meeting at 9am so I get down early to wash up the things I forgot about last night, grab an apple and make an earl grey. Will puts a big pot of coffee on so I have a large espresso too, and we sit down for our meeting, the first of the year. We are welcoming some old faces back and planning the arrival of some fresh ones, as well as splitting up jobs that will help get the place back to looking beautiful after the chaotic festive period. As soon as the meeting is done, I’m up to put a bit of the drying up away and head to the studio with my laptop and notebook to work on some applications and this journal.
After a while I take a quick screen break to check my active ferments:
Lactofermented butterbeans – my favourite snack
Vegan napa cabbage kimchi – I taught Will from scratch just before xmas
Parsnip and chickpea miso – made during a paid workshop in November
Lactofermented plums – gathered from the garden in September
Liquid calcium extract – soaking toasted eggshells in apple cider vinegar to make a component for a natural liquid fertiliser project I’m working on
I also received a gift of 2kg of honey collected from bees at the community garden. The beekeeper donated it as it’s not clear enough to sell and I let him practise saxophone in the school hall. I’m planning some garlic ferments, marinades and wild sodas as soon as the dandelions appear.
Just before lunch I spot a large bird of prey in the playground, swooping between the trees and watched it for a while. I was told recently that the country park nearby has lots of rare birds, this reminds me I need to always take my binoculars out. I head to the kitchen and eat half a veggie sausage that Sonia gives me as a snack, then construct a cheese and kimchi toastie, buttering the outside of the bread just after defrosting it in the toaster. I take it with some kale from the community garden and green beans from the food waste app, steamed, and a cup of beetroot skin and mint tea. The kimchi is maximalist: julienne carrots and spring onions for crunch, a paste made from miso, pickle juice, maple syrup, soy sauce, sesame oil and szechuan pepper, with blitzed onions, apples, ginger, garlic and the customary gochugaru rice porridge. It packs such a punch I can hear Solomon murmuring about it down the hallway, and imagine him as a cartoon character following a visible perfume trail.
On my way to the kettle I snaffle a handful of unclaimed yoghurt-coated cranberries that have been sitting on the kitchen hatch for a few days.
My tummy is growling after badminton and swimming at the sports centre with Sonia, so we stop at the corner shop on the cycle home to pick up a few bits: new potatoes, leeks, apple juice, a reduced price brie. She just needs the potatoes for dinner, and while they’re boiling whole she finely dices gherkins, red onion, garlic and spring onion tops. I raid my fridge for wild elderberry capers and a few kale leaves, then blanche the leaves with some green beans and tenderstem broccoli in the leftover potato water. I make a pot of herbal tea from my stash – rose, mallow, yarrow to restore heart and body. Sonia cuts the spuds into thick slices and adds them to a metal bowl with two tiny cans of fancy tuna, vegan mayo, the diced ingredients and cooked green beans, a spoonful of my capers and some flaky salt. I twist pepper into the bowl then zest a lemon and mince three garlic cloves at my own station. On a camping plate I drop the greens and add the zest and garlic, a large glug of olive oil with bits of basil floating in it and flaky salt. As Sonia finishes her potato salad with lemon juice and sets the table with a candle, I toast two slices of soda bread and top up the teapot with hot water.
After digesting and washing up, I eat the rest of the cranberries no-one even knew existed, and add the zested lemon husk to my now-diluted tea, smiling at the promise of colds for lunch tomorrow.
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Tues 10th Jan
I was working on an application until late last night, fueled by fireweed chai given to me by my friend Sandra when I visited Estonia, so I wake up later than usual. Rather than rushing to the kitchen for breakfast I stay in my room to extend the fast with the plug-in radiator and a long, slow yoga routine. I read my book for half an hour and put a few jumpers on to protect from the old unheated school chill before eventually heading down.
For the first year of being here, I regularly planned meals the night before. Either I was structuring my day around food because I felt it was scarce, or I was holding on to some semblance of control in a chaotic space. Whichever it was, I have relaxed and reverted to scavenging in the communal pantry or my ferment shelf, which illustrates I spend less time worrying about food and more collaging something together from the wealth of intentional ingredients I have spent months finding, making or preserving.
I have a large slab of my first attempt at a focaccia left over from the weekend. It did not rise and so is fairly solid – it needs to be laterally halved and furiously griddled in the toastie press to finish the job. Why didn’t it work? Inactive yeast? Too cold to prove? Faulty oven? Nowt lost, I will try again this week. The tomatoes, marinated peppers and chopped garlic embedded in the top sizzle as they touch the hot metal. Then I reuse a pan my housemate just finished with, spoon in some szechuan pepper oil and crack an egg directly on top. Next to it I add about ten okra, de-stemmed and dissected, and a pinch of my onion skin salt. While everything is cooking, I make a black yorkshire tea with the local honey and a pipette of herbal tincture from Remedy Workshop in Glasgow. My bread is done so on goes some szechuan oil, a layer of plain sauerkraut, the okra, fried egg, scraps of grated cheese left on the chopping board and a swizz of sriracha, stacked. It’s so dense I can only manage half, plus a couple of bites of that potato salad.
Later, I unpeel the orange I brought to my studio and eat the huge segments slowly while listening to Farmerama’s new podcast, and follow with a small pack of parma violets that I randomly found when tidying the cinema.
The remaining half of the focaccia sandwich gets eaten for an early dinner and I think about clearing out my fridge by finishing up odds and sods so the new residents can have a whole shelf. Off the top of my head I know there is at least a snack later:
A scoop of hummus
Dudley’s unwanted crust ends
A dozen courgette pickles
Tex-mex cheese I regrettably bought from a pub when drunk
Three short sticks of celery and a spring onion
And toppings for porridge tomorrow:
A scraping of peanut butter
The dregs of a jar of homemade yoghurt
Pickled blackberries from the summer
Coffee syrup
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Wed 11 Jan
Late last night I decided to clean out my fridge and compost the contents of a thousand forgotten jars. I have a tendency to start menial or mindful tasks when everyone is in bed, partly for stillness, partly because deep down I’m a woodland creature who likes scurrying and scrabbling on his own. As planned I had a midnight snack of a tiny mezze.
I begin my day with porridge plus fancy toppings. Solomon and I talk about making generic exhibition materials out of edible or compostable media, like jam for glue and thorns for nails. I also consider fruit leather for wall vinyl and mushroom paper for business cards. I want my physical work to return to the earth as quickly as possible and without toxicity.
I steal the leftover coffee from the big percolator, now cold, and reheat it in the microwave so violently it climbs out of the mug and onto the little glass dish. I gulp the remains from the mug and clean the mess. Before sitting down to work, I take a muddy stomp around the forest and collect sloe thorns with the intention to neaten them up and start a natural tool box that I can transport with me.
Lunch is a banger today; half a half-price plain quiche warmed in the oven with cracked pepper and basil oil; thinly-sliced leek and runner beans toasted in a dry pan with soy sauce, lemon juice and breadcrumbs added at the end; a forkful of festive parsnip and carrot kraut; vegan mayo with kimchi paste mixed in. My favourite lunches are simple but punchy. I love reanimating leftovers or basing it around a central item (normally a carb). Almost always I will search for complementary or contrary colours and textures amongst my homemade ferments or seasonings, building the plate up like a sketch for a painting. Occasionally I chase block colours – often green or purple – even if the flavours aren’t harmonious as it gives me ideas for future snacks for future projects. In a small way I am changing my relationship with food to heal my body from an impoverished diet in my youth, to soften my soul from the rampant individualism of consumer culture, and to cultivate respect for all ingredients as living beings that enable my basic survival and embetter my quality of life.
This evening, for the whole house, I cook with Milly, a talented textile designer who has just moved her studio here. Owing to our well-stocked pantry, we don’t buy a single ingredient and manage to make it entirely vegan (as is customary). I get to show off and pull loads of jars from my fridge for sides and toppings. I can’t possibly detail the process but the main constituents are:
Roast parsnip and chickpea curry
Steamed white rice
Fresh naan breads with parsley butter
Homemade yoghurt
Quick red onion pickle
Banana chutney
Sauerkraut
Fermented hot lime pickle
Dudley has rice pudding to follow, we love double carbs! I grab another few jars for the table: apple butter, elderberry jam, stewed rhubarb, tahini. I go for yoghurt, apple butter, rhubarb and honey. After filling my hot flask I go upstairs and give Sonia a head massage with coconut oil, surrounded by candles and listening to Nitin Sawhney.
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Thurs 12 Jan
Have been sleeping horribly this week and rise late. Not feeling hungry so clean my room and meditate. I make it down in the confusing time of day when some people are making late breakfast and some early lunch and it kind of feels like I’m in a hostel. This naturally happens when there are so many different working schedules, sleeping patterns and eating habits; I think it’s quite beautiful how everyone’s body rhythm is totally different and what might seem strange to you may be totally normal to someone else.
I used to really push the idea of trying to eat together multiple times a day, cooking house breakfasts or trying to coax others into making communal dinners. It came from a good place (my intentions have always been to connect with others over food) but I eventually realised that it was quite intense for those who generally cook and eat alone, and I would often come away feeling rejected or unfulfilled.
I’ve had to change my approach, working within the pre-existing framework of communal living as opposed to hammering away at something I’m precious with. Perhaps one day I will have a cooking residency where I take care of organising regular communal meals using forage, ferments and things I’ve found in dumpsters. This seems like something I would enjoy! But for now, the reality of living with a group of people who were strangers and are now companions dictates that I need to be more respectful of boundaries (including my own) and appreciate the moments that we are sharing food and space, alone or together. Or alone together.
I use up a few bits for lunch; the other half a half-price quiche; a dozen okra fried with sauerkraut; a hunk of kimchi. I notice a gap on the plate and fill it with yoghurt. Since I cleaned it, the fridge is looking quite bare, and I feel thankful that I can depend on the pantry and my housemates to sustain me until I pay my tax bill. I brew a pot of fermented pineapple skin, camomile and black tea for Sonia and I, made from the solids in a recent batch of tepache and the dust from last year’s dried flowers. It’s delightfully bright with a teaspoon of honey.
Around mid-afternoon I return from a meeting at the community garden and sit down with my phone to read an email about a significant funding application being rejected. Dejectedly, I eat three quarters of a family-size chocolate bar that Sonia brings me upon catching wind. She has had it stashed since she visited me in Estonia last summer, melted and reformed without defined shapes. I eat it with gusto, reminding myself not to personalise the results of things out of my control. That combo keeps me going for a few hours, along with a mint, sage and beetroot skin tea in a Minion’s mug that I hate but choose based on its capacity.
The kitchen this evening is hectic. Solomon, Adam, Will and I all enter successively, like wrestlers in a Royal Rumble, arms bulging with ingredients. Within a few minutes there are four chopping boards out and four oiled frying pans heating up on the induction hob. There’s so much going on: kung pow chicken, kimchi fried rice with shredded sprouts, charred cabbage and pasta, stuffed arepas, smoke everywhere, boisterous rap music, shouts of “backs”, shoes shuffling, cupboard doors closing, spoons tapping on plates, dirty pans clattering in the sink. Four bodies cooking four meals from four cultures. It all smells and looks great. As we all sit down and breathe out I suggest we try and unite forces next time, cook one dish each to share.
Not normally a dessert person, however tonight I continue on the jar emptying exercise and layer up stewed rhubarb, yoghurt, toasted oats and a whizzle of honey in a very short and stubby glass for pleasure.
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Fri 13 Jan
Old hummus pot containing surplus porridge, microwaved, topped with chopped dates, peanut butter, bee pollen, honey and blackberry vinegar. Small glass of water from my activated charcoal decanter with a squirt of elderberry tincture and echinacea drops, followed by a litre of warm water from my flask.
Will offers to read over some writing for me and refreshed a pot of oolong tea while we sit in his room discussing it.
My stomach and head are both hurting today. I think I’ve been staring at my screen too long this week (I accepted it would be this way) and lacking energy so Sonia makes a surprise lunch for us and we plan to go for a big walk afterwards. We each have a slice of toasted seeded rye, spread thick with a mix of vegan herb cheez and kimchi, a fried egg sprinkled with zatar, chili oil and grated vegan cheddar. On the side there’s a green salad plus her favourite food of the week radishes and some plain sauerkraut. I tell her that I appreciate how colourful her plates always are, and that she is quite easy to clear up after. Oh, I’m almost forgetting the mixed fruit smoothie with flax, hemp, spirulina, wheatgrass. We argue the merits of superfood smoothies versus my protein-heavy, dessert-like concoctions of frozen banana, nut butter, dates and oats.
Once we’re back from a muddy stomp, I spend an hour filling the old bathtub in the garden with buckets of water from the studio tap and setting the fire underneath. I figure we need to eat before getting in otherwise hunger will force us out early. We both have instant noodles I went to the Chinese supermarket for especially – high grade shit. I think she has kimchi flavour and mine are something wild like pickled cabbage and fish. Sonia does hers on the hob along with some broccoli, and while my grey (!) noodles rehydrate in boiling water from the kettle, I eat an apple, squeeze my sachets in the bowl and fetch a little leftover pickled herring liquor I’m keeping in the fridge.
I eat mine by the hot tub while it heats up. As well as the candles, I’ve added some dried flowers, slices of fresh lemon and drops of geranium oil in the water. It’s never a quick process, and even slower when it’s so cold and we’re running low on large logs; the small pieces don’t make good embers and burn out too soon. We share a bottle of Hungarian sparkling orange wine and look at the stars through the steam and smoke, talking about our favourite holidays.
Decommodifying my relationship with food – learning to respect the (non)human labour, units of energy needed and disparate origins of ingredients, and making informed decisions on how to nourish myself – goes hand-in-hand with looking closer at flows of materials in my life. As an artist I like to go the long way round, purposefully slowing down or unpacking processes to understand how many actions and agents we have to eradicate to take them for granted. Running a hot bath in the grounds of a dilapidated old school is no small feat, yet the enjoyment and self-awareness bestowed from the sensation is comparable to eating a herb that you grew on the windowsill. It’s not “I made that”, but “I helped that happen”.
Just before bed, Solomon joins us to watch a documentary called “Race: The Power of an Illusion” in the cinema and hands us a bowl of washed grapes to share.
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Sat 14 Jan
Around 10 I bolt up in bed at the sound of the postman knocking at the door and accept someone's package. We have planned to go to Derby for the day and although we are already late to leave it makes sense to eat first. I toast myself a couple of slices of rye bread and use my stick blender to amalgamate lactofermented butterbeans and ajvar which I then spread on both. Atop the pink lumpy mix I placed sliced gherkins and, on one, a tiny fried egg medallion Sonia left me in the pan. All four people in the kitchen have a cup of sencha green tea with puffed brown rice, which we simultaneously cradle while sharing other obscure tea experiences. I am also fed half a banana after I clean the sides down.
In Derby the snacking immediately begins mere metres from alighting the bus. I get some wholefoods as a treat (spelt and walnuts) while Sonia gets superb plain crisps and ginger kombucha. Then we pick up off-brand baked goods on the way to the (closed) post office: veggie sausage roll, tepid, and cheese slice, piping, for a combined £1.50. We decide a mid-afternoon screening of Empire of Light holds the best chance of staying awake and get a coffee each to make sure. The classic M&Ms barely reach me, crispy ones get munched in consolation.
While deliberating a dinner spot we have a couple of rounds in Ye Olde Dolphin Inn and take a punt at walking across the city for a neapolitan pizza in the backyard of a hotel called Mr Grundy's. The labyrinthine reception rooms are full of taxidermy, navy uniform and rock'n'roll memorabilia, plus the obligatory red Chesterfield couches. It has the aura of Snoopers's Paradise in Brighton, a multi-storey junk shop / antique store that can easily swallow you and swap your money for tat. The landlord looks solid and sups a pint of bitter while making our round.
The pizza is very good; a fine charred crust; sweet tomato base; creamy imported cheese. The garlic mayo is bought in but surprisingly stiff and spicy. We also get fries to celebrate probably our only meal out this month. So full yet I'm thinking about getting limoncello, except we have to dash back across town for a rare bus.
I sip the hot water in my flask then chug cold water with lemon rounds from a ceramic pitcher next to the bed, completely satisfying my citrus craving.