Growing Communities

I'm not sure when or how it started, but somewhere in the last year or so I have become increasingly obsessed by my belly. And by that I mean what goes into it, where my food comes from and what I'm going to eat next. In some irrational way I have become interested in equipping my kitchen with things such as a meat mincer, and even a cider press (although was thankfully brought to my senses by the time I got to the till)! How did this happen? I'm not entirely sure, but I think it may have been around the time when we first signed up to the organic veg bag scheme with Growing Communities.

Growing Communities are ace. I first heard of them a few years ago, in my first wave of culinary domestication. Based in Hackney, they run a local veg bag scheme, supplying totally organic food, as locally sourced as possible (today's salad was grown in the depths of Hackney) all for the measly sum of £36 a month! Aside from this though, they also started the country's first totally organic/biodynamic farmer's market in Stoke Newington, and the Good Food Swap last Autumn.

Sad as it sounds I feel a certain smugness over that fact that my bag comes from them and not one of the more 'yummy mummy' schemes. You have absolutely no choice over what goes into the bag, but that ends up being part of the fun. It's like my own weekly version of 'Challenge Anneka'; determining what the veggies are, and how on earth I'm going to cook them. I don't think I had a particularly sheltered life when it came to veggies, but the fact that I'm still looking in the bag and saying "What the fuck is that?" at the age of 27 worries me!

Still, I have to admit, I do seem to do better than most. By and large most of what I now eat is organic and home cooked, and I'm not convinced that it is as unaffordable as everyone thinks either, but I'll come back to that another time.