Wholefood and Buying Organic in London

Moved blog name - lost old entries, tsk tsk

2005-11-14T01:31:27+01:00

Wanted to do a kung-fu blog as well, so I decided this blog should be eco-food.

And so I might have to abandon all the previous entries. Well, there were only 10 or so.

But, here goes again, with a new, more authoritative, compelling, celebrity-laden eco-food-blog! Yes, this is where the world comes when it wants to know WHERE TO GO SHOPPING FOR REAL FOOD IN LONDON!

Can do worse than Brixton Wholefoods. A small-to-medium-sized shop just around the corner from Brixton tube. Full of goodies, good bread, small but adequate array of fruit and veg. Yum yum.

Staff all a bit grumpy though. But not an issue - as long as I get what I need, grump away.

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title-335303

2005-08-24T22:40:21+02:00

made up for the disappointment of Sainsburys by spending £50 at Bumblebees, the best wholefood shop in the world.

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Amsterdam

2005-07-30T22:57:59+02:00

missed an opportunity to visit wholefood shops in Amsterdam to find out how the Dutch do it - but then it was a stag do so I didn't think it would be too cool to say "Hey guys, let's check out the wholefood shops!".

They do have a great flower market in the middle of town, a sweet little Museum of Torture and great line in canals, though.

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Dream wholefood shop

2005-07-27T22:57:13+02:00

I would say I have this wild dream, but it's about as wild as a pet mouse. Sylvie my girlfriend probably thinks it's wild, but that's only in the sense of scarcely achievable. But anyway (in a Martin Luther King accent) I have a dream - I want a wholefood shop of my own.

After little self-psycho-analysis, I realised that I don't want to run it, I just want to eat all the food in it. But I lump it together with my other wildly unachievable dream of living in a commune in London, the one with a kung-fu hall attached.

But my motivations for having a wholefood shop are still the same as ever - I just can't get all the food I want at one shop. All the shops in London only stock individually about two thirds of what I want.

Just spent over £50 at Bumblebees. If it wasn't restricted to what I can stuff in my cycle bag without destroying me or the food, I would have spent more. They still didn't have any European apples, and they still stock Nestle's OJ - which I told them about (without descending into rant mode). Claimed they didn't realise. OK, so it says Libbys on the label and not Nestle but come off it, I know that and I'm not a grocer.

On a completely different subject my mate Ian showed me his blog - a completely utterly different concept entirely almost to this blog - but now I have to try to link to it, so there's an entry in the side bar of the blog somehow, permanently, or rather not as transiently as just a link in this text here.

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Planet-Schmorganic

2005-07-25T23:58:32+02:00

People actually read this, yikes! Didn't realise my whingeings about buying organic would actually interest anybody. I guess I posted it up here because none of my friends would listen to me!

Anyway, now that I'm running with the ball, I may as well carry on - I went into Planet Organic to do my shopping, on the basis that Bumblebees don't stock my favourite muesli (from Dove's Farm). Since the stuff won an award two years ago you would have thought everywhere would have it. Anyway, no. Only horrible muesli with dead flies in (I mean raisins).

The swine at Planet Organic didn't have it either, so I berated the poor shopkeeper. So what am I meant to do? The only place that does it is that wholefood shop with the funny name opposite the Cannon cinema on High St. Ken. Do I have to go there every time?!? Perhaps Brixton Wholefoods do it too, I'm not sure.

Farmers markets: there is one just near me that does a fair amount of organics - eggs, juice, fruit etc. Unfortunately not bread.

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Dalston

2005-07-24T22:55:57+02:00

I don't know why Razorlight are so down on Dalston in their song 'Don't go back to Dalston' because as far as I can tell it's just as good (or scuzzy) as anywhere else in that bit of north-east London. I used to live up the road there decades ago and it's only got slightly worse since then. But I suppose it was a dire, sub-wasteland hell then too, which never recovered from 15 years of Thatcher. Apart from the little sub-wasteland hell problem though, there's now a cool little wholefood shop on a corner of Dalston Lane there called 'Wholesum' (I might have got that totally wrong, come to think of it) and they do what in my humble opinion is the best loaf of bread in London - some kind of dark rye bread from a bakery up the road from there in Stoke Newington. They obviously use some sort of magic to make it and it's so good it has ruined all other bread for me. Every cloud has a tragic lining :O

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Eating organic

2005-07-20T23:57:50+02:00

badly disappointed to find out that Sainsbury's all non-organic food is only 60% of the cost of exactly the same shopping basket full at Planet Organic. For a long time I had been kidding myself that it wasn't that big a difference. But then I spent £38.04 at Planet Organic on a broad range of organic groceries, fruit and veg. A little voice told me it was majorly expensive, so just out of curiosity I went to Sainsburys a week later and bought all the same stuff - the only difference being of course that it was non-organic. I spent £22.70. What complete pants. To try to make myself feel a little better about spending all my money on 'luxury' organic food, I'll go to a couple of non-supermarket shops and buy non-organix there. I think the 'supermarket-factor' is bringing a substantial part of the discount.

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Blog-tastic!

2005-07-16T23:56:50+02:00

This is my first blog entry ever so the pressure is obviously immense! Now I know how Tolstoy felt when he sat down to write the first page of War and Peace!

Actually just to take the pressure off, I'm going to treat this as a trial run and not write anything useful. So here it is. My first blog! I can now say that I blog! I am a blogger! Blogging is in! Be blog, or be square! Blog-tastic!

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Apples in orbit

2005-07-12T22:54:20+02:00

Bumblebees let me down on the organic apples front (only NZ apples) so I decided that there must be a more energy efficient way of getting the apples to this side of the world. I briefly toyed with the idea of putting apple orchards in orbit around the planet, or maybe relocating NZ to the Atlantic just west of Ireland.

On the other hand of course, English apple growers could come up with better ways of storing apples so that we can still eat them out of season. Perhaps they do already but like everything else English, it just doesn't happen.

Talking of the cost of food, there's a debate on the ecologist at the moment about whether organic food is a luxury -
www.theecologist.org, which I maintain it is. You don't find poor people buying organic. The old argument is of course that the prices should come down as the organic food industry gets bigger. I really hope so.

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The Nestle Disaster

2005-07-07T22:42:52+02:00

Made the mistake of reading Ethical Consumer's rag, which told me things I didn't want to know about Libby's fruit juices. They are licensed from Nestle! I was shocked and dismayed. So now I have an OJ emergency. Fresh juice flown in from wherever is bad, concentrate from Libby's is banned (against the Jedi code). Now what? I don't know. Perhaps I should start saving for my own orange grove!

Had to go back to Luscious Organics on High St Ken for crunchy muesli. Bit of a hike, but worth it because they stock Pertwood. I bought 4 packs of it so I don't have to cycle down there again. They must think I'm a freak. I had a chat with the girl on the till about the price of OJ - no salvation there!

PS Live8 - no organic foodstalls! Perhaps I should have expected it - catering was for masses who generated 3kg of rubbish each in 10 hours (data thanks to BBC).

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