Day -2

Paul: Location shoots, and leaves

Food miles, eh? Tricky problem, in these enlightened carbon-neutral times. If food isn’t locally sourced then we’re all going to die in a fiery inferno—and that, I’m told, is 100% scientific fact.

Fortunately, I happen to live in the breadbasket of the North, in the very heart of a pastoral Utopia surrounded by bleating lambs and grunting squealing little bacons and dewy-eyed beefs, and lush verdant acres of pert little potatoes and… other vegetable-type things. Scotland is a vast cornucopia of food-producing regions, places like the Borders and Aberdeenshire and Tayside.

Places, in other words, exactly unlike Fife. Despite the fact that it’s just across the river, I’ve never been to Fife, just passed through it on the way to interesting places. I have, however, spoken to some refugees from that benighted region and Fife, I’m told, is a howling concrete wasteland populated by commuter accountants and neds, with nary a frolicking filly to be seen anywhere. Chief imports: buckfast. Chief exports: violence.

So it seems natural that the local experiment in locally-sourced food is The Fife Diet.

The Fife Diet consists of food entirely sourced from and/or grown in Fife or the surrounding regions (for a somewhat lax definition of “Fife” which I suspect often includes “Tescos”). There is one pig farm and it happens to be the excellent Puddledub. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be a lot in Fife itself.

My compatriots and I are going to give it a bash for a week, and do it properly. <clarkson>We asked ourselves, “How hard… can it be?”</clarkson>

So I’m going to be subsisting on swede and kale for a week. And it is going to be blogged and filmed. I am doing this for you, the viewer.

Tomorrow, three guys and a camera go to Fife and look for food.

I expect to have died of scurvy by Thursday.

Day -1

Hugh: To Fife!

So, as you may or may not have heard, a) my next project is a cooking show, co-presented with Alex and Paul, and b) one of the first episodes we’re doing involves us exploring the Fife Diet.

The Fife Diet is not, as you might expect, a new fad based on research showing the healthful properties of Buckfast, chip butties and Temazepam. Instead, it’s a varient on the Vancouver 100-mile Diet, where a number of people, presumably based fairly near to the region in question, pledge to eat, for one year, nothing that does not originate in that hallowed land they call “Fife, like, fuckin’, eh.”

Unfortunately for us, in this case we rapidly determined that “exploring” could, realistically, only mean “actually trying”. The diet. For one week.

In late-fucking-March.

In season: kale, cabbage, potato, leek.

Out of season:

Absolutely everything else.

And we do mean everything. No bread, despite the fact there’s a mill in Kirkcaldy, for reasons that shall be explicated in the show. No tea. No coffee. Every dairy farm in Fife has gone belly-up that we could find, so no milk, no butter, nothing but a harsh lesson in globalisation, and frankly you can’t spread that on bread. No tomatoes. No garlic. No onions. No beef. No chilli. No wine, aside from dubious and unspellable fruit wines. No yoghurt. No chocolate.

Now I remember why I normally direct: so that I can have actors do stupid shit like this.

Today, we got on the train to Fife in search of our weeks’ supplies, and learned

1. That virtually everyone in rural Fife appears to be absolutely lovely, pleasant, and eager to help. Which was, frankly, something of a shock.
2. That Fife taxi drivers could moonlight as lecturers on agro-industries at LSE.
3. That organic farm-working hippies, whilst lovely, should be trusted neither for their precise sense of distance (hint, people—2.5 miles does NOT take 20 minutes by taxi) nor their exact grasp of seasonality.
4. That getting onto a brutally crowded train with approximately half the agricultural output of the Cupar area in bags can be surprisingly fun with the right company.
5. That I enjoy feeding tame goats. On occasion.

Our Fife-based odyssey of taste—mostly, the taste of swede and kale stew—starts tomorrow. Wish us luck.

[Short update—I don’t actually hate Fife as much as it may seem. Actually, I thoroughly enjoyed today, and met some lovely people—and now have a lot of root vegetables. The meat, which we acquire tomorrow, should be fantastic, although I still have a bit of a “minimal if any snacks, no fats, very few beverages” worry.]

Paul: The Fife Diet: Day -1

Hugh has the scoop on the day’s Fife-related escapades. Fife turns out to be incredibly pretty in parts, and almost everyone there was incredibly friendly and helpful. I did get yelled at by neds in a passing car, but I tend to attract that sort of attention, so it would be unfair to judge all denizens of Fife by that metier.

I suspect it may be possible to sustain myself for a week just on all the words I’ll be eating.

To Hugh’s post I would merely add:

1. we spent at least twice as much on taxis as we did on food;
2. the most exciting things I bought today were some fantastic-smelling beeswax candles, and they can’t be et;
3. green vegetables: I’m not sure I have ever eaten any^[0], which is going to make this week interesting.

Thus far it would appear that we can have no bread, no milk, no butter, no vegetable fats, no tea or coffee, no rice or pasta, no spices, and virtually nothing with sugar in it. I wish I could say I was looking forward to this, but I’m not.

I got into work today only two and a half hours late, and in some of the stickiest clothes I have ever had the misfortune to be wearing. Company and conversation and Blitz spirit notwithstanding, that was not the most pleasant train journey I’ve ever had. Regular readers will be aware that there is some stiff competition for that title.

Right now I am eating pasta in a cream sauce with chicken, with cheese and black pepper on top, and a baguette with garlic butter. Why? Because I can. The diet starts tomorrow.

…that’s a phrase that I have never spoken or typed before, and already sincerely hope never to speak or type again.

—
[0] Except for childhood Christmases when they force you to eat sprouts^[1]. That’s how you know it’s Christmas.
[1] I have heard rumours of human beings in this world who voluntarily eat sprouts. I refuse to believe it, and if it is so, these deluded reprobates must be destroyed for the good of wider society.