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The Fife Diet Thing

Fife Diet
2008-12-22 15:00:00 UTC

New viewers may be interested in seeing a collection of all our Fife Dietary goodness, here in one place.

For the uninitiated: there’s a locally sourced diet called the Fife Diet which has been getting a lot of UK press. Fife is just up the road from us, and frankly, we didn’t think that it would be a very good idea to live on its produce for a few days, let alone a year.

So we decided to try it. For a week. For Science.

Part 1

Part 2 The Blogs

Introduction
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4

Comments

J McG | 2008-12-22 16:06:23 UTC

One of you seems to be wearing a cloak?

naath | 2008-12-22 16:27:23 UTC

I think that the major problems you experienced would be solved trivially if “locally sourced food” was the cultural norm rather than a diet followed only by a tiny minority.

For instance cows can live in Fife, dairy farmers could work in Fife but by-and-large they choose not to; if more people demand milk from Fife then there would be more Fife sourced dairy. If everyone (or even any substantial number) of people eating in that pub wanted Fife food then the pub would serve Fife food. Plus if Fife food were in demand then presumably the farmers would be more likely to take it to farmer’s markets than to make you go out to them to get it.

Hugh | 2008-12-22 17:17:37 UTC

J mcG- Yep, that’s Paul. Apparently cloaks are tremendously practical items – cool in summer, warm in winter, and so on.

Naath – I partially agree. Certainly I find it very surprising it’s so hard to buy Fife milk in Fife, when we passed a dozen dairy farms. And I’d like to be able to source more food direct from local suppliers.

But at the same time, I don’t understand enough of the supply chains to know what the pros and cons of such a massive change would be. I don’t even know if Fife produces enough food to support its population, for example.

There is a Fife farmer’s market – but the problem is it happens only once a week, and moves location. So you’ll only be able to get to it without travelling one week in four, at best.

Ben Sanders | 2008-12-22 17:27:30 UTC

Well, it seemed an interesting experiment, although fundimentally flawed for non-Fife residents.

So, did it actually have benefits? Do you think you could combine the benefits with stuff from elsewhere (sugar, tea, bread etc) to make for a better diet than what you had before?

PS starting counting at 0 confuses things when you didnt do it in your blog posts you were re-posting.

Hugh | 2008-12-22 17:45:10 UTC

Ben – There are advantages to local sourcing, and to seasonality. It’s good to know when things are in season and when they’re likely to taste best, and it’s good to know where your food has come from and how it’s been treated. (I actually think that traceability is a much bigger issue than local sourcing.) And over the short term, it’s a good way of shaking up your eating habits and discovering new things.

But beyond that, I’m pretty dubious about the entire local-sourcing idea. I found new stuff I want to incorporate into my diet, and new suppliers, but I certainly wouldn’t want to limit myself to them. There are reasons we have a less local supply chain. There are even ecological reasons for it.

Overall, I’d say the lesson of the diet for me was increased knowledge = good, trying to put the clock back = bad.

Hugh | 2008-12-22 17:53:55 UTC

I’m also not convinced that us having been in Fife would have made our lives any easier.

If we’d been living in Cupar, for example, we’d actually have had less access to Fife food than in Edinburgh, because it’s a smaller, less cosmopolitan place than Edinburgh, with less public transport. I don’t think we’d have been able to find a pub that served Caern O’ Mohr easily. Paul’s discovery of a Fife dairy wouldn’t have been a quick trip to the local deli, it would have been another 20-mile taxi journey. Sure, we could stock up on Fife oatcakes, but we could do that in Edinburgh too. And if the farms selling meat are 15-20 miles away, that’s about the same distance they are from Edinburgh!

One thing that this entire trip really underlined is how awful public transport is outside cities in the UK. I’d not realised how hard it would be to live without a car in Fife.

char | 2008-12-26 17:36:01 UTC

Alloa’s not in Fife, it’s in Clackmannan.

TBH I think the Fife diet is a lot easier if you actually live there and take advantage of the fruit and veg deliveries (or if, like most Fifers, you owned a car rather than put up with the awful public transport!).

Surely things like butter and cheese could have come from the Fife Creamery?

Scatman Dan | 2008-12-29 13:30:12 UTC

Your best episodes yet.

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