The Trough

happy first birthday p-hop

This is as food/knit as I could make it p/hop, bring on the spaghetti… enjoy the day!

Lots of seeds!

I’ve just come back from talking to lots of children about growing mushrooms. It quite blew me away. They approached the world form such a different perspective and asked a monumental number of questions. The school has focused everything on growing, the kids had created papier mache vegetables, were showing each other things from home related to growing and started growing peas.
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Found these pictures of food that I found very nice and thought i’d share. find more about her here.

Vegetables made from clothes by Sarah Illenberg

Pocket sized

I’ve just finished reading a wonderful book called ‘Why Not Eat Insects?’ by Vincent M. Holt 1885. The first pages mention some bugs that i’d rather not think about. The ones that have some sort of textural onomatopoeia going on where the name of the bug is imitating the off putting tactile nature of it. Like, Slug or Cockroach.

The term for eating insect is Entomophagy. He put it forward as an essay of how Victorians could eat well on bugs instead of wasting them,

‘Not only would their children be rewarded by the farmers for hand picking the destructive insects, but they would be doubly rewarded by partaking of toothsome and nourishing insect dishes at home’
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Bloody brilliant. They are just fantastic.

Oyster Mushrooms at CityEcoLab

Its an incredibly fast way to show the joys of growing food. In ‘Food for Free’ Richard Maybe talks about peoples morbid fascination with them. They grow from dead matter, not producing anything themselves but making the most out of the death of something else.

There is a great but slightly scary guy named Paul Statements talking on TED.com about the  wonders of mycelium and how they are going to save the world. He has a lot to fit in to 20 minutes so its worth watching a few times… Its filled with an amazing amount of product design (an unfortunately some images of US patents), looking at using fungi to breakdown hydrocarbons after oil slicks to produce an incredible amount of oyster mushrooms, or harnessing their antibiotic producing abilities to fight flu.
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Found this a while ago but thought it should be shared here. Ingenious.

Looking at Brookwood House

My friend took me on a little trip to a growing garden in south London.  It was a tranquil spot that had been created in conjunction with Tate moderns ‘Global Cities’ exhibition in 2007 and still going strong. Filled with herbs and cabbages it made the intersecting council estates look fresh. Working with Fritz Haeg and his Edible Estates project and BOST (bankside open spaces trust) they transformed what Fritz Haeg would call ‘green concrete’ or grass land into a usable and productive space.
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