The Granny Skill that Could Save the Planet

As we batten down the doors again to keep COVID out in the cold, it could also be a chance to expand those cooking skills we learned back in March to find out how fermenting our foods could save on waste.

In the foodie podcast, Cooking the books with Gilly Smith, Strawbridge, who co-presented the BBC series ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’ with his father and star of Escape to the Chateau, Jack Strawbridge, says: “ With the pandemic, people are at home and thinking about their health and their lifestyle.”

Over the first Lockdown cooking became a way for many to disconnect as well as to learn more about cooking, which Strawbridge believes is essential towards developing more sustainable cooking habits.

“So much more is possible when you know what the basics are, I think that is something that we haven’t been taught too much about,” said the chef in the podcast.

For instance, food fermentation, a global tradition which has lost many peoples interest as a result of the expansion of food processing and widescale refrigeration in the 50 and 60s.

Strawbridge says, “the community around sustainable eating is growing. It is much more than just hipsters; it’s people of all ages now. We’re all hungry to try it.”

In the podcast, he chats with presenter Gilly Smith, an activist food writer herself whose recent book, Taste and the TV Chef examines the power of TV to change the way we eat. The chef explains how old-fashioned techniques like fermenting or pickling are a fun and tasty way to make the most of what’s left in fridge.

Food waste which is sent to landfill to decompose has a huge impact on the climate as it releases methane, a greenhouse gas several times more potent than carbon dioxide. A shocking 30% of food produced is wasted – about 18 billion tonnes of it a year.

In a study of global food systems by Joseph Moore and Thomas Nemecek (2018), published in Science, it was found that of all emissions released by food, 9% come from food thrown away by consumers and retailers. The anti-food waste app Too Good To Go says that a third of the world’s food goes to waste.

A simple way to fix this is by eating more fermented foods which are also good for our gut health, says Strawbridge.

He describes his own pickling process as “looking after things which then look after you”. All the family’s food jars have names such as Bubbly Mummy, the sour dough and Scobie the Kombucha. ‘You see the vitality of the food”, he says.

Pickles are not just a snack to pull out of the fridge door when you are waiting for your dish to cook but an “added flavour`’ he says in the podcast. “There’s nothing like fermented food as an added layer. I do quite playing with that.”