by Edward Milford
14. September 2009 10:27
This has been an exceptionally good year for plums in the UK. Whatever combination of temperature and rainfall that is needed both as they set fruit in the Spring and as it ripens over the summer appears to have worked, and the plum trees are heavily laden with fruit.
At home, we are lucky enough to have the use of an allotment, and it has a few plum trees on it – planted long before we got the chance to start working it. They too have all fruited heavily, and once the freezer was full I have been scurrying to the recipe books to find more traditional ways of preserving the plums which spoil quickly if stored at room temperature. The work of picking the fruit has just been the first step and significantly more time has been spent transforming them into a stable form to last into the winter. We have tried plum jam, spiced plums, plum chutney, plum puree and, most recently, bottled plums – probably all things our grandmothers and great-grandmothers would have known how to make or do as vital, traditional skills passed down through the generations.
Clear instructions have been surprisingly difficult to find; preserving now seems to be a vanishing art as both the freezer and the convenience of air-freighted fruit replaces it. What struck me, though, is how heavily these both rely on reliable, cheap energy. If energy becomes either less reliable, or significantly more expensive, locally-grown and traditionally-preserved fruit may no longer seem so old-fashioned.
The energy used in the food supply is, of course, just one of the many small elements that goes to make up our overall carbon footprint. Both Earthscan’s new book, the Economical Environmentalist and the well established How to Lead a Low-Carbon Life cover exactly these issues.
