This week M+K sits across the table with Carolyn Steel, best-selling author of Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World, and Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. She shares the importance of cooking with love, her food philosophy and what’s keeping her hopeful through the pandemic.

1. My cooking inspiration…

Is my family. My paternal grandparents had a wonderful hotel in Bournemouth, the Miramar, where we spent most of our weekends and holidays in my childhood, so I grew up eating very good food! My father was very interested in cooking and learned how to cook, both from the hotel chefs and also from army cooks when he was in India during the war, where he learned to cook curries. He taught my mother (who was Finnish) to cook, and she became a total expert at making English roasts.

2. A meal that reminds me of home…

Is roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding as cooked by my mother, with the crunchiest roast potatoes ever! (She always used King Edwards and they were of course cooked in beef dripping). The other meal would be a delicious lamb or chicken curry, cooked by my father.

3. A life lesson cooking has taught me…

Is that there is no better feeling in the world than doing something with love for others. If you make a meal with care and love for your family or friends, you will feel love in return.

4. When I want to be creative I…

Often go into the kitchen and start chopping an onion – it’s amazing how many of my best thoughts have come while I am cooking! When I am cooking a recipe that I know very well, the process feels almost meditative – I often find myself involuntarily smiling when I start to cook.

5. The most transformational book I’ve read is…

Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher. It was written in the 1970s, but it is as relevant today as ever. The opening line is brilliant: ‘One of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved’. Schumacher blows the inherent logic of capitalism out of the water and argues for a more humane economy that respects human dignity and treats nature as sacred.

6. The routines that keep me grounded are…

Cooking and eating – ideally with and for friends. I also have a small roof garden in my London flat where I grow large Danish pickling cucumbers called asier, tomatoes, figs and lots of herbs. Asier pickling day, usually in early August, is probably the nearest thing I have to an annual food ritual!

7. I recently learnt…

From a study by the Food and Farming Commission that 42 per cent of British people say that they value food more under lockdown and 38 per cent more are cooking from scratch. Only 9 percent want life to go back to the way it was before lockdown. As many as 85 percent want to retain some of the social changes, such as cooking with their children, growing their own food and having stronger social bonds with their neighbours. I find this very hopeful.

8. Favourite random act of kindness…

Last winter I was on a very slow cross-country train in Yorkshire without a buffet car. I had a terrible cough and had run out of water, and was feeling desperate – I asked the guard if there was anywhere on the train I could get water, and he said no – but then came back five minutes later with his own, unopened bottle and gave it to me. I was so grateful that I almost burst into tears!

9. To make a difference in my community I…

Try to support local shops and businesses as much as I can. Even though the prices are often higher than in the supermarket and the produce is sometimes not as good, I still buy food from my local shops because I believe that small businesses are fundamentally important to any urban neighbourhood. This has become even more obvious under lockdown!

10. Right now, I’m grateful for…

The great blessing of having just published a book, Sitopia, just before lockdown (in the week that the pandemic was declared!) that seems to be really resonating with people. I am so grateful for all the amazing conversations – like this one – that it has generated and for all the wonderful connections that I am making through it.

Carolyn Steel MA (Cantab) RIBA is a leading thinker on food and cities. A London-based architect and academic, she is the author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (2008) and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (2020). Her concept of sitopia, or food-place (from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place) has gained recognition across a broad range of fields in academia, design and ecology. A director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects, Carolyn studied at Cambridge University and has taught at several universities including Cambridge, Wageningen and the London School of Economics. She is in international demand as a speaker and her 2009 TED talk has received more than one million views. In August 2020, she was featured in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme on sitopia.

 
To connect visit:

Website: https://www.carolynsteel.com
Twitter: @carolynsteel

This week M+K sits across the table with Joan Ransley, Photographer + Food Writer. She talks with us about her approach to cooking, creativity and the joys of making sourdough.

1. My cooking inspiration…

The inspiration for my cooking comes from using fresh seasonal vegetables, herbs, pulses, grains, nuts, seeds, great oils, fresh seafood, good quality cheese, eggs and a store cupboard and freezer full of good quality ingredients. I like my food to be colourful, nutritious and very tasty. I have a PhD in Human nutrition so I am always mindful of packing in as many nutrients as I can into what I cook whilst keeping an eye on the sugar, refined carbohydrate and fat content of the food I create.

2. A meal that reminds me of home…

Really great breakfasts remind me of home. I came from a large family and none of us ever left the house to go to school or work without eating a good breakfast. At the weekend it was a cooked breakfast during the week it was cereal, toast, maybe an egg, and fruit juice. These days I never leave the house without eating a bowl of Bircher muesli topped with chopped banana and berries and a freshly made fruit smoothie. It sets me up for the day.

3. A life lesson cooking has taught me…

Cooking has taught me to complete any practical task as well as I can. It has also taught me to think more about people and how to make an experience nice for them. Cooking is a shared activity and it connects me with my family and friends. Also if you can cook you can eat well and stay healthy.

4. When I want to be creative I…

Cook something that has captured my interest. It might contain a new ingredient and challenge me to present a dish in a new way. I then think about how to style and photograph it.

5. The most transformational book I’ve read is…

Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway: How to Turn Your Fear and Indecision into Confidence and Action by Susan Jeffers I love this book because it helps us to understand how fear can hold us back from doing the things we really want to do. It helps you to manage fear and achieve the things in life that you want to.

6. The routines that keep me grounded are…

Each morning I go for a 40 minute run and a swim in the river near my house in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. In the winter I leave out the swim! I then come home, shower and eat a good breakfast. I am then ready for anything. I eat two to three nutritious meals a day and the closest I get to eating junk food is eating a bag of crisps on a railways station if I am hungry and the train has been delayed. Sleep is important to me and I rarely stay up late.

7. I recently learnt…

How to make sourdough bread and pumpernickel. I love that making sourdough takes time rather than effort and only uses three ingredients: flour, salt and water. Hands-on time is about 15 minutes (for weighing the ingredients out and kneading). Total time taken to make sourdough is 24 hours. Most of that time is taken by the bread proving and rising.

8. Favourite random act of kindness…

Leaving a loaf of freshly baked sourdough bread on the doorstep of one of my neighbours’ houses.

9. To make a difference in my community I…

You need to be friendly, get to know people around you, and then see what you can contribute. Everyone has gifts and time to give their community.

10. Right now, I’m grateful for…

The things I have. I have a home, friends and family and good work which is helping me to live well and share what I have with others that need it.

Joan Ransley is a photographer, writer and food stylist. Her first career was as a lecturer in Human Nutrition. She worked for many years at the University of Leeds both in teaching and research. She holds a MMedSci and PhD in human nutrition. More recently she has become passionate about taking compelling, natural images of food, people and landscapes. This has created wonderful opportunities for her to take photographs for books, magazines and advertising. She also writes about food and the people who grow and produce it. She is an accomplished cook and food stylist with experience of developing, testing and writing recipes. She is based in the beautiful town of Ilkley, West Yorkshire and works on location around the UK.

To connect visit:

Website: www.joanransley.co.uk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joanransley/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joan.ransley
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoanRansley

This week M+K sits across the table with Kate Cook, Director + Founder, The Nutrition Coach and The Business of Wellness, Best-selling Author + Public Speaker, Company Wellness Champion. She talks with us about cooking, creativity and the routines that keep her grounded.

1. My cooking inspiration…

Was my step-mother. We had a battered, old, chugging aga; I would sit on the warm plate lid (not the hot one!) and watch her whilst she cooked, putting the world to rights at the same time. She grew everything fresh in the garden and the idea of good quality food prepared well has never left me.

2. A meal that reminds me of home…

Would be Sunday lunch inevitably. The preparation, sharing and sitting around chatting is my idea of heaven.

3. A life lesson cooking has taught me…

The gift of meditation whilst chopping the veg. When I am chopping veg, all is right with the world.

4. When I want to be creative I…

I turn to the Helmsley sisters’ cookbooks – I love the Art of Eating Well. The book is balanced without being too prescriptive and fussy (well there’s a bit of fussy there but I am a nutritionist!)

5. The most transformational book I’ve read is…

Soil, Soul and Society by Satish Kumar – it explores the connection between soil and life as we know it, which of course includes how we grow our food, and how this fragile planet is so dependent on the alchemy of the soil. Also taking the concept on further, the soil has a microbiome which in some ways mirrors are own microbiome – we are the soil and the soil is us. I read so many books, that in a way Soil, Soul and Society is the latest inspiration! My whole nightstand is piled up with books on a wide range of topics – from nutrition, to history/politics, to philosophy!

6. The routines that keep me grounded are…

Qi Gong (a healing art similar to Tai Chi). It is the most subtly powerful practice that I have ever come across. Practising Qi Gong is literally grounding as it is performed standing up, rooted strongly but flexible and adaptable.

7. I recently learnt…

That food is an expression of society and culture, often an expression of what is not said, and can be powerfully expressed through food. I am undertaking an M.A. in The Anthropology of Food with modules in Medical Anthropology at SOAS (University of London) so I am learning new stuff that blows my mind every day!

8. Favourite random act of kindness…

I talk to everybody – I am like Crocodile Dundee when he visits New York and says G’day to everyone! (well, you have to see the film). Risking being friendly has so little risk and might just cheer someone up!

9. To make a difference in my community I…

Have formed a group which aims to get more communication across groups in our city so we can work together as opposed to in silos.

10. Right now, I’m grateful for…

My immediate family, small but perfectly formed, health, humour and of course good food.

Kate Cook gives talks and workshops to business clients empowering their staff to adopt healthier lifestyles. With over 20 years’ experience, fresh, creative and practical information is delivered in an interactive style that encourages involvement and engagement. Kate is passionate about making nutritional change easy and effective. She is a highly experienced international speaker and her successful practice methods have secured extensive TV appearances, publishing deals, magazine features and commissions as an international keynote speaker.

 
To connect visit:

Website: https://katecook.biz/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/katecookbiz
The Business of Wellness: https://www.linkedin.com/company/5090577/admin/
The Nutrition Coach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nutritioncoach/

What do haiku and cooking have in common? Adamantia Velonis, Founder, Marmalade +Kindness, explains the surprising link between these two ancient practices.

Using poetry in mindfulness practice

Poetry is frequently used in mindfulness and meditation practices, as it can help to bring our attention to the present moment. Often poems about mindfulness or the attitudes of mindfulness are used as part of formal meditation practices. They can be a useful entry point for participants as ‘poetry can both illustrate the state of awareness through the response it elicits in the reader and act as a powerful means for developing the capacities for attentiveness,’ says Julie Connelly, MD in Being in the Present Moment: Developing the Capacity for Mindfulness in Medicine.

In this way, poetry can help us focus our attention, but also to connect us to our senses. Reading poetry often leads to cognitive freedom and openness, as distinct from pure comprehension. In novels or stories, there is often a linear sense of action – a beginning, middle and end. In comparison, poems speak to us figuratively – in metaphor, metonymy, aurally, even visually (through formatting and punctuation) – to access our imaginations. Using a handful of well-chosen words, they create a ‘microcosm’ that we can keep returning to, contemplating, time and again.

Poems have the power to capture the essence of life – those fleeting moments that connect us to ourselves, other people and nature. They have the power to get to the core of how we conceptualise our experience of the outside world – our ability to observe through all the senses (as beings), rather than in patterns of literal thought.

Accessing the contemplative mind

Poetry can also be read mindfully. That is, by slowing down, savouring each word, allowing time for reflection and re-reading, we can access the deeper meaning of a poem. We are not reading to ‘find out what happens.’ We are reading to experience, focusing on the process itself. Like mindfulness, poems invite us into wider awareness, to step away from ‘doing-mode’ (where we live from thought to thought) to ‘being-mode,’ where we feel and sense, without judgement.

In education, incorporating mindful reading into students’ learning experiences has been found to have a positive impact on learning outcomes, as researchers, Barbezat and Bush explain in Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: ‘Mindful reading as opposed to speed-reading, slows down the reader and the reading; and that alone changes the student experience. It is a process of quiet reflection, which requires mindful attentiveness, a letting go of distracting thoughts and opinions to be fully in the moment with the text. It requires patient receptivity and an intention to go further, and it moves the reader into a calm awareness, allowing a more profound experience and understanding.’

The reason for this may be because the combination of mindful reading and poetry shifts our default, super-alert Beta brain waves, to slower Alpha brain waves, achieving a ‘relaxed awareness.’ As, neuroscientists have observed that mindfulness can increase alpha brain waves, increasing creative thinking (and reducing depressive symptoms).

Educator, Tobin Hart observed a similar effect, saying in Opening the Contemplative Mind in the Classroom: ‘The contemplative mind is opened and activated through a wide range of approaches – from pondering to poetry to meditation – that are designed to quiet and shift the habitual forms of chatter of the mind to cultivate a capacity for deepened awareness, concentration and insight.’

Haiku and mindfulness

The famous French impressionist painter, Claude Monet, once said, ‘If you must find precedents, compare me to the Japanese masters. I approve of their aesthetic sense, their powers of suggestion which evoke presence by a shadow, the complete picture by a fragment.’

It wasn’t just Monet, who was inspired by the Japanese masters. Vincent Van Gogh also admired this form of visual art:

‘I envy the Japanese for the enormous clarity that pervades their work…they draw a figure with a few well-chosen lines as if it were as effortless as buttoning up one’s waistcoat.’

While describing the elegant precision of Japanese woodblock prints, his statement could just as easily have described the Japanese tradition of haiku.

Developed by Buddhist monks, haiku is both a form of poetry and spiritual practice. Bringing together Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist teachings they arrived at a structure where ‘language’ (despite its limits) could, as closely as possible, capture the essence of living mindfully.

Written in the present tense, haiku poems are direct and immediate, describing the ‘here and now’ in a short set of words, that capture a complete thought. Haiku distils everyday moments to their essence – adjectives and adverbs are absent – there is no noise, just space.

Consider this haiku penned by Matsuo Bashō one of the early masters of this form:

In the cicada’s cry
No sign can foretell
How soon it must die.

Despite being written hundreds of years ago, the image still resonates with the experience of high-summer. It takes me back to one particular memory of being on school holidays as a child in Australia. The summer was long and hot, and I was struggling to get to sleep over the deafening chant of cicadas, I kept asking my mother when it would stop, hoping she would have an answer.

Reading poetry, and haiku, in particular, produces the feeling of a ‘mental cleanse,’ a quietening of the background noise in the mind. In haiku, every word has significance, and so too, mindfulness teaches us that every moment has value.

Connection to ‘mindful cooking’

Poetry is one entry points to mindfulness, but many daily activities can bring us to this state of awareness. For some, it’s gardening or playing a musical instrument – but for me, that activity is cooking. It’s a daily activity that I can keep coming back to, to connect with my senses and be present.

Haiku captures the ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’, allowing us to come at the familiar with a beginner’s mindset. We absorb poetry with a ‘feeling’ ear – not so much to analyse – but to experience the words and their emotional impact. So too, in mindful cooking, bringing an appreciation to the whole cooking process (from the produce to the preparation, consumption and waste) allows me to deeply reflect on the connection between my inner and external landscapes.

Like the writing of haiku, the process of cooking sharpens my awareness of life naturally unfolding moment to moment. In cooking, we become one with the process of creation, and through the heightened use of the senses (particularly, smell) can access deep memories and explore (and share) our sense of identity. Like poetry, cooking invites us to connect with what we already know – with what is already there (sometimes, described as honouring the light or the teacher within).

So to answer the titular question: haiku and cooking are both ‘practices’ that are linked to our senses – they are personal, embodied and deeply meaningful and can only be fully experienced by being in the moment. Through their continued practice, we can keep coming back to the ‘how to’ of mindfulness, but also keep developing our understanding of the very nature of living mindfully.