It is dark outside and has been for some time. The gentle ticking of the clock, muted by the hum of family life during the day, is the only sound in the kitchen. Accompanied by a little glass of sloe gin, I have spent several hours preparing sweet chestnuts to use in my little girl’s birthday cake.
Earlier, at the base of a tree near her school, we used our booted feet to separate the spiky cases scattered on the ground, checking each one for shiny, plump chestnuts. Now I score each one with a cross to roast in the oven. Once cooled, there is the arduous task of peeling the shells; I will have sore fingers for days. I could have bought vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts instead, and I often do. So why spend precious ‘me time’ doing this?
Here’s the thing: on one hand, we want to prepare nutritious family meals and be more connected to our food and the natural world; yet on the other, we have a food system that gives us convenience, choice and shortcuts: supermarkets with online ordering, shelves full of products that tend to be over-processed and over-packaged, manufactured to be easy to use and to last as long as possible. Of course it is less likely that we will carve out time to manually prepare ingredients such as chestnuts when we do not have to.
We are constantly tempted by the idea that food can be quick and easy: 30-minute meals made with minimum effort. For many, especially working parents, our lives are just not set up with the space and time needed for drawn-out food sourcing, processing, and cooking. Going against the grain takes effort. It takes time to buy more locally and sustainably, let alone forage for wild foods. Walking to an independent on the high street or filling up at zero-waste dispensers can eat into an already squeezed day.
My experience of working with groups of parents and nutrition clients in private practice is that people want ease. Much as I would have it otherwise, a considerable part of my job is researching the quickest meals or best ready-made products to fit nutritional goals.
I know how to bake bread, ferment yoghurt, whizz up oat milk, and make many of the other food products we regularly eat. But I don’t, even though I have the ingredients and equipment to hand. The elusive, crucial ingredient is time.
But I don’t want my family to lose all connection to the origins of food, so I’ve learned to prioritise, and let nature nudge me into slowing down and being present.
Each season, I push aside the routine pressures of life and make time for our local wild ingredients – foods you can’t find in the supermarket and can only be enjoyed during their annual peak. It might be a wild garlic pesto or pickled seeds; hedge garlic and fresh young hawthorn leaves in salads; an elderflower oxymel; candied rose petals, blackberry jelly or sloe gin. Today, it is preparing chestnuts for an autumnal marron cake.
I finish simmering our foraged chestnuts in syrup and bottle them, and I know that the cake will have taken hours to make, only to be devoured in moments. I think back to a long-gone past when the lengthy gathering and processing of ingredients was a daily necessity. I am mindful that now this is more for the experience: a choice I am making. But this choice answers a deep-rooted need for more connection to my surroundings and the ever-turning seasons.
Amid the pressures of modern life and the constant crushing weight of pressing environmental issues, I appreciate these intentional moments. And I know, too, that next year my daughter will more likely want a chocolate birthday cake.
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Anna Thomson is the founding director of Nourishing Families CIC, a social enterprise that supports parents, children and young people to build lifelong healthy relationships with food. Anna is a registered nutritionist specialising in disordered eating, no-diet approaches to weight management, and gut issues. She is also the Nutrition for Wellbeing Lead at the National Centre for Integrative Medicine. She lives in South Devon with her husband and three children. nourishingfamilies.co.uk, on Instagram @kandojournalandkitchen, and on Facebook @nourishingfamiliescic
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Published in issue 80. Accurate at the time this issue went to print.
