Are small farms really more productive than large farms? Or is this shonky reasoning? Is productivity the only measure?

There’s never a good time to be poor but it’s especially tough right now with extortionate rises in the price of basic food stuffs. In the past year, the prices of grains and vegetable oils have nearly doubled, and the price of rice has jumped by about half. No wonder people are rioting in Egypt and Haiti.

The UN Food Summit in Rome reached a limited deal last week (the sticking point was the thorny issue of biofuels). In a small concession to public opinion, the world’s leaders even toned down the menu - that is they didn’t serve foie gras and lobster like in 2002. How considerate!

The presence of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe was politically contentious – after all, the man has presided over the collapse of the country’s agricultural industry and widespread famine. But George Monbiot, writing in today’s The Guardian, says that Mugabe was right on one thing: small farms are more productive than large farms. Monbiot, for the record, did not say that he supported Mugabe and was at pains to point out that Mugabe has actually done the opposite of “democratising” land ownership.

Monbiot’s argument was more nuanced than that and he cites some quite interesting research. He writes:

“Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.”

I would be interested to know whether the studies looked at the size of the farm overall or the amount of land under cultivation. The latter would be a better basis of comparison. I have travelled to a lot of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and particularly to coffee growing regions. Small farms are of course socially very good but environmentally it’s less clear. A well-managed plot  using a well-designed organic farming system such as permaculture, is both productive and kind on the earth. But subsistence farms, where land pressure is intense, have a terrible impact.

In many parts of the world, deforestation is intense because land pressure is so great. Small holders cut down trees because they need the land to grow food – I saw many farms in Uganda that had been carved out of the forest in the past 20 years for example. By contrast, medium and large farms vary in their impact on the environment. Some of them use very destructive farming practices indeed, and they tend to use more chemicals on average. However, in my experience they often incorporate pockets of natural forest as well – I’ve seen this everywhere from Uganda to Nicaragua.

On a bigger farm, not every square inch of land is under cultivation, which makes the farm less productive per hectare but is good from the point of view of conservation. In order to tackle climate change and preserve biodiversity, we need to save forest, even forest fragments, so this quite important. As for whether a small or a large farm is more productive per square metre under cultivation, I don’t know the answer but I would like to see that research.

Another thought – presumably, if small farms are more productive than big farms, then gardens are more productive still. Another reason to have a garden, if you were not already persuaded by this previous post.

When I was a child, my family had a vegetable garden. I can vividly remember the dark green feathery tendrils of the carrot tops and the paler green ripple of the lettuce leaves, poking out from their bed of straw and compost. I took it for granted as a normal part of life, though if the truth be told I don’t think I was especially interested. When I was very small we had chickens as well and one of my favourite jobs was fetching the eggs, which always seemed like a mini Easter egg hunt (though with less chocolate).

Having a garden is a virtuous circle because, as well as helping to feed yourself - lovely fresh food with an infinitesimally small carbon footprint - you also have a green way to dispose of food waste, whether by composting, keeping a worm farm, or feeding to chickens. Food waste sent to landfill is a major environmental problem because it rots anaerobically and produces potent greenhouse gases like methane. By contrast, food waste that is returned to the soil in the form of compost actually locks CO2 into the soil, in a natural form of carbon sequestering. Some local government areas have separate food waste collections but this is rare.

In yesterday’s The Guardian, Michael Pollan, author of In Defence of Food, has written a passsionate riposte to the ‘why bother’ brigade - the argument that our environmental problems are so insurmountable and the actions we take as individuals are so futile that we’re all doomed anyway and may as well just enjoy the time we have left. I really like Pollan’s piece firstly because it’s inspiring rather than just plunging me further into despair and secondly because I think it advances quite a strong argument for the difference that individuals can make. There is the ripple effect - the idea of inspiring other people and creating a chain reaction of individual responses - and also the salient point that, while fixing the problem takes laws and money, it also takes changes to the way we live. Governments won’t act in any meaningful way until we do. It reminds me of the old Margaret Mead quote* about changing the world that invariably gets trotted out in arguments like these but it’s no less true for that.

In particular, Pollan suggests that as individuals we should make a single, meaningful contribution to the solution, and goes on to make the case for a vegetable garden. Did you know that during World War 2, victory gardens supplied as much as 40% of the produce Americans ate?

I recommend reading the piece in full but I have extracted a few quotes. He writes:

“Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

“A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilisers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

“Yet the sun still shines down on your garden, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organised vegetable patch (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden centre), you can grow the proverbial free lunch - CO2-free and money-free.”

He goes on point out there are physical and psychological benefits as well:

“You will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your gardenburning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labour that, having replaced physical labour with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.

“Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself - that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need.”

Finally:

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”

It’s been many years since I have been involved in growing my own food. The closest I have come in recent years has been keeping a few pots of herbs on my kitchen window sill that died when I went away for a month. However, it’s certainly a family tradition. My mother and several of my aunts keep extensive vegetable gardens and two of my aunts are trained designers and teachers of permaculture - a type of organic gardening that relies on design to mimic natural eco-systems and create self-sustaining systems. One runs an organic gardening supplies, Green Harvest, based in Queensland, while the other has a garden design business in Cardiff, Edible Landscaping. My aunt in Scotland also has a rather lovely garden near Inveraray on the West Coast and last year I went up north to pick blackcurrants and make jam.

Currently I live in a rented third-storey flat in London so the opportunities for me to either grow my own food, or avoid sending waste to landfill are limited. Friends of mine in north London have recently acquired an allotment, a UK scheme to give city-dwellers a patch of land for growing their own food. I don’t think I could devote the time to an allotment - it’s a major hobby - and I don’t drive so it would have to be literally around the corner from my house in order to make it feasible for me. But I am hoping that my next home might have a small courtyard garden or balcony so I can at least grow some herbs and flowers and keep a worm farm for my food scraps.

Sinc I don’t have a garden, I do possibly the next best thing, which is to buy locally grown, organic fruit and vegetables. I order a weekly box from Abel and Cole and I’ve always had a very good experience with them, both for fruit and vegetables and also for dairy, bread, coffee, meat and fish, cleaning products (I could almost do a complete weekly shop with them!). It’s very reasonable - we spend £25 a week with them and our total weekly grocery bill for two people is about £40. I particularly like that I can set likes and dislikes - useful in winter to control the amount of potatoes, parsnip and swede I let them send me! I’ve heard very good things about Riverford Organics as well

Do you have a vegetable garden? Do you grow any of your own food? What environmental factors, if any, do you consider when shopping for food?

* The Margaret Mead quote I am referring to is of course: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” I’m sure you’ve heard that one before.

I’m pleased to be hosting the Carnival of Cities on The Gooseberry Fool for the first time. Since this is a food blog, I was especially keen for posts with a culinary connection and I wasn’t disappointed. I hope you enjoy this week’s menu.

* Gray at SoloFriendly on great Thai restaurants in her hometown of Burlington in Vermont. It makes me hungry just thinking about it! We are blessed with great Thai in my home town of Sydney but sadly it is not something that London does well.

* London does, however, have reasonable Mexican food. Jessica at Ripe London was none too impressed with the offerings at Tortilla in the Angel-Islington or Mexicali in Notting Hill, but she does rate Taqueria in Notting Hill. This also happens to be a favourite of mine - terrific tacos and heavenly horchata.

* Wanderus on why Portland, Oregon is the microbrew capital of America. Cheers!

* Samir on living in Dubai and the contrasts with his hometown of Bombay - and a slice of life at an Indian-run cafeteria serving sandwiches, roast chicken and chai tea near Lamcy Plaza.

* Jon on the DC Traveler treats us to a Sunday brunch with a difference at a Washington DC cafe with drag queens.

* Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago is going organic and Stefanie at Focus Organic wants a tomato, basil and mozzarella panini.

If all that food has left you needing to burn off some calories, then it’s time to get active.

* The Q Family call into Cozumel in Mexico for some snorkelling and Starbucks on their Carnival Cruise. (They recommend the fajitas at La Laguna Beach Grill).

* CAE on VWXYNot? describes her love affair with her adopted city of Vancouver. I thought it was a lovely city when I visited, oh 10 years ago now, and all those gorgeous pics of kayaking make me want to go back. Either that or move home to Sydney - I could have a kayak there too!

* Jason Loper on Zola Jones Designs on a bike ride around the lake front in Chicago.

* Random Musings takes us boating on Lake George (is that a town?) and hiking on Prospect Mountain in the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

* Dave Cano on why his first impressions of Coney Island in Brooklyn, NYC were wrong.

* If It Feels Good Do It tells not-quite-all about a bachelor’s weekend in Las Vegas.

Time for a bit of culture, fun and relaxation?

* Leslie Carbone delves into history in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

* See how the other half lives with a peak inside a $9m penthouse apartment in Miami on Michael Emilio’s small business and real estate blog.

* Me, My Kid, and Life heads to Cannes for a short film festival. (Although she was there on business, a girl’s still got to eat and she found time for a shrimp spring roll, Thai rice and chicken in curry sauce).

* Adventures in Daily Living takes the kids on a fun-filled trip to Seattle, where they ride trains, buses, monorails and merry-go-rounds

* Andrew at the Cyprus Informer takes us on a journey to Kyrenia in Cyprus. His blog is usually quite commercial, but this post is not, and it really does sound like a beautiful town.

Thanks to everyone for taking part and apologies for the late posting - my broadband was up and down like a whore’s drawers last night.

Submit your blog post to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities using our carnival submission form. Please only submit one (non-spammy) post and keep it on the topic of cities and (midsize and bigger) towns. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Make the most of the all-too-brief English asparagus season by devouring the succulent green stems by the plateful - plus some cool trivia about ’sparrow grass’

It’s a foodie cliché to declare your love for asparagus, particularly here in Britain where asparagus lovers are so passionate they even have a two-month festival devoted to it. English asparagus is widely considered to be the best in the world - though I rather suspect the secret is freshness and it’s good anywhere as long as it doesn’t have long to travel from plate to fork.

But cliché or not, love it I do. And whether it’s the Englishness of the asparagus or its freshness, I won’t have any truck with imported asparagus in the depths of winter, because apart from the nasty business of food miles, it’s just not the same. At this time of year, the markets and shops are positively bursting with bunches of fat spears of asparagus. I buy as much of it as I can afford and eat as much of it as I can. I never seem to get sick of it but the asparagus hit is enough to keep me going until next May.

There are many recipes involving asparagus and of course it’s good with butter or hollandaise sauce (what isn’t?) but I usually eat it very plain - lightly cooked and sprinkled with salt and pepper, often with scrambled or poached eggs at breakfast time. I don’t really see the point of an asparagus steamer since it can’t be used for anything else (if you saw the size of my kitchen you would understand why). I either simmer it in a few inches of water, or if it is particularly thick and woody I cut it in half and cook the tips in a steamer and boil the bottoms in the same pot (which is basically what an asparagus steamer does anyway but without having to cut the stems). Asparagus is also good barbecued, which I only recently discovered at Sunday lunch at my friend Emme and Jon’s house. If you want inspiration for some fancier recipes, then look no further than May’s In the Bag seasonal cooking blogging event. There’s a further 26 asparagus recipes on the official British Asparagus website.

Now asparagus is never trivial but it is associated with some cool trivia:

• * Asparagus is also a member of the lily family, along with onions, and has been cultivated since ancient times. The name “asparagus” comes from a Greek word meaning “sprout”.

• * It’s also called ‘Hadley grass’ or just ‘grass’, particularly in Massachusetts. ‘Grass’ is sort for ’sparrow grass’, a 17th century corruption of ‘asparagus’. The best stuff was grown in the Mass town of Hadley (and still is, if you live in New England).

• * It can make your pee smelly funny. About half the population experience strange smelling (and sometimes green!) urine after eating asparagus due to sulphur-containing amino acids in the veg that break down during digestion.

• * Asparagus can be purple or white as well as green, but the white effect is achieved by growing it in the dark. The white type is popular in mainland Europe but can occasionally be found in the UK - be warned it takes twice as long to cook. I think the white stuff is nice but the flavour is more intense with the green variety, so it depends whether you prefer a more subtle or vibrant flavour. I prefer the green stuff, personally.

• * Asparagus grows from a crown planted a foot deep in sandy soils and in ideal conditions it can grow 10 inches in a day. Oh and it has virtually not calories or fat and is full of vitamins and minerals.

Cupcakes have been very chic ever since the Magnolia Bakery moment in Sex and the City. There’s usually a queue around the block at this unassuming bakery in Lower Manhattan. There’s a spin-off further uptown, not to mention a host of copycats like Little Cupcake Bakeshop in Brooklyn and the Buttercup Bake Shop in Midtown. London is right on trend with the famous Hummingbird Bakery in Notting Hill, which my friends in West London swear by, or Treacle in Tower Hamlets, near the Colombia Road Flower Market.

Cupcakes are everywhere in the blogosphere as well. In the past week alone, I have seen rich chocolate cupcakes with vanilla bean icing on Love and Olive Oil, ice cream cupcakes and raspberry almond cupcakes with chocolate ganache on Joy the Baker, Persian love cupcakes on Gigi Cakes, and After Eight mint chocolate cupcakes on Rosie Bakes a Peace of Cake.

I think one of the reasons they are so popular is that they are just so damn cute! See these coconut lemon curd cupcakes on Cafe Lynnylu to see just how photogenic they can be.

But to me, it’s totally a matter of style over substance. I am committing food blog heresy here but I think cupcakes are totally overrated. Surely I can’t be the only one?

They look pretty but they generally taste rather boring - dull and dry with excessive amounts of icing to compensate. I have had cupcakes from these famous bakeries and I have had well made homemade cupcakes and my attitude is the same. Give me real cake any time.

Proper cakes are far more interesting - they are usually much moister and have greater complexity of flavour and texture. Cupcakes have their uses - they’re great if you are catering for a fifth birthday party - and I’m not saying they actually taste bad (if I had to pick a favourite flavour it would be red velvet). However, there isn’t a cupcake on the planet that wouldn’t taste better as a full-size cake.

If you want individual serves then muffins, tarts or cookies are fine. But miniature cakes just defeat the purpose - assuming the purpose is to taste good, rather than look pretty, that is.

As well as blogging about food here at The Gooseberry Fool, I also have a travel site at Roaming Tales, which includes both a blog and my professional travel articles.

I have been surprised at how much more popular my food site has been than my travel site and I am trying to figure out why - is it something peculiar to my blogs, or is food simply a bigger niche? I am beginning to suspect the latter - if you want to know why, please visit Roaming Tales to read about my blogging experience, and my analysis of the UK magazine market.

I would love to hear your comments, either here or on Roaming Tales.

Twice-baked salmon and dill souffles

The first time I ever attempted souffle, the result was a rather nice frittata. It tasted great but it was flat as a pancake - and not a Scandinavian one. (In my defence, I would like to point out that we didn’t have an electric mixer and I was attempting to whisk egg whites to a satisfactory state of stiffness entirely by hand). So I was pleased that the Leiths course would be covering souffle.

In particular we made twice-baked salmon and dill souffles. The advantage with twice-baked souffles is that they are slightly easier and you can prepare them up to 24 hours in advance. We made white sauce and combine it with egg yolks, dill and salmon. We also whisked (with an electric mixer!) the egg whites and then folded it into the salmon mixture. We baked the souffles in ramekins (or teacups or your vessel of choice) in a baking dish with a few inches of hot water. (This stabilises the temperature so they cook more easily). Once we removed them from the over, we waited for them to cool, turned them out on to a baking tray and poured over the sauce (a cream dill sauce in this case) over the top. They then get returned to the oven for 10-15 minutes when it’s time to eat it. Salmon and dill was a great combination but there are plenty of others - cheese and chive is another classic for example.

Duck breasts with apple and blackberry sauce

However, the star of the evening was the duck. We made duck breasts with blackberry and apple sauce from a Viv Pidgeon recipe. We had large juicy duck breasts with the fat and skin left on and started by frying the duck, skin side down. It released an unbelievable amount of fat and we had to keep pouring off the excess fat into a bowl. It’s the first time that I have ever fried something in order to reduce the fat content! When the skin and fat was brown and crisp, we turned the duck over briefly to seal the meat. After this point it can be left in the fridge for up to two days or even frozen, before the final step, which is roasting it for 8-10 minutes. After the roasting, we let the duck rest for five minutes before slicing it on the diagonal and serving, along with a homemade blackberry, apple and port sauce and some lightly boiled green beans. It might not be the way to a healthy heart but this was absolutely superb. I would definitely love to make this for a fancy dinner party and I know just who I would invite for maximum appreciation too.

Next week (tonight actually - how the week has whisked by!) we are making chicken liver pate, melba toast, salmon fillets and broccoli with chilli and garlic.

• * Strawberries will be in season in England in another month or two and I’m definitely going to try out this recipe for strawberry panzanella from 101 Cookbooks. I’ve never had, or even heard of a ‘panzanella’ before but mushy strawberries, crusty, toasty bread, and yogurt sounds like a cracking combination and the photos look great.

• * A Forkful of Spaghetti has blogged about dinner at Launceston Place, a restaurant with Michelin-starred chef Tristan Welch at the helm. It’s pretty clear that she liked it!

• * Guardian Unlimited’s Word of Mouth raises the thorny issue of UK restaurants abusing their staff and the good will of dining patrons by keeping tips, or using them to fund the minimum wage.

• * Eggplants (aubergines) are one of my favourite vegetables. A Veggie Venture has a fab sounding recipe for eggplant steaks - looks simple and tasty!

• * Pixie from You Say Tomahto, I Say Tomayto has posted about her mother’s Maltese squid stew. It sounds fantastic!

• * Browners on Around Britain with a Paunch questions whether the current mania for local food is really good old fashioned protectionism.

• * Bakerella was on the Martha Stewart show and super-excited to be there.

• * Everything you ever needed to know about preparing and eating artichokes, from Food Blogga.

• * And for dessert, here’s some ginger ice cream from Cafe Lynnylu. Beautifully photographed, as this blog invariably is.

• * Get cheesy! My friend Jessica who blogs over at Ripe London has written a lovely piece for Times Online on the art of constructing a good cheese platter. Or you could do as the Americans do (or some of them at least) and carve your cheese rather than eat it - Word of Mouth has the details. And Lee at The Unbearable Lightness of being Hungry has blogged about how cheese healed the britpop rift between Blur and Oasis. (Woo hoo!).

• * I have been posting a lot about pancakes recently, but who can resist these poppyseed darlings on 101 Cookbooks? They look delicious! There are instructions for both dessert or savoury versions.

• * Attention coffee drinkers! Science blog Developing Intelligence tells you how to optimise your caffeine hit - small, regular doses are key. (Link via LifeHacker).

• * Travel blog The Window Seat has a guide on how to eat like a local, wherever you are in the world. Not surprisingly, it talks a lot about farmers’ markets - and here is Ivy at Kopiaste’s description of her local farmers’ market in Athens.

• * Apple & Spice celebrates its first birthday with, what else, a spiced apple cake. Mmm… looks delicious! Happy birthday! By the way, you can see a recipe for my namesake here.

• * I gave my recipe for spinach pie earlier in the week. Here’s Rose’s recipe at You Say Tomahto, I Say Tomayto - she has used puff pastry, only 100g of spinach, and ricotta, while I used filo, a whole bunch of chard, and both feta and cottage cheese, so the result would be very different, but I’m sure no less delicious. Rose, who is part Maltese, calls her version “Maltese spinach pie”. I’ve called mine “Greek” (though I’m not Greek), but really variations on this recipe can be found all over the eastern Mediterranean - my friend Tamara from Sydney makes the same dish and calls it “Bosnian pie”.

• * I’m loving the increased coverage of food and drink in Time Out London. This week the mag takes lessons on how to make macaroons from the pastry chef at Soho tearoom Yauatcha and shares the recipe.

The Guardian yesterday devoted the cover of its feature supplement G2 and four pages within it to the fact that its women’s editor Kira Cochrane has decided to lose weight. The tagline on the cover is “the feminist dieter” and Cochrane is also going to be writing a fortnightly column about it.

I must admit, I’m a bit puzzled by this. Firstly, I don’t understand why the paper gave so much space to it. G2 is usually full of smart, interesting, topical features that tell me something new. And indeed the article by Rory Carroll on the Sandalistas in the same issue is a good example. To me, the headline ‘woman goes on a diet’ or even ‘feminist goes on a diet’ or ‘women’s editor goes on a diet’ is worth maybe a one-off column at best. But, hey, I’m not the editor.

The other thing that puzzles me is that after reading the piece I can’t figure out why there was an implicit assumption that it’s somehow un-feminist to diet. Cochrane writes well and I enjoyed reading her work but in the end it didn’t really say very much. I already know that if you eat a lot and don’t do too much exercise then weight gain is the natural result. And I already know that while it can feel liberating not to care about piling on the pounds, it’s a temporary satisfaction as life then gets harder in other ways (Cochrane talks about feeling “sluggish”, not being able to sit comfortably on public transport and not being able to go hand-gliding with her friend because she was worried about the size of the harnesses).

Feminism isn’t about being fat. There is nothing feminist about wilfully pursuing a path that leads to health problems and a curbed ability to take part in the many activities that life has to offer. What I would hope feminism offers is freedom from self loathing and a more a positive relationship with our bodies based on self nurture. We are not defined by our bodies but we are not divorced from them either.

I don’t disagree with anything Cochrane has said or the conclusions she has reached and I wish her well on the weight loss journey, which I’m sure will not be easy. However, none of it seemed particularly new or surprising to me. I’m still annoyed by it being given so much space - it implies that she is being some kind of rebel in being both a feminist and wanting to lose weight, and that’s just not the case.

The best and most simplest nutrition advice I’ve heard was Michael Pollan’s famous seven words: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”