Anthony Collazos Customer at Fresh & Wild, Clapham Junction, May 2004.
We are lucky enough to have choices in a world where most are not. Whilst millions of people face starvation every year, we can choose to buy high-calorie, low-nutrition foods from corporations whose ruthlessness beggars belief, or fairly-traded, high-flavour, high-nutrition, artisan-made foods that are as strong on ethics as they are on taste.
If you shop at Fresh & Wild, you have made a choice to support small family farms, wholesome businesses, importers who pay people both locally and in faraway lands fairly, and decent people who believe that craft and artistry are essential to the food we eat. Naturally, you’re tasteled too, buying real foods full of flavour for the enjoyment of great eating.
At the end of a hard day’s work, the last thing you want to do is make moral and ethical decisions about your shopping. You just want to get a bunch of tasty stuff, go home and eat it. And that’s the beauty of Fresh & Wild. Not only is the experience of shopping there so much nicer, but you can trust that their team of buyers have made all the big decisions for you.
You don’t have to worry whether the fish is sustainably caught or humanely and safely farmed. There’s no need to waste time wondering if the hens that laid the eggs have been routinely injected with antibiotics; if the fruit and veg are covered in pesticides or anti-fungal waxes; if the milk and cheese is full of hormones; or if the breakfast cereals, biscuits and sweets contain dodgy E numbers and battery farm eggs. You can be certain that everything for sale at Fresh & Wild is untainted by all these things, that it’s GM-free, full of flavour, full of nutrition and fresh as can be.
It’s not really about what it doesn’t contain, but what it does. In short, the store is stuffed with real, proper, tasty and unadulterated food – lots of organic foods, lots of imaginative foods, lots of food that you will love. It’s not a health food shop so much as a real food shop, full of flavoursome, healthy foods. This can be a bit of a culture shock if you’re used to the standard run-of-the-mill supermarket sweep.
That’s where this book comes in. I want you to explore, experiment and have lots of fun with things that you’ve never tried before. Fresh & Wild has plenty of staple foods that you know exactly how to eat – like the excellent hand-baked organic breads, or incredible artisan cheeses, or the many varieties of apples, cucumbers and potatoes – but what exactly is mochi? And what are you supposed to do with burdock roots, nori, or Ras-el-Hanout?
I love playing with food. Mixing and matching the most amazing ingredients and recipes from near and far, sometimes making an authentic meal from another continent, other times cooking up a mélange that could only happen in a multicultural city like London or Bristol. We’re blessed with choices, so why not enjoy the amazing opportunities we have to tickle our taste buds with local, traditional delicacies or exotic, fairly-traded delights? And have a browse at the culinary gadgets they’ve got, too. The Rookie chopsticks are great for kids, while the cast-iron griddle pans are top for char-grilling just about anything, from fennel to fish.
Ingredients listed in this book are mostly available in season at Fresh & Wild. The stores vary from location to location, as each local Fresh & Wild has its own customers with different preferences, so the managers tailor their products accordingly. So Clapham’s got lots of organic baby food and family favourites, while Soho’s geared up for single creatives in their twenties. And Notting Hill satisfies the needs of lots of local models and pop stars, so that’s the one for Dr Haushka cosmetics and luxurious delicacies.
The food on offer at all Fresh & Wild stores develops and changes to reflect what you, the customer, want. Some ingredients prove majorly popular and spread throughout the network of stores like wildfire. Others are popular at just a couple of locations whilst customers at the other shops don’t go for them. So in short, if your Fresh & Wild doesn’t seem to have one of the ingredients you need to make a particular recipe, let them know that your community wants it stocked.
Of course, some really unusual ingredients can’t be guaranteed to be on the shelves 365 days every year. The availability of seasonal and niche foods comes and goes, so plan ahead if you want to try some of the recipes with stranger and more exotic things in them. For instance, fresh wood blewit mushrooms aren’t seasonal, as they’re farmed in Sussex, but they’re unlikely to be stocked all the time, in all the Fresh & Wild stores, until enough people like you and I buy them regularly enough to make it worth their while.
So let’s make it happen by buying strange ingredients. Let’s keep small artisan food crafts alive. Let’s make sure that those special little ingredients stick around for future generations to enjoy. Oh yes, let’s have some fun in the kitchen.
All recipes in this book are for organic, fresh produce: organic meat, organic poultry, organic milk, organic soy products and organic eggs – and luckily they’re the only kind on offer at Fresh & Wild. Where a recipe includes eggs these are large hen eggs unless it says otherwise. All fish recipes are for organically-farmed fish or sustainably-caught wild fish. Some of the cheeses mentioned are organic, a few are not, but all are proper artisan-produced, slow food delicacies. All oils are cold pressed, the honey isn’t heat-treated and there are no artificial chemical preservatives, colourings or flavourings to be found in any ingredients listed.
Use any of the different kinds of salt in the stores, as they’re all from clean waters and have no strange things added like the sodium hexaflouro-cyanate generally found in salt. I particularly like Malden and Geo Atlantic, but try them all and be amazed at their subtly different flavours. And all butter listed in the ingredients is unsalted unless it says it’s salted.
I’ve confidently used things like lemon zest in the recipes, as organic citrus fruit don’t include loads of wax and pesticides and are therefore ready to zest. Some of the fresh vegetables, like rainbow chard and burdock root, are only available as organic produce. It makes sense that if you’re a farmer growing a very special or heirloom variety, you’re the kind of person that wants to go the whole hog and grow it the best way. Lots of the spices are only available organic too, although some are only available uncertified for now.
I’m only happy to write recipes that taste delicious and feel good for the people who grew the ingredients, whether they’re in faraway countries or on our own doorstep. Ingredients grown in the tropics and sold at Fresh & Wild are always fairly traded, like dried papaya and cassia bark. When you buy British organic ingredients at Fresh & Wild, like carrots and lamb, you can be confident that our farmers are paid fairly for their hard work and early January mornings, something that’s rarely the case in many other stores.
Next time you venture into a shop that’s not Fresh & Wild, please read the small print on their wares. Take a closer look at the eco-sensitivity of the packaging on those organic bananas. Read about the sustainability of the fish in that gas-filled pack. Check out those long words on the side of the biscuits, next to the listing for liquid eggs that they don’t point out come from inhumane battery farms. I can’t help but see the tarnish, the corner cutting, the injustice to farmers, the potential for health and morals to be undermined.
That’s why I run back to decent food, happy to part with a few extra pence for apples that aren’t unripe Golden Delicious; apples without a covering of anti-fungal waxes and without a cocktail of pesticides on their skin – apples that are full