THE FOOD REVOLUTION, PART 3: Scotland's role
By Vicky Allan

This year's tattie harvest is coming to an end at Craggie farm in the Cawdor Hills. There, Glen and Gilli Allingham are currently pulling up potatoes, just as the generation before them did on this land and probably a generation before that. Yet, in two weeks time, the workings of the farm will turn to a far less typically Scottish activity. The Allinghams will start planting their garlic for next year, as they have done for the past eight years. It says a great deal about the evolution of how we eat in Scotland that the Allinghams, finding potato production was not reliable enough in the current market, turned to a new crop that whiffs of the Mediterranean.

Garlic is not something commonly grown in this country. Twenty years ago it wasn't common even to eat it. But our tastes have been changing. And at the same time as we are eating more garlic, we are consuming fewer potatoes than we once did. "That's partly," says Gilli Allingham, "because we eat more pasta and rice, but also because we're eating less carbohydrates overall."

The Allinghams' journey into the world of garlic began when they took over Glen's father's farm and decided that in order to make it work, they needed to try something different.

They looked into a crop-diversification programme that was supporting test runs on garlic, borage and daffodils, and Allingham found that the idea of garlic immediately jumped out. Having spent many years working as a chef, Gilli knew how central the vegetable had become in modern cooking.

The surprise for many is how well garlic grows in our climate. It was only after research and travel to Ontario that the Allinghams found a variety that suited the north of Scotland. "Canada is on a similar latitude to here and they have similar rainfall, but their seasons are much more extreme," says Allingham. "They actually think we've probably got a climate better suited to it."

Garlic takes nine months to grow. That time, Gilli says, is like a pregnancy. There is so much that is unknown, and most of the job is waiting. The wet weather this year did not favour them. "There were fields," she recalls, "that had just gone rotten."

With their packaging slogan "It's chic to reek", the Allinghams have acknowledged our changing relationship to this thoroughly smelly bulb. "Garlic went through a stage," says Gilli, "of being really frowned upon. The Victorians thought it was terribly lower-class. Very plain cooking became fashionable."

Now, however, there is barely a celebrity chef recipe or product on the market that doesn't include it. The problem for the Allinghams was not so much how to get people to eat garlic, but how to get them to buy their Scottish version over the cheap bulbs from China and Spain. In their marketing they wanted to steer clear of anything tartan, discarding the company name Gaelic Garlic.

Really Garlicky summed up the idea that this was just a good and intense garlic. It was also capable of covering the products that Gilli was experimenting with making in her kitchen.

The food map of Scotland is changing. What we eat, how we cook it, how we grow it, how we buy it, and even the way we talk about it are undergoing a revolution. Though this has its roots in local producers and in farmers' markets, it extends out to the supermarkets, ever happy to take up a new idea that sells. "Buy local" is the frequent refrain. Get to know your friendly farmer and get on first-name terms with the chicken that graces your plate. But this change is about more than that. It is partly about nostalgia. It revolves around the idea that other cultures and other times knew far better than us how to eat. That is why it not only resonates with a return to old Scottish practices, but with influences from other cultures. To consume olive oil drained from a demijohn as they might do in Italy, to eat fresh crunchy rye bread, hand-baked by a German master baker, to infuse all we eat with garlic as those healthy Mediterranean types have done for centuries; this is to lead the better life. Across Scotland many businesses are responding to these desires and, at the same time, following their own urge to produce in this way. These are just a few.

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THE GARLIC GROWERS
Butternut squash with garlic soup; tomato, oregano and garlic sauce for pasta; garlic oatcakes and aioli; these are all on the current list. In these products The Really Garlicky Company, whose products grace supermarket shelves as well as farmers' market stalls, forms a marker for how profoundly the Mediterranean diet has influenced ours. These days, we are as likely to open a packet of pasta as we are to cook some mince and tatties.

THE BAKER
A MOUND of dough breathes a sigh of citrus and cinnamon as it collapses out of the mixer onto the bench. Falko Burkert, Konditormeister (master cakemaker), is grumbling as he works: so many cakes to make, so little time.

He is berating himself for having taken on the huge commission of supplying Christmas stollen for Selfridges. The job runs contrary to his principles; his aim to keep small and special. He is, he emphasises, a retail baker, not a commercial one. Yet, he couldn't resist this temptation, and now he is working at production-line rate in the tight space of his open kitchen. "When I've got enough time this job is quite relaxing," he says. "The minute time becomes an issue the fun seems to disappear." When people suggest he set up a store in Glasgow, he resists. His existing stores - a bakery in Gullane and this Edinburgh cake shop - are more than enough.

Burkert made his first stollen at eight years old. As a child growing up in Swabia, Germany, he used to go down to the kitchen on a Sunday morning while his parents slept, and take out the cookery books and bake. The making and consuming of cake was a ritual back then. At weekends family and friends would gather and cake would be shared and judged. Standards were high, and Germans could be blunt. "What did you put in this?" they might say, with disapproval. Most often, the only sign of success was silence. "In Swabia they have this saying, If you don't moan it's praise enough." Burkert is nostalgic for that tradition. "It seems to have died completely. How many families do you know who have dinner together? It's the same with cake. All that's disappeared. Its not just in this country. In Germany too. The Germany I remember does not exist any more."

Scotland, he believes, lacks a proper modern cake culture. The cake has been one of the victims of our transition to mass-manufactured food. When he first arrived in to work in Edinburgh, as a fully trained Konditormeister, he was shocked to find that he was expected to make cakes using packet mixes. He calls this "the Great British cake of horror" and he believes it is ubiquitous.

It's easy to forget that we also had a domestic baking tradition. Burkert's business partner, Robert Linton, for instance, grew up in Lanark licking the cake mix from his mother's bowl and was left with an enduring passion for all things sweet and spongy. "Cakes. I like so many of them," he enthuses, pointing to their cabinet. "I like the plum cake and the spiced almond cake, and lemon tart of course."

The company is the result of a chance encounter between the cakeheads. Within hours of them meeting in a bar in Edinburgh, Linton, then a computer programmer, was asking why Burkert hadn't set up his own business, and by the time they parted, the idea for Falko's was virtually in the oven. Soon they were selling their cakes in the Edinburgh Farmer's Market, baking them the day before in Linton's flat. On the first day they sold out by 10.30am. Proof that even if we don't have time to bake our own cakes and bread, we still want to buy our cake and eat it.

RHUBARB VODKA?
WHEN a young woman walked into his Glasgow store with a bottle of rhubarb vodka and asked if he'd be interested in selling the product, Angus Ferguson felt that a prayer had been answered. His sister had been making her own home-brew version of the drink, combining the light sharpness of vodka with the sourness of rhubarb, and he had been searching for someone who could produce it in bulk. This bottle had been sent down from a rhubarb farmer near Inverness, and Ferguson had high hopes.

But when he opened it and took a swig, the contents tasted dull and lifeless. He phoned the farmer and asked for another bottle. Yet again, what arrived was a disappointment. Undaunted, he phoned again, and the farmer confessed that he had sent out some old product. Ferguson requested he send one last "new, fresh batch". When it arrived it was: "a hit, spot-on. Even the colour was beautiful. It was absolutely fresh".

The orange-pink liquid is one of 60 that sit in huge glass bulbs along the shelves of the Edinburgh and Glasgow branches of Ferguson's shop, Demijohn. The vodka's story is characteristic of many of the drinks Ferguson sells: full of accident, experimentation, and kitchen-garden innovation. His sloe gins, spicy rums and alternative vodkas come from "retired PE teachers, bankers and farmers' wives". They are a testimony to the secret art of home brewing that the UK is quietly so very good at.

The shop is a prism of colours: inky sloe, algae-green elderflower vinegar, yellow Seville orange gin. Though Demijohn looks like a new concept, it harks back to an old one. Originally, Ferguson had wanted to create an old-fashioned shop where you could take your own bottle to be filled with your chosen fluid. For health and safety reasons this wasn't possible, but his business gets close to that principle by allowing customers to choose by taste, then decant into his own bottles on site, then labelling them personally. Customers can come back for refills, providing they bring the same container.

It's an idea that had been germinating over many years. On a student work placement in Italy, Ferguson enjoyed being able to buy wine by filling a jug direct from a drum. Later, stationed with the Black Watch in Germany, he came across shops in the small market towns where sweet and sticky liqueurs could be bought in the same manner.

Ferguson's travels have influenced Demijohn's products. The Seville Orange Gin was inspired by a drink he had in Spain, where they crushed citrus into a gin cocktail. He wondered if someone could capture that zing in a liqueur and asked a couple he knew to try creating it.

Demijohn works hard at being green. The bottles are recycled, many of the shop fittings come from recycled sources and their system produces very little waste. Their weekly rubbish throw is never more than the size of a single small wheelie bin. "When we phoned the council asking for a small bin for the Glasgow shop, they were shocked. They said, but you're on Byres Road. Businesses there use a tip-sized bin a week."

THE DEER FARMERS
RASCAL, the white hart stag, stands on a hummock 100 metres from where his progeny will be slaughtered and butchered. The connection between the animal and the meat is one that John and Nichola Fletcher are keen to emphasise. When promoting their venison at game fairs, they often used to take a couple of stags like Rascal along. It was important, they felt, that people understood that when they ate a piece of meat they were contributing to the death of an animal. "It means you respect the animal," says Nichola Fletcher.

Here at Reediehill Farm, Auchtermuchty, there is a division of labour. Nichola is responsible for the meat production and marketing, while John, vet and deer expert, rears the animals. Although celebrity chefs have lately been rearing and slaughtering their own livestock, the Fletchers set up in 1973 as Europe's first commercial deer farm. All the processes that make a venison steak take place here, most of them within the vicinity of the house.

Every Thursday, the stockman drives a tractor into this field and shoots 10 or 12 deer in the head. The other animals don't flinch. Meanwhile, in an outhouse, the butcher works his way through muscle and bone. The kitchen is where Nichola created the recipes in her Ultimate Venison Cookery Book. From field to kitchen table, all in a few metres.

In the 35 years the Fletchers have been farming, the image of venison has changed. "A small number of people had come across it as part of their background and thought it was wonderful," says Nichola. "Then there were others who had eaten some not very nice stuff and thought it was revolting and tough." Now, the Fletchers say, most people talk about venison being lean and healthy. John believes this is the meat we evolved to eat. "We've been eating red deer in Europe for up to 50,000 years," he says.

The Fletchers try to farm deer in a way as humane as keeping them wild. The animals have not been bred for particular traits, and therefore have the same genetic make-up as those in the wild. However, his deer are fenced in. The young are housed in winter. Because of this, the farm has been the target of several attacks by animal rights activists who have cut open their fences.

This puzzles the Fletchers, who consider their animals to have good lives. Their quality of life and death, they believe, is exhibited in the meat. "The meat sets better if there is low stress," says Nichola. "It tastes better. If it's had a lot of adrenalin it can become very tough. Ours is very tender."