What It Means To Eat The Wight

Throughout September, my sister Natasha and I set ourselves the challenge of eating only food grown, reared, caught or produced on the Isle of Wight.

The idea had been brewing for a while. It came from conversations about Island food, wanting to support producers we already knew and discover some we didn't, the establishment of the Island Foodie Collective, and a longstanding curiosity about just how much of our diet this bountiful little Island could provide.

We weren't trying to prove that everyone should eat like this, or even that we could keep it up indefinitely. We simply wanted to give it a go and see what we discovered.

What counted?

Anything grown, reared, caught, brewed or produced here was in.

We allowed ourselves a couple of fairly generous loopholes: coffee roasted on the Island and tea blended and bagged here both stayed. I wasn't prepared to investigate the effects of caffeine withdrawal at the same time.

Otherwise, we stuck to it surprisingly well.

The tricky bits - The biggest challenge wasn't a lack of food. We have an extraordinary amount available here. It was time and preparation.

Without pasta, rice, pulses or the usual cupboard staples, there wasn't much scope for throwing together a quick meal. Food needed thinking about in advance and most things needed cooking from scratch.

Sourcing it took longer too. We shopped at places including Hazelgrove, Harvey Browns, Briddlesford, The Garlic Farm and Brighstone Farm Shop, alongside other producers we discovered along the way.

That clearly isn't as convenient as getting everything under one roof. But I did find it a much nicer way to shop.

I've started referring to the alternative as "supermarket anxiety": standing in an aisle faced with hundreds of products and trying to weigh up price, health, provenance, packaging, organic, local, sustainability and whatever special offer is shouting loudest at you.

There was something quite calming about having fewer choices.

And there were things we really missed - Black pepper was high on the list, although Tash found that foraged Alexander's seeds made a surprisingly good substitute.

Lemons were another. Apparently people are successfully growing lemons on the Isle of Wight, but unfortunately I didn't manage to find any of them.

Nuts were tricky. We foraged some walnuts, but not in anything like the quantities we'd usually eat. Spices disappeared, which meant curries largely did too. Coconut milk was replaced, rather indulgently, with Briddlesford double cream.

Chocolate was greatly missed.

Sugar, less so. We used Island honey instead and found it worked in far more recipes than I had expected.

September was also probably the easiest month we could have chosen. The hedgerows were full, vegetables were abundant and fruit was everywhere. Doing the same challenge in February might tell a rather different story.

What about the cost?

This was one of the things I was most interested in.

I expected our food bill to rise considerably. Some local products are more expensive than supermarket equivalents, of course, but across the month the difference wasn't nearly as dramatic as I'd imagined.

Part of that was simply because we bought less.

There were no impulse purchases, snacks appearing in the trolley or offers persuading us to buy things we hadn't intended to. We also became much more conscious of using what we had — making stock from bones, using leftovers and preserving surplus food.

But there is an important caveat - Making the most of local produce takes time, equipment, knowledge and cooking skills. I also had access to produce from our market garden and already knew many of the Island's farmers and food businesses. Those things made this experiment considerably easier for me than they might be for someone starting from scratch.

So I don't think the conclusion is as simple as "local food isn't expensive".

A more useful question might be: what would make local food easier for more people to access and use?

What I've kept - The month has changed some of my habits, although perhaps not in the ways I expected.

I've started putting aside one morning a week to prepare food for the family. This is only possible because I've arranged three additional hours of childcare, so I don't pretend it's a cost-free solution. But for us, so far, the trade-off feels worthwhile. There is food ready for the week and far less 5.30pm panic when everyone gets home tired and hungry.

I've also realised how useful regular deliveries can be. Veg boxes, meat boxes, milk and egg deliveries remove much of the work of sourcing food individually.

And the things we couldn't find locally have got me thinking too. I'd like to explore an organic buying group with friends for staples such as pulses, rice and oats, sharing bulk orders and delivery costs.

I'd also love to experiment with getting people together to cook. Not necessarily a formal "class", but a chance to bulk cook, preserve food, swap ideas and learn from one another. There are lots of food skills that used to be ordinary knowledge and are now much less commonplace.

Perhaps the best bit - One of my favourite parts of the month was simply talking to more of the people producing our food.

Karen at Hazelgrove told me she'd tried Eat the Wight herself after talking to Tash and I. Doing it helped her notice what was easy to find, what was missing and what she might change or add in the shop.

I loved that.

Buying directly creates conversations that don't happen when food is anonymous on a supermarket shelf. Customers learn what it actually takes to grow and produce food, while producers hear what people are looking for.

So, what did we actually learn?

I don't think a month of eating only Isle of Wight food provides any grand answers about how we should all eat.

If anything, it left me with more questions.

How can we make locally produced food easier to find? How can we make buying directly from producers more convenient? How do we pass on the cooking, growing, preserving and foraging skills that make seasonal food easier to use? And how do we make sure conversations about local and sustainable food include affordability and access?

What September did show us was just how much food is being produced on this Island — and how easy it is to overlook it.

We're very happily eating rice, spices, lemons and chocolate again.

But we're also buying differently, wasting less and thinking much more carefully about what we can find closer to home.

Perhaps that's a more realistic version of Eat the Wight: not trying to eat 100% locally, but looking at what we each buy regularly and asking whether a little more of it could come from the farmers, growers and producers around us.