Fri 13 JanOld hummus pot containing surplus porridge, microwaved, topped with chopped dates, peanut butter, bee pollen, honey and blackberry vinegar. Small glass of water from my activated charcoal decanter with a squirt of elderberry tincture and echinacea drops, followed by a litre of warm water from my flask. Will offers to read over some writing for me and refreshed a pot of oolong tea while we sit in his room discussing it. My stomach and head are both hurting today. I think I’ve been staring at my screen too long this week (I accepted it would be this way) and lacking energy so Sonia makes a surprise lunch for us and we plan to go for a big walk afterwards. We each have a slice of toasted seeded rye, spread thick with a mix of vegan herb cheez and kimchi, a fried egg sprinkled with zatar, chili oil and grated vegan cheddar. On the side there’s a green salad plus her favourite food of the week radishes and some plain sauerkraut. I tell her that I appreciate how colourful her plates always are, and that she is quite easy to clear up after. Oh, I’m almost forgetting the mixed fruit smoothie with flax, hemp, spirulina, wheatgrass. We argue the merits of superfood smoothies versus my protein-heavy, dessert-like concoctions of frozen banana, nut butter, dates and oats.
Once we’re back from a muddy stomp, I spend an hour filling the old bathtub in the garden with buckets of water from the studio tap and setting the fire underneath. I figure we need to eat before getting in otherwise hunger will force us out early. We both have instant noodles I went to the Chinese supermarket for especially – high grade shit. I think she has kimchi flavour and mine are something wild like pickled cabbage and fish. Sonia does hers on the hob along with some broccoli, and while my grey (!) noodles rehydrate in boiling water from the kettle, I eat an apple, squeeze my sachets in the bowl and fetch a little leftover pickled herring liquor I’m keeping in the fridge.
I eat mine by the hot tub while it heats up. As well as the candles, I’ve added some dried flowers, slices of fresh lemon and drops of geranium oil in the water. It’s never a quick process, and even slower when it’s so cold and we’re running low on large logs; the small pieces don’t make good embers and burn out too soon. We share a bottle of Hungarian sparkling orange wine and look at the stars through the steam and smoke, talking about our favourite holidays. Decommodifying my relationship with food – learning to respect the (non)human labour, units of energy needed and disparate origins of ingredients, and making informed decisions on how to nourish myself – goes hand-in-hand with looking closer at flows of materials in my life. As an artist I like to go the long way round, purposefully slowing down or unpacking processes to understand how many actions and agents we have to eradicate to take them for granted. Running a hot bath in the grounds of a dilapidated old school is no small feat, yet the enjoyment and self-awareness bestowed from the sensation is comparable to eating a herb that you grew on the windowsill. It’s not “I made that”, but “I helped that happen”.
Just before bed, Solomon joins us to watch a documentary called “Race: The Power of an Illusion” in the cinema and hands us a bowl of washed grapes to share. Sean Roy Parker is a visual artist, fermentation enthusiast and community gardener based in Derbyshire, England. He writes on fermentalhealth.substack.com and posts as @fermental_health on instagram.
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