Beginning the West Island Way

February was the month we were walking the West Island Way, a 40km way marked trail around Bute. The bags were packed, ferry taken, campsite checked in to. Unfortunately, the weather had other ideas. We trudged through massively boggy ground for the first 8km, the Kilchattan Bay circular, before deciding to spend the rest of the weekend drinking coffee and reading books.

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Pause & Ponder // Reading in Feb

The danger goes beyond authority figures silencing female voices. Young women internalize societal cues about what defines “appropriate” behaviour and, in turn, silence themselves.

It wasn’t until I heard the Phi Beta Kappa speech about self-doubt that it struck me: the real issue was not that I felt like a fraud, but that I could feel something deeply and profoundly and be completely wrong.

I realised that searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming.

Lean In – Sheryl Sandberg

The very meaning of food is being transformed: food cultures that once treated cooking and eating as central elements in maintaining social stricter and tradition are slowly being usurped by a global food culture, where cost and convenience are dominant, the social meal is obsolete, and the art of cooking fetishised in coffee-table cookbooks and on television shows.

Just as we long ago broke farming into its constituent pieces and are now suffering the consequences, our solutions have tended to follow a pattern that is no less reductionist, in which each problem (for example, synthetic farm chemicals) is met with its own discreet solution (organics). Yet just as most of our food challenges are now understood to be interrelated and evolving, our solutions, too, must be both comprehensive and capable of constantly adapting.

The End of Food – Paul Roberts

The French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet recalls his friend the literary theorist Roland Barthes musing, ‘In a restaurant it is the menu that people enjoy consuming – not the dishes, but their description.’ The words, the bright names of ingredients, the voluptuous-sounding dishes are all part of the experience of the food.

“We don’t sit around a table as a distraction from the travails of daily life. We do everything else in order to sit around the table. What you share when you eat in the Caribbean isn’t just food, it’s stories. Words become a condiment to the food.” Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

The Edible Atlas – Mina Holland