“Back in 2008, community group Transition Town Norwich asked Nick, William and I to help them work out whether, with climate change in mind, the city could feed itself from surrounding farmland,” says Josiah Meldrum, co-founder of Hodmedod alongside Nick Saltmarsh and William Hudson.
“We looked at various scenarios, but what was striking about all of them was the need to grow and eat more pulses; not only because they’re a great source of protein and other nutrients but because they make a fantastic contribution to more sustainable crop rotations.” Crop rotations are used by organic farmers instead of nitrogen-based artificial fertilisers. Pulses absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere and ‘fix’ it in the soil; growing more of them “would help to reduce the city’s food footprint (the area of land needed to feed itself),” Josiah says.
A 100% self-sufficient Norwich might only have been a thought experiment, but the notion that we should be eating more British pulses stuck. The future-Hodmedod team discovered that there were traditional pulse varieties still being widely grown locally – and then exported, or used for pigeon feed!
One early interest was Fava beans, grown from the Iron Age right through to the 19th Century, but now out of fashion: “It seems that in the UK, as we got richer, Fava beans became stigmatised as poor people’s food and over the last 200 years or so have almost completely disappeared from our kitchens. In much of the rest of the world it’s still a staple.”
Carlin peas are another Hodmedod crop with a rich history. The story goes that in the Elizabethan age, a Spanish ship was wrecked off the coast of Newcastle, and bags of Carlin pea seeds were washed ashore and planted by curious farmers. Since then, they’ve become a Northern favourite – but aren’t yet widely used in the rest of the country.
Nick, William and Josiah decided to form a company to “bring forgotten and overlooked pulses back into kitchens and onto farms.” Hodmedod (an old East Anglian word for snails, ammonites, hedgehogs, the curls in a girl’s hair, really any curled-up thing… Even, the team thought, a bean shoot!) was born.
Since then, their innovative range has been recognised with a whole host of awards – including loads of Great Taste Awards (23 and counting at the time of writing), and the BBC’s Food Producer of the Year.
