Ceri Buck's Page

Invisible Food is a series of walks with local residents in the green spaces around the Loughborough Estate in Brixton. It has provided an opportunity to search for and get on first name terms with local edible plants. After walking, the participants make or cook something such as tea, jam, cordials, quiches, soup or cakes with the herbs, flowers or berries we find. This map and bundle of recipe cards will help you explore this area and interact with the plants you find.

Invisible Food lives in the conversations held and the relationships that spring up during the walks. We've walked in step or with different length strides, we've looked at the ground or turned to each other to speak, we've talked about plants and what they bring us back to; childhood, games played with them, family members, herbal remedies, other countries, 'the country'. Snippets of chats, emotions triggered by words, blasts of an idea or a different approach remain after returning home and shutting the door. Conversations held while searching out a plant never noticed before can gently blow away a confining sense of self and certainties. As Meg Wheatley writes, “Conversation is the natural way humans think together.” Whatever I or you or any one person or group knows is not enough. We need each other to fill in the gaps. I've pointed out some wild plants in our natural habitat, while the participants have helped me see, hear, feel and flesh out another broader context for our shared dwelling space here in Brixton. The Invisible Food Cafe – a roaming cafe of wild herb teas, jams, cakes, cordials, drawings, recipes, books and elderberry ink to doodle with – visited the Loughborough Primary school summer fair, Bonkersfest, the Lambeth Country show, Peckham Green fair, Transition Town Brixton Unleashing and People's Republic of Southwark eco fairs in 2008.

On another level, Invisible Food explores approaches to play, and peak experiences that can surface through play. I've identified peak experiences as moments lost in an activity when time stops, or when relationship to time is punctured and its pressure released. These are moments which impart a strong physical memory beyond the ordinary consciousness of everyday life. There was scope for these peak experiences during the project through contact with nature and through exploratory play. In searching for wild food, we had to enter into an attitude of play, of allowing the unknown and the new to come into frame. We could free ourselves from a body which rehearses patterns of behaviour, such as getting from A to B as fast as possible, looking in a fixed direction and blocking out the context of habitat. We had to alter our route, pace, and eye level. The bodily absorption in the environment changes patterns or reveals something not noticed before. The blackberries are there to lose ourselves in.

Invisible Food is a tool to learn about wild plants and to make transparent the learning processes the project has housed. We live in a society with a largely uncontested belief that competition amongst experts creates strong and healthy systems, but we haven't spent nearly enough time researching how cooperation and interdependence can create health and resilience, and how diverse voices create texture and strength. I encourage gardeners and botanists to share their experience of how plants in their natural habitat embody these qualities. And I offer these recipe cards and a map indicating plants in the area. This is not a fastidious documentation of the walks, and I haven't chased after some kind of representation of a peak experience. The words, drawings, photos and map have sprung into place instead, to point at the world outside and invite you to take your own walk of discovery.

This publication has been distributed to every household on the Loughborough Estate.