Capturing Light
Hello, and happy spring. A streamlined newsletter today: a blogger interview followed by a question we hope you’ll answer in the comments. Read on!
This time, we’re talking with Steve Dent, author of the UK-based food blog The Circus Gardener’s Kitchen. On the blog, Steve is known for his innovative vegetarian and vegan recipes as well as his attention to the political and ecological dimension of food.
1. Hello, Steve! How long have you been blogging?
In May of this year, I will have been blogging for eight years. My enthusiasm hasn’t waned in all that time, but I have had to learn a great deal about blogging and food photography.
2. What were your motivations for getting started, and what has kept you engaged throughout?
Partly I wanted to showcase good vegetarian and vegan food and to persuade visitors to the blog to try the recipes. More importantly, I wanted to draw attention to our “broken” food system—the way we produce, distribute, regulate, package, buy, sell and discard food—and to set out ways in which we can help to bring about change, both as individuals and collectively.
3. As an admirer of your photography, and also of your food styling, I wanted to ask how you learned the art of food photography? What equipment do you use?
Thank you. When I set out as a blogger, my photography was pretty average, but I have learned a great deal simply from practice and from studying the food photography and styling of successful food bloggers. I now realise that good food photography is almost as much about capturing light as it about shooting the food itself. I always use natural light, which becomes more of a challenge in the winter months, enhanced with an array of reflectors. My camera is a Nikon D810 and I only use prime lenses, most often a fast 35mm lens.
I am fortunate enough to have my own small studio in the house. It includes a metre-square table set up by the window where I photograph my creations, a whiteboard on the wall to write down recipe ideas and a shelving unit full of plates, bowls, fabrics, cutlery and other props that I have built up over the years, mostly sourced from local charity shops.
4. How and when did you become vegetarian?
I have been vegetarian for most of my adult life, although there have been a few lapses along the way.
Vegetarian food is often more imaginative than traditional meat-based meals, but there were and are more compelling reasons for me to turn to a vegetarian diet.
The first is that we don’t need to kill other living beings in order to live. As Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian and philosopher, put it: “but for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.”
More recently, it has become clear that the meat industry is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding the combined output of all forms of transport. If more of us gave up meat eating, we would be helping to tackle the climate emergency.
5. Your blog notes that you're a self-taught cook. But your recipes are creative and, for lack of a better word, elevated. How did you learn? Where do you gather ideas and inspiration?
I am the oldest of five children, and both my parents had to work hard to put food on the table. I began cooking at an early age, probably around twelve or thirteen years old, really just to help out, but I soon realised I enjoyed it and that I was quite good at it. I harboured ambitions to become a professional chef, but my secondary school was quite academically inclined, and I was persuaded to go off to university instead. So my life took on a different course, but I never lost my love of cooking. I often wonder whether I might have lost that love if I had become a professional chef, having to serve up dozens of meals every day from a hot and stressful kitchen.
In terms of creativity, I read some advice years ago which was to follow a recipe the first time you cook a dish, but the next time try to cook the dish from memory. Inevitably it will be different, and quite possibly worse, but the idea behind that advice was to learn to use your instincts in the kitchen. Over the years I have developed a good sense of which flavours and textures work well together and have used this to inform my own creations.
6. What do you do when you're not cooking, gardening, or blogging?
I do not have a car, so I do a lot of walking and cycling, often with my wife, Sara.
Before Covid changed all our lives, we used to host several dinner parties a year. I would cook anything up to seven courses, whilst Sara would act as front of house. Sara is very artistic and creates wonderful table decorations. She once turned our dining room into a Bedouin tent for a Middle Eastern-themed dinner party!
I work as a volunteer one day a week at Worcester’s Community Garden, an initiative which aims to teach people to sustainable gardening practices and to encourage them to grow their own food.
I am also a trustee of Worcester Environment Group, which is dedicated to protecting and promoting biodiversity and encouraging people to connect with the natural environment.
A few years ago, I helped set up Worcester Food Rescue, which collects supermarket food that is perfectly edible but beyond its “display by” date. Without our initiative this food would be destined for landfill. Now it is collected by volunteers and distributed to several local charities.
7. On The Circus Gardener's Kitchen, you don't run ads but you do engage in brand partnerships. Is this by design?
I deliberately do not run adverts, because I believe it could subvert or distract from the underpinning message my blog is trying to put across.
I have had many approaches for brand partnerships, but to date I have only accepted one, which was from Suma Wholefoods, a UK-based vegetarian wholefoods cooperative.
Suma runs on strong ethical principles, specialising in fairly traded, organic and natural products, and as a workers’ cooperative to boot they pretty much ticked all the right boxes for me, so it felt like a good fit, and I was comfortable in accepting their proposal, and it has been a happy and fruitful partnership for us both.
8. Who are your food heroes?
There are many unsung food heroes I admire, people who campaign on issues like food waste, food inequality, food standards and organic food production. I also admire UK TV chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, who have both used their celebrity status to champion important causes, such as the quality of meals served to children in schools and the scandal of food waste caused by supermarkets’ ridiculous cosmetic standards.
In terms of recipe creators, two non-vegetarians chefs spring to mind. Paul Gayler has created some wonderfully imaginative vegetarian dishes. Yotam Ottolenghi also creates brilliant vegetarian dishes and has introduced many of us to a range of new and exciting Middle Eastern ingredients.
9. Any tips for food bloggers just starting out?
Be clear from the start what you want to achieve and stick to it. In my case, I wanted to showcase good vegetarian cooking but also to get people to think more about the food they are eating. I set up the tagline “seasonal vegetarian cooking with a side helping of food politics,” and that has acted almost as my mission statement as well as telling visitors what the blog was about.
I would also advise a new food blogger to really work hard on his or her photography. The photograph of your dish is the window into your blog. If the food does not look appetising through that window then it doesn’t matter how wonderful the recipe is—people aren’t going to visit.
Find Steve at The Circus Gardener’s Kitchen, or on Instagram or Facebook. You can also check out his profile and recipes on Trivet Recipes.
So here’s the question for you, dear newsletter reader. Do you use Wordpress? If you do, what are your biggest gripes about it? That could be as a food blogger specifically, or just a user in general. We’re interested in anything and everything!
Thanks, and see you in a couple weeks,
—Katherine