Grow, Cook, Dye, Wear: From Seed to Style the Sustainable Way

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Her cooking is influenced by the principles of sustainability as well as by the flavours of her Tel Aviv childhood. Rhubarb is a zero waste plant – dye with the roots and eat the stalks; the leaves are poisonous but powerful mordants to prepare fabric for dyeing. This is a really beautiful book, full of lovely photographs, which looks at sustainable ways to use certain crops, starting with growing them from seed, cooking and eating them and ending with using them to produce dyes for fabric. Not only can we use this rubbish to create new plant life, but the fact that it nourishes insects and grows more food is inspiring.

Onion is a great choice, as it can be cultivated easily and if people lack space to grow it, it’s common enough to be able to source skins. Once you’ve perfected the process of dying your own fabrics, you can then transform those fabrics into exclusively designed pieces of clothing, including a shirt dress and a duster coat, using Bella’s five full-size pattern sheets that come together with the book! Also used in food processing, alum is not poisonous in small quantities and it is a natural mineral.

Like most recipe books, the recipes are a little hit-and-miss, but the majority of recipes in this are actually really good, which surprised me - a lot of vegan cookbooks pair the strangest ingredients and make really conflicting meals, but for the most part, the recipes here were unusual but really delicious. Right now, the book offers a very feasible experience that does not involve growing plants to extract fiber, dyeing those and then weaving them into a fabric. I always feel that everything can continually be more sustainable but nothing is ever truly sustainable. If the initial age verification is unsuccessful, we will contact you asking you to provide further information to prove that you are aged 18 or over. With respect to dyeing, cabbage is not an ideal dye plant as it creates temporary but beautiful colors.

You start with the onion, perhaps in spring and harvest in autumn, cook with it, collect enough skins to dye the fabric and make the dress over winter so it’s ready to wear next spring. If you went through the journey of making the garment, you would never throw it – you would mend it, pass it along to family and friends, it becomes a part of you and you become a part of it. Swap food waste and fast fashion for homegrown produce, delicious vegan dishes, and a contemporary capsule wardrobe with the help of Bella's friendly, accessible approach to sustainable living.Soil can be enriched with organic matter – from manure of horses and chicken, or using leftover food waste that does not contain meat. Perfect for: Crafty, sustainability-minded readers who enjoy making things with their own hands, and anyone who wants to understand more about the processes behind the items we consume on a daily basis. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

The common phenomena now is that people wear things once and then throw it away, particularly in the UK. Five crops; blackberry, cabbage, nettle, onion and rhubarb play leading roles in this book by Bella Gonshorovitz, as they carry the reader through each step or process: grow, cook, dye, wear. I made the onion dyed dress from upcycled fabrics for myself, showed it to my agent – who helped me put together a proposal. It’s the best, most natural embodiment of a circular economy, something that’s often perceived as an academic and lofty concept. However, it is challenging to live that way or even do the whole process of the book in just one season.The one that I left out was beetroot, because like cabbage its dye doesn’t last very long and it gets less impressive results. One of them is pH level in water – modifiers like lemon help intentionally change the pH level and so a murky brown can become pink. Modifiers are interesting because when you dye something, it is very rare to get two identical results. For example, madder – it can be harvested only three to five years after growing and the roots are used to obtain the dye.