The ‘How to eat your Christmas tree’ project is a cookbook and supper club series by
Julia Georgallis that explore the unsung edible heroes of our forests — Christmas trees and their delicious, evergreen friends! Both book and supper club encourage reflection around food waste and resourcefulness during Christmas, one of the most wasteful times of year. Trying to eat your tree is not only a way of extending the already short shelf life of something that has become so inappropriately disposable but is also an opportunity to really scrutinise keeping trees in the first place. The cookbook offers ways of cooking with Christmas trees, Christmas tree alternatives and can also be used as a handbook for a more sustainable festive period. You can read more discussions around this topic here.
The project began in winter 2015 as a light-hearted dinner club before climate change had become one of the world’s primary concerns. The supper club continued each festive season and has gained more and more interest as the noise surrounding climate change has increased. Recipes from the dinners were collated and turned into a cookbook, published by Hardie Grant and has since sold thousands of copies worldwide, appeared in a number of TV and radio programmes, print, online articles and podcasts. It has now been translated into French and German. The last series of supper clubs ran in early 2023.
Though there's no doubt that eating a Christmas tree won't singlehandedly help any polar bears or freeze any icecaps, the aim of the project was simply to start a conversation about why on earth we still insist on cutting down thousands of trees that usually live for a really long time (literally thousands of years) to hold them hostage in our homes over Christmas. By eating them rather than throwing them out after Christmas, we are not only repurposing them, but are acknowledging them as living things instead of simply commodities of Christmas. If we are going to cut down a tree that works to protect our environment, we would do much better to think about how we can use it to its fullest potential, not just stuff it down the back of the bin on a cold January morning. It also throws into question whether we can use other trees that may be better for the environment to celebrate Christmas (such as bamboo, a much faster growing and more sustainable plant, or adorn our house plants instead?).
Blog: 'I accidentally wrote a cookbook'
'...up to the point of putting pen to paper, I had run a series of supper clubs called ‘How to eat your Christmas tree’ since 2015, which I started with friend and designer Lauren Davies shortly after I'd made the decision to quit design and retrain as a baker. Lauren and I were both quite into scrappy cooking (cooking with leftovers, not wasting anything, foraging, etc etc.). We thought, perhaps, we’d run a supper club together around Christmas time and asked ourselves what was thrown away the most around that time of year that might be edible to encourage discussion around waste? A little lightbulb floated over our heads — it was Christmas trees, wasn’t it? People fucking loved Christmas trees.
In 2015, this was the extent of what sustainability was to me — leftovers, waste, recycling. I understand now that it is much bigger than that, that there needs to be radical, systematic shifts in all aspects of life to achieve any semblance of sustainable living, but just ten years ago the noises surrounding climate crisis were pitched to a low hum, not nearly as loud or as urgent as they are now. Cooking with Christmas trees was how we were going to save the polar bears, apparently (spoiler, it wasn’t and we didn’t)...' Read more here on Julia's Substack page
