Under the Solstice Sky
I am sitting outside as I write this, the air still warm from the long hot day, the first stars beginning to settle into their places, and the sky holding that particular blue it only holds at Solstice. A year ago I created this website. I created it as a small private space, mostly for myself - a place to write, to make sense of the years that had asked everything of me, and to find my way through what was beginning to take shape underneath. Writing, in different forms, has been the practice that kept me steady through years of major change and through the months of rapid evolution that followed.
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
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A year on - several women did write to me through this website, saying thank you for sharing my journey, saying how resonated many things with their own life and they don’t feel lonely. And here I am, arriving at something I did not predict and would not have planned. The website is becoming the work itself, rather than the place I escape to from the work. That shift has not happened over night; it has been built by a series of arrivals, each one pulling me towards the same realisation. I am ready to use this space to help others, rather than only to express myself.
I could not have written it last summer, when I created this website - is because more time needed to take it from thought forms into acceptance and reality.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
I am no longer trying to be one thing. The founder, the brand creator, the fermenter, the supplier, the mentor, the woman home-educating - all of it is allowed to be true at once, and the truth is that I am more useful, more rooted, and more myself when I stop trying to compress all of it into a single neat description. The single identity, the predictable lane - has never worked for me, and after a long internal arguments I have stopped pretending otherwise.
Out of that allowance, the last few months have unfolded with a velocity I am still catching up with. Mercato Battersea opened its doors at New Covent Garden Market, and a new community is building with great success. The Mind The Gut workshop came into shape with my dear friend and collaborator Olga, a naturopathic nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner, and our first session at Divertimenti sold out faster than either of us expected. And underneath all of that, requests have been arriving - from women, and from organisations - for two specific kinds of work that have been part of my life for a long time, but that have only just found their formal shape on this website.
“What you seek is seeking you.”
The first is mentoring.
During my entrepreneurial life, women ( and men ) have been coming to me now and again - friends, friends of friends, women I have met through businesses, workshops. Asking the same kinds of questions - how do I open a small independent shop? How do I find suppliers when I am starting from nothing? How do I take what I make at my kitchen and move it safely into a commercial setting? How do I build a brand that is genuinely mine, rather than a copy of someone else's? Should I stay in food, or is the road actually leading me out, or vice versa? I have been answering those questions over coffee, on phone calls, in the corners of events, and in long voice messages to women I care about. What I now offer formally - one-to-one mentoring for women at a crossroads - is the same work, finally given a name and a structure.
It is for the woman who is ready to do things her own way and who wants a guide who has actually walked the road. Built, lost, and built again. Adapted on the path. Stood in front of suppliers, retailers, accountants, difficult business moments, in the middle of production challenges, you name it. Learned which of the rules to obey, ignore or follow her own rules, where is substance and where is shallow knowledge. The mentoring is for her.
The second is the work I do with organisations.
This part has had a longer and more interesting incubation. For years I have been invited to give talks, run demos, and lead workshops in fermentation - into corporate teams, cookery schools and food businesses, I have been called to advise on commercial productions. None of it was systemised; all of it was real. What changed recently is the scale of the conversations. Hillary Cottam, whose work on social systems wrote about my work approach in her most recent book, The Work We Need. It lead to a pilot project introducing fermentation into a regenerative farming cycle - is currently in development. And a proposal exploring the role of fermentation in national food strategy is being prepared for DEFRA. Together it has made it impossible for me to keep treating the organisational work as a side activity, when in fact it is becoming quite an important “room” in this “house”, that needs a name.
The room For Organisations exists because the work is already happening at a level that deserves a proper front door. Talks, demos, workshops, designed programmes, advisory work - all of it grounded in practical 25 years experience at the heart of London's food industry. From the work I have done at Borough Market, the businesses I have founded, the products I have supplied to Selfridges, Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. Through my products that have been proudly featured at the V&A. It is for organisations who understand that fermentation is not a trend but a powerful practical tool - with real consequences for gut health, sustainability, food waste, and the way we think about land.
I will continue to reflect here in my Soul Notes, the way I always have. The reflecting is not separate from the offering; for me they are the same practice, drawn from the same well.
If you are a woman who needs this kind of support - a guide for the crossroads - I would be glad to hear from you. If you are an organisation, a school, a festival, a team, or a public body considering the work fermentation could do in your context, I would equally be glad to hear from you. The doors are open.
With love, under the longest sky,
Elena x
