Am I going mad?

I am beginning to wonder about my own sanity! 3 months ago I considered us to be a reasonably average family living a reasonably normal life, but after being sucked into the greener living issues I am beginning to have doubts. Once you start reading more articles, watching more films and generally become more aware of environmental issues, it gets harder and harder to ignore the problems with our lifestyles. I am beginning to fear that in my enthusiasm I am turning into some kind of eccentric.

I started off this project just wanting to have a conscience that wasn't pitch black all the time and now I am finding myself doing stuff I would never have imagined 3 months ago. E.g. yesterday I said to my husband I would quite like a sewing machine (Christmas is coming, so time to throw a few hints), and he in his usual pragmatic manner replied 'I take it you want one that doesn't use electricity then'. I hadn't actually thought about that, but after his little 'funny' remark I couldn't help doing a google search on non-electric sewing machines. Needless to say there are no modern versions of people powered sewing machines and you need to do a bit of digging (in your wallet as well) to get one of the old ones, especially the ones with a footpedal rather than a handle... The point here though is not the fact that non-electrical sewing machines are hard to come by, but the fact that I actually did a google search on the subject!

This morning I walked my daughter to school despite the fact that it was pouring rain. She didn't mind, she got a chance to show off her green teddy umbrella, but when I returned to the house completely soaked I did wonder what had happened to me. Last winter I would not have left the car at home on a day like this.

Last year I had no idea about growing vegetables and I had no interest for example in learning how to make jam - what's the point when you can buy it in the shops; but now I am thinking it would be great to make lots of stuff from all this amazing fruit that is going to grow in my garden. (Hopefully I will get the hang of this gardening thing at some point...)

A few days ago I was making breadcrumbs out of left over crusts - something I would never ever have considered previously. OK we still throw out some of the crusts, otherwise we would drown in breadcrumbs, but the fact that I did make a portion of the crumbly stuff tells me that things are actually changing.

I hope the changes are for the better, I certainly feel happy about them, but I do occasionally wonder if I am in fact loosing the plot.

Last week I was talking to one of the other mums at the school gate and briefly explaining about my green project. She was very polite, but basically told me that she thought all this green business was rather silly, it was just the government trying to scare us and especially global warming was nothing to get so hung up about, as it was just part of a natural cycle for the planet. I was slightly lost for words! Her reply made me remember that what I thought was generally accepted as the right thing to do, (even though most of us rarely get round to doing the right things) is in fact to some people complete nonsense. She considered me a fanatic with some kind of strange belief system and for a moment I felt like some kind of missionary facing a group of heathens. It was a strange feeling -I never really thought of being green as a religion! Am I in fact part of a new cult?

The ultimate strike to my sanity then came when I later opened my e-mail and there was a message saying I had been banned from the ad programme on this blog because I posed a risk to the advertisers. For a moment I thought I had become all powerful. Was my blog really so influential that advertisers like the utility companies considered me a risk? Unfortunately I doubt that, but it turns out that these ad programmes are more secret than MI5 and MI6 put together, so I am unable to obtain any information on this risk - maybe the risk was just the fact that they were due to pay me? I shall never know, so maybe I could just stick with the illusion that my green project has become a threat to some of society's big companies... ;-)

Anyway, ads or no ads, religion or not, I am still going strong. This project might be taking me in directions I didn't imagine to begin with, but I still feel I am doing the right thing. I might be slightly more cautious of who I speak to about the project until I gain the ability to remember some hard hitting facts to use in a discussion (not much hope there then, I am useless at memorising facts), but I have learned a lot and that in itself is reason enough to continue. At the end of the day we are still a pretty normal family I think, our lives haven't actually changed that much, we have just changed the focus a little.

Waste

I have just been looking through the supplement to the September edition of Holyrood Magazine – yes I know it is November now, but Scottish politics magazines are not top of the priority list at the moment... The theme of the supplement was ‘waste’, a lot of the articles giving information on the Scottish Government’s ‘Zero Waste Plan’. Interesting stuff, although they obviously gave it the name ‘Zero waste’ because that sounds better than ‘15% waste’ or '30% waste', but as far as I can see they haven’t actually figured out when or how Scotland can have nil waste. Apparently the target is for 70% of waste to be recycled by 2025 – That is not exactly zero waste.

Anyway government plans or not, I have been thinking a bit about the amount of stuff we throw out. Our bin gets collected every 2 weeks and despite making an effort to recycle, to compost and to reuse it is usually almost full. That is worrying! How can we have so much stuff that just gets dumped? So I have been trying to suss out what actually ends up in the bin.

We never put stuff in there that can be easily recycled, so no paper, card, tins, cans, milk bottles, juice cartons and similar as that gets picked up by the council for recycling. We take all glass to the bottle bank. All clothing or material go either to charity shops or textile banks. Any other item that could still be used, e.g. old toys, baby equipment or books, goes either to charity, on Freecycle or occasionally on e-bay.

Obviously there is the much mentioned foodwaste, but even 1.5kg of waste every 4 days is not going to cause a full bin. Especially considering that some of the 1.5kg of waste would have gone in the compost rather than the bin.

Then there are the nappies. Yes, I have to admit it, I use disposable nappies for my 2-year old. Not very good for my green credentials, I know, but due to different circumstances this is how things turned out, and considering that my son is just about to be potty trained I don’t want to invest in washable nappies now. Even the nappies though are not going to fill the bin, he doesn’t pee that much!
Likewise the paper tissues we use for runny noses etc are not going to make the bin full, even when combined with the food waste and the nappies.

I think the majority of the stuff in the bin is packaging. It is all the plastic trays from the supermarkets. It is all the plastic and cellophane that various items get wrapped in. It is all the tubs that used to contain butter or ice cream or something similar. What is this thing we have about packaging, why is everything wrapped in layers of paper and plastic? Do we think our pyjamas are nicer to wear if they have been wrapped in plastic? Does the tea taste better if the teabags are individually packed in paper covers, then bundled together in plastic wrapping and then put in a card board box again wrapped in plastic (no I am not exaggerating – I have seen this myself)? Does supermarket meat make better bolognaise sauce, when it has been put into a plastic tray that could take about double the amount?

I want to reduce the amount of stuff we throw out, but how do I do it? Packaging seems to be such a big part of most things we buy. Apparently there is a law in the UK against excess packaging, and it is enforced by the Trading Standards. (http://www.which.co.uk/advice/excess-food-packaging/excess-packaging-tips/index.jsp) So we can complain about this, but interestingly enough the law is about whether the packaging is deceptive, e.g. made excessive to make us think we are getting more than we actually are, rather than being about unnecessary and pointless packaging.

As always I think the supermarkets are some of the biggest culprits, and frankly by now I should have become a lot better at avoiding supermarkets and buy more from the real local places, e.g. I am sure the local butcher doesn’t pack all his meat in massive plastic trays. But reality is that it is a lot quicker to get everything in the one shop, rather than going to several places, and many things I can only really get in the supermarket, so I would have to go there anyway.

Other than avoiding supermarkets I am not sure what to do? I certainly cannot think of any easy effortless solutions.
So here I am again – more effort needed! I start off by wanting to have less waste and end up needing to do more...

Maybe I should move to Berkshire, apparently they have started a scheme where you get money off vouchers for recycling. They are expecting that the average household can earn £130 worth of vouchers in a year, at least that way I could get something for my recycling efforts, and if it would mean money off at the local butcher’s I might even make it to the shop.

Food, food, food

I am becoming obseessed with food! Not that I am eating all the time, but I seem to be constantly thinking about all sorts of food issues.


First of all there is the food waste project. This week it was all about planning your shopping and making use of the stuff you already have before buying more. It worked well in the way that I actually sat down to plan the dinners for the whole week and did the shopping accordingly. It was a very good reminder of how planning can help keep stress away because everyday I knew what I was cooking, rather than panicking at 4 o'clock. It also meant I didn't go to the supermarket almost every day, which was very nice, both for my stress levels and for my purse. However I have to admit I didn't do the suggested full scale planning that the project suggested, that includes planning for lunch as well. That was far too complicated. Asking everybody in the family to decide for the whole week which days they are having packed lunches, school dinners, lunch meetings etc was too much - not to mention how difficult it would be to keep track of the answers. So the planning element only covered dinners.

I am not sure it had a huge impact on the foodwaste. We still wasted food on a similar scale to last week, because again we mainly seemed to have an issue with not too tasty stuff. (one day I managed to cook a dinner that was almost inedible, even though I had followed every detail of the recipe...) So from a foodwaste point of view not a major impact, but from a stress busting point of view quite successful.


Another food issue that has been popping up is my cooking talents (please note that the above mentioned inedible meal was an exception, I am usually not that bad...). We are still having 2 vegetarian days a week and it works, but we have reached a point where we need to extend the repetoire of vegetarian dishes, and I feel my cooking skills are needing an upgrade. This is not because vegetarian dishes are more difficult to cook, but they need a different mindset that I haven't got, because most of the cooking I do include some form of meat. I need to find somebody who is vegetarian who can show me what they actually eat during a normal week- I am sure there are loads of great veggie dishes out there, I just don't know that many of them.


Similarly I have been doing a lot of thinking about the whole buy local, buy organic, buy seasonal thing. Organic food is great, but from a carbon footprint point of view not always the best - an organic apple that has travelled all the way from New Zealand might be low on chemicals, but it has caused a fair bit of CO2 to be released during transport here. Hence the reason we should be eating local food to save on CO2 emissions. But if we only eat local food (local even just meaning British) there are lots of things we wouldn't get - despite global warming we still can't grow bananas or avocados or lots of other common stuff on this island.


Even if you do manage to get food produced in Britain, it could easily be intensively grown green house vegetables, that are very unhelpful for the CO2 levels as well, so not a great option either. That is why you are supposed to be eating seasonal food, and not think it is normal to eat strawberries in November.

The thing is if I was only to cook with ingredients grown locally, in season and preferably organic I would be down to a very small range of items, that I wouldn't have a clue how to cook. I mean, I struggle to be creative doing vegetarian dishes, but if I was limited to the stuff that can actually grow in this country, my family would very quickly go hungry. Not only would most of my cooking books be obsolete, but I would need a series of cooking lessons to figure out how to make kale and turnips exciting.

So despite being an OK cook, I am finding it really difficult to make big changes to our eating habits. To feed a family it is not enough to know 4 different dishes, there has to be variety, and because we are now so used to everything being available all year round, most of us don't really know how to cook with only local ingredients.

So in my confusion and frustration about all these food things I turned to my own garden again. (obviously I can't grow bananas or papayas, but at least I can do local and organic) This weekend the weather was actually dry, which has been fantastic, so I kind of saw it as my last chance to do a bit of garden work. Despite the fact that the only really successful thing in the garden this year has been parsley, I still seem to have boundless optimism, so today I planted a plum tree and some blackberries. I have also ordered 2 apple trees which will hopefully arrrive by the end of the month. It is amazing how a bit of gardening can lift the spirit and pottering about in my wellies I felt certain that next year I will definitely be able to 'harvest' lots of stuff. Long may this feeling last (!), then I just need to learn how to cook with all these local vegetables...

Kitchen Canny

I have just completed the first week of a food waste project. Interesting! I signed up to this project called Kitchen Canny a few weeks ago, but only last week did I manage to get started. It is a 4 week project. The idea is that the first week you continue as normal, but put all food waste into a separate bin. The second week you are supposed to look at your shopping habits and the third week is all about cooking appropriate portions. The fourth week you do the bin thing again, and hopefully things are a bit better.

Now, this is about all the food that you could have eaten, but you didn't for some reason. So it includes all the stuff you find at the back of the fridge which is out of date, all the vegetables left on the plate because the kids wouldn't eat them, all the half rotten apples you ended up with after a 'buy one get one free' offer etc. However it doesn't include banana peels or other stuff that isn't really eatable.


The result of the first week was interesting in several ways. I actually had less stuff in the bin than I had expected after the 4 days you are supposed to do it. I know that we can be wasteful sometimes and I probably thought the bin would be more or less full. However at the end it was only half full with a weight of 1.434 kg. I have a suspicion though that the time span isn't really long enough to fully capture our habits. You are supposed to pick 4 normal days in the week for collecting your food waste, and although we did have 4 pretty normal food days, I don't for example get round to clearing out the fridge every 4 days. Anyway I shouldn't really complain that I had less foodwaste than expected.


So what did end up in the bin? There were quite a few prawn skewers. They got binned because nobody actually liked them, the box had 2 varities and only one of them was nice. So I guess we won't be buying them again, but we had no way of knowing they would be that unappetising.


3 potatoes went in the bin, because they had started decomposing! I really must get round to finding a proper box or bag for storing the tatties.


A fair bit of bread crusts went in there as well, solely due to the fact that my daughter refuses to eat the crust of anything. It is a bit of a pain, but except for shoving them down her throat I have run out of ideas on how to get her to eat them? It was a bit of an eye opener to realise exactly how many crusts actually go out on a daily basis. I guess I could start buying crustless bread, but I don't think that is the best way to go, both because the rest of us are happy to eat the crust and because I don't want my son to change his mind and decide he doesn't like crusts either. I have been wondering if there is something I could do with the crusts, but the only thing I have been able to think of so far is bread crumbs. I am now going to make sure that we always have a supply of homemade breadcrumbs, but at the end of the day there is a limit to the amount of breadcrumbs a family can consume - what should I do with the rest???

Then there was a small bag of peas I had to throw out. They were meant to be frozen, but in my distracted busy mum state of mind, I managed to put the bag in the vegetable drawer of the fridge rather than the freezer... oops. If I find a way to avoid this kind of stuff I will probably have cracked the big question of how to be an organised and calm parent!


The one thing there was surprisingly little of in the bin was leftover food from the kids. I fully expected that to be quite a big part of the waste. It could be that we had 4 lucky days and for some reason the kids were exceptionally good eaters these days? Or maybe I just haven't realised that my children actually do very well and they are not really the fussy eaters that I claim?


We also didn't seem to have much waste due to cooking too much, something else I had expected. I do normally tend to weigh out things like pasta or rice, but it can still be difficult to cook the right amount. Some days 400 g of pasta is more than plenty, but other days it is not enough. Likewise with vegetables, one night a bag of beans is far too much and nobody wants to eat beans, 3 nights later beans have turned into the children's favorite food and one bag is not enough. On the 4 waste days it must all have been good days and all vegs got eaten, but I am pretty sure that 4 days taken out of a different week could look the exact opposite. With kids you just never know.


As I said I never had time for a fridge clear out, so nothing really went in the bin just because it was out of date, but I do know that happens. We didn't have any overripe bananas either which also happens on a regular basis, but maybe it doesn't happen quite as much as I imagined?


So what have I learned from this first week of Kitchen Canny. Well it almost looks like we primarily waste stuff because we buy stuff we don't like (prawn skewers, bread with crust...) - not a very clever thing to do, but not really intentional either. Not quite sure how to avoid this, unless I stop buying new products and always stick with the things I know everybody likes? Hm, that wouldn't exactly make dinner time exciting. The other thing to remember is to store food properly - no potatoes in plastic bags, no frozen peas in the fridge. I will just have to get organised!


Judging from the contents of the bin I should be happy, because matters weren't as bad as I feared, but I am still left with a sneaky suspicion that things could have looked different and somehow we had 4 good days. I am going to try my best to do week 2 and 3 even though they require a little bit more of my precious time and then week 4 will be interesting. If I end up with more stuff in the bin it will definitely be proven that this was a lucky week, if I end up with less then I shall be very proud of myself. Bring on the food waste challenge!