(Possibly) Easy Green Advise Part 1

I have been trawling through some of the vast number of websites and publications giving green advice, looking for ideas and for some way to find targets. There are lots of them and you could easily use a lot of electricity keeping your computer going while looking at them all.
The good news is that the advice is often similar, so at least there appears to be no major conflicts or contradicting advice, although it often differs how far it is suggested to go. So I managed to find a selection of things that should not cost me neither too much money nor effort to try.


Do your washing at 30 degrees. Yes I know, this advice has been around for a long time and well publicised, but I have to admit that until now my washing machine has always been set at 40 degrees. Anyway, I tried it today, and as far as I can see the washing looks fine. I will probably have to run a tougher test at some point and see how 30 degrees cope with spaghetti sauce and similar delights, but so far so good. The only thing that concerns me slightly is that I remember reading that dust mites and other tiny house guests only die if washing is done above 50 degrees...


Go vegetarian. According to the Guardian Newspaper the issue with green house gasses when it comes to food isn’t really about foodmiles or excess packaging, but about the actual production of meat and dairy. So it is a good idea to cut down on these two food categories. The question is how far do you need to take this? Paul McCartney and his showbiz friends suggest 1 vegetarian day a week, but the Guardian advises an almost entirely vegetarian diet and three vegan days a week! However much I want to go green, having three vegan days a week is just not going to work. My kids would be devastated if they were denied their cheese and yoghurt, and I would have a hard time explaining it to them when general food advice tells them to consume the stuff. Oh, and I would have to drink my tea black – no, it would definitely cause an awful lot of misery. But 2 vegetarian days a week I think we can manage, after all macaroni cheese, tomato pizza and pasta with red sauce all qualify. Hey, I think I might have something to put onto my list of targets....


Avoid foodwaste. Apparently people in Scotland throw out 566.000 tonnes of food every year. I know we are part of this, bread for example has a tendency of turning green and bananas very brown in our house, but apparently the way to avoid this is planning! Now this creates a few issues for me. First of all I do try to plan and write shopping lists (sometimes I even remember to bring the shopping list to the shop as well...), but supermarkets are extremely unhelpful when it comes to buying just the food you need. I know I have already had a rant about supermarkets and their ungreen ways, but here is another issue to add to the list. They sell lots of stuff in bags or bundles or boxes, so I am often forced to buy a bigger quantity than I need. Not to mention the ‘buy one get one free’ offers, they should really be called ‘buy one and get another one you don’t need’, especially when it comes to fruit and veg; there is a limit to how many apples or leeks or beetroot we can eat in a space of a few days before they go off. So planning ahead is fine, but after a shopping trip you find yourself with a selection of odd extra bits that you struggle to use. Right now for example I need a recipe that can use up 3 leeks, a courgette, half a tub of yogurt and 2 overripe bananas – suggestions anyone? I guess I really must find a farm shop where I can buy the quantities I need, but that contradicts another piece of advice from the Guardian:


Never use the car for shopping, buy online. This is interesting advice I think. The good thing about online shopping is that you are less likely to come across all sorts of bargains and offers, that you end up buying, so if everything is fully planned it can be useful. The down side is that you don’t pick your own stuff, and I have experienced ending up with some rather battered bananas for example, where most of them became foodwaste in the end. Online shopping doesn’t take away the issue of preset quantities either.
Going back to the farm shop, there are of course a lot of them who do weekly deliveries, which like online shopping would save the car journey (yes, I do know the van is then making the journey in stead, but it should be more efficient to have one person doing a planned out route, rather than 15 car journeys to the same place). Unfortunately you can easily get stuck with a box half filled with food the family won’t eat, because again you are not fully in control of what and how much goes in the box.


And I am just realising now, that what should have been a list of easy to try green advice, has turned into another rant about the difficulty of green shopping, hmmm! I shall leave the rest of the list to another day and instead go and consider what to do about my shopping today...

Green shopping

Warning! Trying to be green when doing your shopping can cause a major headache. The day even started well, I felt rather smug about walking my daughter to school and being able to do imaginary head shaking at the other parents in their cars (obviously I conveniently ignored the fact that it is quicker for us to walk than to drive).

The smugness was still there as I pushed the buggy down the road to do the shopping on foot, but within 2 minutes of entering the supermarket my smirky grin had completely disappeared. Before starting I had done a mental checklist of certain criteria to green up the shopping:

1. Look for organic produce,

2. Take the version with the least amount of packaging,

3. Think about the food miles, so look for stuff that hasn't travelled half way across the globe

I only made it to the fruit and veg section before realising that I might be on a mission impossible. Standing in front of the mushrooms I first went for the organic option, although the whole organic thing doesn't work very well with the out of money issue, but I decided 20p extra would be OK. Until it dawned on me that these organic mushrooms were placed in a non-recyclable plastic container and then covered in non recyclable clingfilm - completely 'un-green' and contradicting no 2 on my list. So I changed my mind and opted for the individual mushrooms that you choose yourself and then place in a brown paper bag, that way I saved packaging and 20p (and probably got a few chemicals included in the price..). But the BIG question raised was: why can you not buy organic mushrooms in a paper bag? In fact when I quickly toured the whole section ALL the organic produce was packed in some kind of plastic, and no loose weight items were available in the organic version. What is going on?

Next stop was apples. Obviously it was the same case of organic apples in plastic bags, but this time versus ordinary apples also in plastic bags. The real problem occurred when I reached point 3 on my check list - foodmiles. The organic apples had travelled all the way from New Zealand! Not exactly local produce. And to my horror I realised that none of the apples were in fact British, never mind Scottish. All the apples had been transported from NZ, South Africa or Argentina. Again, all I can say is: what is going on? I don't expect to find British bananas or Scottish pineapples in the supermarkets, but apples aren't exactly exotic fruits and surely there must be British farmers with apple trees?

By this point I was thoroughly disheartened, not to mention that my 2 year old was seriously fed up with my very slow moving shopping, so the rest of the shopping choices were made on the usual speed principal rather than the green principal. Not exactly a green success.
On the walk home I kept asking myself what should I do: should I start a campaign against the supermarkets to get them to take some responsibility, should I extend the vegetable plot in the backgarden to grow all my own stuff and be self sufficient (not a very feasible option, we would all be very hungry), or is the best option to find an organic farm shop in the area, even if it means taking the car for shopping?
It is definitely going to take me some time to figure out how to do green shopping.