meals 30 January

Breakfast: porridge using oats (not local – using old oats) and milk from the milkman

Lunch: beetroot soup and wholewheat rolls with fruit drink as yesterday, oat biscuits and cheese

Verdict: not bad, but not as good as others

Supper: Onion and leek quiche with potatoes and carrots and sprouting beans. Apple juice. Followed by yoghurt and jam (made by me but not with local sugar).

Verdict: good

Oven: 1 hour for quiche

Hob: 20 minutes for vegetables

Microwave : few minutes to warm soup

meals 29 January

I thought I might as well start to record the meals we’ve eaten here.

Breakfast – toasted home-made not-very-good bread and spreads

Lunch – Brussels Sprout soup with not-very-good white rolls (old flour), B also had blackcurrant/blackberry/redcurrant drink, made with frozen fruit and sweetened with a little honey.

Verdict: Not bad. The kids at B’s school didn’t like the smell.

Dinner – Hungarian Plum Dumplings – more on an Environmental Graffiti post soon.

Pudding – milk whippy (using non-local packet powder) followed by the last few chewy sweets (non-local) and coffee (non-local)

Verdict: Good, though bit unusual clash of tastes.

Oven: On. A lot. Though mostly on very low to rise bread.

Hobs: On. A lot to cook soup. We’re buying a slow-cooker.

environmental graffiti

I’ve been asked to blog about our locavorian diet on www.environmentalgraffiti.com

So I’m not sure what to do with this blog..

intelligent locavorian criticism

It is interesting to note the discussion that is happening, particularly from the USA, about locavorianism. This is a really interesting and intelligent discussion with the guy who also wrote this

Basically James McWilliams’ point is that local food might not be the most energy efficient if you take into account the whole lifecycle of the food. So, for example in the UK where a lot of our electricity is produced by fossil fuel power stations, the contribution of producing inorganic fertilisers might be large. Heating greenhouses can use a lot of energy, and trying to grow certain foods in unsuitable places may require high inputs of energy for irrigation, for example.

Recent discussions have stemmed from academic studies which suggest Brits eating New Zealand lamb maybe more energy efficient than eating local lamb. Michael Shuman fairly effectively rebutted this assertion, showing that the researchers were comparing apples with oranges and not considering road transport, which as I’ve previously calculated is a significant source of pollution.

Still, the point is a good one – local food is not necessarily better environmentally than internationally transported food. But the solution to that is not to throw up hands and give up, but to seek out more environmentally friendly local alternatives, or to give up eating that foodstuff.

Vitamin C

One problem with considering a local diet is obviously to be sure that the diet is healthy and that one is getting the recommended daily amounts of essential and minerals. Vitamin C springs to mind as one is clearly not going to be eating citrus fruit.

I have not thought too hard about nutrition for a long time, so I was a bit surprised to find that whilst an orange gives 75% of the RDA of vitamin C, happily other British fruit, vegetables and meat (scroll down the page) also contain varying amounts of Vitamin C, so there does not appear to be much of a problem.

There is an amazing amount of Vitamin C in Rosehips though (and I’m told that rosehip tea can cause problems in pregnancy, should anyone ever consider trying it).

lent with no lentils

So to recap: having heard about the 100 mile local food challenge, my family and I have decided to only eat local food for Lent (6 Feb-22ish March, depending on what you count as being in Lent).

This requires a fair amount of planning and thought, so we’re using the few weeks to plan exactly how we’re going to do this.

The rules are: eat only local products produced with local ingredients. And if this isn’t possible, go without (or if really impossible, replace with ingredients from the UK).

One major problem is going to be sugar. Whilst there is sugar produced in the UK and processed in Peterborough, this does not appear to be available at the moment.

Other things that are out include: vine fruits, most spices, citrus fruit, olive oil, most fish (more on this later), lentils, chickpeas, soya.

So the diet in our area is best described as ‘meat and two veg’ where the veg is mostly root vegetables in the winter. Fruit, other than berries and apples, could be a problem. It is a little like living through the blitz…

local eating

Would you believe it, there is a word for someone who eats local food:locavore

see here: www.locavores.com

the ethics of local food

So, how do we assess the importance and contribution of food miles (ie how far food has travelled to get to our plate) to our patterns of unsustainable living? Is eating local worth the effort when we could be supporting destitute farmers by buying Fairtrade versions of the same food?

According to a report called CO2 Emissions from Freight Transport in the UK by Professor Alan McKinnon for the Climate Change Working Group
of the Commission for Integrated Transport:

Using what are considered the most reliable estimation methods, it is suggested that domestic freight transport in the UK generated 33.7 million tonnes of CO2 in 2004, roughly 21% of emissions from the transport sector and 6% of total emissions from all sectors. Road transport accounted for 92% of these freight- related CO2 emissions. The movement of freight in vans, which represented only around of 35% of all van-kms, was responsible for 13% of total freight emissions.

So an estimated 6% of all emissions are caused just by moving stuff around the country, more than is saved by persuading the whole of Europe; to use low energy lightbulbs (23 million tonnes of CO2 per year).
Globally, international shipping produces a whopping 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and as one of the biggest economies in the world, what we put into our mouths is responsible for a lot of that.

According to the BBC ninety-five per cent of the fruit and half of the vegetables in the UK are imported. Looking around in a supermarket suggests that the majority of products on the shelves are from outside of the UK.

So, what is there to conclude?

Whilst I am sure Oxfam; are right to suggest that airfreight is a minimal polluter compared to other lifestyle choices, I cannot see that transport which emits up to 50 times more pollutants than other transport is justified. I feel really sorry for the farmers, and I am committed to the concepts of fairtrade. But I cannot justify an existence which requires me to save destitute farmers by disproportionately polluting the planet. So I am not buying anything which has been airfreighted for a start, fairtrade or not.

Second, far more important than airfreight is national transport of food, which represents 6% of emissions. That isn’t the emissions from growing or processing, that is simply from getting the food from the farm to the plate. We could be eating things which originated in fields next to our house and are transported several times just for us to buy them shrink wrapped in the supermarket. There is enormous capacity to reduce this by eating local food.

Finally, there is a moral case. If we can survive eating products that we can obtain in our own country, it is immoral to import them from other countries simply because they are cheaper.

For these reasons, I believe that local food has the vast weight of moral and environmental justification. As I mentioned in the ‘about’ section of this blog, the issues are complicated – particularly once we start to consider how the products we eat are grown. We must also make strenuous efforts to improve the lives of the poor and to find alternatives which allow them better lives without the necessity for air transport.

have a cuppa

I sometimes wonder how much we would have to pay for commodities if they were produced in our country rather than in poor countries around the world.

And the answer is: a lot more than we do at the moment.

Tregothnan Estate in Cornwall has the only tea plantation in Britain. Tea sachets cost nearly £10 for 25 – that is 40p a bag.

On the other hand, how great is the idea of being able to drink British-grown tea?

Now how about coffee…?

electricity choices

How are we going to generate energy in the future?

With the recent announcement of a new Coal power station and today’s announcement about nuclear power it is clear that energy production is going to be the next ethical battleground.

We don’t like nuclear, wind farms (bad for the birds), incinerators, biofuels and of course fossil fuels

So what is left? Any ideas?