A Food Philosophy

Yesterday I read this interesting article called 7 Small Ways to Begin Your Journey to Sustainable Eating posted by @ReFreshfood on Twitter.

As I read the article, I thought: "This is pretty much my own food philosophy".

1 Meatless Mondays
 We do like to have a roast dinner with all the family on a Sunday, so for us, Mondays often involve eating up the leftover meat from Sunday's joint.  But then on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as long as I've used up all the meat I will then try to keep the meals meat free on at least two out of three days.

2. Buy food with less packaging
I always buy my meat from the butcher in my village.  I take my own containers so there's no plastic packaging.  I also know that my meat isn't going to leak juices all over my fridge so that's an added advantage.


I bulk buy food like flour, dried fruit and nuts, couscous and pasta, again taking my own containers.

I buy veg and fruit from a small greengrocer in a nearby town.  When you buy their produce, which is locally sourced, you will get all shapes and sizes, but it is loose, so you can pick out the shapes and sizes that you want.  If I know I'm going to chop up the fruit and veg, then I'll pick out anything that's a bit wonky, because I want to support them and support local farmers in cutting down waste.  Most of the time, I'll be chopping it and cooking it so I really don't often need it to look pristine.

3. Buy sustainable meat
As, I mentioned, the meat I buy is from a local business, and they source locally.  I make sure I use up every scrap of meat that I buy.  If I want some chicken, then usually I will buy a whole chicken rather than buying chicken breast.

4. Forgo Fish
I do eat fish and seafood, but I look for sustainably sourced and don't eat it often.  I do get my fix, though, if I am by the sea, picking local fish and only where I can sea that wherever is serving it they have a sustainable sourcing policy.

5. Eat seasonally
Absolutely!  As far as I'm concerned, you can forget strawberries most of the year.  Seasonal eating is what makes it special.  The one exception might be that I usually manage to freeze a few batches of blackberries from the abundant supply on my hedge at this time of year.

6. Eat locally
I think we've covered that one already!

7. Lose the bottled water
It is probably getting on for three years now since I bought water in a plastic bottle.  I have a couple of different water bottles and I always take one filled with good old Oxfordshire Tap every time I go out.

And then I thought about one more thing that has become really important to me. So here's my step number 8...

8. Forget the packaged snacks
Last year (2015) my family took on the challenge to go for a whole year without buying anything in single use plastic.  Although we didn't succeed 100%, we did pretty well.  One of the things that I had to do to succeed was to ditch the idea of ever buying packaged snacks out on the go.  This is a habit that we've developed over the last few decades, I'm sure.  I look around me and I see people eating snacks, everywhere, whatever time of day or night.

I'm sure I used to do the same too.  But not now.  I do buy nuts and dried fruit in bulk in my own containers and if I know I'll be out for a while and I'll be likely to get hungry then I will take a container with some fruit and nuts out with me.  But recently, I'm dong that less.  I just came to the realisation that if I'm eating properly, 3 meals a day, there's really no need for the snacks.

Snacks are often just empty calories, full of sugar and salt and SO OFTEN they are packed in non recyclable packaging - my pet hate! So I don't bother (unless I've taken my own.)

#WasteLessSaveMore

Last week I was invited to speak at the Discovery Communities Live event at The Silk Mill in Derby - an event organised by YearHere in conjunction with Sainsbury's #WasteLessSaveMore campaign and the town of Swadlincote.

I decided that the most appropriate thing I could talk about was my experience of taking part in Zero Waste Week back in September 2013, when it was all about reducing food waste.  So I took a look back at my blog posts for the week to remind me about why I took part, what I did and what I learnt from it.

It was an enlightening experience reading back over past blog posts and it really highlighted how much my family has changed behaviour over the years and managed to create lasting waste reduction habits. I wish I'd counted the number of times I asked myself: "Did we really do that?"

One of my fellow speakers, Chris King, who is photographing and documenting the people and organisations who are tackling the food waste problem, asked me what was the worst food waste I've ever seen and immediately I thought about one of the images in the slides I was going to show to accompany my talk - my cheese drawer from 2013.

The seriously mature cheese collection in my fridge
 at the start of Zero Waste Week 2013

One of the things I found so useful about Zero Waste Week, was that it got me thinking about why I wasted food.  I realised that I was the only person in my family who ate any cheese other than cheddar so decided there was no point in buying an array of cheeses when I had friends for dinner as the cheese would generally end up like the picture above. So I changed my buying habits and bought a couple of different cheddars for my cheese selection. It was a simple decision to make. Several years later I find that Senior Daughter has developed a taste for Brie and Camembert, so now I can add another variety knowing it won't get wasted. But still, I keep it simple and just offer a very limited choice.

Another big change I made to my buying habits also revolves around parties.  If we had a summer get-together we used to invite people to bring whatever meat they wanted to cook on the barbecue. Generally what would happen is that every couple/family would bring meat enough for three families - either because they couldn't decide what they fancied to eat - or they were overtaken with a generosity of spirit - or maybe both.  It was a food waste disaster every time - well in fact more than that - it was a waste disaster altogether alien to our Zero Waste  lifestyle.  Again we learnt to simplify the offer.  We now provide just sausages and burgers - locally made from local meat.  We tell guests they don't need to bring anything, which saves them time and money, and saves me from the abundance of packaging and wasted food.  I take my cake boxes to the butchers so what I buy goes straight into those with no plastic bags. The burgers get cooked from frozen a few at a time as and when there are people wanting them.  The sausages are bought fresh, so that any spares can be frozen (in family sized quantities and used from the freezer). Again we only cook a few at a time. This way very little extra is cooked - and it is usually all eaten during the evening or put away for breakfast the next day.  Simple and high quality is the rule and it works.

Several people said this picture resonated with them after my talk.
It was clearly food for thought!

As with a lot of times when I talk at events I am often asked what my children think of my/our Zero Waste lifestyle and the Discovery Communities Live event was no exception.  It is really now that my children are making their own way and their own lives that I am really seeing the impact of life without a bin. We regularly have discussions about how to use up ingredients and I frequently get photos of their creations as they make the most of their food. I really hope that the work of Swadlincote and the other towns that have been working on innovative food waste projects as part of the #WasteLessSaveMore campaign can reach families and young people to inspire the kinds of conversations I am lucky enough to have with my daughters. We must engage with our teenagers on the subject of wasting less over the next few years. We need to move away from seeing food as a low value disposable commodity stacked high on a supermarket shelf, to something of great importance to our health and social well-being, that deserves the time for a conversation about where it has come from, who has made it and how, and at what cost to the planet.  We need to love our food and care about how it is produced and we need to be doing that whether we are 9, 19 or 90.  Let's take time to talk about what we put on our table and why.  A great place to start (or just to carry on the conversation) could be to sign up to join Zero Waste Week 2016 and involve the whole family.  Lots of people who were at the Discovery Communities Live event last Tuesday have signed up already.  I hope lots more will do so over the coming weeks and months, so we can carry on the conversations started and turn some of those conversations into actions.

There were many innovative ideas shared at the event, lots of ideas that were taken away by food waste reduction champions, by people from local councils, by entrepreneurs and by representatives from Sainsbury's.  The highlight of the day, for me, was the delicious food on offer made from food that would be otherwise wasted.  The Real Junk Food Project made a wonderful lunch from food that would have been wasted.  There were several delicious samples from food producers who were taking otherwise waste produce and creating something yummy from it.

Here's some of the delicious food and drink available at the 'Discovery Zone' - all products that are made from ingredients that might have otherwise been wasted.  All this shows just how much we could be doing to make the most of the food we produce and the carbon footprint that it takes.

Recycling Polystyrene

Yesterday I was asked this question on Twitter…

Technically the answer is 'Yes' - Polystyrene can be recycled and I learnt when I visited the Resource and Waste Management Show in Birmingham last year that it is recycled in the UK.

The map on this link shows you where in Britain you can find polystyrene recycling points.

But likely the more practicable answer here is NO.  Why?  The problem lies in collecting waste streams for stuff that is not an everyday waste item.  In addition, polystyrene is very light and bulky- it is actually 98% air!  That's the reason it is a good item for packaging, but a bad item for recycling.

In West Oxfordshire we are asked to put polystyrene into our grey rubbish bins - the ones for residual waste.  Would I do that?  NO WAY!

Polystyrene is one of those things I actively avoid whenever I can so I don't get a lot of it.  For instance I won't buy something in a supermarket that is packed in a polystyrene food tray.  I don't understand why a food processing company would choose a material that is so rarely recycled to package something they want us to buy on a regular basis and so I won't give them my business. Plain as that!

However, I have found that people will bring things to my house that are packed in polystyrene and occasionally I have had parcels arrive protected by polystyrene or filled with polystyrene pellets.  So what do I do with them?

I turn it into a resource and reuse it.

A timely project for polystyrene right now is for potting up my geraniums to bring them indoors for the winter, which I do every year towards the end of October.  Of course, I save the polystyrene from previous years but each year my geranium collection grows by about half a dozen plants as I take cuttings and separate bits of plant that have naturally rooted during the year.  So I always need a bit more polystyrene or broken crock for the bottom of the plant pots. For this purpose, I keep a bucket in my garage into which any bits of polystyrene or broken cups and plates get stored until I need them.

This is last year's stock about to get used this weekend.

A couple of other projects that have used up my stock of polystyrene lately:

This planter that Mr Pitt made for me out of some recycled wooden planks needed quite a lot of drainage in the bottom.  Polystyrene was ideal for that as it does the job of rocks and pebbles - but without the weight.  It keeps the soil in but allows the water to find ways through and creates a dry zone between the soil and the wooden base of the planter so that the wood doesn't rot.

You may notice that it also used up my collection of bits of oasis from various flower arrangements acquired at weddings, several cricket dinners and a few other events.  I always knew I'd find a use for it eventually!

Secondly, my local community shop that raises lots of money for our village clubs and societies sells quite a few fragile things, so I recently took a bag full of tissue paper and some polystyrene packaging pellets to them, which they said they were always in need of.

If you don't have storage space for your polystyrene in a garage for example then you could maybe put it on Freegle.  I often find things will go same day or within a couple of days.  People use polystyrene sheets as insulation in greenhouses.  It would make a reasonable substitute for oasis for dried flower arrangements too.

New Year, new you?

Do you do that thing of making New Year's Resolutions?  If so, what is your resolution for 2014?

Last year, I embarked on a year of "Swishing".  My new year's resolution was this:

• to give away 2 items of clothing to charity each month, and
• to not buy any new clothes, but instead buy from charity shops or reuse/recycling shops or websites

Like many people, I often find that within a few weeks I've forgotten all about my new plans and resolution, but not last year.  I cleared out my wardrobe, sorted out plenty to give to charity and not only that, my daughters both cleared out their wardrobes too.   So as far as the first resolution is concerned I smashed that target.

As for the second, not only did I manage to keep to the resolution, I loved doing it too.  I bought quite a few new clothes, but spent less than £100 in the whole year.

I found that both the giving aspect and the buying aspect, spread too.  During the summer holidays, with the assistance of my two daughters, we decided to embark on a big sort out.  We set ourselves the target of reducing the amount of stuff we have around the house.  We have lots of storage space, so it is easy to think that we can just keep everything - just in case it might be useful.  But we were getting to the stage where every bit of storage was full up - every shelf, every cupboard crammed full of stuff, that might be useful to someone, someday.  Time for a clear out!

We decided to go for the 'One Room at a Time' approach, giving everything a good clean as we went and mending anything that needed mending as we came across it.  But it was slow going and frustrating because we still seemed to have packed shelves at the end of the process.  I just wasn't being ruthless enough!

My perusal of charity shops on various occasions throughout the year, though, had definitely sparked a shift in thinking.  I started to tell myself that if ever I needed something again I could just borrow it, or buy it second hand.  And that got me thinking...I needed a target!

So, that's when we set ourselves the aim of parting with 80 bags of stuff to take to the charity shop.

It took me two months to go through each room, fishing out toys, games, books, clothes, bags, rags, buttons, jewellery, shoes, belts, boots, hats, art and craft stuff, CDs and DVDs.  I managed to fill 80 carrier bags to give away.

Here are 3 principles that helped us fill our 80 bags:

• We didn't want to part with all our games, as we do use some of them when we have younger visitors.  How to decide which to keep?  We decided that if all the parts were there and the box was perfect, then it went to the charity shop.  But, if there were bits missing, or it was a bit tatty, we kept it.  Why?  It was fairly easy to see that the games in perfect condition were the ones that had been played less.  The ones that we'd used over and over again, seemed to be the sensible ones to keep.  The better the condition of a game, I thought, would mean it more likely to bring in revenue for charity.  We often found that the tattier games had makeshift pieces, so we'd clearly played them despite their condition, so we'd be more likely to play them again.
• We set up boxes for each person, so that I wasn't making a decision to give away something that wasn't mine, but could still feel like an area had been cleared and finished with. Each person was then able to go through their box as and when they had time.  I'm sure much of what was given away, would have been kept if it had just been left where it was out of sight out of mind!
• If it didn't fit, it had to go.  This helped, for instance, with DVDs and books, where we had stuff double stacked.  It made us go through them and part with a few that we thought we wouldn't watch/read again.

If it didn't fit, it had to go!

So, is my house minimalist and organised now?  Far from it!  Despite our clear-out we still have a lot of stuff.  It did fire a desire to free up more space, to acquire less and to clear out more.  I had a big clear out in my office, when I decided to minimise the paperwork I had stored over the years.  I recycled more than my body weight of paper by setting myself a twelve week clear out programme.  But there's lots more that could go, so the summer sort out might be repeated in 2014.

And New Year's Resolution for this year?

I plan to continue my efforts at reducing food waste, reducing packaging, buying from charity shops or choosing considerately up-cycled goodies.   But my big giveaway this year will be…

BOOKS!

Here's the rules if you want to play the game too!

• 10 books per month to be given away
• No new purchases of print books unless for work
• Borrow from the library whenever possible.   

Best Before Dates on Eggs

I was reading the waste and recycling section of a local council website today in preparation for visiting one of the primary schools in their area.  In their food waste guidelines they give some explanation of 'Use By' and 'Best Before' dates.

The website quite rightly explained that it is the 'Use By' dates that you need to pay attention to, but 'Best Before' dates don't imply a health risk after that date.  However, I was surprised to read this:


Most foods can be eaten after the ‘best before’ date, except for eggs. Never eat eggs after their best before date, or other products after their ‘use by’ date.

I didn't think this information about eggs was correct.  Having grown up with free-range chickens at home I've always gone by the float/sink rule.  You submerse your eggs in a bowl of water and if they sink, then they are good to eat but if they float then they are not.  Floating eggs go straight out onto the compost heap, because they'll stink if they break.

Food Aware tweeted me some information about eggs and their best before dates. The most recent information from the Food Standards Agency is that eggs can be used a few days after the 'best before' date...

'providing the eggs are cooked thoroughly until yolk and white are both solid, or if they are used in dishes where they will be fully cooked, such as a cake. After the 'best before' date, the quality of the egg will deteriorate and if any salmonella bacteria are present, they could multiply to high levels and could make you ill.'

Did you know that you can also freeze eggs.  So if you have some eggs that you've had a while you can beat them and store them the freezer until you need them - great if you have eggs unused before holidays, for instance.  Frozen egg whites are particularly good for meringues as they whisk up well.

Here's the Food Standards Agency's information on Use By/Best Before Dates: http://www.food.gov.uk/about-us/about-the-fsa/faqsconsumer/bestbeforeuseby#.Ujle-pV5n8s