The Pig Idea

I came across "The Pig Idea" on Facebook today via Tristram Stuart and it really got me thinking and reflecting on all that's happened over the last few weeks while I've been running my pilot Dustbin Diet course.

Yesterday in my DustbinDiet workshop the students were talking about food waste, using up leftovers and also using leftovers to feed pets.  The world has gone a bit mad - thinking that any food that we feed animals has to be specifically engineered for them by humans, hasn't it? Why is it better to feed your cat the same boring diet of highly engineered food pellets, than to share the rest of your tin of tuna with it instead of leaving the tuna to languish in the fridge?  Haven't we all done that at least once - forgotten about the tin of tuna we started until we find it on the next clear out of the fridge?

My mother-in-law's dog eats what she eats, mostly - and no, I don't think they dine at table together when we're not looking, but  Cookie appreciates a bit of gravy and a few peas along with his dog biscuits. There are rules, of course, like no cooked bones, but there's plenty that can go to making up a nutritional meal for both parties.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream manufacturers give their food waste in the US and in Holland to nearby pig farms (apparently they don't like mint).  My Mum used to teach in a local school in the days when schools served proper home cooked meals.  We came home each day with a slop bucket, that would feed our geese.  In return we'd give the school cook goose eggs - because they made great cakes.

How did we get into such a ridiculous state where we can't feed our slops to our pigs?  I had a vague idea that it was something to do with the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease but couldn't remember exactly what happened and why the EU ban on feeding food waste to pigs came about.  So I checked out some of the research on The Pig Idea website and this is what they say:

"[In 2001] feeding catering waste to pigs was banned by the British government in response to the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD). It was tentatively concluded that the FMD outbreak originated on a farm that was illegally feeding its pigs unprocessed restaurant waste. The government justified the ban because it considered that there was a risk of infected meat entering the food chain. It was originally intended to be a temporary measure, but a government-sponsored enquiry into the government’s handling of the disease outbreak (the Anderson Enquiry) recommended that the ban be continued. In 2002 it was extended across the whole of the European Union."

That seems a bit like the "no cooked bones" rule being used as a reason never to feed any food waste to your dog.

They also say that:  "With the correct biosecurity measures in place, [feeding leftover food to pigs is safe]. Cooking leftover food renders it safe for pigs, and also for chickens. Pathogens such as Foot and Mouth Disease and Classical Swine Fever are effectively eliminated by heat treatment. Pigs and chickens are omnivorous animals, evolved to eat all the kinds of food that humans eat, and there is no evidence that feeding them properly treated food waste is unhealthy either to the animals, or to humans. That’s why countries like Japan and South Korea encourage this practice instead of banning it."

I think, given the huge problem we have with food waste and the problems we're causing ourselves and the planet allowing deforestation in order to grow feed for pigs it seems time to call for a change.

Check out  The Pig Idea website and sign the pledge.

Of course, we still need to think about the waste hierarchy.  The best way to deal with food waste is not to have any.  But the next best thing is to re-use it. Raising pigs on food waste is the perfect circular economy, is it not?

Image from my "Ice Green Energy" post a couple of years ago
 http://gizmo-the-geek.net/index.php/ice-gree-energy/

An eggs-ellent find

My local butcher has always sold free range eggs and I've bought them from there a few times, but recently they have introduced a twenty pence per half dozen discount if you bring your own egg box.

The eggs are £1.59 per half dozen (with the 20p discount) for large eggs.  Four eggs consistently weigh 266 grammes which makes a nice big cake.  I always weigh my eggs and use equal weight of butter, sugar and flour for cake-making.

Lemon drizzle cake and raisin and oatmeal cookies.

I am really keen to support this kind of reuse system.  It is bound to work well as the customer has the incentive to remember their egg boxes or have the pain of paying 20p per box more.  Carrot and stick is always a good combination.

Cardboard egg boxes are great on the compost, and the cardboard and plastic egg boxes are recyclable and collected by most councils, but reuse generally has higher carbon savings than recycling - and this system of egg box reuse is a perfect - yet oh so simple - example of a carbon saving system.  The Waste Hierarchy (pictured below) shows that the best way to deal with packaging is to prevent it.  If you can't prevent it then the next best thing is to prepare it for reuse and if you can't reuse it, then recycle it.  If you can't recycle it then ideally your method of disposal will recover some value from it - as it would if you were to compost your cardboard egg boxes.  As the Waste Hierarchy diagram shows, binning your egg boxes into landfill is the last resort - and basically shouldn't be happening!

The Waste Hierarchy

Image reproduced with kind permission of Scottish Environmental Protection Agency:

 http://www.sepa.org.uk/waste/moving_towards_zero_waste/waste_hierarchy.aspx

The first time I noticed the egg box reuse incentive (i.e. 20p saving) I didn't have egg boxes with me, but I knew I'd be passing the butcher's the next day, so as soon as I unpacked my meat I retrieved plastic egg boxes from my recycling bin and found a cardboard one that was awaiting being torn up to add to my wormery, and popped them in my bag.  The next day I was pleased with my 60p saving -  it was a cricket tea week - so I needed eggs for sandwich filling and eggs for cake-making.

I noticed yesterday the eggs from the little supermarket in our village were 10p per half dozen cheaper but my daughter bought those a few days ago to make a birthday cake (the butcher was closed) and the four eggs weighed just 214g.

So, I've got into the habit now of keeping my egg boxes in the bag I take to the butcher's, so I can always get my discount.  I'll be cake making for cricket tea this afternoon.  I'm thinking... lemon drizzle, fairy cakes, fruit scones and I might try making some chocolate cookies.

Swishing

New Year's Eve 2012 - As I sipped my champagne cocktail, awaiting the midnight fireworks, wearing my new favourite dress bought for me, as a birthday present, by my two lovely daughters,  I wondered what my New Year's Resolution would be.

All the usual things came to mind - you know the ones... eat less, exercise more, reduce the alcohol intake!

But I had another idea, inspired by two tips sent in for my book which I thought would be fitting with my mission to get the waste reduction message across.

I decided that I would buy no new clothes (nor shoes, nor any other accessories) for a whole year. I outlined my plan in a blog post in February - in brief, I would buy only second-hand, repurposed or up-cycled items in an attempt to reduce my carbon footprint and save money too.

Fast forward to May 2013: I decided that I would try to wear only second-hand, repurposed or up-cycled items when I piloted my Dustbin Diet workshops and gave talks in schools, and so I took a look at my wardrobe, had a good mooch around my local charity shops and put together a few outfits to fulfil that goal.

Photo: My Eco Activities Day at the wonderful Octavia's Bookshop in Cirencester,
 wearing purchases from my local Oxfam shop accessorised with upcycled necklace by Laura Hounam.

I also came across this fantastic website called swishing.co.uk which will be a great help when I get my workshops in full swing later this year.  With Swishing.co.uk you get to trade in clothes and accessories you don't wear for virtual money credits which you can use to buy clothes from the website that you will wear.

Here's how it works:

Click on the picture to open it fully 

I spoke to the team at Swishing.co.uk and they have set up a special offer code of rosie306 which will get you £1 of virtual swishing money to start you off. They will also give £1 of virtual money to my Dustbin Diet project for each person who registers with the rosie306 code by 30th June this year.  This will be a great help towards being able to encourage some of the young people to think about a more environmentally friendly approach to fashion, so I will be very grateful for your support if you sign up.

I'm now in my 5th swishing month and I've probably bought more clothes than I do normally, but I have certainly reduced my overall spend. In these tough economic times, I'm sure lots of us are trying to do just that.  There couldn't be a better time to take up some new green living money-saving resolutions, don't you think?  

Pearly Queen

On the hunt for information about up-cycling, I visited a local exhibition by Laura Hounam, who makes up-cycled jewellery.

When I walked into the little museum that was hosting the exhibition I was blown away by the extent of it, the variety of gorgeous pieces of jewellery on offer and the range of up-cycled material that had been lovingly donated, collected and re-purposed to magnificent effect.

The next thing that struck me was the note on the table that told me all the proceeds from the sale of this wonderful jewellery was going to support the charity, Against Breast Cancer.  More about that later...

Let me, first, show you the creations and share Laura's story.

These made me think of all the buttons I've collected over the years.  I always remove buttons from anything that is going to be turned into rags, thinking I might use them one day.  I have a whole box full of them which I think would be better served by donating them to Laura.

These are decorated with donated pearls from broken necklaces.

That's another thing I seem to be collecting! I often find random beads around after parties.  Another broken necklace and the bead pot gets a donation.  I plan to use a few of them to decorate a bag I made from an old T shirt, but then I'm going to donate the rest to Laura.

Next on my clear out list is the array of colourful bits and pieces that fill a whole draw in my hallway.  I have plastic beads, shiny flowers and butterflies galore from when my daughters were little.  Into the 'Laura bag' they go.

Made from an old mattress cover

This beauty, has a wonderful story to go with it.  Laura told me it was made from an old mattress cover.  She grew up in a tenement, apartment blocks surrounding a courtyard.  She remembers when she was little that a man used to come round to recover the mattresses every now and again.  In those days, mattresses were stuffed with wool - the best were made with Scottish wool.  The wool would compact after a while and, so to make them last longer and for hygiene's sake too, the man would come round with his machine that looked like a gondola with spikes sticking out of the bottom, and he would remove the mattress cover, fluff up the wool with his spiky gondola machine and then give the mattress a new cover.

If jewellery from an old mattress cover wasn't bizarre enough, how about rings and brooches made from old tights?

These beauties are made by crocheting old coloured tights.

Laura is often given lots of things with which to create her jewellery, but she also finds some of her materials amongst pieces donated to Against Breast Cancer, to whom she donates all the money she makes from selling her jewellery.

If you have single earrings, stray beads, buttons, belt buckles and that kind of thing you can donate them to Against Breast Cancer, who are in the process of setting up collection points around and about.  If you have items to donate, or you would like to hold a collection point for Against Breast Cancer please contact Jane Terry on 01235 534211 or you can email her - jane@againstbreastcancer.org.uk for more information.

You can see Laura Hounam's jewellery exhibition throughout May at Faringdon Tourist Information Centre.  Laura will also be at craft fairs on Saturday 11th May at St Frideswide's Chruch on Botley Rd in Oxford, on Sunday 19th May at the Food and Craft Fair at Roots Garden Centre in Hermitage and on Bank Holiday Monday 27th May at the craft fair in Bampton Village Hall.  For more dates, you can visit Laura's website. http://hounam.myzen.co.uk

Birdsong

Back in March, I had a lovely weekend entertaining various family members from far and wide. Because there were a lot of us, and we all like food, it did seem that most of the weekend was spent, either preparing meals, eating meals, or clearing up after meals.  And everybody mucked in and helped.

They all got very into my eco-friendly ways - when there is clearly no dustbin in a kitchen you kind of have to.  "What do I do with this?"

One of the things that I love to do is to make up feasts for the birds - my garden is full of birds and birdsong all the time.

Like Louise, who contributed Tip 2 in my book, I scrape up fat from my frying pan to make my bird feasts and then use breadcrumbs, toast crumbs and whatever other bits and pieces seem like they'll make a tasty treat.

This is the bird feeder we made when my family were over in March, when I came back from holiday.

It was full to the brim when I put it out.  Not a lot left in there now, as you can see!

It doesn't cost a penny to make and it takes no more time to scrape the crumbs off the breadboard or the fat out of the frying pan into a container like this, than it takes to scrape it into the bin.  I have no idea if they actually use the little perch I added by poking a skewer through the bottom of the cup, but it looks cute, don't you think?

Snow Carbon

Can a skiing holiday ever be low carbon?

Skiing and eco-friendly holidays don't really sit naturally together in my mind.  But I was 11 years old when I got the bug for this high adrenalin sport and loved it so much that at 18, I went to work as an au pair near the lovely village of Manigod in the French Alps.

MANIGOD Croix-Fry Merdassier by ARAVISPANORAMA

I then did a French degree in London, but chose to go back to the French Alps for my year in a French university and on finishing my degree, I worked as rep in a ski resort for a season.  As you can see, I was well and truly hooked.

Since then I've been skiing a few times with my family, recently travelling by car (not too high carbon with six of us travelling - as my children take a friend each).

We have always been conscious of trying to keep our holidays environmentally friendly as far as we can.  Some of the ways we do this: we support local businesses, avoid waste as far as possible, avoid all-inclusive places.  You know the kind of thing!

This year, in choosing our skiing holiday, we again tried to find lower carbon options  We were only four rather than six, and so we didn't want to drive, but didn't want to fly either. So for the first time, we travelled by train to our holiday destination.

We found a holiday by train through Snow Carbon travelling with Zenith Holidays to the Hameau des Airelles in Montgenèvre which has recently obtained the EU Ecolabel.

View over the village

Some of the lifts have a choice of chair or cable car, which is great
 because yo can choose which to take according to the weather.

I found Zenith Holidays to be super helpful.  Everything was made very easy and I was really made to feel looked after.  Zenith organised our train travel via Eurostar to Paris and then onwards to Oulx in Italy on the TGV.  Prices were comparable to flying, though no cheaper even though we booked as early as it was possible to book the entire trip. Our Eurostar tickets cost us £70.50 each for the way out and £61 pounds for the way back. It takes aound 2 1/2 hours to Paris Gare du Nord and then you have a short 2 stop train journey on the RER to the Gare du Lyon for onward travel to the French alps. On the Eurostar you can buy a book of 10 metro tickets for around 13 euros. The TGV to Oulx  was £64.48 each return and took around five hours, but we were comfortable and the journey passed very quickly.

We'd decided to take rucksacks as we thought that would be the easiest way to deal with luggage, but in fact a wheeled suitcase or sports bag was what most fellow travellers had!

I'd advise taking plenty of food, snacks and drinks with you for the journey as food is expensive on the train and at the stations.  The Eurostar Lounge both at St Pancras and Paris Gare du Nord are comfortable, so if you have a wait you can generally find somewhere to sit and read.  But the Halle des Grande Lignes at Gare du Lyons only has about eight chairs, so it is not the best place to spend any amount of time.


We were met at the station - actually on the platform by our Zenith rep and then whisked by minibus up to the resort of Montgenèvre, which took around half an hour. All very swift, efficient and welcoming.

Onto the accommodation...

The Hameau des Airelles was lovely.  We opted for a two bedroom apartment which is said to sleep six people, as there's a sofa bed in the lounge. For four it felt spacious.  Six would be fine, but cosy.  But there's no way I could see six people fitting in their ski boots into the ski locker without them getting wet from snow dripping off the skis and other  boots - four was a jigsaw, which we failed on the first time and had to dry out our boots the second morning with a hair dryer - not very eco-friendly, I know!  The problem with the ski lockers is simply that there's no use of the wall of the locker to be able to slot boots onto pegs upside down, which is all it would take.

Your bed linen and towels are provided, so you don't need to lug that with you on the train, which is very helpful. Towels for the spa are provided too, but in good eco-friendly style, they invite you to keep them all week.

When you check in you are given a little cardboard box containing 6 dishwasher tablets.  In the apartment, you will find a teeny-tiny bottle of eco washing up liquid, a dish washing sponge, but no tea-towel. They are giving you a clear message that you will use the super efficient dishwasher provided rather than wasting lots of their precious hot water on washing up!

There's a row of recycling bins across the road from the apartments, and instructions about this in their booklet.  Most packaging is recycled, but they don't take yoghurt pots - that's a French thing that I have never understood and must investigate one day!  Surprisingly, for somewhere professing to be eco-friendly, there's nowhere for food waste.  Obviously if you are going eco, you will not be generating a lot of food waste, but we did have a chicken carcass, banana skins and such like to dispose of.  From my research, I have learnt how important it is to keep organic waste out of landfill. So the fact that there's no separate food waste recycling was disappointing, but again that's a France thing (and yes I'll look into it sometime soon) and not really something within the power of the apartment block, though I did think that it was a shame the residents' waste was not used for heating.  Surely that would have been an option these days?

For skiers, the biggy is of course how easy it is to get to the lifts and get home again.  Well, getting to the lifts was a doddle.  Skis out of the locker, cross the very quiet road onto the side of a ski slope , put your skis on and enjoy a gentle green run down to a choice of two chair lifts.  In the evening, you need to be at the Serre Thibaud chair lift by 4.25 pm and there's an easy blue (or hard red / black if you must) which takes you home.  In April, ski-in ski out places are not always that, but this one was.  However, I will say that the bottom of the run got slushy most days which Mr Pitt and I both found hard work on the legs at the end of the day.  Still, you don't go skiing if you don't enjoy a bit of a challenge and it was always a great feeling to get so close to the door on your skis.

The apartment had a well stocked and designed kitchen, so eating in was a pleasure, particularly because next door to the apartment block was a warm and friendly and very inviting little grocery / delicatessen called the Coccimarket.  In fact, it was so inviting that other than the first night when we found take away pizza, chips and salad from 'La Capitaine' as we'd missed the supermarket, we actually chose to eat in every night.

So what did we do to be eco-friendly, food-wise?

• We took our own reusable shopping bags
• We shopped daily so that we only bought what we needed and didn't waste anything unnecessarily.
• We went for fresh seasonal vegetables and avoided packaged food.  The meat was fresh and local, with an adequate variety for the week.  There were different meats available each evening. 
• We bought some cheese, sauscisson sec and honey from a local producer who had a stall in the foyer of the apartment block on the second evening.
• We brought fresh bread daily from the bakery and toasted what was left in the morning for breakfast.  We saved up the bread crumbs from the chopping board and used them to make some breaded pork escalopes one night and other days we put the bread crumbs on the balcony for the birds - and they cleaned up in no time!
• We used up leftovers, when we had them, the next evening by adding them to what we were eating, or having them as a starter and yes, I confess, I ate chilli for breakfast on the last morning - but you know, I had a long train journey and there was just no point in wasting it.   
• The supermarket was a great help as there was plenty of fresh unpackaged food, and they sold things singly - including eggs! You could also buy home-made jam which you could buy a small quantity of in your own pot.  They did this at the bakery too.
• We made baguette sandwiches for the train journey home which finished up our jar of mustard and we took the remaining lettuce in a bag to eat like crisps on the train.  We kept the paper from our daily purchases of baguette to wrap our sandwiches in for the train.

Any eco-disasters? Yes!

We spotted a lovely looking mountain hut advertising lasagne and paninis, so we went there for lunch one day.  Never again.  The lasagne was only pasta and bechamel sauce and was so awful it was inedible and you can probably imagine how much that pained us to leave food uneaten.  The etiquette at the place was to put stuff into a bin, but we decided to leave the uneaten lasagne on the table, so that they would see that it was inedible.  The waitress had made a face at it when she collected it from the chef, so we were pretty sure they'd get the message, but unfortunately my Italian was not up to an explanation.  The place was lovely but they need to change their lasagne supplier!

So, now for the big question.  Can any skiing holiday be eco-friendly?  All that energy required for the lifts!  I'm sure it can't be.  So all you can do is think about making up for it in other ways as much as you can.

These days the ski-passes are reusable, so don't forget to give yours back at the end of your stay - and get back your 3 euro deposit.

Don't buy skis (yes I did all those years ago when I lived in a ski resort and was using them every day - but they are now languishing in my garage).  As well as the added carbon footprint (and effort) of transporting your skis to the resort, the technology has changed over the years.  Skis get out of date.  It is best to hire and get the latest technology while the skis get good use made of them.  As I was skiing on my hire skis and wondering what it would be like to ski on my old skis I wondered what happened to all those old style skis.  As we left the resort, however, I did find out what had happened to a number of them as I noticed that the fences to the fields were made up of tall, slim old style skis!

Next year, though, I'm thinking about getting even more eco-friendly with my skiing and going entirely for cross country skiing and snow-shoe walking. The only energy used then (other than the embodied energy of the equipment of course) is my own. A great advantage of choosing cross country skiing is that a ski pass for the week cost 43 euros as compared to the 199.50 euros of a downhill ski pass. And if you think that the adrenalin rush won't be the same - just you try it...  I remember it well from my mountain-dwelling days.  You can't beat the feeling of getting to the summit entirely under your own steam! 

Zenith were great.  They explained the train travel and organised to book the Paris to Oulx bit on the first day the tickets went on sale, which is three months prior to the travel date. They got us discounts on ski hire and ski passes as well as providing the taxi to and from the station, and getting in some provisions for the first evening/ morning.  I'm not a package holiday kind of girl, but sometimes it just makes sense.

If I book again, which I quite likely will, I'd be tempted to book the Eurostar tickets actually with Eurostar the first day possible which is 4 months prior to travel.  Our tickets this time were through Rail Europe.  There was no problem at all with them, but we did arrive back at the Eurostar in good time for an earlier train, and there was very much a 'don't give a damn attitude' from the lady at the Eurostar reception when I asked if we could be allowed on the earlier train.  She said there was nothing she could do because it was booked through an agent and we'd have to contact the agent.

I've travelled with Eurostar before when speaking at conferences in Paris and remember once being put on the earlier train even though I'd actually paid less for my ticket then than I did this time.

Oh yes,  next time I'll pack a tea towel too!

Cooking up the stock

It is amazing how delicious stock made from vegetable peelings can be! It is so easy and costs hardly anything at all to make.  I can't believe we've only just realised.

We've been cooking up our chicken carcasses for many years, usually adding a bit of onion or leek and some herbs to the pot. In an effort to reduce food waste and get more from our food generally we started to add bits of vegetable peel, carrot tops, the trimmings from leeks etc, which featured in my book, 101 Ways to Live Cleaner and Greener for Free. This makes a most delicious stock which we use as a base for making soups and risotto, both of which are great ways of making a cheap meal and using up leftovers as you can put anything in them really. (It's Tip 6 on page 23!)

But then we didn't have chicken for a while.  Gradually the stock in our tiny freezer diminished but the desire / need / longing for lovely warming home-made soup didn't.  That's when Mr Pitt had the idea of trying just the vegetable peel.

So out came an old ice cream tub and all week long we gathered up all the off cuts and peel from every meal we made. In went the carrot ends, the onion peel, potato peel, the floppy green ends off the leeks. A couple of apple cores went in and some orange peel and then into the stock pot to get boiled up just like we'd do with our chicken carcass, but without the chicken.

The vegetable peel stock in progress.

It works!  The ice cream tub is now fully and permanently employed. We've been collecting all our vegetable peelings, keeping them in the ice cream tub in the fridge so we can have a regular boil up even without the meat.

The compost heap doesn't seem to mind.  The peelings get there eventually, but we get more value from them first.

Bon appetit!

Risotto made with vegetable peel stock.

 I think the people at Part-time Carnivore, Come Veg With Me and Love Food Hate Waste,  will like love this, but I wonder what Nigella and Jamie would say?