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.)

A year without plastic

Well we have completed our strange experiment. We have tried and failed of course to manage a whole year without purchasing anything packaged in single use plastic.

We did try quite hard most of the time, but this has certainly been the hardest eco challenge that I have attempted so far. It was bound to be hard. The challenges I've undertaken so far, like a year of buying only second hand clothes, a year of not buying new books, are things that only affect me. It has been up to me and me only to succeed or fail. I like a challenge so I have found it fairly easy to stick to my decisions. This year, though, my challenge has affected my whole family, my guests, my pets even. Now that's a lot harder. But it hasn't been a complete fail.

First of all here's the sum total of our single use plastic for the year.

I tried to get Smarty the Cat to stand in front of the bag to show the scale of our year of plastic, but he wouldn't oblige for long enough for me to snap a picture of him with the bag. He is nearly as tall as the bag.   Does that help give an idea?

All of this plastic is squashed inside a 2.5kg bag of cat food (almost).  When I chose this challenge, I decided that I wasn't going to go anything like as far as trying to make my own cat food.  So I found these clear bags of cat food at Countrywide.  They have been a success with the cats, and this was the first bag of the year, when I found that they also did 10kg sacks. However, I didn't want to find that the cats didn't like it, so I tried the small bag first. We then swapped to buying 10kg sacks which are not squashed inside this bag, because they are being re-deployed for various purposes like storing wood chippings, kindling etc.  So, that way, they are exempt from the single use plastic.

I can't decide whether this looks like a lot of plastic or a little, because I didn't really ever measure the amount of plastic we got through before, and I had already tried to cut out any non-recyclable plastic.  So how does it compare to plastic in a 'normal' household, I wonder?

There's something else missing from this bag too.  Quite a lot of other plastic that I didn't stock up, as I was trying to concentrate mainly on my own shopping habits rather than other people's habits, and the less I used plastic, the more I noticed how much plastic was brought into the house brother people.  If anyone bought something wrapped in plastic, I put it into another plastic bag and sent it out with my weekly recycling (most plastic in West Oxfordshire is recycled).  I think I've put out plastic recycling from other people maybe six to eight times this year as it has taken that long to fill a bag to a reasonable amount to put it out.

Before I commit this little bag of plastic to the recycling I'm going to have a good think about what has been good and what has been not so good about our year without single use plastic (nearly). But that's for another day I think.  Today I'm just going to say that it is done and my family can no doubt heave their sighs of relief, at least for a bit, until I decide how many of the new plastic free habits are going to remain in the Pitt household.  I dare say some of them will be willingly accepted, but not all of them.  I can't remember how far through the year the term 'illegals' became a Pitt family thing - as in "Sorry, Mum, I've brought illegals".  Over the next few weeks, I will tell all, maybe!

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

Zero Waste Week 2014 - Day 5

With today's Zero Waste Week email being all about food waste I just had to zone in on the kitchen today.

A topic that could fill a book - it sure can.  After writing a section on food waste in my book 101 Ways to Live Cleaner and Greener for Free, I felt I wanted to concentrate  my next book on just the subject of food waste as there are so many things we can do to make more of our food.  I'm hard at work on it and I hope it will be finished before the end of the year.   If you have a top tip for reducing food waste that you'd like to share in my book, please do message me in the comments and I'll be in touch.

Needless to say, with researching and writing about reducing food waste I've become pretty nifty at using up every scrap.  I started my book, coincidentally, on the first day of Zero Waste Week 2013 which, as you may know was all about how to reduce our food waste.  I learnt lots from the tips that the Zero Wasters shared that week and I've been gathering tips and trying out recipes ever since.

So, today I had a CORN lunch, having first picked out what is going to go into tonight's bean casserole dinner. There was some tomato and onion pasta sauce and I picked out the cucumber and apple pieces from a bit of last night's salad - the rest is peppers, spring onion, carrot and celery all of which can go into the casserole.  What was left looked like the makings of a couscous lunch - it had been pork filet in a tomato sauce, and it turned into a tasty couscous sauce.

After lunch, before returning to the delights of explaining anaerobic digestion in a fun and exciting way for teenagers, I decided to blitz the kitchen clear out. One thing that has been driving me mad lately is that my collection of plastic pots (two drawers full when none are in use) was a mess of pots and lids but never the right pot with the right lid.  So I emptied out both drawers and sorted the pots and lids putting together the ones that matched.  I put a few margarine and ice cream tubs into the recycling as they didn't have the right lids and a few pot-less lids went in too.  The rest are now neatly stacked in their wicker drawers and harmony is restored at least to that quarter the Pitt kitchen.

The other area of the kitchen that bothered me was the kitchen dumping ground - a wooden trolley.  I had no idea what was there, but the general rule was that if it didn't have a place, that's where it ended up.  But my kitchen, in theory, has a place for everything.  Which could only mean one thing, if it was on the bottom of the trolley, it wasn't needed.

Before :(

Most of what was on the trolley went into either the recycling boxes, or one of two pots in the garage for odd bits of scrap metal and odd bits of hard plastic, neither of which we can put in our recycling boxes.  The scrap metal pot gets emptied occasionally at the local recycling and reuse centre when we are passing or have something else to take there.  The bits of hard plastic just accumulate as nowhere takes hard plastic in this area.  But the pot is an ice cream tub and it isn't yet full, so I'm happy for it to sit there in the garage for now.  I will say though, there has been more than one occasion that the 'hard plastics pot' has been raided for a gizmo - or at least a piece of plastic that can be used to make or fix a gizmo.

A couple of glass jars went into the dish washer and will be added to the slowly building jar collection which we'll use for making jam and chutney in the coming months.

Sadly, my lovely cast iron cook pan that has been broken for many years is awaiting a trip to the WEEE recycling so it can be taken apart to begin a new life.

And here's the result of my whirl wind sort out session…

After :)

How long will it last?  I estimate somewhere between 10 minutes and 10 days, but for now, I'm feeling good about myself and a few resources are on their way to find a new purpose.

There was nothing added to the charity shop bag, so I picked out these from various shelves and cupboards… I've never used them, but maybe someone else will?

Off to the charity shop

Oh yes, here's my attempt at mending my jeans - I'm not quite sure why I decide on pink embroidery thread, but oh well, the main objective of no more bum on show is achieved!