Eco audit: buying containers that can be reused

We have a friend whose mum would never ‘throw away’ a jar, all year – because they were all needed for the annual jam making. Containers were not just for one use – they were for multiple. And preserving makes a virtue out of this.

So what do you do when you’re in the supermarket, doing your weekly shop? Do you make a point of choosing food in containers that can be reused? Does it matter?

I wrote earlier about recycling jars and cans.  It’s probably one of the easiest places to come in.  So point one: if you can recycle it, once you’ve used the contents, do so.  But it doesn’t have to stop there.  Yes, recycle, but you might find you can also do some reusing before that point.

You don’t need to read much Jamie Oliver to learn that a humble jam jar comes in handy for mixing up a dressing for a salad.  Or craft sites, to discover that you can use them for making lanterns.  Or keeping spare screws.  And so on.

When I was at university, and a few years beyond, it became popular to reuse glass jars to store kitchen ingredients in.  Nice jars can be good to look  at – and work just fine for seeing your ingredients too.  (This was also useful before the arrival of IKEA in our neck of the woods, and the ease of buying glass storage jars.)

In my teens, I had a bit of a thing about coloured glass.  Those wine glasses I brought back from Germany: they had coloured stems.  So I would hang on to blue glass bottles – because I loved the look of them.  I think we ended up inheriting the collection of our friends now in Italy, when they headed over there.

Ironically, as a parent, it can become trickier to recycle – if you have a small maker nearby, who is convinced something exciting can be made out of just about anything you are about to put in the recycling.  No cereal packet is safe, of course.  But there are also the plastic bottle tops from milk cartons, other bits of packaging that suggest buttons on a robot, and so on.

Packaging plus imagination is a combination I prefer to support – even if it has been to pass on some of the recycling to nursery for the inevitable junk models that come home.  (On the plus side, when you/they tire of them, or run out of window sill space, you’re bound to be able to recycle at least some of the model.)

Some of my other items – plastics, and others – have made it into the toy kitchen.  It’s easy to buy items for a toy kitchen – wooden or fabric if you want a sustainable material.  But you can also extend it when you get a small item of packaging that would be hard to recycle – but would add to the cooking and restaurant play.

Little cardboard packets that raisins came in.  Ditto for ‘sweetie sticks’ (aka the sweetie cigarettes of my youth. Except they can’t call them that any more.).  But also small plastic bottles that are just the right size for a dinky kitchen – and little hands.

It can also be fun to make new things out of packaging that would otherwise be ignored. Those cardboard boxes that internet purchases are delivered in  – they can find new uses. Fired by seeing homemade cardboard arcades online (Caine’s Arcade, that has become a hit around the internet), there was a certain degree of designing and building, post-Christmas.

We now have our own arcade game, complete with Lego Stormtroopers to guard the hole where the ball is meant to go in.  And the beginnings of a cardboard robot costume that isn’t quite finished.  (But it packs flat, at least, until it gets looked at again.)

Here lies the struggle.  It is cheaper to transport plastic than glass.  It is convenient to see through the packaging of what you buy – which you can’t do with cans or cardboard.

But given that, so far, only plastic bottles can be reliably recycled in most places of the UK, there is still masses more packaging to do something with.

How am I doing here? Not always so good.  I do have mesh bags that can take fruit and veg at supermarkets.  I don’t always remember to bring them with me.  And equally, it can be harder to buy loose items at supermarkets.

Those pre-bagged items – they are also to speed you up and get you through the checkout faster.  So more people can buy.  When I did more of my weekly shopping at our local Coop, they would see me coming – and ring to open another till.  Weighing fruit and veg takes time for the checkout person.

I’m trying to make a few shifts – one to buy a type of (well-liked) pudding in Tetra Pak rather than plastic, so I can recycle it.  To avoid buying items in lighter plastics which can’t be reused in the same way as sturdier ones, like margarine cartons.  (My freezer owes much to the stackability of margarine cartons.)

Given that further uses of packaging can be thought of, ad infinitum, I will finish here.  But I will tap myself on the shoulder when I do go food shopping – to see what I am putting into the trolley in the first place.

 

Eco audit: going against the dominant food culture

There’s nothing like Not Eating the Same as Others to make you stand out.  It doesn’t seem to matter what your difference is.  It gets trickier.  Sometimes you are seen as being Difficult.

In your teens, it is important to find a few ways to be different from your family.  To embrace causes.  To have high and lofty ideals.  And, on occasion, to Make Life Difficult for your Mum.

So being a vegetarian ticked all of these boxes.  And thankfully, my mum did cope.  She may well have been fed up behind the scenes, but she didn’t say I couldn’t.

I come from a family of Good Eaters.  (I will calm down with the caps, soon.)  There were a few things that each of us didn’t like, but we mostly all ate the same.  We ate healthy food, we ate homemade food, and we didn’t tend to leave much, if anything, on our plates.

So starting to eat differently from the rest of the family was a challenge.  Luckily, there was cheese.  If I had been keener on egg, that would have helped, but I’m not.  (I discovered Spanish omelette towards the end of my main vegetarian years, and it was a bit of a revelation.)

However, it wasn’t so odd.  There were a few other veggies about.  There was still plenty we could all eat together at home – and when others were having meat, I was probably having veggie burger things.  So it generally worked out.

When I visited my German penfriend, I had much more of a sense of going against the dominant food culture.  Germany is a country that has good health food shops – but it is also a country which is serious about its meat.

Luckily, the mum of my penfriend was already on the case.  She wanted lighter food, things that were better for you.  She was finding ways to cook with tofu before I had any idea what it was. I was impressed – and grateful that I could eat what I wanted.

Fast forward to the last few months.  I am now cooking gluten-free and dairy-free food.  It’s not every meal, but there’s significant amounts of food planning, label scrutiny, and so on.  And when you live in Europe, with lots of meals including wheat products, and/or dairy, you can bet you will feel like you are going against the dominant food culture.

It has been interesting to learn how much of the world is dairy-free – in main because of lactose intolerance.  And you can also pick out places where wheat is much less the big deal: corn-based products (think Latin America, and proper corn tortillas), and of course rice-based products (much of Asia).

The best place to be gluten-free and dairy-free is probably somewhere like Thailand.  Rice noodles.  Coconut milk.  But that is somewhat at odds with what food can be produced in the UK.  And therein lies an extra complication: what it means for the environment to ship in those foods that can be tolerated.

Of course, there are UK options that work just fine.  Three cheers for potatoes, as a starch with loads of variations.  Fish and chips.  Homemade roast dinners.  Boiled eggs as a great standby. All good.  And we do those too.

Fortunately, it’s getting easier and easier to buy, cook and eat food in the UK that is gluten-free.  It’s not mainstream, but it is more and more familiar.  I’ve been able to find almost everything I need from regular supermarkets, which is a big help.

Dairy-free – a bit less familiar, but also still doable.  Think cakes made with oil, instead of butter.  Think almond or soya milk on your cereal – both a little sweet, like regular milk.  The main recipient of the cooking isn’t a tea or coffee drinker, so there isn’t that shift to make. This one was actually the easier shift to make.

But both? It’s a double whammy.  Your cafe, out and about, might have gluten-free, but is unlikely to have dairy-free too.  We have a new respect for meringues (sugar and eggs).  And we are the lucky ones, I feel – because we don’t have to worry about eggs, soya or nuts, that can cause such tricky reactions for those who can’t tolerate them.

Last year’s droughts had an impact on world harvests for wheat, potatoes and soya.  And we use 2 and 3 quite a lot.  Food sufficiency in the UK is becoming more of a thought – and a dilemma.

It’s one thing to want to buy locally produced food – it’s another when you can’t necessarily manage it. Maybe it’s up to those of us at home who can still eat what we want to support UK produce.

And to think a bit more – again – about what goes into the supermarket trolley.

Eco audit: buying fresh from farmers

Childhood is not complete without a little pick-your-own strawberry activity.  (And of course eating, while picking.)

I don’t know that my parents were choosing to do it for ‘support the farmers’ reasons.  I think we did it because it was fun, because the fruit was so fresh, and because it made a family outing out of the process of acquiring food.  It may also have made jam making cheaper.

I don’t remember childhood strawberry picking (though my parents will tell tales of me in a sunhat, managing to sit on the largest strawberry).  But I do remember it in my teens.  We were fortunate to live in a fertile part of central England, good for fruit-growing.

So pick we did.  Strawberries.  Raspberries.  Gooseberries, I suspect.  Being not far from the border with Herefordshire (home of apple orchards), some of the farms also sold their own cider.  You brought along a plastic container, and filled up.  It was pretty strong – but I was allowed to taste.  And take in the wonderfully fresh, appley aroma.

Thing with pick your own: you tend to need a car to get to the farms.  So that put it out of reach for quite some time, until we owned a car.  We went to one in the Scottish Borders a couple of summers ago – partly as a family outing.  And it was wonderful.

The pick your own practice has moved on a bit in the last couple of years.  It doesn’t seem to be the thing to bring your own boxes for collecting any more.  (Or maybe people do fruit picking more on the spur of the moment? I don’t know.)

There are cardboard baskets, as well as plastic punnets.  (The baskets now see use elsewhere – one holding boxes inside a kitchen cupboard, the other as part of the equally important toy kitchen set up.) The owner is a little less friendly than those in the past – but this is a specialist fruit farm, rather than one which diversifies and also does fruit.

The gooseberries are gigantic.  My small helper soon tires of the task of dodging the thorns, and is sent back to help in the strawberry area.  It is all on a bright, surprisingly hot summer’s day.  We take the strawberries to friends for lunch, take the leftovers back later for making summer pudding.

But what happens on the overcast days? The ones where the produce is not quite as tantalising? I have not really got that far.

Like I said before, we all seem to find areas of environment to adopt – and this is one I haven’t got to. So far. Other friends took to ordering boxes of veg much earlier on.  Or frequenting farm shops.  That was their area to support – and they did.

And this is the struggle.  Because we have got used to having choice, of a wider range of veg than is locally available.  This was something that was coming in in my teens, but has expanded to far greater numbers of fresh ingredients – and far wider areas of import.

In Asterix the Gaul, the druid character is making a potion, supposedly to make the Romans strong.  But he is toying with them.  He asks them to get strawberries, supposedly a missing ingredient – which are almost impossible to find.  Then he and Asterix eat them, comment on them – and ask for more for the potion. (Oh, the many ways of winding up the Romans.)

That sense of seasonality has stuck with me.  So I don’t buy strawberries out of season – because the proper thing tastes so good.  But I don’t always manage to stick to purely seasonal veg – much as I love root veg.

There is a whole interplay of factors here: food miles; supporting local producers and eco systems; supporting growers of organic produce; being prepared to cook your way through a box of fruit and veg that someone else has chosen for you.

This is an area where I am still contemplating what to do.  There are a couple of good farm shops I can drive to – but then it would make sense to do more of my shopping there, to make it worth the drive and the petrol.  I like to plan meals ahead of time – how do I balance that with the ‘what is fresh right now?’ aspect?

So I buy Scottish where I can; British where I can’t.  I buy some fruit and veg imports from Europe, but ones that I know could be transported by road or rail or boat, rather than flown over.  Where something is seasonal, plentiful, I may buy more and cook it up for future use (parsnip soup being a bit of a favourite in this household).

To go the further step – of also buying only (or almost only) what is produced closest to home – I’m not there yet either.  I know about the Fife Diet, and others that have followed on, where you really stick to buying what is produced within a fifty-mile radius, say.  But I guess I am thinking about it too.

Whatever I do adopt, in the end – I hope it will be also for reasons of taste, of pleasure, of respect for the land.  And that I will find ways to squeeze the food budget in other areas so that I can try this out, at least a bit.

And I would also like to commit to eating more strawberries.  Hand picked – by me.

Eco audit: reusing items for wrapping presents

I grew up with a golden rule for what to do with Christmas cards at the end of the festive season.  Turn them into tags for next year’s presents.  Ideally, cut with pinking shears to make zigzag edges for greater interest.

I can visualise my mother doing this.  The pinking shears were a particular source of interest, given that a) they were hefty and excitingly dangerous-looking and b) they didn’t appear very often.

And yes.  I still do this.  I don’t have the pinking shears.  I don’t feel the need for the crinkly edges on the tags.  But it works just fine – and you recycle the back of the card, by the way.

There was also an expectation that you would keep, and reuse wrapping paper.  I don’t know whether Mum took it and ironed it before reusing it (though I have a feeling brown paper did get ironed and reused).  No surprise – I have my stashes of wrapping paper to reuse.

When you meet your Significant Other, there are many things to work out.  Subtle ways in which families differ.  Does your beloved favour saving wrapping paper – or just rip it open?

When I have been known to open some presents with scissors, cutting the tape so you can reuse all the paper, you can imagine that some eyebrows have been raised.  (All those who wish to check OCD tendencies may as well begin here.)

Dan did however put me on to the notion of buying plain wrapping paper, in colours like red or gold, which can work for any time of year, any occasion.  Still useful.

What would my teenage environmentalist be familiar with – and surprised by?  Perhaps that there would be so many shopping services taking on the task of doing the wrapping for you.  The rise of internet shopping, leading to the growing number of Jiffy bags about.

Jiffy bags, however, do not always cross cultures.  In the UK, we’re fairly familiar with reusing these – as long as your new label is clear, you can keep sending them on, and on.

But when I tried doing this in Poland, in my second time living there, I was taken to task by the local post office.  The implication was that the parcel looked like it had been tampered with.  (Perhaps not so unknown in Communist days.) Thankfully I did get my parcel sent at last, but it was a bit of a battle.

What gives us a good half-way house is the present bag – whether bottle bag or something bigger.  These again can be used over and over – new label, new sellotape at the top, and you’re away.  And the paper is often too tricky to tear, so people just open them.

In fact, I’m not the only one who finds the wrapping paper thing tricky.  But these days, you can read craft websites that direct you in making fabric bags for present wrapping, that can be used almost indefinitely.

You can also do fancy paper reusing – the one I liked most had presents wrapped in old newspapers but tied with lovely ribbon.  (Which could itself be reused.)

Is it a big deal? Is it just me and packaging again? There again, I don’t know how many rolls of wrapping paper are sold each year – and how many are just crumpled after the present has been removed.

In the meantime, I need to find a use for the little scraps of wrapping paper that are too small to actually wrap a present – but might still have another purpose.  Any suggestions?

Eco audit: buy presents locally

In my teens, I reached a stage where I was fairly independent for travel.  I was at a point where I wanted to buy presents for friends for Christmas.  Where did I go? I got on a train, and went to Oxford.

I lived in a smallish town, with a larger town about half an hour away.  I could have gone there.  But going to the big city had a certain attraction.  Some of it was more independent shops.  More choice.  (And a chance to look at the dreaming spires, back in the days when I still had thoughts to study there.)

What did I buy? Probably somewhere I’ll have a notebook that tells me.  (I know.  Back to those lists.) I do remember buying things that I couldn’t as easily get in the larger town: some of them imports from China, and from South America.

They made good presents.  They were beautiful, and also practical. Wooden Chinese steamer baskets, a spoon my dad still uses.  The items from South America, I remember less, but they might have been an early version of craft items to support local crafters, and local traditions.

Buying local wasn’t really something that was thought of, at that time.  Of course you bought local – because, in most cases, you had to go to the shop to buy it anyway.  If you live most of your life in smallish towns, with less selection, you are inevitably buying local.

Beyond this, I knew there were some ‘One World‘ shops out there – Edinburgh, anyway – where you could buy present items hand made, to support local communities in various parts of the world.  (I certainly supported the makers of wooden elephants.)

My teenage self might have expected it to get easier to buy things from different countries.  But I wouldn’t have predicted all the internet shopping, the free shipping worldwide, and all those things that mean we can pretty much buy from wherever we please.

I wrote yesterday about the issue of flights abroad.  When I did go abroad, I did also buy local presents to bring back.  The Polish craft shops, Cepelia, had good trade from me, as did Russian markets, and places selling the lovely blue and white Boleslawiec pottery.

It didn’t really matter where I went – whether in the UK or abroad – it was an easy way to buy interesting presents on the hoof (harder to manage when you’re working fulltime).  And for certain destinations, like Jura, we would buy local products to support the islanders producing them.

My teenage self would not have anticipated the possibility of China producing huge numbers of products, in vast quantities.  And certainly, over time, it did get harder to buy items actually made in the country I was visiting.  Nor would I have forseen the emergence of Amazon (or eBay) as places to buy anything and everything, seemingly.

And yet.  We still know that certain products are made in certain places.  They retain a cachet, a stamp of respectability – and authenticity.  For all of it becoming easier to (seemingly) buy anything from anywhere, we will still be interested in these special items.  That can be a good thing, certainly, for the producers, and the traditions of that area.

And we balance this with listening to the growing appeals to ‘buy local’ – because if we don’t use what is near at hand, on our doorstep, we will likely find it gone pretty soon.