How Green Is Our Parish?
Copenhagen – farce or fiasco? Well, I don’t know if it was as bad as that, but it certainly disappointed many of us that were hoping that the leaders of our world would knuckle down and try together to save it. (Ed: Not enough, not yet – but there have been some changes since Kyoto).
So where does the lack of agreement over radical carbon limits leave us? Exactly where we were before. With or without international limits on carbon emissions and the forcing of big industries to curb their toxic outputs, we still are all left needing to do our ‘bit’. This is, after all, what our nation is good at. During the war everyone had to do their bit – bath in a couple of inches of water, dig for victory, collect scrap metal for melting down to make aircraft. Come to think of it, there is a lot the war- and post-war generations can teach us….
There is a frightening statistic that 1/3 of all food bought in this country is thrown away – WHAT?!! Just think about that for a moment – it’s like eating breakfast and lunch, then chucking your dinner straight in the bin – madness! What can we do about this terrible waste? What did they do during the 1940s & 1950s when food was scarce & no one wasted a mouthful, never mind 1/3? Try this to start:
Make menus for the week, make shopping lists from the menus, and STICK TO IT when you go shopping – no impulse buying!
Learn to gauge accurately the appetites of the people you are cooking for & cook appropriate amounts. You may have some leftovers, in which case refrigerate or freeze what is left for another meal – some leftovers make great cold lunches the next day (pasta is esp good), some you can save in the freezer till you have enough to re-heat for a ‘left-overs’ meal – everyone gets to eat their favourite meal that week again!
Get into the habit of using up all the leftovers – use leftover veg to make vegetable stock by boiling it up with some herbs for a while, or do the same with leftover bones from meat. Then make soup from the stock, or freeze it in ice-cube trays to use when cooking – cheaper than buying Oxo!
And speaking of the 1940s & 1950s – in those strange, far-off days they managed without fridges, let alone freezers! How did they do it? They bought local produce that was still fresh enough to keep with being refrigerated, shopped frequently and kept less food around ‘just in case’. We can all learn something from that approach. These days it is unthinkable to live without a fridge and freezer – and I’m not suggesting you should – but have you thought about the amount of electricity they use? Lots – 24 hours a day. So, get ‘A’ rated appliances when you buy new, keep them in a cold part of the house so they don’t have to work as hard (freezers do well in garages, if you have one), and get rid of chest freezers (do you really need to store 6 months worth of food at a time?)
Happy Eating!
Kathryn Firbank
STOP PRESS! As this issue was being prepared, there appeared a headline in The Western Morning News (18th. January) – “Give ‘Out of Date’ food to Homeless”. This is not a “let them eat cake” issue – it is a Government approach to major retailers to curb the confusion caused by labelling that is meant to inform and protect us that leads to appalling waste sent unnecessarily to landfill. FareShare, which distributes thousands of meals from 12 national depots, last year sent food to 600 local charities, benefiting 29,000 people a day. Hilary Benn, Environment Minister, said that it is calling for “clear, unambiguous date labelling, food storage and usage guidance” – there is clear confusion over sell-by and best-before dates, which are different from use-by dates. It also suggests using food that is surplus to generate energy through anaerobic digestion or producing fertiliser or compost. It insists that major changes to the food supply chain is, and will be, driven by consumer choice rather than Government intervention. It IS up to US!
Ed: My economics tutor used to point out that the leftover mustard, pickle, jam or whatever left on the side of a plate or in the “empty” jar represented the makers’ profit … and people’s jobs. Well, not entirely, thought I, but it was a good way to make a point – and get people to think.