The White Stuff

With a new year comes new resolutions, quite a lot of which relate to food. Eating less of it, eating better things, making more from scratch and thinking about how what we consume affects the planet. 

Last year I tried to kick start myself into having at least one veggie day a week. It worked quite well, but I don't think it made me eat more healthily. Evening meals of macaroni cheese or home made pizza are delicious (even if I say so myself) but swapping lean meats like chicken for dairy products like cheese probably won't make me any leaner. 

But the reason for trying to cut back on meat was mainly for environmental reasons not the health benefits. According to the Vegetarian Society's website eating less meat will reduce my carbon footprint, save water, save land and protect the seas. Sounds pretty good! At the moment, I'm having roughly 2 veggie days a week, which isn't fantastic in green terms but is better than nothing. However, is my switch from meat to dairy products really any better for the environment?

As long as I'm consuming animal products the animals still need to be grown, fed and given water to survive. It's common knowledge that animals use more land than plants to grow, and lots more water too. According to vegetarian author John Robbins it takes 60, 108, 168 and 229 pounds of water to produce one pound of potatoes, wheat, maize and rice respectively. A pound of beef needs more than 20,000 pounds of water and to produce one litre of milk it takes nearly 1,000 litres of water. That's a lot.

So, should I be cutting out dairy products, or even all animals products too?

I'm not ready to go vegan or fully veggie yet, but for the environment I can see that we need to eat less meat and probably consume less dairy too. But it doesn't have to be one after another, I don't have to tackle full vegetarianism before I can move onto cutting back on other animal products.

So that's the new aim, keep up two veggie days a week, but start to cut back on milk, cheese, butter and eggs as well. 

In some ways this is quite easy. Nice healthy salads for lunch rather than my normal boring cheese sandwiches actually feel like an improvement tastewise as well as for health and the green credentials; while cooking vegetable soup on cold January evenings is warming as well as healthy (it's amazing how few calories mushrooms and celery have!). 

Breakfasts is where it gets harder. A nice bowl of British grown oats with some dried fruit and milk is a great start to my day and it keeps me full right up until lunchtime salad. But what about that milk? 

Over the last week I've been trying out soya milk (sweetened and unsweetened). So far, it's a success. It adds a nutty taste to my cereal (oats really don't taste very exciting) and while I was very wary about using it in tea it turns out to taste different, but good. I've bought a carton of almond milk too, to try out over the next week or so. We were surprised to find similar levels of calcium in soya milk compared to cows milk too, even if artificially added it still gives you what you need.

So, cutting back on dairy as well as meat might not be too hard after all. Keeping away from cheese and butter will definitely be healthier too! But there's still a niggling doubt about soya, and that's the rainforests.

I've always heard that rainforests are cut down to grow soya for milk and other products. I'm careful about what else I buy if it affects the rainforests, so does swapping to soya milk really do more good than bad? I'm not sure yet. But a vegan friend pointed out last summer that there is far more rainforest cut down for meat than there currently is for soya farms. Whatever we eat has to be grown somewhere and hopefully soya will need less land to grow than dairy milk. 

Cutting back completely is obviously the best solution, but a diet of UK grown organic veg and pulses doesn't fill me with excitement. So for now its one veggie day and one vegan day a week with less cheese and butter, and soya over dairy milk whenever I can. We'll see how it goes!

Spring In My Step

Even though it's still January it's beginning to feel a lot like spring already. A bright sunny walk along the Exe floodplain on Sunday morning gave some beautiful views, sights of kingfisher, even buds and flowers on the trees. 

With the hawthorn coming into bud (even before it has leaves) it's not surprising there are catkins all over the place too. I love the range of colours they appear in, purple right through to greeny yellow; covering the trees like leftover fairy lights.

 As well as all this new growth there's the reliable gorse still in flower. Looking bright and cheerful these flowers can be used to make a delicious ice cream.

With all this wonderful seasonal change it's time to get outside and rediscover nature. This weekend is a fantastic time to do it too with the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch happening all across the UK. Count the wildlife that's counting on you and help to give nature a home this year. It only takes an hour and will definitely bring a smile to your face as you spend an hour watching nature. I can't think of a better way to spend the weekend!

Starting Anew

Amazingly, it's been over a month since my last blog. Life got in the way.

So, after a somewhat extended Christmas break, I'm back. Over the next few weeks there will be more blogs on green weddings, on the green worries when buying a new car, on my continued struggles with shopping and cooking without waste or green guilt, on a computer free fortnight and on all the other green topics that are buzzing around my head.

2014 has been a good year for wildlife spotting so far. On a drive through the midlands yesterday evening I saw red kites soaring, hares hopping and foxes creeping through fields. It was magical. This morning whilst hanging some washing up (a pleasure I don't get in Exeter) I enjoyed birdsong all around me. Blackbirds seem to be everywhere and robins are signing from the treetops.

I had lots of lovely new things for Christmas, but I'm not sure anyone of them make me smile quite as much as nature.

December Bits and Pieces

It's been a very busy few weeks, so busy that last Monday passed me by without even noticing that I hadn't written a blog, but now I'm back and here are a few things that have been worthy of note in this green life over the last week or two.

During a quick (and sadly rare) visit to the local Waitrose I discovered that they are still selling UK grown strawberries. This amazed me and although the berries were quite small they smelt delicious. After a quick internet  search I found this fantastic page on strawberries on the BBC Food website. It turns out that

Traditionally, part of the strawberry's appeal is that its short, six-week season, from early June until mid-August, coincides with the brief, long-awaited British summer. These days, however, the British strawberry season extends from mid-April until mid-December, thanks to the increased use of plastic polytunnels, which provide the berries with a warmer, more protected environment - and a much longer growing season. 

When do you think of strawberries? It's true that I'd put them in June and July and sometimes August. I can't believe I've lived 24 years without realising you could have UK grown strawberries near Christmas. But as the article says, the traditional season is only extended because of plastic polytunnels, and (I would imagine) heating in those polytunnels. I'm always a little confused over which is worse, flying food to the UK where it is naturally in season or growing in locally but using lots of energy to make it work. I was so confused that I gave up, and put the strawberries back on the shelf.


Electricity has been in the news a lot recently too and it's been hard keeping up. On the BBC website alone there have been articles here, here, here and here. There's quite a useful page on how green taxes are broken down but I'm still a little confused. From what I've heard on the news it appears that the government has cut green taxes which in turn has reduced the average household bill by £50 a year, so just less than £1 a week. It also means that projects which helped the poorest people save money by improving energy efficiently and general sustainability projects which help to make future energy production more secure. To me, this seems like a short term publicity win for a long term real life loss. But then, maybe for some families that extra £1 a week means the world of difference. If so, I'd rather pay an extra £2 a week and help then AND have green projects continue.

And finally....

Staying of the subject of heating I've found a new green way to keep warm at night. Rather than putting the heating on in the bedroom I often have a hot water bottle in bed to keep my feet warm. But I've found that a 2L empty coke bottle filled with hot water works just as well as a rubber, specially bought hot water bottle. In fact, I've also started using recycled water too, since still-hot bath water seems to keep me warm enough without having to boil the kettle. So there's a new green idea for keeping heating costs down and recycling both plastic bottles and bath water. I wonder what surprises the next week will bring.

50 Years

Last week there were lots of fiftieth anniversaries. Fifty years since the deaths of JFK, C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley and fifty years since the first Doctor Who episode. All this happened twice my lifetime ago. Today, much is still the same as it was then, but there have been changes.

Compared to fifty years ago my childhood had less skylarks than my parents' did, less fields to play in and more cars; but also more access to knowledge, more sights of far away lands and unimagined creatures. Today there are more nature reserves, but is this because we value our nature more or because these are the only islands we have left in our world where nature can remain? We have so much more of almost everything than fifty years ago. More people, more televisions, more food (for some of the world), more hunger (for other bits of the world), more knowledge, more travel, more communication. But you can't just have more, we still only have twenty four hours in each day, what have we given up for all of this more? Recent studies  indicate that over the last fifty years the proportion children playing in natural spaces has dropped by as much as seventy five percent. So for every four children running around in fields, rivers, beaches and woods when Doctor Who first aired there is now only one child today.

I expect JFK and Huxley have somehow affected my life, perhaps by affecting my parents lives (they were in primary school all that time ago), but I am certain that C. S. Lewis and Doctor Who have helped to shape who I am today. Both the Narnia series and Doctor Who tell stories of escaping to another world, full of wonder and adventure and where battles can be fought and won and where hard decisions for good must be made. These are elements from any good children's story. In fifty years time I want my future children and grandchildren to have these stories too. I want them to wonder at worlds far beyond our reach and imagine what dangerous adventures they might go on in the future. But I don't want that wonder to just come from a screen or a book. I don't want to tell them tales of why the hedgehogs disappeared or explain what a tree house was.

Whenever we imagine the future, we want to imagine it brighter, cleaner, safer and better for our children. That's the image that I hear people talk about when they talk about JFK's potential legacy. It would have been better if....

But the future we give to our children is whatever we can manage to make it. It's not something to be imagined it's something to be made. My children will run around in fields, they will see creatures they have never imagined and they will reach for the stars, because I will show them how and because my parents showed me how. But if we don't try, if we don't open the doors to the fields, or take the time to show them a daisy, a hedgehog or a skylark, how will they learn?

We are the children which the past produced, whether it was fifty or ten years ago. Our children stories have taught us to fight for good, to make hard decisions for a better  future and take ownership of our lives. All we have to do is make those stories reality, fight for the best bits of life and our planet and protect them. If we can do that, then who knows how good the next fifty years might be?

Finally Feeding

Six weeks after I first put up my new bird feeders I was beginning to lose hope that the local birds would ever find them. I moved them a fortnight ago to a different window because the large flock of local sparrows congregates in a hedge in front of our flat, rather than at the back where the feeders had first been.

Even the meal worm feeder which had been successful last spring wasn't attracting any hungry insectivores and was still completely full.

But then, a few days ago at breakfast we saw movement at the window. A magpie hovered against the window, picked up some meal worms and then darted back out of view! I never knew magpies could hover, but apparently they can. Over the last few days (while I've been away) the magpies have returned again and again, learning that the window sill can be sat upon to feed and so we don't get the entertainment of hovering anymore.  Now the feeders empty and I need to fill it up again, which I've very happy to do!

It's wonderful to see the feeders providing a use now the weather has turned colder, and I love magpies. If I were abroad and saw large black and white birds I'd probably stop to enjoy the exotic sight, here in the UK I still think they look exotic and I love watching them figure out where food is hidden on the roofs opposite our flat. Now I can have an ever closer view of these fascinating creatures.

Hopefully the regular visits from magpies will encourage the other local birds to check out the seed feeder, which is only a few feet away but is still as full as ever. We'll have to wait and see.

Gifts That Keep On Giving

Lat week I talked about giving bulbs for Christmas presents. Often these lovely presents flower beautifully and then die off and get composted. It's normal for these bulbs to be designed as one use only, but sometimes they can surprise. 

This cyclamen was bought for me as a present about 3 years ago. It looked lovely the first Christmas I had it, and then it was put in our garden in Preston, and forgotten, for about 15 months. It was rediscovered when we moved last year and although there were no leaves or flowers it made the journey down south with us. Since then it's been living on our kitchen windowsill and in the last few months leaves have appeared and then, slowly flowers too. It's been flowering for about a month now and it's still going strong, hopefully at least until Christmas. So who knows, those bulbs you plan this year and give to friends might give them years of enjoyment, surprise and pleasure, there aren't many gifts that can do that.