Cards on the table

A question that I ask myself quite frequently is "Just how green or sustainable am I?"

I am a lot greener than most people I know. This occasionally gives me fleeting feelings of smugness, but only when I lose site of the fact that the environmental damage being caused by worse offenders than me is still likely to screw all of us, and that even if I were in the bottom 1% of UK consumers in terms of energy usage and pollution (which I'm probably not anyway), then I'd still probably in the top 1% globally.

But anyway, just as an exercise and for benchmarking purposes I'm going to make a list of things that I and my family do (however small) that I think contibute towards making our lives green, sustainable, ethical and healthy etc. Which I'm going to put under the heading "good stuff". I'm also going to note down things that have the opposite effect - "Bad stuff" - and things that Id like to do or am planning to do - "Aspirational stuff" (and I will come back and edit this entry as I remember things to go on the lists).

If anyone feels like making suggestions for the aspirational list then go ahead. This is the sort of thing I would like to have on the forum section of inconspicuousconsumption.com when I get it going.

So, in no particular order:

Good Stuff

Buy organic milk where possible (wow - the first item on the list and I feel I should write an entire entry on it - but not now - guess this might apply to lots of succeeding entries too)
Have an allotment for growing vegetables
Have a compost bin in the garden
Use the council run recycling scheme
Mostly cook from scratch, avoiding processed and packaged foods where possible
Buy fresh produce from our local markets, which I can walk to
Buy most other groceries from local shops and supermarkets, which I also walk to
Buy many goods second hand on ebay
Donate and receive items locally on freecycle.org and recycle4free.org
We don't have a TV
Have bought sheeps wool insulating material for under our floors
Use green (hydro) electricity
Buy fair trade coffee
Buy fair trade bananas
Almost never buy chicken (definitely an entry coming up on this)
Use mailing preference service to stop junk mail
Often buy second-hand furniture from auction
Use washable nappies (mostly second-hand)
Have invested Child Trust Fund money in Britannia Building Society savings account whilst waiting for an ethical share account to come on the market
Have a "Nuclear power - No thanks" sticker on our car
Have one diesel powered, van derived car for the family and no other motor vehicle (not sure how good this is really, but it seems like a necessary practicality)
Use some energy efficient light bulbs
Are installing multifuel stoves to heat the house (burning mainly waste wood)


Bad stuff

Leave computer, radio and battery chargers on standby
Don't entirely use energy efficient light bulbs



Aspirational stuff

Would like to keep chickens

Do it 4 the kidz

This morning I heard an item on the Today Programme on Radio 4 about an open letter in the Telegraph, signed by over 100 academics and professionals, concerned that modern life is leading to "the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions".

It filled 13 minutes of the programme, but I'm not sure what else it did.

Some empirical and anecdotal evidence was presented to support the case by two of the signatories and the interviewer had a hard time picking holes in their arguments. And yet, my feeling is that this item, like vast numbers of previous items about similar bleedin' obvious but hard to quantify problems, will simply wash over the vast majority of listeners, and like an incomplete course of antibiotics will actually have a deleterious effect - further inuring us to the utter madness of so many aspects of modern life.

Of course, coming back to the actual point of the item, I fully agree with everything that was said, and can say with alternating and slightly schitzoid feelings of smugness and angst that I personally am trying to do something about the problem (for example, we have two toddlers and no TV). This probably puts me and my family in a small minority, but I would love to know how small, and also how the rest of the population is reacting to the situation. The options as I see them are:

• Understand the problems and try to do something about them
• Understand the problems and do nothing about them
• Don't understand the problems

Then of course the really big question is, how do those of us in the first group - probably a tiny minority - get everyone else to join us?

Well I've sat here for about an hour thinking about this situation and composing this short entry. I'd love to spend another hour, but it's late and I have to be up nice and early to spend another day fending off those two toddlers without the aid of a TV. More later...

1 Variety

I remember hearing on the radio not so long ago, perhaps on the excellent BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, that Heinz tomato soup, was in fact probably as nutricious as one of the apparently fresher and more natural looking chilled soups that have stormed the supermarkets in recent years, like the Covent Garden Soup Company ones. Perhaps it had something to do with lipids? In any case, I've always enjoyed a can, as it's perfect comfort food on a miserable winter's day.

So maybe, and I've made no attempt to check this out, Heinz tomato ketchup is, in the pantheon of processed foods, no great demon either, at least nutricionally. But whether it is or not, unfortunately I still have a problem with it, which is the way that some people use it to totally obliterate the taste of whatever (and in some cases I really mean whatever) else it is they are eating.

Actually, although I am somewhat concerned about hoards of teenagers failing to develop an appreciation of good food, for me the problem is more personal. One of the perpetrators of the crime of food smothering is my wife, and I find it especially galling when she is doing it to something that I have lavished time and effort on in preparing. When I put a plate of home made salmon fishcakes, shepards pie or beautiful fresh spring greens in front of her it is a racing certainty that she will, admittedly slightly appologetically, reach for the bottle.

Obviously I can see that this is more my problem than hers. But today I sought a solution. As I am currently in the throes of a tomato glut - coming from the six greenhouse and three outdoor tomato plants on my allotment - I decided to make my own tomato ketchup.

Having never made ketchup before I went straight to Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall's River Cottage Cookbook, which I thought might have a recipe, and it did.

Essentially I chopped up 2 kg of tomatoes along with a couple of onions and a red pepper and simmered them until very soft. My two year old daughter and I then went to work with the Mouli for a while before adding 60 gm of sugar, 120 mls of white wine vinegar, a pinch of mustard powder and a bag containing mace, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, bay and allspice. the recipe worked out well in every respect except for the time it took to reduce the thin sauce that came out of the Mouli to a thick gloop. Hugh suggested it might take 20-40 minutes, when in fact it took six hours!

Luckily I wasn't planning on serving it with dinner this evening. Also, and it's hard to tell as I haven't bottled it yet, but it looks like my 2 kg of tomatoes is going to produce less than one litre of sauce. Oh well, at least now when my wife smothers my food in sauce I won't think of it as another battle lost to processed food and a personal insult, and she needn't stint to avoid hurting my feelings.

Sea Trout

As a child I was an avid, or maybe even compulsive, angler. I used to ride miles on my bike to sit all day by a tiny stream catching inedible fish.

I haven't really done much fishing for the last 25 or so years, but nowadays I am very interested in catching fish to eat. Especially as we moved last December to a house within a few hundred meters of a river (actually between two rivers, the Frome and Piddle, one on either side) and only a couple of kilometers upstream from Poole Harbour, which of course adjoins the open sea.

I'd like to smoke eels. In July the river Frome teems with grey mullet, which can be almost as good eating as bass. The mud in the shallow waters of Poole Harbour is full of cockles and is just a short sea-kayak away. But perhaps, most impressively, there seems to be some prospect of catching sea trout in the vicinity.

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Where To Fish 1965-66, a guide to fishing in the rivers and lakes of the UK and Ireland. Flicking through the section on notable fish, I saw that the record sea trout at that time - 22 and a half pounds - was caught at Binden on the river Frome in 1946, just a few kilometers upstream of where I live. Even more promisingly, a fish of 21 pounds had been caught in the same place in 1918. The river has a track record.

Obviously further investigation is required, but I feel a slight frisson at even the idea of catching one of these fish.

Why this Blog?

For some time I have been thinking about creating a website offering help, advice, support and a forum, aimed at people who share my concerns and have the same ideas about tackling them. It will be called inconspicuousconsumption.com

My big concern is that western civilisations run on current capitalist models are completely unsustainable.

I can break this down into:

• The oil is running out
• The temperature is going up
• We're contemptuous of nature
  
• We're contemptuous of each other
• Most of us have already got most of the stuff we need
  

I'm not under the illusion that I can create some kind of movement that is going to make any big changes to all of this. But that doesn't mean that I personally have to go along with things the way they are.

I think that my best chance of happiness is through greater self reliance, involvement in my local community, and in helping my kids to build up the skills, knowledge and attitudes that they will need to survive in a very different world from the one we live in now. If you feel the same then maybe we can help each other along the way.

I am not a doom-monger, but neither am I very optimistic about the future. However, even if we do come up with fantastic new technolgies to solve all of the looming problems, I know that I will still feel good when:

• I don't get suckered by a brand
• I avoid a car journey or a flight
• I pass something on instead of throwing it away
  
• I get involved in projects to build up my local community
  
• I grow, find or catch my own food
  
• I spend time with my kids instead of wasting it slaving away somewhere I don't want to be to 'extend consumer choice' for someone else who probably, if they thought about it, doesn't need their choice extending anyway.

By now you probably get my drift.

I'm still working on that website, but in the meantime I'm going to post my thoughts, observations and ideas here at Inconspicuous Consumption - the blog. I may rant about obesity, second homes, processed food, building regulations, 4x4s and the school run. I may extole slow food, orienteering, allotments, lime mortar and ebay. But whatever it is that's getting my current goat, I'll try to keep what I pass on to you interesting and succinct.