Fran’s School of Hard Knocks

Live local

If we want to live sustainably, we can increase our efforts to live local.

Wherever possible – in other words, without going fifty miles out of our way, spending a whole day driving around in the car trying to find something, or parting with an overdraft-crippling amount of cash – as a household we try to avoid air-miles and motorway-miles in the sourcing of our food. We also try to avoid and reduce our use of palm oil, refined goods, soft drinks and plastic-wrapped produce. And generally to reduce our reliance on those things that we think we need, but which, actually, are surprisingly unhealthy, un-necessary and expensive. Personally, I do try to avoid refined carbs, sugar and caffeine but I can’t realistically place such restrictions on others: I simply recognise that, as the main cook and bottle washer in our house, I can certainly influence what we purchase and eat.

It is ironic that, whereas a hundred years ago, a diet of wholemeal bread, brown rice and cabbage was seen as crude and primitive, nowadays plain, whole, home-produced food is seen as highly desirable – think of artisan bakeries and health food shops – and comes at a premium both in terms of cost and the time and human labour expended in producing and sourcing it.

In “living local” I also consider alternative modes of getting around: the bus instead of the car, the train instead of the plane. I have reason to be very grateful to airlines – and I do sympathise with their plight in the current economic slowdown – but without them, I’m sure that alternative arrangements would have been possible and I would have been reconciled to travelling less. As an easily accessible way of getting from A to B, I have made use of flying, which for longer journeys is often less expensive than train travel. With flying falling slightly out of favour, might rail fares reduce?

A recent and peculiarly disjointed news bulletin has me thinking with fresh urgency about the difficulties that arise in making consistent, national policy decisions in response to the climate emergency. Three headlines, all delivered without any ironic inflection, the first about the battle to construct a third runway at Heathrow; the second, about the impact of the coronovirus in shrinking the global economy; and the third, about the likelihood of further flooding in areas of Britain already metres deep in water.

Since it appears very challenging for national agencies to come up with a clear, co-ordinated policy to tackle climate change, once again, the onus falls on consumers to vote with their choices. Let’s hope that our choices, and our voices for change, can make a difference.

Thanks for listening.

Please share:

Get milk delivered

We get milk delivered. And have been doing so for so long, that I can’t quite remember how we got started with this. Hubby and I come from the generation who remember the milk delivery from the milk float to almost every home in our street: glass pint bottles left on doorsteps, used, washed collected and re-used, with minimal wastage of resources.

When I realised that a milk delivery in the locality was a possibility, I mentioned it to my husband and we set it up. Yes, it is more expensive per unit – this tends to be a recurring theme in living more sustainably – but our household waste no longer includes plastic milk cartons, which require to be rinsed, flattened and put out for collection, and which tend in the meantime to leak their milky residue everywhere.

We do have marauding seagulls, cats, dogs and foxes hereabouts, but we deal with them. A seagull was piercing our milk bottle tops and smashing the glass, so now the delivery chap leaves the bottles at the top of our internal staircase for us. We have cats, but food waste recycling left out for recycling is, if double-wrapped, almost impenetrable to them. And we have foxes, who particularly covet chicken remains. Instead of trying to fend them off – they will find their way to food waste with unerringly accuracy – we now simply take our finished chicken carcass – and I mean finished! – to the foot of our hill out the back, where doubtless the local wildlife fall upon it gratefully. A bit unorthodox, perhaps, but then, all of “ethical living” might be seen as an attempt to refute our current orthodoxies for more sustainable, long-term solutions.

A thing done once is seen as challenging and daring, unusual. A thing done twice becomes easier, and a thing repeated becomes part of a new, emerging orthodoxy which will, naturally, have to be modified with time. The trick is to start somewhere and keep trying to make a difference.

Thanks for listening.

Please share:

Our use of the kettle

Continuing our look at kitchen economies and the environment, I am rather exercised by our use of the kettle every morning.

Typically, hubby will get up before me, put a lot of water in the kettle and boil it up to make himself a cup of tea. And that uses a lot of electricity. (I’m reminded of the story of the national power outage when everyone went to make cups of tea during the running of the TV series, “The Thornbirds”.)

I now get up rather earlier, chat to hubby and daughter, and, while the first boiling of the water in the kettle is still hot, pour most of the surplus into a thermos flask. Which has several obvious advantages. During the day I don’t have to boil the kettle so I save a bit of time, and steam, and I don’t scald my mouth from sipping hot beverages. I experiment with how long a standard thermos keeps water hot and am often surprised. It’s actually really easy to set this up, and quite fun to notice just how much electrical power we waste by not planning a little ahead.

In my grandmother’s day, when the kettle was boiled on the gas stove, this was never such a big deal for me. Gas is a relatively cheap, primary source of energy. Electric kettles, on the other hand, use secondary energy generated from another source: gas, coal, wind or solar.

I like hot water as much as the next person, but do we really need to boil the kettle all the time? To give another example, I used to boil the kettle before our evening meal – it was just a habit I got into – before realising that actually, we drink cold water with our evening meal – we have excellent fresh water on tap, so we can do that, here – and often, we didn’t think of hot drinks until much later in the evening. So I bought a jug for the table and filled it with cold water instead.

It’s interesting to note how often we do a thing without thinking about it…

Thanks for listening.

Please share: