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This is another huge and complex issue. Where to start? I’ll kick off with general topics, then get down to the nitty gritty things like meat eating and organic production.
The most pervasive subject is that of getting food, any food, to your table or, for the majority of us, to your lap in front of the television. Food is grown in one place and transported to another for sale. For processed or packaged food, there is often intermediary transport to the washing, cutting, cooking and packaging plants. There can also be additional trips to warehouses and distribution centres. Food one way or another accounts for 30% of road haulage in the UK, costing about £9,000,000,000 a year. The general rule seems to be that the larger the shop you buy your food in, the further it has travelled. So supermarket food tends to have gone further than greengrocer and butcher food.
There is also the packaging: the more processed and generally mucked about your food, the more packaging it comes in. Again, greengrocers and butchers tend to use less packaging than supermarkets and they are far easier to talk to, so you can ask them to give you exactly what you want with no packaging.
It’s worth noting that between 10% and 50% of the cost of food is in the packaging – you are paying for the food industry to advertise and market their products to you. Packaging also accounts for about 3,200,000 tonnes of waste a year. That’s a lot of rubbish and at present only a small amount of it is recycled. Most things can be recycled, but a lot are not. The best for recycling is paper and cardboard, then comes glass. Next come cans, especially the easy recyclable aluminium and steel ones. Some plastics are very hard to recycle, and it appears that many plastic drinks bottles fall into that category. Worse than plastic are things like tetra packs, as their mixture of laminated materials are extremely tricky, but there are now some recycling facilities for these around the country. Remember to squash things down before putting them in the bin, as they need to the trucked to the recycling factory and the less room each item takes up the fewer trucks will be needed. This is ably demonstrated in this video.
Fresh food, preferably sold loose and unwashed, will have taken a lot less energy to get to you than processed food. It will not have had to travel to be mechanically or chemically washed, peeled, plucked, pummelled, salted, sugared, cooked, irradiated, indoctrinated, inebriated and any number of other processes that we are told very little about. The fresh stuff is also likely to be far higher quality food in the first place.
So generally speaking it is best to buy locally grown, non-processed, non-packaged food. I would also add that buying from local shops or farmer’s markets is better than supermarkets, but that is probably not the most balanced opinion ever. I would also highly recommend getting a weekly veg-box delivered to your door (see links below), as the organic veg is often grown in the UK and the seasonal variety leads to some culinary delights. It is also surprisingly cheap.
Please follow the links below for in-depth discussions on topics such as organic food and meat eating.
What to do
Food is responsible for about 31% of the European Union’s domestic contribution to climate change. It is therefore well worth changing to more sustainable ways of eating.
It is also worth noting that about 50% of all the food grown or raised for the UK market is wasted - whether on the farm, by supermarkets or by us. The first two will take lobbying to change (unless we stop shopping at supermarkets & head for real markets instead), but we can make a big, instant difference by changing our habits. To this end, Green Planet has some good tips about how to use up all your odds & ends (albeit in a USA stylie).
There are some foods that are only available in certain forms or places, and none of us want to return to the Dark Ages of turnip soup seven days a week. However, where possible I would recommend the following:
- Buy fresh, local food and cook yourself (finding this food is easier in local shops and farmer’s markets).
- Eat seasonable vegetables where possible.
- Eat more vegetables and less meat, but enjoy higher quality meat when you do. Go for free range, organic or RSPCA Freedom Food.
- Eat some fish, but make it sustainable and varied.
- Eating organic is generally a good idea.
- Try and make sure you don’t buy unsustainable palm oil in your food.
For more discussion, please visit the Forum. For good food and all the related paraphernalia, please visit the Shop.
Other Sites
Big Barn has a directory of local food producers that is easy to search. It also has some interesting recipes, so you can make the most af any grub you end up buying.
Organic fruit and veg boxes delivered to your door:
Able & Co deliver organic fruit and veg, organic and free range meat, good fish, booze, vegan stuff, dried goods and just about everything else needed for cooking.
Organic meat for occasional or monthly purchases from the Well Hung Meat Company. Meat should be hung in a cold room to get properly tender and tasty, so Well Hung Meat is a good thing. For instance, beef should be hung for three weeks as a refrigerated carcass before being cut up and eaten.
Organic or seriously free-range beef (mainly) from Pampas Plains. Note that the transporting from Argentina takes almost no additional energy than just hanging the meat refrigerated for three weeks, which is how long the ship takes to get here.
Also check out 10 Top Tips for Eating Fish by the World Wildlife Fund (now specific to Wales, for some reason) and the Recycling Bank Locator.
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