Eco Worrier - Times Online - WBLG

Ten unexpected benefits of being self sufficientish

Yes, that’s the good humoured, tolerant brand of self sufficiency promoted by Andy and Dave Hamilton on their website and now in their book.
I spent an afternoon with the twins at their home in Bristol last week and learnt about the most brutal slug-slaying method known to man and why everyone can make a few lifestyle tweaks to become more self sufficientish. The interview will be in Body&Soul this Saturday. In the meantime, here are the boys with their top tips on becoming self-sufficientish (clicking here should take you to a video), and below are some benefits of their lifestyle you might not have thought about.

1/ Being self-sufficientish is generous spirited. There isn’t enough land in Britain for everyone to become properly, pig-in-the-yard self-sufficient, a la John Seymour, the father of self sufficiency. So, adopting a few measures, such as growing your greens or making your own dandelion cough syrup, is a more sustainable way of letting a greater number of people have a go.

2/ You’ll save a lot of money, at a time when rising fuel and food prices are causes for concern. Andy reveals that his total earnings a few years ago were £5,000. On this, he lived and ate very well. Thanks in part to his commitment to Freecycle, skip-diving (never passing a skip without having a poke around), growing his own food, mending things rather than chucking them, cycling and walking rather than driving and buying clothes in charity shops.

3/ Your brain works better away from a desk. Andy and Dave’s idea of a work meeting is to head to the woods and pick some wild garlic. “It helps you to think, much better than speaking over the phone,” they say. I quite agree, sometimes I have to move to think. I’ll sit at my desk and stagnate for hours, then trot off to make a cup of tea, and bingo, I’ve got it.

4/ It’s an affordable way of eating delicious, organic vegetables. That is, if you’re not keen on coughing up a fiver for a bag of carrots and a cabbage at a farmers market. This is was why Dave started growing vegetables as a student. He persuaded his landlord to let him cultivate the garden. (And yes, they are delicious: Dave gave me a bagful of purple sprouting broccoli from his allotment. For the past few evenings, I’ve been steaming it – both florets and stalks – and eating it with a wedge of butter and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. It is truly a gourmet vegetable and I'm planning to plant some myself this weekend.)

5/ You don’t have to move to the countryside. Dave and Andy say the self sufficientish lifestyle is well suited to towns. There’s great urban foraging potential (here’s a thread about foraging in parks); more desirable stuff in skips; good public transport and you can still go to the cinema and find pubs full of different kinds of people.

6/ You end up absurdly healthy. Just take a look at Dave’s budget food section. Yes, it’s cheap. Yes, the recipes are simple to make. Ok, so it is a bit studenty. But just imagine how healthy you’d be on a diet of dahl, broth and cous cous.

7/ It promotes a happy lifestyle. “Just spending ten minutes in the garden or making your own soup for supper will make you feel better than half an hour in front of an X-box,” says Andy, and I believe him.

8/ You’ll be at the forefront of a trend. You might think that your moth eaten cardigans and second hand clothes are an embarrassment to your children/husband/friends but actually – and you can tell them this – they are part of a new fashion trend called chic-eco (pronounced chico). Or so says Dave and Andy (but it could be a Bristol thing).

9/ It doesn’t matter if you’re not perfect. Don’t think that there’s no point trying to be green because you’ve blown it by owning a car or flying on holiday. Everyone has weak points. Andy feels bad about taking taxis and he confesses to eating meat, which has a heavy carbon footprint. Dave still smokes, even after writing this handy guide to quitting, and he feels especially bad about it because tobacco is a heavily sprayed crop with a bad record for exploiting workers.

10/ You can wow your friends with nettle haggis dinner parties. It tastes nicer than it sounds, apparently.

Eggs that are shedding their packaging, or some of it.

Never before have so many multinational confectionary retailers harked on about cardboard content, plastic packaging and recycling potential. It’s good news I suppose, but I’m not fully on board.

Yes, it’s a step in the right direction that Mars is reducing the amount of plastic in its Easter eggs and is committed to using recycled cardboard - a measure that it estimates will save 12,000 trees - but it has only reduced the thickness of its plastic inserts by 10 per cent. Let's not get too excited. Looking at the press release and the company’s new eco logo, see bottom of post, you would think it had found a way of avoiding the use of plastic altogether.

Then there’s Cadbury’s unboxed eco-egg, a foil-wrapped hollowed out egg. But has anyone seen one? Please tell me you have, because all I can find is the usual rows of plastic and cardboard encased eggs, each one marketing a different chocolate bar.*

Meanwhile Sainsbury’s promises that all its “boxed Easter eggs have reusable, recyclable or home compostable packaging.” I’m wondering how to reuse the plastic insert, or is it supposed to be recyclable? And surely that depends on your council - some accept only PET plastic bottles. I'm also wondering if I'm being a party pooper, about as welcome as a fox at a gathering of Easter bunnies...

I still think that buying little eggs, such as these Fairtrade ones from Divine or these from Green&Blacks, is best. Then you can have all sorts of fun filling china egg cups with them or hunting down alternative ways of packaging them. An empty egg box is perfect or an old yoghurt pot or olive pot, decorated with ribbon or wrapping paper.

If that sounds too much like hard work, go for a Booja Booja chocolate egg (a collection of them is shown in the picture above). It’s shell is a thing of beauty as well as being reusable. It is a handpainted gift box made by artists in Kashmir. The chocolate inside is organic, vegan, dairy-free and gluten-free, so it’s good for you too. Sort of.

* UPDATE: I take it back. I've found them. Very sweet looking too, but still outnumbered by the normal eggs in my local Waitrose.

Darling's plastic bag charge: should we be pleased?

With politicians, it’s never easy, is it? They never come out with it, pure and simple. There are always clauses, exceptions, and promises to reassess in a few months. With plastic bags, what I wanted was direct action, right now. For too long we have pussy-footed around our plastic bag problem.  We should  be joining Ireland - where there has been a charge on plastic bags since 2002.

For here is a rare thing: a green policy that the majority of people agree with. Unlike the rise in the price of fuel or taxing gas guzzlers, a charge on plastic bags is universally supported and anticipated. So, while I salute our Chancellor for promising at least something, his pledge to charge retailers from the start of next year is disappointing. I can’t help feeling that he could have been bolder.

Because, you see, there’s a sub-clause. What many people will choose to ignore is the bit after Darling’s promise. That the charge will begin next year only if the Government “has not seen sufficient progress on a voluntary basis to cut the amount of single-use carrier bags.” So it is dependent on another Government decision, another load of paper work, more talking about it, rather than doing it.

I’ve read enough press releases from supermarkets broadcasting news of their latest plastic bag initiative to make me glaze over whenever I see one. They talk plans to change things in the future; they conduct trials in a handful of stores, but not one of them has taken the difficult route and announced a charge.

That Darling’s budget has a light green hue, I will not deny. I’m impressed by his measures to combat gas-guzzlers and his £26 million commitment to the Green Homes Service to advise consumers on how to reduce domestic carbon emissions, waste and water consumption. This is why in my Body&Soul column this week, he is up for the weekly eco-angel award - unlike Boris Johnson who is a strong contender for eco-sinner, given his opposition to the £25 congestion charge for cars in high CO2 emission bands. But I regret his caution on plastic bags. Had he been bolder, it would have won him cosiderable support. Not least from the eco worriers of this world.

How to darn a sock

A bit like with cooking, reading how to do something crafty can be off-putting as it’s difficult to imagine yourself doing it. But as this video shows, it’s easy if you watch someone else doing it. Which is why this is a jolly useful guide to darning a sock that should encourage all of us to stop binning our socks just because our big toe peeps out and whip out the darning mushroom instead. The video, made by ethical textile retailer Green Fibres, has already been viewed over 5,000 times. Good to know that granny chic is alive and well.

For me, darning a sock is fun because it’s an excuse to sit on the sofa and watch bad TV, plus you get to feel virtuous and fifties house wife - or husband - ish, and I'd never consider doing it without making myself a hot chocolate first, for sustenance.

According to Green Fibres: “Most socks are made from conventional cotton, which is the world's most polluting crop, and that nearly a quarter of all insecticides – mainly damaging organo-phosphates – produced globally each year are poured and sprayed over cotton plants.  The damage to the environment and to poor cotton farmers around the world is massive. A World Health Organisation report estimates that up to 40,000 farmers die from pesticide poisoning each year.”

You will need:
A darning mushroom (you can buy one here or you could improvise with a plastic bottle or a lightbulb – this’ll make sense when you watch the video)
Some darning thread
A large needle
A sock with a hole in it

Eco-cheat: still not ready to take up needle and thread? You can buy organic socks, certified by the Soil Association from Green Fibres and Natural Collection

How to make your own muesli

Call me a sandal-wearing hippie, I don’t care. You can even call me a Guardian reader and I won’t take offence. The fact is that homemade muesli rocks. And I’m super fussy about breakfast cereals. Too much sugar in some; others are strangely salty, and I don’t like large lumps of fruit that go soggy in the milk.
Having discussed this at length in the office, it is clear that everyone has a different muesli criteria, as well as a different way of saying the word. The best option is undoubtedly to make your own. This way you can save money - the most expensive packet of muesli I can find is Rude Health’s Ultimate Muesli (£5.95 for 500g) - and guarantee that your morning bowl is just the way you like it. 

Instructions:

1/ First you need to invest in a container. An air-tight dispenser like this one from Lakeland or this one from John Lewis is perfect for the job.

2/ Some people like to toast their oats first. This involves spreading them out on a baking tray and grilling them until you can smell something delicious. Or you could roast them in the oven for 20 minutes.* It sounds like a faff, but it’s worth it. They become firmer so you end up with a less soggy final product. *You could easily toast your oats in a cooling oven to save turning it on especially for this purpose.

3/ Larger oats make better muesli. I like these jumbo organic oats because they taste delicious.

4/ Consider spicing up your dry mix. As well as plain rolled oats, you could add barley flakes, oatmeal or oatbran to your dry mix.

5/ The mixing process. Once you’ve got your oats in a large mixing bowl, add chopped fruit, nuts, seeds and anything else you fancy eating for breakfast. Mix thoroughly. Proportions depend on taste. I use roughly three cups of oats to one cup of mixed nuts, seeds and fruits.

6/ Here are some content ideas: raisins, chopped apricots, chopped dates, dried banana, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, chopped walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, flaked almonds, desiccated coconut and cashews. Variety is crucial.

7/ If you prefer to follow an exact recipe. I like this one from Anthony Worrall Thompson, although you wouldn’t necessarily have to soak the mixture in apple juice as he suggests.

8/ Cheat with the seeds. To avoid a complex process of mixing, which invariably ends up with hemp seeds scattered over the kitchen floor, I buy a ready mixed packet like this one from Holland & Barrett.

9/ No need to add sugar - especially if you’ve used some dried fruit. And by not adding it, you have the perfect excuse to drizzle maple syrup, honey or a sprinkle of brown sugar on your bowl. 

10/ Pour it into your air-tight container and wait until breakfast. As well as eating with milk, you could soak it in apple juice the night before and add a dollop of yoghurt at the last minute.

As if further evidence were needed of the benefits of making your own, Canada’s Heart and Stroke Foundation has included a homemade muesli recipe as part of its health information.

T-shirt of the week

Here's another cheeky t-shirt from organic clothing label Tonic. Whatever you might think about Bruce Forsyth, you can’t deny that his 80th year (celebrated on 22nd Feb) deserves commemoration. If we can do this in ethical fashion, all the better. 

This isn’t Tonic’s only take on cultural icons. There's Eastender’s Dot Cotton here and don't overlook The Hoff.

Since my family is always moaning about the disadvantages of scoffing too much chocolate over Easter, I'm planning to buck the trend and offer each of them an Easter t-shirt.

Here are a few more trendy and ethical t-shirts.

Among others in its latest catalogue, check out Howies' Tap Water is Cool slogan t-shirt. Find it here

Magic Bean is new to the eco t-shirt scene, but I love it's More Trees Less Bush t-shirt, made from bamboo, the sustainable material of the moment.

And how could I ignore the doyenne of slogan t-shirts? Click here to see Katherine Hamnett's range of t-shirts for men. And here for women's - not forgetting her vest dresses with uncompromising messages such as Clean Up or Die.