You are what you eat?

Two related articles that I wanted to share:

• The Guardian - Inside the food industry: the surprising truth about what you eat
• Whole Larder Love - That's a reality I'd like to see change

I'm not anti-science at all - everything we eat is chemicals and we're a bag of chemical-using biological processes - but I'd much rather eat a cake made at home using an egg from a chicken living at the bottom of our garden than one produced in a factory using "potato protein isolate" in place of the egg.

Food for thought?

No bike ride, but the veg patch gets closer

Instead of going for a ride this morning, I did some more digging. I finished digging over the second bed, made a brick pathway running between the two beds (using bricks we've found in the garden over the years), transfered some more rabbit-poo goodness into the beds and put the two wooden ends to the first bed.

Each of the two beds if 2.2m by 1.2m, so we've got about 5.25 sq m of growing space in these two beds. The old bed is 2.3 sm m and the small patch outside the back door is about 1.5 sq m. So that's about 9 sq m of growing space in the back garden.

(I did make a quick trip to work and back this afternoon, for a massive 5 mile ride...)

The Good Life

We made a start on our veg patch today. We dug up turf from the side of the house, roughed up the "soil" underneath and then shovelled on the soil from where the rabbit pen used to be; seven years worth of rabbit poo and bark chips have made brilliant soil! We've returfed the old rabbit area with the grass we dug up.

We finished digging for one 1.2m by 3m bed today and I'm going to put in another tomorrow. There's space for another two or three the same size if we need them. We've got a small area outside the back door we can use for herbs and salad leaves, plus the area we used this year for tomoatoes and sweetcorn. I'm going to build a wooden edge for the beds, using the wood from the small rabbit pen.

E was a brilliant help, finding worms to put in the beds to make the soil better. L took off her shoes and socks and wandered about in the dirt barefoot.

I'll try to snap some photos tomorrow, but I'm also going to try and get out on the bike; I'm in danger of not hitting triple figures this month!

Edit: I just worked out that I've only done 43 miles so far this month. I'll be doing another 18 over Monday and Tuesday next week, plus 5 on Saturday to get to West Park and back. That's 66 miles, so I need to do 34 miles tomorrow at least.

Stop shopping... Or the planet will go pop...

'Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet,' begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser and all-round environmental guru.

'Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.'

According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the government on sustainability, we have become a generation of shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be. Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview with The Observer, that merely switching to 'ethical' shopping is not enough. We must shop less.

The Observer: Stop shopping... Or the planet will go pop...

Some really good links at the bottom of the article too, and mention of a TV programme: Big Ideas that Changed the World: Tuesday 10 April, 7.15pm, Channel Five

New purchases, and a sale

(Originally published on Bike Darlington - The Darlington Cycling Campaign blog.)

Today we became a seven-bike family (four of them are mine). My wife got a free bike from her brother which has been sat in his garage for a couple of years. It fits her and is serviceable enough, although it's not the best bike in the world.

Since she wanted to be able to take out youngest around and about on it, we were thinking of a rack-mounted child seat, but when we was Halfords were selling the two-child trailer for 30% off, we bought that instead. This has the advantage that we can fit both kids in, as well as shopping and toys, and it seems pretty waterproof. It also converts very easily into a pushchair, which will come in useful.

We've had a play with it in the street, but not taken it on a longer ride yet. Once we put four stone of children in you can feel it but it's much easier to pull than riding a bike with heavy panniers fitted, which is what I expect a seat would feel like.

Tomorrow is the big test, when she takes out eldest to the town centre. Thinking about the route has shown to us again that there are still major gaps in the cycle network; pavements will be ridden on at times. If "The Magnet problem" is ever solved we will have an almost traffic-free route from home to town, but for now when faced with a choice between riding on a badly laid out bit of road with the cars or on the pavement we'll be choosing the pavement option I'm afraid.

So, that's the new purchase, what's the sale? Our car. We hardly use it but it costs us a fortune, so a week on Saturday it will make its final journey with us, to some friends in Leeds who are buying it off us. After that we will be car-free.

We've been lucky in that we made decisions which mean we had already minimised our car use: we chose to buy a house close to our family, I only applied for jobs I could get to on public transport, we live near to local shops (and only a ten minute walk from Asda), and we tend not to drive unless we have to. We'll see how it goes, and will report back here.

Just call us Tom and Barbara

Had a brilliant family day today. We walked to the shops, with E and L riding their bikes, to get a WiFi adapter for the old PC I salvaged from work and a new toilet seat. When we got home, S cut the grass while me and L did some gardening and E slept.

We moved a couple of plants from the back garden to the front to make room for a small (2m x 0.7m) vegetable plot. I used a left over piece of wood to make it into a slightly raised bed, and laid down the cardboard box my Solitude came in as a weed-suppressing mat and covered it in 3 or 4 inches of compost from our composter.

The idea is that the cardboard stops the grass and weeds below from growing up through the new soil on top, which we use for growing veg. After a while the card will rot down, but by then the weeds below will also have rotted. I saw it on TV on It's Not Easy Being Green last year and looked it up online. S was sceptical, but it actually looks OK since you can't see the cardboard.

We've not planted anything yet, but will be growing peas, tomatoes, salad leaves and other stuff.

When E woke up, she helped for a while, then S, E and L made dough for pizzas and bread. We had the pizzas for tea, and will have the bread for breakfast tomorrow.

Brilliant day!

Splashing

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan (and an annotated summary of the article at Megnut) [via Kottke]

Acorn Coffee

The Howies blog has adetails on how to make acorn coffee. Might have to give it a go and feed it to someone unsuspecting...

It's the end of the world as we know it...

...but everyone seems to feel fine.

He wants us to buy hybrid cars and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. He proposes many other things like that—including walking and biking “wherever possible�—baby steps in the right direction. Add up all the baby steps and, sure, it’s a tick in the right direction, sort of like getting people to move their beach chairs a yard higher up on the sand as the tsunami approaches. It’s a major political achievement to upset all those dozing sunbathers and make it happen. Think of the sacrifice: drinks will spill and hundreds of square inches of mayonnaise surface will be fouled with sand. But tens of lives could be saved.

A Convenient Lie at Clever Chimp is quite a depressing post about just how screwed we potentially are. Everyone who drives should be made to read this.

Today I had to take a heavy and awkward package to the post office for delivery to one of my out-of-town customers, at the same time I was watching my daughter. Juggling errands and child-rearing is one of the most commonly cited examples I hear for why the bicycle/car-free lifestyle isn't realistic.

While A Day in The Life at Oil is For Sissies is a bit more optimistic.

I'm not sure what point I'm making. Just read the links.

Doh Boy

Add bread to the list of stuff not to buy at the supermarket:

Doh Boy from Howies.

His name is Doh Boy and his mission is to take the fat back out of bread. Doh Boy reckons ‘we don’t kneed it’. The only reason it is there is to help make bread quicker to make and make it last longer on the shelf. Doh Boy thinks this technique (called Chorleywood) has made fatter profits for those who make and sell it. But it has also made us all a little fatter as a result.

Stealth fat is a growing problem. These are the fats that we don’t know are there. We expect there to be fat in a chocolate bar. But we don’t expect 3 slices of some breads to have as much fat as that chocolate bar.

Grow your Own

Firstly, add four pinches of insecticide. Two pinches of fungicide. And two measures of herbicide.

After picking, store in conditions that reduce the oxygen from 21% to 3% and replace with the corresponding amount of CO2 . This is perfect for stopping the aging process so the salad still appears fresh, but it can't stop the goodness being lost with each day that passes.

Keep in this state for anything up to a month.

Then take some chlorine, 50mg per litre should do it, a measure the equivalent of 20 times the strength of your local swimming pool. And gently rinse.

Then simply bag, ready for sale.

- From Howies

And that's why we'll be growing our own salad leaves this year.

We're also going to be getting most of our veg delivered by a local Veg Box company, Farm Around North. They deliver to our area on a Wednesday. We'll be getting a standard veg box and a standard fruit bix at first, then seeing how things go.

Darlington Farmers' Market

Darlington Farmers' Market is third Friday of every month:

Darlington
Certified
Location: Market Place
Town: Darlington
3rd Friday Monthly
9:00 am to 4:00 pm

From NAFM.

Organic and local

We're trying to be healthier and wiser.

We're only buying meat from our local butcher; it's all locally farmed, well cared for, properly butchered and tasty gorgeous. We take our Ellie (2) to the butchers with us; she knows ham, pork, sausages and gammon all come from pigs, and that mince and beef come from cows.

At the supermarket, we try to buy organic where we can. Just about all of our meals are cooked from scratch, without even using sauces from jars. We're looking into a local organic box vegatable service, so we can buy even less from the supermarket. Even food that seems like a good choice at the supermarket is questionable; the salad bas and fruit are generally covered and washed in all sorts.

This summer, we're going to try growing some salad leaves from seed in growbags, and maybe some potatoes in pots, and tomatoes.

Ellie (usually) eats whatever we're having. When Libby (4 months) starts on solids, we'll be giving her selected bits of our meal blended up, rather than jars or preprepared food. We all sit at the table together to eat, and the TV is turned off. Sarah has started baking with Ellie every weekend, making things for our teas and my packed lunches.

Our car sits on the front for much of the week. It gets used occasionally on a weekend, and on a Monday; very rarely at any other time. We're going to get a smaller car next time, or maybe not bother replacing it. I ride my bike to work, Sarah and the kids walk just about everywhere.

I'm going to start putting up some links and things here related to all this, and photos of the veggies and food.