Friday 6 August 2010

Reasons to buy only things made from coppice.

Here are some quotes I pulled from t'internet sites to cheer you all up:

An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world's farming land "moderately or severely eroded"

Soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes, in Europe 17 times faster and in America 10 times faster.

The UN Food and Agriculture Programme believes food production must rise by 70 per cent on 2005-7 levels to cope with a world population forecast to hit nine billion in 2050

Britain's population by 2060 will increase by 25% from the current figure of just over 61 million to almost 77 million.  It currently has to import 40% of it's food.

There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year.

A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs – an average of 45 pieces per bird.

40% of the world's plankton is now dead, and is dying off at the rate of 1% per year.  This will be a bugger for carbon dioxide levels.

206,000 out of 210,000 tons of shrimp caught every year in the NE Atlantic is chucked away.

That'll do.  Every time I buy something from now on, unless it's from a sustainable source and not made from placcy, I will think very hard indeed about whether it's really needed at all.





Thursday 5 August 2010

A preserving food thought.

I have an irritating habit of rambling on about things not worth talking about over meals, which I suspect is causing my wife to wish she'd kept her earplugs in from the night before, permanently.

Typically, I say nothing to start with and just stare blankly at a random spot on the wall while bovinely chewing mouthfuls of what the packet describes as "museli" but which looks a lot like chicken mash to me.  Same ingredients, minus peas and grit.  After half a pint of tea I then feel a caffeine kick and my mouth just starts up on it's own accord without any connection to a brain, and K's eyes glaze over ten seconds later.

Anyway, I had the idea to make pickled cucumbers and had them steeping in a brine on the table.  I was to drain them and put them into vinegar with some dill, etc, and suddenly it occurred to me that after a whole summer of eating cucumbers, it would be very nice indeed to spend some time without seeing one of the bitter, tough, seedy, tasteless buggers again.  These days there are enough varieties of veg to have something fresh every day of the year, so why preserve something you've been eating for months so you can keep eating it when it's not in season?  Why not have a few special preserves of very nice things (like habanero chilli  chutney) to add to a meal of seasonal items as a condiment instead of eating another bag of frozen beans?  That way you come to appreciate new season's veg, having not had it for months from a freezer bag or something.

It is thoughts like these that make K go to work very early indeed, and work late into the night.