life with booyaa

a few people i interact with on the wonder that is the intarweb have brought this to my attention. go watch it.

the story of stuff

When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles

from 100milediet.org

love this idea, the attempt to acquire your food from within a 100 miles of home. i say acquire because many of the people who have joined the movement are growing their own and exchanging with like-minded folk. it's become, inevitably, if you think about, a replica of bygone days, with people returning to the old talents of canning, drying, cooking from scratch. the bartering and craft revivals, too, are all reminiscent of how we used to live. i love it.

i would never want to live in those days, without electricity or teh intarweb, or all the modern advances of society. i'm no luddite. but i think recapturing those values, resurrecting the forgotten arts of baking, sewing, knitting, creating and mending... they don't much fit in with our working lifestyles but i'd love to be self-sufficient and spend time growing and drying my own food, sewing my own clothes as i used to, fixing things rather than recycling them and buying new. you get the picture. it's not just about returning to the old ways, it's about recognising the need for sustainability here and now.

booyaa and i have acquired an allotment. we put our names down aeons ago and were told to expect a two year waiting list, but, less than a year later and we got a phone call from a gentle soul, apologising for things outside of her control, and inviting us to visit and choose an allotment.

we went down after work (it's a five minute bus ride from where we live) and she pointed out the available plots. we'd requested a half plot, figuring that we wouldn't know what to do with a whole plot. we are now, of course, wondering if we shouldn't have gone the whole hog. there would have been space for a patio, barbecue (not for me, i hate barbecues. where's the fun in eating half raw/half charred food with ash on it? beats me.) and, we have learned, more space between plants for ease of watering and weeding. anyhow.

our allotment was a jungle of evil weeds when we took it over. luckily joe swift is a few weeks ahead of us on gardener's world, so we're learning the tricks from him ;) we also chose a plot which is surrounded by ubergardeners. we have lionel on three sides. he works for the council services who look after the allotments and has been gardening for over 20 years. then along and down one there's malcolm, who used to show (hushed reverence) and between them they are keeping us right. and giving us spare plants left right and centre!

get stuck in to these food and nutrition-related bits and bobs i've come across recently.

shock finding that nutritional value of your food affects your health!
wired snuck in a little article about magnesium which caught my eye. not so much the magnesium but the general thrust was that nutrition is the basis of health, which i've said for aeons, though nobody seems to take it seriously enough. summarised nicely in this quote, right at the end of the article, by one of the researchers into the effect of a lack of dietary magnesium on the human body:

We're very interested in the way that you eat on a day-to-day basis can catch up to you," he said. "You can make it through the day, but you cause stress to your organs, to your body, and eventually end up promoting long-term disease.

so much for the global economy. what the world eats: shocking.
next up, a stunning look at how the world eats. it's a time magazine photo-journal of a dozen or so families around the world, clustered around their dining table/kitchen counter/mud floor with a week's worth of food. amazing. a must see. so see it. here.

mouths are demanding better quality food
entertaining video up now, by a host of mouths demanding real food. yes, i know, sounds crazy. and it is :) on youtube.

brits are a bunch of wasters
this made it to the radio 4 news so presumably i'm not the only one to be appalled. 3.6m tonnes of food are thrown away in england and wales every year. that's a phenomenal amount. and a fair chunk of it is still edible. the implication in the bbc article is that people don't know how to store food properly, throw things away because they don't know if it'll still be ok and are just plain wasteful. and it goes straight to landfill, creating unsightly and unhygienic mountains of waste, producing methane, then there's all the energy gone in to producing it, transporting it etc all gone to waste, too. outrageous. and then they say we need GM crops to sustain us. no we don't. we just need to learn to use what we've got better. i hate mindless consumerism but i'm also amazed that people can afford to be so wasteful. thank god we can now compost most of our waste. makes me feel at least i'm doing my bit.

after breakfast on saturday we headed straight off to the lottie (allotment) to discover that the wet weather had not only prodded the potatoes into rampant growth, but the dreaded weeds, too. so, it was a case of on your knees and get picking, girl.

i have to say it was a bit disheartening. we have a nasty weed called mare's tail and we know it's going to be troublesome. but when we first started on the allotment, before even thinking about sowing, we turned over the soil in minute detail and pulled every visible weed up at the roots. so, really, we hadn't expected to see them come back in such wanton profusion. anyway. the next issue is that we can't dig them up where tiny baby seedlings are coming through, as the root movement will displace the young plants. so we just have to tough it out for a while. to add insult to injury, they're looking to seed, so if we don't get rid of them soon they'll spread everywhere and not only will we have a hundred more of the blighters but our lottie neighbours will be most displeased with us.

in amongst my usual weekly offers from ocado, the grocery delivery company for waitrose supermarkets, came an email telling me all about food waste awareness week, 23-29 june 2008. intrigued, i googled to find out more and what i could do to participate - apart from the obvious. i was so disappointed to find very little info on the web, and what there is is hard to find. but at least it answered my question: i know what i can do to help, i can start by collating some resources here.

i've known about this for a while and not done anything about it. finally took the plunge and bought some. i now have a verdict to share with you.

soap nuts are a nut or pod which grows on the, wait for it, "soap nut tree" in india and nepal, and has a high saponin content - that means, basically, it exudes a soapy sap. you put half a dozen of them in with your laundry in the washing machine and the warm water encourages the release of the saponin and washes your clothes clean.

we tried a few different combinations over the weekend and found that for most clothes on a 30 degree wash you get a clean load at the end. heavily soiled whites (i managed to stain a towel with leg make-up) don't come completely clean, so you might be better off treating anything like that separately. i used a dozen drops of essential oils on the cloth bag the pods come in to scent the wash, and that was a lovely treat.

soap nuts are wildcrafted and usually fairtraded. there are no chemicals involved in your wash to go back out in to our water supply or to irritate your skin. so, all in all, they're great for the planet and good for you, too.

you can get them all over the place these days, but i bought mine here. if you decide to buy them at the funky raw shop then you should get yourself some conscious chocolate while you're at it. divine stuff.