Purpose

mumsnetBack along, my family and I swapped a house for a three-acre field in Devon and a leaky caravan where we lived off-grid for two years. Sadly, we failed to get the planning permission we needed to stay. We are now back within four walls, with a proper loo and everything in a cottage in Dartmoor. So this is now a blog about living ethically amid a fabulous landscape with our home educated kids while we adjust to being 'normal' - for a while... and what we plan to do with our land next

Wednesday 16 April 2014

It is meat (and write so to do)

Firstly, I feel I should apologise for the headline. I have been told that if I want to increase the amount of search engine hits I have, I should make my headlines actually describe what I am writing about - but where would be the fun in that?

Anyway,  three weeks of my ban under the belt and I have discovered a fitting use for plastic wrapping.

My new butcher has very thoughtfully gone out of his way to help me, despite the slight sense I get from him that he thinks I am potty. I say new butcher, because it is nigh impossible to buy chicken or meat that doesn't come in plastic from a supermarket. Indeed it was four pork chops in a veritable boat of plastic that contributed to my ban in the first place.

I had thought meat would be a problem and wondered how people managed in days gone by. Then I had a vision of Lance-Corporal Jones (right), the butcher in Dad's Army, wrapping his wares in newspaper. It was possible for him to do that, partly because there was a war on, partly because health and safety rules hadn't yet banned newspaper as suitable wrapping material, and because people just shopped differently in those days, buying local and frequently.

So I rang Martins, my nearest butchers, and have now switched to buying my meat from them. This feels much better all round, it is a local business that supports local farms. The prices are also competitive, so I didn't feel I was straying too far from my plan to try and shop 'normally' without resorting to expensive high-end shops.

'This takes me back,' said the chap on the counter as he attempted to wrap up some chicken thighs in greaseproof paper. It wasn't going well, they kept spilling out. Eventually he managed to contain them and moved on to the chops. The queue behind me was starting to lengthen.

'This is how we did it when I started out,' he continued. It would be nice to write here that a look of nostalgia crept over his face, but it didn't. 'Plastic bags are a lot better,' he said. He was trying to stuff pet mince into paper bags as he said this, and I felt he had a point.

Back home I attempted to place the sloppy paper bags in the freezer feeling the need to process them quickly before they became saturated. This was a mistake. A little more thought with how I stored them might have helped when it come to defrosting. I will spare you the details of how I managed to separate paper bag from the gloopy pet mince, but it is fair to say the mince won.

The irony is that now when I bring meat home, I decant it into plastic tubs before putting it in the freezer. The other irony is that the bags the butcher normally uses are biodegradable, which makes all the effort in this direction feel a little irrelevant. Still, I shall soldier on. Don't panic!

Tuesday 1 April 2014

All gone teats up

The wheels are already falling off my 60-day plastic packaging ban.

I thought they might, somehow.

I moved swiftly to implement the ban, partly because I nearly always favour the bull-in-a-china-shop approach to life, but also because I felt that if I prepared for it, I would cheat. I chose 60 days, because it is long enough for me to run out of things like pasta, shampoo and floor cleaner - had I given myself a little more notice I might have felt tempted to do a little stocking up since the ban does not include using up existing plastic-packaged commodities.

Unfortunately, the first thing I ran out of was rubbish bags. Since they come in black plastic or, er, black plastic, I bowed to the inevitable and bought the most environmentally friendly sacks I could find.  But I still felt cross. I comforted myself by noticing that the wrapper around them was paper. So in a very disingenuous way, I didn't completely flout the terms of my ban. Although, of course, I did really. 

Next up was the very thing I thought would be one of the most problematic: milk. At first, I thought I had found an absurdly easy solution. Our village shop stocks organic milk provided courtesy of the cows of Riverford Dairy in Totnes, which comes in cardboard cartons.

But then I became suspicious about how the cartons fail to become soggy. So I rang up Riverford and discovered the cartons have a very fine film of plastic on the inside. They are fully recyclable, but don't quite fulfil the terms of my ban.

'Problematic'
Barry, the operations manager at Riverford, very decently suggested I try to find someone who will sell me milk direct from a farm. We chatted for a while about the state of the milk industry. The sad fact, he said, is that in the drive for cheap non-organic milk the cow has come to be seen as a rather problematic inconvenience.  I admired his passion and commitment and decided I could do worse than sticking to Riverford milk for now.

But disaster struck on day two. I discovered we had run out of milk while actually in the process of making tea - actually in the process, mark you. I sent the girl child to the shop but she came back empty handed because all the cartons had gone. I gazed in panic at the the five cups lined up on the work surface. Some households run by clockwork and on organisation - ours runs on tea. I was due to leave the house for several hours and couldn't begin to contemplate how ugly the mood would turn if I left it milkless.

'That's plastic,' said Sam at the shop as I sheepishly bought some semi-skimmed. 'I know,' I said in anguish 'it's an emergency.' Later, I headed for a supermarket where I was sure I had seen old-fashioned glass bottles of milk. There were indeed bottles that resembled such a thing, but when I reached for one I discovered it was plastic, as was everything else on the milk shelf.

I gave up.

The next day I knocked on the door of a village farm to ask if they would sell me a jug of milk. 'Not any more,' said the farmer's wife regretfully. 'It's illegal now.' She and her husband, it turned out, started selling milk in 1946. It didn't surprise me; you can't move in this village for sprightly octo- and nonogenarians. She explained that they gave up dairy farming years ago - partly because the price of milk made it uneconomical, but also because of the ever growing list of regulations.

This was confirmed by Frances, a local dairy farmer. 'To sell green-top [unpasteurised] milk, you have to jump through hoops and more hoops,' she said. 'What if I can find someone who pasteurises it on the their farm,' I asked. 'You can try,' she said, 'but they will probably bottle it in plastic.'

'What if I take my own container along,' I asked. 'Well,' she said doubtfully 'there are all sorts of health and safety rules around containers.'

'Oh, for pity's sake,' I said 'surely if I want to live dangerously by using my own jug, I should be allowed to.'

 'Where do you get your milk,' I asked Frances.  'Straight from the cow.' she said with a grin.

Well, I guess that cuts out the bloody plastic.