Comfortable Compromises (Ethical Eating part Deux)

Life is full of compromises, not least when you have several conflicting desires in one specific area. I did manage to find a way of eating ethically that, while not perfect (because really, perfect is unattainable and would be dull if it were), suits me and my household well for the present.

First of all, I turned to the internet and that one modern joy that this Luddite truly appreciates - internet shopping, and found me an organic delivery company for the weekly shop. I found another company that deals with organic meat, game and rare breeds. And I found a company that sells organic grains, pulses and other dry goods and staples in some kind of bulk. Those companies are :-

Abel & Cole - weekly vegetable box and grocery delivery company

Blackface Meat Company - seasonal, organic meat, rare breeds and game

Goodness Direct - dry goods, cereals, pulses and other grocery supplies

I've had good service from all three during the past two years, but Abel & Cole do stand out as a firm that goes above and beyond the call of duty to keep their customers happy. Also, their ethics are second to none. All their vegetables are UK sourced (and that, dear readers, is my compromise on the 'Local' front) and any fruit that comes into the country - citrus, pineapples, coconuts - are shipped in, not airfreighted. Their bread and other baked goods are outsourced to local small artisan bakeries and baked to order, and they have an arrangement with a local zoo to pass on any fruit and veg past their best, so waste is at a minimum.

Now, I'm nowhere near well organised enough to get all my groceries this way, but I've managed to reach a happy medium. Almost 100% of the meat, milk, eggs and butter that comes into this house is organic - the rest is free range. I would say that 85% of all fruit and vegetables is also organic, a lot is fairtrade. Most dry goods coming in, and about half the tinned or bottled goods are organic also. Coffee and most chocolate is Fairtrade - sadly not all the tea is, because I just get through so much of it.

One thing that is undeniable - this way of eating costs more. In some parts of Europe where quality is more valuable than quantity, they do spend a lot more on food than is the UK national average, and I spend a comparable amount. I'm lucky that I can do it, and I'm well aware that a lot of people just can't. And if I can't do it this way at any point in the future, then I'll have to sit down again, and make another list of compromises. One thing won't change, though - I'm 100% committed to Humane Farming, so the only meat, eggs, butter and milk here will be Free Range as an absolute minimum. All other things are negotiable.

xxx

I Try So Hard To Be Good (Ethical Eating Part the First)

Once you start thinking that, perhaps, you should be taking more notice of the food you eat, you start reading up on the subject (or you do if you're me, at any rate). There is a plethora of articles, books and websites out there telling you where your daily bread comes from, how far it travels and how soused in petrochemicals your eventual toast and jam for breakfast is.

It gets confusing.

The terms Organic, Free Range, Locally Sourced, Fairtrade, Permaculture, Seasonal, Food Miles, Monoculture all get jumbled up until you give up and phone out for a pizza to get your head straight again.

I decided a couple of years ago, that I was going to attempt to eat and shop in a way that supported my ethical and moral beliefs. Hopefully, anyway. I sat down, read a few books and made a short list of what was most important to me.

Humane Farming
Eat organic or free range meat, eggs, dairy and fish to ensure that the animals were content, healthy and able to express natural behaviour!

Yup, that's really important to me (checks box) Organic or free range it is from now on!

Biodiversity
Buy food produced on small farms that encourage local wildlife through hedges, wetlands and fallow field systems!

Again, that's important to me (checks another box) Will be looking out for small, named producers and supporting those who work with Nature. Yay! This is easy!

Fairtrade
Buy goods for which the producers were paid a fair wage, allowing families to raise themselves out of poverty!

That's always been important! No change in habits there, then (makes note)

No Processed Food
Cut down the number of non-nutrient chemicals you ingest by cooking and baking from scratch, using only basic fresh ingredients! No unpronouncable preservatives, colours or chemical flavourings!

Hmmmm... but... butbutbut...

The first wobble of uncertainty creeps into my resolve at this point. I sometimes enjoy cooking, sometimes I don't. I always loathe washing up the kitchen afterwards. And sometimes? Sometimes I just want a pan of pasta with a jar of Sacla sun dried tomato pesto and some fried bacon. I'll be buggered if I'm making pesto from scratch every time I need comfort food!

But... cutting down the number of unnecessary preservatives I eat IS important to me. And buying less processed food will cut down on food miles also - all those ingredients had to travel to the factory after all, before travelling on to me. Gah! This being responsible lark just got a lot less fun...

But! You can buy organic pesto! And organic other things too. So it should be feasible to cut down on the processed food, but still have access to the odd jar of sauce or tin of baked beans without being bowed down with guilt and too much sodium. In theory, anyway. YAY! The Great Change in Eating Habits is still on! This is good enough news to break out the exclamation marks more than once in a paragraph!

Eat Seasonally
Cut down on unnecessary food miles! Don't expect strawberries to eat with your Christmas pudding, don't get a hankering for stuffed peppers in January!

Okay! Actually, this shouldn't be too difficult. I like Winter vegetables and I do realise that the out of season stuff that gets shipped here from other countries tends to be tasteless and very expensive. So this is something that's important enough for me to make a little extra effort. We're back on track at last. And I may secretly be pleased with the challenge of making parsnips New and Exciting week after week after wee(sob)... By Damn, I will MAKE myself pleased!

Eat Locally
Cut down even more food miles! Support your local farmers, keep your money in your local economy, keep farmland from being covered in executive starter homes and save local wildlife!

Ah...

And here, dear friends, is where we come to a screeching, grinding, sparks flying halt. Because, much as I love Yorkshire - and I really, really, really do love Yorkshire - we are not exactly weighed down with an overabundance of good food all year round. From now until February, when the rhubarb comes in, we basically produce Kale.

So, while this last is very important in my grand scheme of things (eating locally, that is. Not Kale), I needed to find a compromise. If I had a car and I could cruise the winding country lanes looking for farm shops, perhaps it wouldn't be such a show-stopper. But I can't. So "local" needs to be stretched out to cover... what? How large an area is "local" to me here in the North of England?

Airshow 2

Here be some photos of planes, for those who are interested. And a few random seagulls :) As before, some pics were taken by The Welshman, some by me - I was using my old balky point and shoot as my DSLR is on sick leave, and it shows. Sorry!

This is a Dakota...



And, here it is again



This isn't a Dakota...



and neither is this. It's a B-52 doing a single fly past, though it did do so on both days.



The F-16 pilot was performing his first season as a display pilot, and clearly loving every minute of it



Wheeeee!!!



The regular residents of the area were not impressed...

On a Wing, a Prayer, and a family sized Tub of Sunburn Soother

Sunderland International Airshow 2010

I like airshows. I wouldn't expect to, I have less than zero interest in mechanics, engineering and the collection of, or playing with, various gubbins. Well, not unless they're yarn related anyway... but I do like airshows. Most of them are hard to get to on public transport or prohibitively expensive to get in, but Sunderland is different. The displays are held over the sea, for a start off, there's a metro station about 15 mins walk away... and it's free.

So, it's on the coast, it was a semi overcast weekend, and those of you who know me will know exactly what that means. Sunburn. OOOh, yes, did I get sunburned - when I took the specs off on Saturday night, there were two little white half moons under my eyes, the rest looked like boiled lobster. Ouch. Of course, this happens at least once a year - for some reason the slight haze and cool breeze at the coast both con me into forgetting that I frazzle as easily as a small snowball dropped into the third circle of Hell.

Anyway, enough bitching and whinging. Pictures were taken. Some of the following were taken by The Welshman, used with permission and all rights retained etc...

First up, the Royal Commandos supported by HMS Winchester attempt to rid the beach of Tourists! uh, I mean, Terrorists!










Um, you keep at it, lads. I'll be sure to send you some coffee over some time in November...

Next post, some actual planes...

Photo of the Week 4

Once again we visit Leeds Canal Basin. This time we can see a wonderful juxtaposition of one of the most recent buildings in Leeds, and one of the oldest complete ones.

Bridgewater Place (also known as the Dalek) was completed in 2005 and is still the tallest building in both Leeds and West Yorkshire. It is an office / residential complex with retail units at the bottom - thus bringing one step closer the old Sci Fi standby of living, playing and working all in one building. It is a very striking building and can be seen from up to 40km away. There's a particularly good view of it coming into the railway station on my line. Linky above to wikipedia for the curious.

The building in the foreground is now also offices, but was built as a warehouse at the terminal of the Canal - spot the large door opening straight onto the water for lading from the backs of boats. It is so literally at the end of the Canal that Lock no.1, the lock connecting the Canal to the river, stands right next to it. There is a blue heritage plaque on the side (it is a listed building) which reads:

"In 1777 this robust stone building was constructed as a terminal warehouse for the Leeds Liverpool Canal. Started in 1770 the canal was finally completed in 1816 at a cost of £1,200,000 - nearly five times the original estimate"

So... Hot... Mellllttttinnnngggggg...

It's been a bit warm here recently. Just a bit. In fact, they've been predicting yet another record-breaking day here in the UK this weekend.

Seems we have one of those every year. And they say global warming is a myth ;)

Not a lot has been getting done - the humidity means the knitting yarn is binding to the needles and besides, knitting with hot sweaty hands is a recipe for felted socks. There was a massive Clean Up of House due to welcome visitors the other week, which has inspired me to try to maintain the home in some semblance of neatness. You know, like a so-called normal person? Here's hoping... Though at the moment, laying around sucking ice cubes is more attractive. Even the cats are trying to get every inch of their skin onto the cool kitchen tiles in an attempt to reach a more civilised temperature. Not that those delinquents are ever civilised.

Even the reading is suffering. There are two books on the go right now and they both need more brain power to process than my crispy fried neurons seem capable of providing.

Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin, is an account of the finding of Tiktaalik - the earliest link between fish and tetrapods yet found (tetrapods have four true limbs with arm / leg bones and hands / feet and can therefore mostly support their own weight. Fish have fins which are arranged differently and other than a few rare species, cannot support their weight. So Tiktaalik is essentially a 'missing link' between water and land animals). The book also takes the time to explain genetics and the relationship between us humans, as tetrapods, and Tiktaalik and other animals.

The Incredible Human Journey, by Alice Roberts, is about how we became human, and colonised the planet. Roberts followed the story literally, by travelling to Africa and visiting various archaeological sites, then up and out into Southern Asia. This was also filmed for a BBC series, which I did not see, not being a TV watcher. Palaeoanthropology is one of my abiding interests, so this book is fascinating to me - I had no idea that the earliest evidence of use of ochre was 164,000 years old. That is incredibly early to our eyes, considering that modern humans appeared roughly 200,000 years ago. I think that the subject has been so Euro-centric for so long, concentrating on the cave paintings and digs in France, that we've sort of assumed that it was in Europe that modern thinking first arose. But, of course, Humanity arose in Africa and those first people were anatomically identical to us, they could think like us, so why should they wait until they reached France before suddenly 'waking up'? It's a subtle kind of racism brought about by a long history of Euro-centric learning and thinking.

It must be hard to write a popular science book. Not all scientists are natural authors or communicators, and to be able to pitch the information you're imparting to just the right target audience is a very subtle skill even for a professional writer. Shubin and Roberts both have different styles and ways of communicating.

Out of the two books, I'm finding Roberts easier to read. This is probably because I'm not quite the target audience for a popular science book anyway - I'm slightly more knowledgable than the average reader and don't have a lot of patience so I find some books simplistic and grating to read. Shubin's insistence on describing the tetrapod limb as 'one bone, two bones, lotsa blobs, digits' is a case in point - the repetition makes me grit my teeth and gives the impression that the book was written for people of below average intelligence or education. Perhaps it was. Roberts seems more willing to use the more academic language with a brief overview at the beginning.

It could just be a difference in American and British publication styles - I've noticed in other genres of books that US editions seem to rely on in-text interpretations (usually in parentheses) after every instance of an unusual term or word, whereas UK editions stick a glossary in the front or back and have done with it. Both styles have their place, I just seem better able to deal with the latter.

Photo of the Week 3 - Leeds Cityscape

Leeds is an old, old city. Nobody really knows how old, though - there are some written references to a Roman garrison town which was in the area, on the River Aire by a ford, but no remains have been found to pin down the precise location.

The forest of Loidis, or Leodis, was part of the kingdom of Elmet, from the 5th to 7th centuries AD.

As you can see above, if that Roman town WAS in the same spot on the river as Leeds occupies today, there's really no hope of ever finding it. The Waterfront in Leeds has been a very busy area for a very long time.

The above photo was taken from the staircase in the Hall of Steel at the Royal Armouries Museum on Clarence Docks, overlooking the Aire. It is centered on the parish church, and shows one of the Victorian cast iron bridges in the background, the Millennium Footbridge in the foreground, and several of the apartment buildings that comprise the redevelopment of the Dockside area. It was taken in January 2010 and, let me tell you, that frozen slush you can see was murderous to walk on.

This is NOT a Knit Blog!

But, it is written by an obsessive knitter, so knitting is going to feature heavily.

I've already mentioned my sock knitting craze, and after 8 pairs of plain toe ups with short row heels, I'm currently working on my first ever patterned pair of socks. Still toe up, but I'm hoping the departure from the old and familiar is the start of a more mentally challenging creative journey. The next step will be a pair of cuff down socks, now I have a good eye for how much yarn it takes to make a pair to fit me, so I'm not fretting about running out of yarn with half a foot to go.

One thing I've learned from this project, is that Malabrigo Sock yarn deserves its reputation for gorgeous colours, but with the slightest hint of dampness it binds onto bamboo needles like it's glued there. Since I love my bamboos, and the past few weeks have been hot and humid, this has not been a project full of peace and harmony. In fact, more a project filled with profanity, threats of violence against inanimate objects, tangles and obsessive hand washing and drying (to no avail). Grateful as I am for this skein, which was a swap gift and a most thoughtful one, I don't expect to be seeking this brand out in future, unless I'm prepared to use metal needles throughout the project.

As the image also shows, I caved in to the inevitable (not gracefully) and switched to metal needles. Since I have the tension from hell, and bend my needles into something resembling emaciated bananas, metal needles do unkind things to my fingers, so I mostly avoid them.

Of course, I don't just knit socks. In fact, my creative diary is fully booked up for the foreseeable future. I have a hat for a friend, another hat and a sweater for The Welshman, a sweater for The Caver (not such a hassle, he's a skinny shortarse. Has to be to get down those pot holes), plus, at some stage, a warm shawl and a hooded jacket for me. All to be done this year. Along with more socks.

I like a challenge...


And, to those now suffering an earworm of This is Not a Love Song, by the Sex Pistols... gotcha! :)

Photo of the Week 2 - Leeds Canal Basin

Leeds became a prosperous cloth market town in the Middle Ages due to the fact that the Aire river was navigable along much of its length. Cloth and other bulky goods such as coal and limestone were gathered in from the surrounding areas into the huge warehouses along the river front owned by major merchants before being shipped onwards.

In the eighteenth century, the Leeds & Liverpool canal was built to make shipping these bulky and heavy goods over the Pennines to the port city of Liverpool possible, as well as shipping them down the Aire. It took 46 years to build in its entirety. This is the very end of the canal, the basin in Leeds where it was joined via locks to the Aire river.

This area has recently reopened after redevelopment. Sadly, this translates as 'one of the few central green spaces in the city now has a blocky ugly hotel and an apartment tower on it, with a few benches and tiny patches of grass left over to keep the public quiet'

However, many other redevelopments along the canal and river front in Leeds are a lot more sympathetic to the history of the area. Expect a great many other photos of the waterways in the future. This picture was taken from the bridge near the Canal offices, looking towards the Aire river. The new hotel is on the left.

Inherent Contradiction the First

I am a lifelong barefooter. I have wonderfully healthy feet and ankles as a result - they're broad, well shaped, not deformed from ill fitting shoes or heels, the nails are healthy. My preferred footwear for years was a good pair of hiking sandals, year round.

So, why is my time so taken up these days with the knitting of socks?

Perhaps I'm just an awkward sod.

But no. About a year and a half ago now, my trusty hiking sandals failed me. A strap broke. Being Autumn, sandals were thin on the ground (see what I did there?) so I was forced to fit my feet into shoes. Literally in years, the only shoes I'd worn had been a pair of 'high days and holy days' black heels which covered both funerals and job interviews with aplomb, and now I found myself with a pair of black Birkenstock mary janes.

I found out within 15 minutes that my normally tough feet did NOT have the required calluses to go bare in Birks, and found out within days that the commercial socks I bought were NOT fun to wear on a daily basis.

And, well, come on! Knitting is what I do. So, armed with a pattern, yarn and needles, I set out to self sufficiently clothe myself.

Eight pairs later, I have enough sock yarn stashed, and patterns bookmarked to keep me going for about 5 years, at the rate of one pair per month. And I do not knit that fast.

Self sufficiency in socks has been achieved!

And, you know something? For the past two winters, my feet have stayed warm and dry. And I end up wondering how come I didn't do this sooner? Sometimes it's okay not to be superhuman tough, it seems.

But I still call myself a barefooter. Because I'm an awkward sod.

Inaugural Photo of the Week

Ingleborough in the Peak District, taken on a changeable day in the first half of May this year.

One of the mountains that make up the Three Peaks Challenge. Along with her sisters Whernside and Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough in this picture shows everything I love about my corner of the planet. Solitude, space, a sense of monumental time passing...

The Three Peaks are limestone country, and as we all know, limestone is made of the shelly remains of sea creatures, deposited, laid down and compressed over millions of years. Now, think of the preceding sentence and look at that picture again. Sea creature shells make up that entire landscape. Look at the size of it, and think of all those countless billions of little creatures, over millions of years.

Time passing.