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?