ONE FAMILY'S REVOLT AGAINST EVERYDAY POLLUTION When a beanbag sent
thousands of polystyrene balls flying through her garden, Kate
Hughes decided to make a break with the throwaway society. She and
her husband transformed the lives of their ordinary family of four.
They ditched plastic, shunned supermarkets, cooked all meals from
scratch, bought only second-hand clothes, and made their own
cleaning agents. Then they went deeper - greening every aspect of
their home life, from their gas and electricity to their car, from
their money to their IT. The Hugheses have achieved the 'zero
waste' goal of sending nothing to landfill. Now they are going even
further... Told with refreshing humility and humour, this
eye-opening story shows that a well-lived life doesn't have to come
wrapped in plastic. Packed with handy tips, it reveals much about
what makes a fulfilling modern family - and how readers can empower
themselves to preserve the climate, forests and seas. And,
heart-warmingly, how that can lead to a more relaxing life. Extract
We were starting to realise that making the journey was leading to
more questions than answers, more grey areas, misinformation and
conflicts of interest than we ever imagined - and that was just
about food. We hadn't even got started on anything else that came
into our home yet. Take a single, uncontroversial ingredient, let's
say peppers. Should we buy them grown in a UK hothouse or ones
trucked in from Spain? What if the Spanish ones are organic? Or the
only UK option is wrapped in plastic? Which is better for the
environment? Or at least less harmful? If we ever want to eat
peppers again without negatively impacting the planet in some way
are we going to have to grow our own? Because self-sufficiency
wasn't really part of the plan... All we could do was dive in and
hope we didn't drown in the detail as we swam around looking for
food that worked for us and the planet. We started with the problem
of transport because food mileage was a well established measure
that meant we could actually make some decisions based on numbers
for once. Or, at least, we thought we could. Three quarters of all
the fruit and veg now eaten in the UK is imported. Almost all the
fruit we eat has been grown overseas, and soft fruit in particular
is flown in. It turns out that the UK only produces half of all the
food that is consumed on these shores - which is somewhat
patriotically disconcerting as well as practically unsustainable.
One of our family stories is the recollection of the first banana
my great uncle ever tasted after WW2, shipped from the other side
of the world. We were very aware that bananas came from overseas.
But the fact that such a vast proportion of the apples eaten in
Britain are imported from South Africa, or at best France, when the
fruit grows very well in the orchards you can see from near our
house seemed to be absurd. The obvious solution appeared to be only
to buy food produced not just in the UK but as close to us as
possible. That immediately threw up two questions. The first we
were becoming increasingly familiar with. Were we really prepared
to give up things we took great pleasure in for the sake of an
unquantifiable, but undoubtedly minuscule effect? Or even just to
settle for not adding to the runaway levels of damage that our
disconnected food shop was causing each and every day? But the
second question was whether a straightforward food mile approach
was even a worthwhile aim. When I put the question of food miles to
Riverford Organic Farmers, the sustainably produced veg box people,
they told me that for most of the year our carbon impact would be
smaller if we bought organic tomatoes trucked in from Spain than
those heated thanks to fossil fuels in a UK hothouse. That means
the answer has to be to eat food grown in the UK at the time of
year it is traditionally produced. We finally arrived at a robust
solution - seasonal, native eating.
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