mind the gap

I bought a cucumber and a bunch of grapes from the supermarket yesterday. The only odd thing about that is that I’d not done that since last September when they were in season. Nowadays, eating fruit and veg mainly from veg boxes and my allotment, such things are a rare treat, in this case an attempt to get my son to eat cheese sandwiches for lunch and a treat for my daughter who craves grapes when she’s ill. In terms of British eating season, we’re entering the hungry gap, when the roots all go floppy and start to sprout. I’m finding it hard to muster enthusiasm for cooking up, again, the swede, celeriac and parsnip in my fridge drawer. Yet, just in time, the greens are starting to come into their own and now every meal is green, rotating between chards, sprouting broccolis, various kales (this year I’ve grown Pentland Brig, Borecole and Red Russian) and the early pungent salads, a mix of rocket, lamb’s lettuce, dandelions, fennel leaves, various herbs, chives and young cleavers and brassica leaves, all coated with a honey and tahini dressing to offset the bitterness. The hungry gap means that the apple season is over, oranges from Europe have nearly finished and bananas are now a rare occasion in our fruit bowl. For the next two months, rhubarb is our main fruit and when strawberries arrive we will so very much enjoy them.

Am I a joyless self-flaggelating purist? No, on the whole – apart from, ahem, the roots - eating locally in season is pure pleasure, and the range of vitamins and minerals soaked up from our local, natural, unpolluted soil, water and sun are perfect after a long winter without sun, fresh local veg and exercise. Mankind has been finely, intuitively, tuned to nature for 80,000 generations, and just because one generation of Brits has bought the marketing message that supermarkets mean progress, doesn’t mean that it is so.

Freedom food

I had a horrible flash-forward this morning in the netherworld of sleep/wake. In this nightmare it was the supermarkets, not the banks, experiencing a run on their food stocks as their fragile infrastructure, based on cheap, plentiful oil, water and labour, and a healthy soil and climate, came tumbling down.

In the cold light of day, that’s not so hard to imagine, as we have literally handed over the power to feed ourselves to these giants and their suppliers, Monsanto, Cargill and the likes, who are, technically, interested in profit, not us (Tesco profit up 10% globally during this year’s world food shortage). This week, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University and government advisor said that Britons should dig up their gardens and start growing their own fruit and vegetables in the face of a looming world food crisis. ‘Ultimately people have to take more control of their food systems...If you depend on Tesco or Sainsbury's or Waitrose, you are a consumer. In other words your food supply is under their control. But if you garden and can grow at least some food to eat, however little, then you are injecting a little food democracy into your food supplies and asserting your food citizenship.’

If you are reading this you are almost certainly one of the 98% of ecologically aware people identified in a recent survey of Lewes District residents who still shop primarily at supermarkets. I am still recovering from the shock of hearing this from the friend who carried out the survey. There was never a more urgent time to radicalise your eating; and you can do it cheaply too; check out May’s bulk food: oats, rice and beans, cheap, organic and delicious. Bills is supplying budget options these days, with 5 avos or huge bag of local apples for a pound. Get a veg box, go to the Farmers Market, in fact, go to every independent food shop in Lewes, and you will find that giving up supermarkets is one of the best, most liberating things you will ever do.

Our bread and butter

A letter in the Sussex Express last week demanded why the group behind the ‘flaky Lewes Pound’ weren’t doing anything to stop local shops like Seymours closing down. The writer spectacularly missed the point: a local currency succeeds if we all spend it where we care. Local currency is a deeply radical means of storing and transferring power. Power that is almost tangible as I hand it to someone whose future I depend upon and vice versa. Where we spend our money is still (for now) an area of great freedom, though few of us (dumbed down as we are) know and act on this information.

This point was graphically illustrated during a rare and deeply unsettling late night visit to Tesco last week in search of lunch box material. Two things in particular upset me: 80% of apple varieties on sale were from New Zealand, none from this isle. Yet England is in the middle of a great apple harvest. I didn’t buy apples that night, partly because they didn’t have a fraction of the life of the picked-that-day apples being sold cheaply by the cheerful Polish guy in the Sunday market. For now, the cost of oil to store and ship them make NZ apples cheaper in terms of the checkout costs, but we are short sighted in patronising supermarkets whose economic model impels us to dismantle our remaining mature local food chains. Second, the checkouts have started to become automated, the slippery slope to less local employment. I still don’t understand the commonly held belief that chains increase local employment: Bill told me that he employs 60 people in his Lewes store alone. The complex cost of buying in supermarkets is hidden from us as we consumers con ourselves into thinking that the money in our pocket is the main thing.

People like me are often accused of coming from a privileged economic position. Not true! Shocking to say, I discovered, when completing our tax return, that our family lives close to the level of the government’s described relative poverty. On the other hand, it’s good to know we’re living proof that pretty much anyone can, if they want to, have a great, healthy local life without it costing the earth.

I just don't buy it

What I call the Reality Gap is widening daily and I’m in danger of falling in it. On one side, there’s a growing sense of huge approaching change. On the other side, you switch channels and there’s business as usual: buy, buy, buy; drive, drive drive; blah, blah, blah.

So it’s very comforting to meet other people who are quietly Minding the Gap. I recently discovered my friends Oliver and Sacha were doing this when I tried to flog them a copy of Transition Handbook at the Farmer’s Market. This is what Sacha told me (and bear in mind that she is one of the most stylish women around town):

‘We’re not buying anything new. We started in January with a six-month pledge. We can buy basic day-to-day stuff like underwear, floor cleaner, presents and food. But the other stuff like books, cds, clothes, coats: you can buy anything second hand. Just after we started our fridge broke down; we bought a great second-hand fridge for half its normal value.

‘I also started a clothes swap five years ago. I had a big bag of clothes I was going to take to the charity shop. I called up about 15 friends who brought clothes they didn’t want and we dumped them on my living room floor. We put a pound in for each item we took and gave that to charity. Now I do the clothes swaps in Iford Village Hall with more people; last time we made £265. I come away with wonderful stuff I could never have afforded to buy new, like a silk shirt from Joseph.’

‘My biggest learning is that I don’t need to buy things I thought I needed. I’ve found it liberating. I feel better about myself because I’m living by the values I feel are important. This experiment has made me really look at life in a different way.’

(Insider information: check out the Story of Stuff, a humorous animated story told by Annie Lennard)

Money as powertool

I've got money on the brain these days. Money is like thought: what you invest it in creates reality. So when I do spend money these days, I like to think of it as a creative act: by buying from local food producers I am reconnecting the broken links between myself and the land. When I buy from people who make clothes and useful things I am supporting that person’s life. When I buy from local shops, even if the goods are not local I am helping rebuild our community’s economy or lifeblood.

Not that I do buy much these days: apart from food, one can live extremely well off the fat of our society’s excesses by harvesting skips, swapping with friends, buying second hand or using Freecycle. But the other day I did, after some thought, buy something new: a pressure cooker. It was, at £106 from Steamer Trading on School Hill, the most expensive thing I’ve bought in ages. A month on, this tribute to Swiss engineering is practically a member of our family. We can now cook rich meat stews or chickpeas for houmous in 20 minutes, brown rice in 10 and steam root veg in seconds. It’s a great investment that, the makers say, can pay for itself in six months through energy savings. Plus, unlike most bought stuff, it’s helping us do our bit for the planet.

Saying it with flowers

There’s a bunch of flowers on my kitchen table that’s giving me great delight. The cosmos, rudbekia, dahlias and sweet-smelling sweet peas are the last of the summer beauties, soon to be obliterated by the first frosts. The flowers were sold at Laportes and grown by Jo Corcoran, in a field at Ashurst Organics, one of Lewes’s organic growers. Jo, who runs Floralworks, also supplies the Lewes Farmers’ Market during flower season. This information is important to me: I drew the line on imported flowers earlier this year. When I learned about the price being paid by Kenyan women and Kenyan soil and Kenyan water to bring me cheap beauty, I decided I couldn’t buy into that particular beast any longer. I want to fund Kenyan women to grow their own flowers, and chickens, millet and beans, for that matter.

For those who believe in fair trade to promote international equity, there’s another option though, now that Hilary Moore’s flower shop stocks a selection of plants and flowers with the ‘Fair Flowers Fair Plants’ label. They do what they say on the package and if you care about these things, it’s important we support our local shops who care on our behalf. Meanwhile, I believe the best things in life are free, and glean increasing satisfaction from the occasional whiff of jasmine and rose in my garden and now winter flowering viburnums and witch hazel starting to send out their improbably powerful scents out in to the cool air up on Castle Banks.

Living like there's no tomorrow

I’ve been living for so long in my perfect world that I get a shock when I step out, as I did this summer, into what could be called the ‘surreal world’. Out there, people are living like there’s no tomorrow. Getting in a car to drive half an hour to the nearest Waitrose while on holiday seemed perfectly normal to my dear sister, when the organic farm shop, a scenic walk up the road, stocked plenty of cheap staples for a fortnight’s holiday. Now even the broadsheets are telling us to ‘cut our carbon’ yet there is little appetite for what that means: to wean ourselves off fossil fuel and everything it’s in. It’s killing us (at least, poor people and nature) and it won’t last. But we are addicted to oil, and by not dealing with our addiction we bring on the oblivion of no tomorrow. Today I give up alcohol (again). Plus, I’m starting to enjoy being frugal. Here are ten steps for a starter:
1. Educate yourself. Read Energy Bulletin for global updates.
2. Just buy less. Join Freecycle.
3. Share things; develop community.
4. Start learning skills.
5. Join an organic box scheme. Get off supermarket addiction.
6. Buy bulk food with Just Trade.
7. Eat more simply and locally.
8. Get into hot water bottles and heat one room.
9. Get a grant from LDC for solar water heating. Bathe less.
10. Wake up from the dream. Find out what true pleasure means!

Gut reaction against Tesco

Over supper the other night our family were discussing what it would take to make Tesco disappear. Smuggling rats in by empty cereal packets was one option the children came up with. We talk about Tesco rather a lot, as the great ugly monster of our own making. According to Tescopoly, the supermarket now controls 30% of the grocery market and made £2.5 billion profits in 2007. Colin Brent’s description of pre-Tesco (pre-oil) Lewes as a vibrant, robust local economy with a huge diversity of crafts, skills and community shops and enterprises still haunts me. I’m deeply upset when I think of the financial choices we have made to gradually erode away the resilience of our local economy and our
natural resources such as topsoil and clean water.

We can blame corporate agriculture and retailers but, essentially, it is we who have chosen through our purses to give away our power. Our family stopped shopping in supermarkets a while ago, mainly using them occasionally as after-hours convenience stores. We tend to eat further down the food chain now, which helps make supermarket liberation affordable. And hey, we eat so well from local shops. There’s a wealth of fantastic food to be had here in Lewes - staples and luxuries too. Humanity has created Tesco so we can uncreate Tesco, and the first place to start is in our mind, just imagining life without Tesco (and Waitrose for that matter). Look at the excuses, one by one. Do they really stand up? What is your gut feeling?

The power of Lewes

I was talking to Colin Brent, economic historian, this morning and he told me that in Victorian times almost all Lewes businesses were owned by people who lived in Lewes or near Lewes.

Local people owned the gasworks and the waterworks. Local people owned the farms and the shops. Local people owned the barges that went up the river and the breweries. Local people owned the three newspapers and the print-works. Local people owned the foundries, including a big one called Phoenix. Local people owned the banks, including Lewes New Bank, on the site of Barclays Bank, and which joined with other banks to create the first Barclays Bank, a direct line from local to global. The only business that Lewes people did not own was the London to Brighton South Coast Railway, but local people initiated and were shareholders in the Lewes to Uckfield line.

In the age of capitalism, we Lewesians have given away our power; leaving ourselves vulnerable to the hunger of corporate and supermarket agendas and out of town developers. However, the tide might be turning. The picketers at Lewes Arms pulled off a great coup last week; another group is forming a community land trust to investigate community ownership of the land of Lewes, and Lewes Community Partnership is seeking funding to buy the Pinwell Road site for an array of local businesses. With troubles ahead, we might just be waking up to the need to rebuild our resilience and abundance. Colin Brent will be talking at Pelham House alongside Bill Collison and Topsy Jewell at the next Transition Town meeting, ‘Feeding Lewes - Past, present and Future’ Wed 2nd May, Pelham House 8pm, £3

How low can I go?

How low can I go? How much can I reduce my impact on our gorgeous, precious planet? Last September, I wrote about a self-imposed zero waste week in our household. That experiment was so eye-opening that our family life has continued to move in this low-impact direction. Here are some things I did this week that seem quite sensible, from the perspective of the polar bears and the endangered small pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies in our woods. I pruned a rampant Virginia creeper in our garden, cut and bundled up the pieces with twine and stored them away for next winter’s kindling. OK, it took an hour, but all that bending did wonders for my stiff back. I started to dig up our paved garden (15 ft square) to make vegetable beds. We used newspaper to line our compost bin. We talked to neighbours about newspaper sharing. We shopped mostly locally and walked a lot. I had several long conversations. I didn’t do any printouts. We only ate meat twice. I didn’t buy much, apart from food. On Sunday, six friends stacked coppiced wood that will fire our stoves for the next five years. I used a mooncup for my period instead of tampons.

Mooncups are a great local product invented by women from Brighton. I look forward to all re-localisation of crafts and manufacturing, and I support and thank with all my heart those who have weathered the era of oil: our blacksmith/toolmaker on Fisher Street, our potters, clothes makers and menders, guitar makers, cheese makers, basket makers and brewers.

Transitioning to a post-oil world

Is it still happening? The transition to a post-oil economy, I mean. The signs are that it is. Brighton has just announced plans for a sophisticated new public transport system that will help get people out of their cars. The Soil Association last week sent a letter to all members asking for support for their Food and Farming - Post Peak Oil initiative, including Transition Towns.

Next step on the citizen/consumer front: good citizens will by now have written to Lewes District Council to support Glynde’s wind turbine (because it creates energy from a renewable source) and have put in their diaries the next Town Council meeting (5 April). As a citizen this week I have decided to write to Waitrose to ask why they keep all their lights on at night. For good measure I will write to Tesco to ask why they keep their doors open through the winter and their freezers and chill cabinets open while operating a central heating system. As consumer I continue the journey towards unconsumer. Last week I walked the length of Lewes in search of a cushion. Not only did I not find one good enough, but neither did I buy a single other thing on that journey. I’m free! And I now carry lightweight cotton bags wherever I go. Barefoot Herbs, our local eco-store, now simply does not offer plastic bags, even recycled ones. If people have forgotten to bring a bag, they can buy a cotton one for a quid. Imagine Tesco doing that.

Slavery

Last week I asked Sheila Marshall, the dressmaker on Station Street, to alter my daughter Anna’s winter coat. In the spirit of make-do-and-mend I was keen to support a local artisan whose skills will become important when the fossil fuel fiesta winds down. It turns out Sheila had just returned from a trip to China, a package tour that took her to Beijing, Shanghai and beyond. It was like a Hollywood set, she said: from the top deck of the double-decker tour bus, she could see behind the glossy façades into the filthy shanty towns behind, whose roofs were piled high with coal soot. My friend Gordon also told me last week that when villagers enter these shiny new cities, they are rounded up and given work in factories for minimum board and lodging, often never to be seen again (perhaps from choice).

It’s dawning on me that I’ve been supporting economic slavery, without being fully aware of human beings in the Far East making cheap Primark clothes, and of Kenyan mothers growing Valentines flowers for a pittance, killing the great lakes and soils of African lands, and their history and community. It’s more insidious than forced labour: sometimes the great economic beast of western consumption just makes it so. So. That’s it. I’m going local for clothes. On the whole, I’ll be buying from some of the great ethical shops in Lewes: Gossypium and Susanna Wolf, along with second hand clothes: Roundabout, Stock Exchange, Barefoot Herbs, as well as all the great charity shops around. I hear M&S is investing in fair-trade cotton too; organic knickers, why not? Apparently, it's the bicentennial year of the abolition of slavery. I wish.