tescopoly

As part of its expansion plans, Tesco revealed that it has a £30 million turnover compared to 17 million for all other retail businesses in Lewes, including Waitrose. That means that about two thirds of our total retail spend is spent at Tesco. That overdependence makes our food supply hugely vulnerable to the ‘perfect storms’ the world has started to experience. It takes ten calories to get one calorie of supermarket food to your plate. Plus, it’s bad for our health and the planet’s.

Friends who shop at Tesco tell me it’s cheaper and more convenient. Those are partly myths: various recent surveys have shown that local wholefood is cheaper than Tesco’s. And in terms of convenience, you can redesign your habits to make local shopping easier, getting most of your food delivered.

The average family spends only 6% of their income on food compared to 30% a generation ago. That’s roughly what our family now spends on food, which is almost all organic wholefood. We make up for it by doing less on other things like expensive holidays. I’ve shopped like this for our family of six for some years, including years when I was holding down a demanding full-time job. Friends say they can't imagine how to wean themselves off supermarkets. Here's how I did it, including weekly costs for a family of 6

Bulk delivery (including loo rolls and the likes) from Infinity Foods three times a year £35
Weekly veg boxes delivered from local farm Ashurst Organics £15

Organic goats and cows milk delivered £10
Occasional meat from Boathouse Farm; fish from Riverside £20
Additional fruit, cheese, bread, butter, tofu and other fresh staples, mostly from May’s, Laportes and Barefoot Herbs, and Waitrose when I’m lazy: £80

That’s £160 a week, £27 a week each on food, or £3.80 a day, including lunchboxes. We could even cut that budget in half if we had to.

Tesco already gets two in three of our retail pounds. It wants to expand in Lewes by 50%. The application goes to the District Council’s planning department in early June. If you object, stop shopping at Tesco. And write to the Lindsay Frost, the director of planning mailto:lindsay.frost@lewes.gov.uk and the councillors below, referring to planning application number: LW/08/1395.

See the Tescopoly website for the issues that the planning committee will consider. Though personally, I think being a major contributor to the destruction of the local economy, communities, the environment, the creatures such as honeybees, our national farming and our health should be good enough reasons to object.

Cllr Bob AllenCllr Rod Main (Chair) Cllr Sharon Davy Cllr Ian Eiloart Cllr Peter Gardiner Cllr Barry Groves Cllr Tom Jones Cllr Ron MaskellCllr David Mitchell Cllr Robert Worthington (Peacehaven)

UPDATE May09: The committee decided to postpone the Tesco decision while gathering more information. It's due for decision autumn 2009. I now grow most of our vegetables on our new allotment but still use the veg boxes and some veg from Barcombe Nurseries' stall in cliffe most saturdays.

un-bee-lievable!

I was sitting on my terrace yesterday, sunning my bald head, when a solitary honeybee flew into the glass doors and fell to the ground. It was the first honeybee I’d seen this year in my garden, and I eased myself to the floor to make contact with it. It was dusting itself off and resting, its abdomen pulsing. Hey little one, how fare you? (I always talk to the bees.) Not so well, clearly, since bees tend not to collide with solid objects. After a pause, it flew off and I bid it well. I’ve spent some time this week setting up three ‘lure’ hives in different locations, calling in swarms to set up camp. It’s perfect swarming weather, warm and wet, though, given the dearth of bees in the air, I accept that they may remain empty.

In this week-long bee immersion I’ve been finding out some truly shocking information. The British Beekeepers Association has allegedly been accepting large sums of money from agro-giant Bayer, the manufacturer of the powerful modern insecticides, called nicotinamides, in exchange for allowing Bayer to market these pesticides to farmers as ‘bee friendly’. These pesticides, used extensively in Britain, were banned from France, Germany and Italy from 2001, when the beekeepers there protested after large swathes of the bee population were decimated by the agrochemicals. What is tamely called colony collapse disorder here, is very likely to be caused by Bayer’s toxins, which are systemic poisons, in that once in the plant they continue to work against insects throughout the plant’s life. More worryingly, they wash off the land into groundwater - their half life is two years – where they are taken up by the weeds and other wild foraging plants loved by bees. The effect of such chemicals, which, according to Bayer, work as low as two parts per billion, is that honeybees and other insects get disorientated and cannot find their way home, or dance the dance that shows the rest of the hive the source of nectar. The colony starves, collapses, even in the peak of the nectar flow.

Private Eye this week quoted environment secretary Hilary Been as insisting that "We haven't seen any evidence that [pesticides] have an adverse impact on bees". This love affair between our leaders and corporations is taking the honeybee, which has been around for 50 million years, and worshipped by wiser humans than us since the beginning of humanity, to the edge of existence. It bears repeating that 30% of British honeybee colonies have died out in the last two years and that we depend on the honeybee for pollinating 80% of our food.

How to deal with such outrageous information without tipping in to denial and powerlessness (which is the numb-down route taken by so many of us in the western world at the moment) or despair (the route of illness and loss of the essential life force needed in this time of change)? Philip Carr-Gomm, our resident chief druid, spoke of this in an evening hosted by the Transition Town Lewes Heart and Soul group last week. He called for the need to look at such information with ‘bifocal vision’ – to see things simultaneously as whole and also as sick. Dancing on this edge, we can stay sane in an insane world and be alert and effective change-makers.

And we are powerful, each one of us like a honeybee in a colony; we can manifest goodness and health if we work together. What can we do to help the honeybee? The answer is clear. Short-circuit the corporates through choice; eat local, organic food. Do it now, and do it as though your life depends on it. And watch this video to make you smile.

bee movie

I’m getting pretty alarmed about the lack of honeybees this summer. The giant rosemary bush on my allotment is spookily silent – in years gone by it would have been covered by flying insects of all kinds especially honeybees. Who Killed the Honey Bee, a documentary on telly a while ago (watch back here) points the finger at pesticides, lack of habitat, the Americans’ habit of moving bees around and, I would add, micro-wave radiation. But perhaps the biggest cause of stress in honey bees is, I believe, the way that we are managing them.

The current practice of western beekeeping hasn’t changed much since it was introduced by the Victorians. I’ve been keeping bees for 15 years, after a training course at Plumpton, and I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with the degree of intervention that this entails. In order to stop colonies from swarming and taking the year’s honey supply with them, beekeepers open hives regularly in the summer, thus disrupting the bee atmosphere, with its powerful yet delicate matrix of pheromones, heat, smell and Goddess knows what else. They smoke them, they take off almost all the honey stores, replacing them with sugar syrup for feed, and they treat them with antibiotics and pesticides when the bees get ill. Perhaps most damagingly, honey bees are encouraged to create cells on a foundation of wax made by man, in order to harvest more honey, which is often about 10% bigger than the cells that bees make naturally, and they can’t make many of the larger drone cells. Far from being natural, traditional beekeeping is highly intrusive.

So I was delighted last year to find out about the Top Bar beehive, a model adapted from an intermediate technology approach used in Africa. I’ve just finished building my first top bar beehive, with my friend Steven. With the top bar beehive, you leave the bees alone to do their thing, including making cells of the size of their choice. With the Top Bar you take only a small proportion of the honey, leaving most for the bees to overwinter on. And if they want to swarm you let them, instead of destroying their new queen cells. With the colony in the woods I’ve decided not to open the hive at all other than to treat them naturally for varroa mite twice a year. Basically, natural beekeeping – or bee caretaking - is about learning about what bees want to do instead of bending them to our will, for our own profit. A few beekeepers are starting to listen to the bees. We’re generally vilified by standard beekeepers as allowing disease to enter the population. But given the facts – 30% of British bee colonies have been wiped out in the last two years – I reckon there is a call to create bee sanctuaries.

Rather than focus on the human colony collapse that might well follow from the bees, I will just bless and thank our honeybees. May you flourish and multiply. May you teach us about how to live in balance. And since I am now looking to populate our new hive, I now sing to the bees and if anyone hears of a swarm in this swarming month for our new hive, please contact Viva Lewes, and they'll get in touch with me.
Biobees

the kindness of strangers

You know that terrifying scene in Roald Dahl’s The Witches when seemingly normal women throw off their wigs and gloves to reveal bald heads and distorted hands in true witch-like fashion? As I near the end of chemotherapy that’s just how I feel. It wasn’t enough for my hair to fall out, but a far greater indignity is losing one’s eyebrows and eyelashes. Children are starting to stare at me in the street and friends are starting to not recognize me; I don’t even recognize myself these days. And when I do have the occasional weep the tears plop straight out of my eyes on to my dessicated hands in the oddest manner.

And yet… I’ve never before experienced such kindness from both strangers and friends. These last few days I’ve been going around the shops with a Lewes Pound survey. Far from showing their curiosity or distaste, many people talk to me straight, without pity or fear, and adjust to my new image. A surprising number of friends have been ringing me up letting me know they’re thinking about me. Just when I was at my lowest ebb this morning, not sure I’d have enough juice to get out of the house, my friend Nimmy rang and we ended up having a good laugh about eyebrow wigs (yes, they do exist). Another friend Lilliana dropped off an exotic scarf in my colours and my friend Hermione also gave me a quick ring. I will forever be grateful for all the friends who have accompanied me on this journey.

Chemotherapy is the damndest thing. The whole point of it is to take you to the brink of your own physical tolerance - which can also test psychospiritual reserves. It's a very Western approach to a disease caused mainly by living in the Western world. It’s a harrowing experience but it’s often life-saving. But it’s working for me, and I’m simply grateful to be alive.

down to earth

The earth is our mother; we must take care of her. I sang these words on Tuesday in the Dances of Universal Peace, as part of the Transition Arts festival over the Easter weekend. This chant comes from the native American tradition, from people for whom nature is sacred, who lived the words, not as an ideal but as practical, interdependent survival.

Now, only a small proportion of people on this Earth live within her carrying capacity. And most of those aspire not to. Only a tinier proportion of those people actually aspire to live within the planet’s means, and these are generally native people. A scattering of native tribes around the world have survived intact because they have, unlike us in the west, continued to take care of the earth in a way that doesn’t damage her or deplete her.

Last week new calculations from nef (the new economics foundation) revealed that on Easter Sunday this year, 12 April, the UK in effect stopped relying on its own natural resources to support itself and started to 'live off' the rest of the world. This day creeps earlier each year. It’s worth taking some time to ponder what this means, especially to other human beings. There is simply less to go around because of the choices I make.

It’s not a question of feeling guilty; that’s just a waste of time. It’s a matter of taking positive, effective action. That will mean something different for each one of us, and in the years to come we'll be learning what that means. For we are entering a time of Earth Care and Earth Repair, the age of Ecology. Every single choice we make about what we eat, how we travel, how we share with each other, allows us to start to practice Earth Repair, from this moment. We have a huge amount of power of choice; far more than we have been led to believe. As the song goes, Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take.

As the sap rises, I’m currently deepening my understanding of Earth Repair on my new allotment. I’ve been a permaculturalist for 15 years, but I’m now learning from the greatest teacher of all, our Mother. And just like the happy man in this video, I’m finding that the rewards are many.

vision on

I set out this week to write about the Tescopolisation of Britain’s towns, after a trip to Scotland and the Midlands. I scrapped that and started to complain about how police are turning peaceful protests such as those at the G20, which I attended last week, into riots. But both times I felt my stomach churning, my jaw tightening.

Is this what I choose, to oppose what I don’t want? Or do I choose to attract what I do want, even if it’s a dream? But dreams do come true, whether they are personal or global. The more we realize that, the more powerful we become in creating a better reality.

This week I have been dreaming of root vegetables because it’s that phase in the biodynamic moon planting calendar that I’m working with for the first time this year. I have a three-day slot in which to plant the rest of my onions and shallots, beetroot and carrot seeds into the fine seed beds that Andi and I created last week. Maybe we’ll even tuck the chitted potatoes in to rows before next week, when it’s the turn of the leaf vegetables. Then I’ll plant up my new planter with lettuces; it was donated to me by a wonderful new venture, Food Up Front, created by Transition Town Lewes’s Food Group who provide free ex-recycling bins filled with compost and soil and instructions on how to grow abundant food in a small space on our doorsteps and balconies.

A couple of years ago I discovered that a few Lewes groups had been selected to contribute towards a vision for the 12-acre light-industrial area of North Street, and that that ‘vision’ was being engineered by the fact that a major developer was part of the conversation - he was peddling plans for 800 flats and a new clone-town shopping centre. I was told that although the discussion group was closed, I would be able to contribute to the vision for the area via Lewes District Council’s website. Several of us wrote in our visions - which are well worth a re-read. My contribution was an article from the Sussex Express, set in 2020, celebrating the fact that the community-run scheme had won an award for the most creative energy descent plan and use of local resources. The fictitious newspaper article praised the District Council for averting the plans of the developer and goes on to describe some of the award-winning aspects of the North Street development, including a biomass plant, an affordable housing scheme on stilts, a raised bed training growing area and an alternative transport hub.

In real life, Angel Property has since speculatively bought up nearly all the riverside on North Street, but because of the recession, it now seems that the developer is likely not to be developing the area. At the time I wrote the article, it seemed like a pipedream. Now that community land is no longer so attractive to gold diggers, perhaps the time is coming for North Street to be developed ‘by the people, for the people’. Read the 2020 vision under Transition Town Lewes here.

thanks allotment

To my sheer delight I discovered last week that I have an allotment. Having at last reached the top of the Landport waiting list I have by remarkable good fortune been allotted the land previously cultivated by my friends Chloe and Tilo. Once again, my gratitude in advance has been heard (thank you)…

This is a lovely embryonic Permaculture patch, with fruit trees and bushes, a mammoth rhubarb and another giant rosemary now in full-on pale blue flower. Plus five full compost bins and an equal number of water butts and a very leaning shed… Any gardener reading this will understand the depth of my joy at being given land to caretake. For the gardening instinct runs deep among us. Evidence shows that we humans have been growing our food, mostly small scale, for 14,000 years, long before the advent of so-called civilization.

When I dig out the weeds, tamping down the clods of soil with my hoe to a fine tilth seed bed, when I sow peas as I did this morning, I am re-enacting a sacred and life-giving act that runs back and forth through the generations. It’s an act of love and interdependence, human to land, hand to soil. As I lean over in the hoeing and the seeding it’s as though my body remembers the work of all the past generations of growers. Our present fossil-fuelled supermarket fed way of life is only that of my generation – my grandparents knew how to grow a tomato or two, as did my father, even if it was just as a hobby.

This is the month in which we sow most of our seeds for the year to come, hoping and praying for a perfect balance of light, heat and wet, fondling, feeding, the soil that will nourish us. We are totally interdependent on our Mother Earth, our soil. Though most of the other allotmenteers seem to prefer a scorched earth approach, to a permaculturalist that is anathema; I will be covering the soil with straw mulch and green manures like clover and phaecelia, feeding it with nettle and horsetail teas and sprays. Dreaming into being my future food. All is well in the garden. As William Blake put it:


To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.