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 HELP - seasonal? organic? local?Jump to page : 1 Now viewing page 1 [25 messages per page] | View previous thread :: View next thread |
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mikey9 |
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Member Posts: 8 | We have just signed up for the challenge and need some help filling out the charts. We are a bit confused about how seasonal our food is for instance. We seem to be filling in almost all of the pie as seasonal. We think that staples such as cereals, dairy products etc. can be kept or produced all year so are seasonal. Is this correct? Obviously if grown in our own garden or the farm down the road (so long as its not from an artificially heated greenhouse) its definitely seasonal but what about imported food? What about bananas or imported tomatoes? How do we find out when banana/tomato season is and doesn't it depend on what country it comes from and how its produced/processed? How strict is the organic section? If we grow veg without chemicals but don't use organic seeds then we can't claim to be organic or can we? What about local? If we make jam from our garden plums the fruit is local but the sugar obviously isn't so I guess we cant say its local? We make our own bread from organic flour but the yeast isn't organic (is there such a thing?). And then there's the local bit - the Doves Farm flour we use says that depending on the season some of their flour comes from Canada to get the right type of flour for bread-making. So not strictly local either? Does anyone have any views? | ||
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| Martin |
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Veteran Posts: 275   | I don't claim any kind of high ground, but our approach is: Seasonal means things that are in season, here. There probably should be a separate category for a-seasonal stuff that can be kept all year, but it seems a bit of a cop-out to claim to be eating seasonal food if you mean rice and beans! And similarly, if someone told me they were only eating seasonal fruit, I wouldn't be thinking "he must mean bananas, seasonal all year round due to refridgerated shipping and god knows what other technology". Organic includes anything we grow for ourselves without chemicals (not even slug pellets). I'm not sure how important the organic-ness of the seeds is, maybe someone else can help with this? We swither a bit on local-ness. If we buy bread from a local bakery, I think that should be considered local. So in that case, if I make bread myself, then that is also local, although it would be better if I used local flour. But I think there are probably other things we make ourselves, where there isn't a locally-baked alternative, and we've thought about where the majority of ingredients come from. Not very logical. I suppose I'd say home-made jam is local, because the alternative would be jam made somewhere else. Similarly, if Black Isle Brewery beer is local (which I think it is) then homebrew is also local, wherever the ingredients come from. And I reckon home-made bread using organic flour is close enough to organic, however the yeast, salt, etc. are produced. | ||
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| Anne Thomas |
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Extreme Veteran Posts: 319 | None of these categories are hard and fast and all will require a certain amount of personal judgement. Flour, we have discovered, is a difficult one as good bread making wheat doesn't grow this far north so even somewhere like Golspie Mill will be bringing their ingredients some distance. Barley flour is a possibility as barley does grow up here. You could also consider more potato meals and less pasta or rice. Potatoes also provide four times the calories for the same growing space, so as food shortages are already starting to appear due to early effects of climate change (- fires in Russia and floods in Pakistan) it makes sense to eat something that gives more energy for the same amount of space. I guess what we are aiming for is to reduce our food miles by looking at where our food comes from and seeing what we can improve on. The four categories of local, organic, seasonal and less meat all give some scope for reducing our carbon footprint. Some people will be happy to give up some things like bananas and coffee altogether as with the Animal Vegetable Miracle book. Others will find that much too difficult. We've generally substituted Black Isle apple juice or tap water for cartons of apple or orange juice and given away the bottles for wine-making thereby solving the problem of not being easily able to recycle the cartons, too (there is a collection at Dingwall recycling centre). However with tea and coffee we've cut down and grown our own mint for mint tea, but not given up altogether. Fruit has been good over the summer with a succession of black-currents, raspberries, cherries, strawberries and now blackberries and apples with some still stored in the freezer and an attempt at bottling, but I dare say the appeal of a few bananas and oranges will be stronger over the winter. We definitely consider things like jam local even if half of the mixture is sugar. We are looking at keeping bees, in which case that would reduce our sugar requirement. Cutting down on sugar and salt is recommended on health grounds anyway and we generally make acceptable bread with a teaspoon of oil, a teaspoon of sugar and no salt. Its really a personal choice, but the Highland Food Challenge hopefully provides a framework for measuring progress and obviously if you decide one thing for the baseline 3 days then stick with that for the 3 days a month following. | ||
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| mikey9 |
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Member Posts: 8 | Thanks Martin and Anne for the comments - we recognise the difficulty in coming up with hard and fast directions. It doe open your eyes to some of the contradictions. My homebrew is based on a kit shipped up here from down South - but I have added 40 pints of local water to it. How local is that...perhaps 39/40ths local. Our Jam is made from British Sugar (yes Silver Spoon have a red tractor labelled British sugar from beet) so qualifies for the "more local than using W. Indian cane derived sugar" mark., The bread situation is also a complex one - with all the ingredients being imported (to the highlands) but the product being made feet from where it is consumed using electricity from the roof ;-) Certainly does what intended - makes us think a bit more. | ||
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| FindonMills |
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| With reference to the Highland Food Challenge survey I find myself with the same questions that I have wrestled with for years. What is sustainable and what has the least impact on the environment. It seems to me that there is no straightforward answer. I have come to the conclusion that I would always choose very local over organic although “local and organic” is obviously better, but eating, say for instance, Argentinian organic beef before choosing local beef from a local butcher with no organic provenance would be a no-no. Whilst producing our own vegetables and fruit we inevitably produce a glut, but can keep ourselves in fruit and vegetables throughout the year by freezing large quantities to intersperse with the seasonal vegetables (unless the deer eat the lot as they did last winter!) The cost, environmentally and financially, of running a modern freezer is not high if well packed and in a cool outside room and must surely be less than the growing, transporting, packaging etc. involved in buying fruit and vegetables. All our fruit and vegetables are grown on organic principles as far as possible preserving the state of the soil. On the subject of sugar and bees, as a beekeeper there are difficult questions to answer. It is very unlikely that I would get away without feeding my bees at some stage which means using sugar. A large colony of bees, in the Summer, needs a lot of honey and pollen for themselves and the brood, let alone storing any away for the beekeeper. In a wet July, for instance, they would soon run out of stores and if they are not to starve to death they must be fed an emergency feed of sugar solution. As a conscientious beekeeper, from the bee’s point of view, I will actively search for ‘pure cane sugar’ because the beet sugars are quite likely to have been produced using imidicloprid seed dressings which are thought, but not proven, to be a cause of the disappearance of bees and are banned in France and Germany. Oil seed rape is also treated with these seed dressings so it is always wise to choose organic oil seed rape oil. As you can see it is not a straightforward situation of swapping sugar for home produced honey. Some years you may not get any honey but will still have to feed bees to keep them alive over winter. Concerning organic seed, even the Organic Gardening Catalogue of Chase Organics cannot supply a 100% range of organic seeds as they are simply not available but insist that their seeds are not treated with any chemicals to aid storage or deter pests. As far as the survey is concerned I think I would like to have seen a list of the most often used products, say 100 or so, (fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, cheese, meat etc. and groceries) so that we could record initially whether they were local, organic, seasonal etc. This would encourage the closer reading of labels and would show up more clearly whether a local or more sustainable alternative had been found as time went by. At the moment there seems to be no provision for showing up that the only fruit we eat is organic, home produced and from permanent plantings. I hope this instigates some further discussion, as this I feel must be the point of the exercise to make folk more aware of what they consume. | |||
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| Anne Thomas |
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Extreme Veteran Posts: 319 | Thanks for this very thoughtful contribution. As I said in my last post, it all does require a certain amount of personal judgement but I think the aim is very much to make people more aware of what they are consuming. A previous attempt at the food challenge recording had a percentage tick list but this was felt to be a bit cumbersome. A list of 100 most often used products sounds an excellent idea. Maybe you can have a go at compiling one or an example one which we could adapt for general use. | ||
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| Martin |
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Veteran Posts: 275 | Some very interesting points. We used to keep bees, never needed to feed during the summer, but we did feed considerable quantities of sugar at about this time of year - because we'd just taken all the bees' reserves for the winter. I never felt totally comfortable with that, and sometimes we left the bees with enough honey, so they didn't need sugar solution. It reduced our honey stores, but it seemed a more natural approach. I wasn't aware of the issues with beet sugar, so that's interesting. We were thinking of getting a drier to reduce pressure on the freezer. Driers seem to use about 600 watts, which is quite a lot, but they only need to run overnight, so if that means a smaller freezer, it's probably a good thing. And I used to think that organic seed was such a small part of the food-growing, it wasn't all that important. But these days, mostly we get organic seed. it's supposed to result in plants better suited to organic growing, but I can't say I've noticed the difference. I think the main reason for buying organic is that, if you don't like using chemicals yourself, why pay someone else to use them? Is this all getting a bit off-topic? | ||
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| mikey9 |
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Member Posts: 8 | Matrin, Anne, FindonMills (?) - no not off topic at all - very educational and makes us realise it isn't just us wrestling....... On Driers/dehydrators - a bit of research threw up the Westfalia catalogue who do one fro less than £30 which a few people seemed to recommend. As we came into a box of bananas a couple of weeks ago and made a few jars of excellent Banana Leathers (but used the oven - which seemed a bit of a waste). | ||
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| mikey9 |
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Member Posts: 8 | OK, we are trying again this weekend - but the "Seasonal" bit is throwing us completely.... Jam - some of it obviously was seasonally made - The sugar (50%) is picked in season (then highly chemically processed apparently!) -. Jam is a "preserve" does that mean it is OK anytime of year....? Dairy products - are they seasonal? Eggs - seasonal? Bacon - seasonal? The only things we seem to be able to put as seasonal are the FRESH veg and fruit from the garden. Pasta, Potatoes (store well) are they seaonal, tea? Coffee? As you can see - the more we think - the less clear we are. | ||
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| Anne Thomas |
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Extreme Veteran Posts: 319 | I would count jam as seasonal as it is a time honoured way of preserving fruit. I'm pretty sure it uses less energy than freezing, but it would be interesting to have some figures on that. Bottling is another option and healthier as it uses a lot less sugar than jam and also avoids this generally non-local ingredient. I've tried preserving cherries this year in a 'kilner jar', but we are working our way through frozen soft fruit first with the rational that it is using energy to keep it frozen. In a way 'seasonal' is going back to what would have been regarded as normal for the time of year until exotic food stuffs became the norm. This would have included jams over the winter and things like apples and potatoes carefully stored. My mother in law still has an apple shed and they keep very well often till Easter or later. It is again a personal judgement as I would not include apples from New Zealand at this time of year, which often still seem to be for sale as it is obviously not the right season there and they are likely to have been kept artificially cooled as well as flown from the other side of the world but I would include my mother in law's apples at Easter. | ||
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| Martin |
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Veteran Posts: 275 | I don't think eating jam is something to be avoided, but on the other hand, I can't see how you could say jam is seasonal, at any time of year - the whole point of jam is that it doesn't have a season. I agree that jam-making is traditional, but seasonal and traditional are quite different! And I don't think traditional is necessarily better than contemporary, so even if there was some kind of system where virtuous foods got points which could be converted to seasonality, then I wouldn't give points purely on the basis of tradition. I thought the reason for promoting seasonal food was to give priority to things which are fresh, so as to reduce the energy used to preserve stuff. In that case, I would say that seasonal produce is mostly fruit and veg - although I think there's also a natural season for eggs, some cheese, and for meat - we just seem to have found ways around those. Has anyone got any info on that? Mike, I don't know if this really helps you much! But, for what its worth, my view is that potatoes have a season, pasta, tea, coffee, bacon and jam definitely don't, and I suspect eggs and dairy produce once did but now rarely do. | ||
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