Getting rid of food waste

 

Several years ago a study found that up to a third of all food sold was thrown away uneaten – inexcusable in a country where farmers struggle and children go hungry. That country was the United Kingdom, which has a generally good record of conserving its resources, so pundits wondered what a global study would find.  Such a study was released later – by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, somewhat surprisingly – and looked at impoverished Third-World nations as well as the prosperous West. Unfortunately, their findings revised the figure … upwards. 

The IME report found that “30-50% (or 1.2-2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach” across rich and poor countries alike. The reasons varied, however; poorer countries had less money and technology to harvest and store food properly, while countries like ours waste food mostly through “retail and consumer behaviour.”

The retail part accounts for a third of all crops brought to stores, they said, when “supermarkets, in meeting consumer expectations, will often reject entire crops of perfectly edible fruit and vegetables at the farm because they do not meet exacting marketing standards for their physical characteristics, such as size and appearance.” For ten thousand generations humans ate or preserved what was ripe; now we demand food appear before us in all seasons, looking like it came off an assembly line. 

Then, once the food is on the store shelves, “commonly used sales promotions frequently encourage customers to purchase excessive quantities which, in the case of perishable foodstuffs, inevitably generate wastage in the home. Overall between 30 percent and 50 percent of what has been bought in developed countries is thrown away by the purchaser.” That’s up to 50 percent in our homes on top of the 30 per cent at the store – up to 80 percent overall.  

Such depressing findings studies do have a glass-half-full side, however: we could cure world hunger right now with what we already have. Of course, there’s no one giant pool of food – if we waste less, it won’t mean a village of Africans suddenly receives more. It might mean, though, that lands being used to grow crops for us – bananas, coffee, whatever – could instead be used to feed local people, or some other effect.

Conserving our food waste would also save money in bin charges, and would help reduce some of the greenhouse gases that are making the global weather go haywire. Properly composted kitchen waste gets munched by worms and oxygen-loving bacteria, but when thrown in the regular bin and buried deep in a dump, a different type of bacteria have to work on them – methane-producers. Methane is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide from our cars and factories, so while our food waste is only a small part of greenhouse gas emissions, it’s a powerful part, and one easily eliminated.

The first way to cut food waste, obviously, is to use as much as possible, whether store-bought or from your garden. If you have extra fruit or berries, or find they are a bit too ripe, make them into jam to preserve vitamins over the winter. Freeze them to use later as pie filling. Mash and dry them into fruit leathers for snacks over the next few weeks. Pile the fruit and berries into a jar to the rim, pour spirits like vodka or poitin over them, and make liqueur.

If you have too many leftover peas, for example, try juicing them, mixing them with lemon juice and vodka, and making peatinis. Make them into a dipping sauce. Dry them by the closetful for pea soup over the winter. If you have too many courgettes (zucchini to Americans), incorporate it into bread, cakes, casserole, soups, stir-fry, sandwiches, frittatas, moussaka, tarts and latkes.

If you are overloaded with herbs, cut them at the base, hang them upside-down in the closet or greenhouse to dry, and use them over the rest of the year for flavourings or tea. Alternately, mash basil and other herbs with pine nuts and olive oil to make pesto.

Most of all, remember my favourite weapon in the fight against home food waste: quiche. This fancy-sounding French dish – typically cooked vegetables covered in cheese and eggs and cooked like a pie – works well to disguise any number of old dishes.

Raw vegetable waste unsuited for human consumption – carrot tops, coffee grounds, peelings and woody stalks – need a compost bin. If you don’t already have one, start working on it now or ask permission to use an inconspicuous corner of someone else’s yard. Compost turns your waste back into soil that you can put back in the garden after a year or two, soil rich in the kind of nutrients that might otherwise require chemical fertilisers.

The most basic kind of compost is for raw vegetable waste – things like animal waste or mulch need a separate bin, and need to “cook” for longer. Don’t put meat, cooked food, fat or eggshells in, as they could attract vermin. Don’t put too much that would be poisonous, like potato leaves – farmers around us pile up the potato leaves to dry and then burn the dried pile in spring.

For things that don’t go in regular vegetable compost, there are few kitchen disposal units better than chickens. They are basically pigs with beaks: they eat both meat and vegetables, cooked and uncooked, and they don’t care if the rolls are a day old or the carrot slices have gone woody. Also, they will readily turn all your waste back into protein again.

Consider hot composting, which I have written about before – with the right ratio of carbon-rich to nitrogen-rich materials, and you flip it with a pitchfork to oxygenate it, you can “farm” bacteria that generate heat rather than smell. I have taken a hot shower in the middle of a field on a very cold Irish morning, the water pipe heated by nothing more than compost. For more information on how to do this, I cannot recommend highly enough the research of Bruce Terrell in Ireland, seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_731DFSY0  

With measures like these, most of us could reduce our waste to almost zero in a short time, and while we’re not directly responsible for supermarkets and other companies, we can influence their behaviour. If you have a lot of chickens or a big compost bin and they have fresh food they throw away each night, you can talk to them about alleviating their waste disposal costs.  Such experiments have hazards, of course – you want to make sure you don’t generate disease or a neighbourhood odour – but when done properly they could solve multiple problems with a single solution.

And, of course, you can grow your own.

 

WRAP study:
https://www.ns.is/ns/upload/files/pdf-skrar/matarskyrsla1.pdf

 

Institution of Mechanical Engineers study:
https://www.imeche.org/policy-and-press/reports/detail/global-food-waste-not-want-not

 

Photo: Parsnips from our garden. 

 

The Purpose of Free Speech

 

Ordinarily in this space I write about growing food, or paring down possessions, or trading with neighbours, or other pragmatic ways to cut expenses, increase self-sufficiency and improve community. I rarely mention timely news issues; in this bitterly divided age I want to talk about things that can unite people, and in this time of competitive virtue-signalling I want people to focus on the simple and the practical. All the practical advantages of life, though, mean little unless we live in a decent and free society, one in which you can speak your mind on an issue without having men show up at your door at night, or attack you on the street.

If you had been dropped randomly into any time and place in human history, however – from the time modern humans evolved perhaps 200,000 years ago until today, anywhere in the world – you would almost certainly have landed in a time and places where these values were unthinkable. Almost anytime, anywhere, you could be killed for speaking the wrong opinion, against the wrong person.

Freedom of speech has existed as only in brief flickers in history. One such flicker was the Athens of Pericles, for example, where in the middle of a horrific 30-year-war, Aristophanes could still write a pointed anti-war comedy. The longest period so far, though, began in Europe after the Enlightenment of the 1600s, and even then free speech was available only to certain classes in a few countries. Its gradual spread across much of the world is one of the great inspirational stories of the human race, and as much as I love traditional ways of life, this is one area where we have been the luckiest people in history.

The free era, though, might already be fading, buckling under pressure from many sides. We saw the first signs of this in 1989, when Muslim extremists condemned Indian author Salman Rushdie for writing a book that they thought criticised Islam. Rushdie has been called one of the greatest novelists of the last century, and his novel The Satanic Verses gently satirised many religions, including Islam – but for that he has had to live in hiding for most of the last 33 years. And last week, after decades of hell, Rushdie was stabbed and severely injured.

Many others associated with this book have also suffered – its Japanese translator was murdered, its Norwegian translator shot, its Italian translator attacked, and its Turkish translator barely escaped a mob that killed 37 people. Amazingly, few people were willing to speak or write in favour of Rushdie, with many European politicians siding with the terrorists instead.  

As another Indian writer, Kenan Malik, put it: These extremists lost their battles, as Rushdie’s books went on to be published, but they won the war, as hostility to freedom of speech has now become commonplace in the Western World. Former fans of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling denounced her, burned piles of her books and threatened her life after she expressed personal opinions that harmed no one. Author Jordan Peterson, whose self-help lectures went viral on the internet, has been the victim of a similar campaign, with mobs rioting and trying to shut down his public talks.

Rushdie himself said a few years ago that his book could probably not have been published today. Astonishingly, a May 2019 poll by the Knight Foundation found that almost half of college students thought that not hurting people’s feelings was more important than freedom of speech.

Most of us today like to imagine that if we had been around when slavery existed, or when the Nazis were taking power, we would have been foursquare on the side that we now know to be right. If you think that highly of yourself, ask yourself this: do you have the same opinions as your friends? As the media you listen to? Do you see yourself as being on a political side, and think of the other side as ignorant, violent and malevolent?

If the answer is yes, congratulations – you’re like almost everyone else in the world, hearing your own attitudes reflected back at you. Once in a while, however, you might hear a different voice – a voice that you don't enjoy, a voice that makes you blind with rage. You might feel complete certainty that they are wrong, and they often are. And occasionally, we – or future generations -- look back and realise they were right. When the entire nation “supported the troops,” they were the people questioning the war, and when many of the hippest intellectuals endorsed eugenics, they were the few speaking out against it. They – the unpopular, the unpatriotic, the annoying – are the voices we need, because sometimes they’re right.

You might not like or agree with Rushdie, or Rowling, or Peterson, but you need to be prepared to listen to and seriously consider opinions that anger you. That’s what makes us a free society, and we have been living with that blessing for so long that we no longer take seriously the real prospect of losing it.

I confess I had always meant to read Rushdie’s books, but never got around to it. So I walked into a bookstore today and bought two of his books. It was a tiny decision, I admit, but our lives are made of tiny decisions, so they might as well be votes for principles we believe in.

Coming home for the first time

 

A couple I know lived in a century-old house in the middle of their town, a few miles from their jobs and surrounded by long-time neighbours. When the last of their children left home, they announced it was time they looked for a bigger house.

“Do you mean a smaller house?” I asked.

“No,” they said, surprised. “We mean a bigger house.” They had some extra money now that they were not raising children, and they wanted to invest it.

Their later years, however, did not turn out as relaxing as they had hoped. Both husband and wife had to work full-time to pay for their massive new house, and their few free hours were spent cleaning and maintaining it. They gave their old house to their son and his wife, who worked to pay for its mortgage and maintenance. The son’s child – my friends’ grandson — was put into day care while parents and grandparents worked long hours. I gathered that everyone ate on the run, often felt ill and depressed, and rarely saw their families.

It was not my business how they lived, and maybe there was more to the story. As far as I could tell, though, they had neatly divided an obvious solution into several problems.

If my friends had stayed in their old home with their son, they could have all pitched in to maintain and pay for it. If someone lost their job in this depression, others could fill the gap. They might have more time to spend with the grandchild, rather than pay exorbitant sums to see him raised by strangers.

I talk often with elderly relatives and neighbours from Missouri, Germany and Ireland. They all grew up in different worlds; a farm, an urban tenement, or the ruins of a bombed city. Ask them what has changed, though, and the answer is always the same: the ubiquitous presence of family and community.

Almost all these elders grew up with relatives in the home or nearby. Harvesting the garden, preserving food, praying in church – all these were done as a group, with children mimicking the adults. Even in urban families where most people worked, at least one relative stayed home to keep house, and families ate together, sang or played cards together, and shared beds or rooms. They may have made a fraction of the money as America’s desperately poor today, but did not feel poverty in the same way, for their lives were not spent drifting through a sea of strangers.

Inside the cheap energy window of the last few decades, however, family members were encouraged to live in isolation, first as a “nuclear family” and then as individual consumers. More households saw both parents working, more children warehoused in day cares and more families struggling to pay for escalating mortgages and expenses.

These days, of course, some of us are part of online “communities,” but there we often mistake breadth for depth. No amount of Twittering can build a relationship with the old lady down the road, and no amount of online eco-activism can substitute for pollarding one’s own trees.

Merging disparate relatives under a single roof, of course, is rarely simple – we all have different standards of cleanliness and privacy, different philosophies of child-rearing and cooking. But enough lines can also make a safety net, as more hands mean more people to fill in, more likelihood of a cook or gardener or mechanic in the family, someone who can tell stories or play music at the end of the day.

More of us will find ourselves doing this. Foreclosures and unemployment will force more people to move, as will a changing climate, and loved ones are generally preferable to a shantytown behind the parking lot. Smaller families and aging Baby Boomers mean more elderly relatives who need care. We should not wait for an emergency to throw us together, though – we are better off easing into the new grocery lists, new sleeping arrangements and schedules, and new boundaries of modesty and conversation.

This is likely to be the face of our future: a hundred million small and simple changes to reduce our debt and isolation, to cope with less money and weirder weather, to consolidate our possessions and needs. We might have to shed our load of rootless consumerism, but we might also rediscover what it means to be part of something. For some people, who have spent their lives searching for connection and meaning, it will be like coming home for the first time.

 

Older than Ireland

 

"Sometimes when you are asked a question, it puts your mind back to something you had forgotten about for years. For example, when you asked that I remembered when we used to say the rosary at night"

"There was eight of us, and we’d all say the rosary. And when we were done Daddy would say to us, 'that’s the end of that now –say your own little prayers, like good children.' Well all you’d hear was the tick of the clock, the all-weather clock on the wall. And that was all you’d hear was the quiet, but these days everything is buzz, buzz – noise everywhere, and people in a hurry all the time."

"I remember well my young days, particularly Black ’47. When I was born, the treaty had been signed but not ratified – I always call myself a child of the state, for I was born on Christmas Day 1921, and. I made my First Communion on Trinity Sunday 1928. There’s a lady here who was born in ’28, and I think I’m doing better than she is, I’m holding myself better. "

- interview with Patty Trabears, 2018. Photo taken in Ireland around the time of Patty's birth.

Still Life with Four-Year-Old

I wrote this 13 years ago. My girl is turning 18, and I think the things I wrote then -- especially the part about a risk of "civil war and public breakdown before she is grown" have held up pretty well. 

Tonight as I put my daughter to bed, she looked out her window and whispered, “Papa – look! There is a boy robin in the garden, on the rocks.”

I see him! I said, as our faces gazed out the window together. I think his missus is in the trees back there.

"Why doesn’t she come out?"

She takes care of the eggs, while he looks for food. He’s bright red so predators will see him instead of the missus.

"And there is our neighbour – he is smoking! That is bad for you," she said, pulling out the lung page of her children’s book about the body and showing me.

Yes, you should never do that, I agreed.

"And what are these?" she asked, pointing to the book’s pictures of red and white blood cells.

Well, the red blood cells carry oxygen to the … um … let me start over, I said. The red blood cells are lorry (truck) drivers, I said, and they take air from your lungs and deliver it door-to-door in your body like postmen. The white blood cells are gardai (police), and if a germ tries to sneak in, they pounce on it.

She asked to play red blood cells for a little while -– I swear I don’t make these things up -- knocking on each cell door and announcing they had an air delivery. Then she wanted to play white blood cell, creeping up on a naughty germ and saying, "I’ve got you now!"

After a while of this she asked, "Papa, what would happen if there weren’t trees?"

That would be very bad, I said. Trees make the air that lets us breathe – they are why the sky is blue. The sky is made by life.

"And they grow fruit," she said.

Yes, and nuts, and many other things to eat. What else can you eat that comes from a tree?

"Linden leaves!" she said.

Yes, and you could even eat sap and some bark, I said.

"Wow!" she said in delighted disgust.

It doesn’t taste good, but you could eat it if you were hungry in an emergency, I said. What else can you eat in an emergency? She cheerfully rattled off the list she knows from songs, and we talked and read a bit more before I kissed her good night and came downstairs.

I have often written here about my four-year-old, and the responses have allowed me to meet many kindred spirits far beyond my circle here in County Kildare. The moments with her are what give my life meaning; every day it tears me up inside to leave her with her grandmother, and go to a day job, and no amount of promotion or rewards will change that. A part of me dreams of being able to let go of my job, spending time with her all day, every day, and post daily four-year-old stories for years to come. But she will not wait for me, and today, already, she is five.

Of course a yearly marker does not make her a different person. But time will, and too quickly for me to do anything but run behind it, calling for it to stop. Perhaps it is because I am in my thirties now, and my clock was set long ago – like most middle-aged people, I feel a year go by when two or three have passed. Perhaps it is because the world events that I study have accelerated with harlequin abandon in the last few years; already we have seen so much of the world unravel, and might see civil wars or public breakdown before she is grown.

I only know that each moment flickers by like passing traffic out the window, too swift to observe as it happens, but only to remember dimly after it has gone. Part of me wants to live in a painting – Still Life with Four-Year-Old, a golden moment in amber. A part of me winces to see my toddler grow lanky and coltish, tapping newfound reservoirs of defiance and negotiation, her once-giant eyes occasionally rolling in the first fetal signs of adolescent ennui. I want to throw a hook into the blur and reel in the moments, pore over them, plead with each of them … stay. Please, don’t go. Linger.

But they won’t. She will be six soon enough, and ten, and fifteen, each age attended by its own moments of comfort and joy, its own arguments. I can try to be a good escort into her future and linger over the moments, knowing their blurred passage is all I will ever have. I cannot extend my life’s length, but you, my girl, allow me to extend its depth.

Thank you.