There are many factors to bear in mind when considering how to eating sustainably, including; what you eat, where it’s from, how you cook and making sure you minimise waste. As a BANT Registered Nutritionist I often get asked: Is organic better for you? Should I go vegan? What’s the ‘best’ diet to follow? In answering any of these questions, there are three important points I always consider:

1. Your budget   2. Your health  3. Our planet
 
You don’t have to go out of your way to find vegan options these days. You’ll find good choices in supermarkets, bars, cafes and restaurants. However, veganism is more than just not eating food derived from animals (i.e. not meat, fish, dairy, eggs). A true vegan won’t eat honey, use products tested on animals, or wear materials that come from animals such as leather and wool. Veganism goes way beyond food. So, when a well-known fried chicken company decides to put a vegan burger on its menu, I can’t help but wonder, would a vegan eat a ‘vegan’ burger from an establishment whose main business is chicken? Honestly, no. Are there better non-meat options for your health? Most definitely. And are companies simply jumping on the bandwagon to make more profit? I’ll let you decide on that for yourself. However, does it provide an opportunity for someone to try a non-meat option? Yes! The upshot is, these things are never black and white.
 
The same holds true when considering whether veganism or vegetarianism is the most sustainable way to eat. There are many factors to weigh up. First of all, if you’re a regular meat eater, switching from one extreme to the other can be hard, so your best intentions may be short lived. Secondly, you need to consider whether it fits your health status. There are nutrients that are harder to come by in a vegan diet, so supplementation may be required. There are also many other dietary options out there; NOMAD (no meat and dairy), climatarian, flexitarian, reducatarian…..although I’m not a fan of having to put a label on it! 
 
The general ethos of these ‘tarian options and why they fit the sustainable eating model, is that they’re not just about eating less meat and more plant-based food, but also focus at sourcing more local produce, reducing plastic and food waste and generally just being more mindful of your impact on our planet. We can all take some steps towards this ethos; considering zero waste shops, local markets and suppliers to buy our groceries, understanding the best ways to store food so it keeps longer. Planning your meals can mean less food waste and saving money. Every DAY in the UK we throw away over 1 MILLION bananas, 5 MILLION plus potatoes and glasses of milk, 24 MILLION slices of bread. We have an annual wastage of 178 MILLION bags of salad (so food and plastic waste there!). If you want a simple way to eat more sustainably, start by looking at these foods and think, do I buy more than I need? Do I plan my meals? Do I store it appropriately? 
 
I’ll be discussing all of this in more detail at my talk ‘How to Eat Locally, Seasonally and Sustainably’ on Saturday 7th September at GreenFest in Hampstead Norreys. I’ll also be around all day to answer your questions and be handing out top tips and recipes on ways to eat healthily and sustainably.

Save the date and put Saturday 7th September 10am – 4pm in your diary. Check out the Facebook event page @ourGreenFest and website for more details and I’ll see you there!  

Plastic Free July is a campaign led by the Plastic Free Foundation. Each year, millions of people around the globe take the challenge and choose to refuse single-use plastics.

As we head into what is looking to be a sweltering Plastic Free July, I thought it was a good time to go back to basics. To be blunt, the situation is pretty desperate. Marine life from sea birds to whales are starving to death because their bellies are packed so full of plastic, there’s no space for food. Even us humans are eating and drinking plastic. The chemicals leeched by plastic affect our hormones, detrimentally impacting functions such as growth and fertility. We are poisoning the world around us and it is poisoning us back.

The truth is terrifying and can overwhelm us to inaction. But there are simple steps we can take to keep our rubbish out of landfill and waterways at least. Quite clearly, reducing and reusing is the ideal and we can all achieve this to a greater or lesser degree, but until businesses change the way they supply goods to us (and this is happening – check out TerraCycle’s new Loop business model), it is incredibly difficult to stem the flow of single use plastic into our homes.
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So, the question is, how do we stop the unstoppable polluting the world around us?
 
Recycle responsibly
So, who in West Berkshire puts their yoghurt pots into plastic recycling? 2 years ago, that would have been me. I believe the voices in my head were of the opinion that if the packaging is labelled as recyclable, I should surely be able to recycle it. End of story.

Sadly, this attitude, brought about by a lack of information and the confusing fact that kerbside recycling varies so much across the UK, is bad.

Now, I’m not guaranteeing that assuming more responsibility over your recycling means it will definitely get recycled (God knows what’s happening right?) or that you won’t peer at an item of packaging ever again without a little confusion over whether or not you can drop it into your recycling bin.

However, it will give you piece of mind that you’ve done all you can to make sure it wasn't you who contaminated a few truckloads of plastic. It will also open your eyes to just how much plastic you still need to send to landfill.

​Substitute or eliminate
The next step is to look at what you buy. Are there equivalents that come in plastic free packaging? Olives in glass jars instead of plastic pouches, squash in glass rather than plastic bottles, same for milk etc….

There may even be easy switches you can make that are packaging free. Loose fruit and veg from the local market, supermarket or a veg box scheme. Many butchers and fishmongers these days are happy to pack your purchases straight into tubs you've brought from home.

If you have the time, there are plenty of zero waste style shops springing up around the country. Check out Thatcham & Newbury’s local zero waste pop-up Lonely Lentil, for dried food staples and Scoop, which brings the same business model to Oxfordshire. The Hampstead Norreys Community Shop, Thatcham Refillable and The Mix in Wantage all supply refills on a whole range of SESI cleaning products.

There are plenty of options to go plastic free and we’ll be sharing many more ideas as we move through July.
 
Seek out other recycling routes
You’ve made all of these changes, but you still have a steady flow of single use plastic into the house.

The fact is, we don’t have to rely on kerbside collections anymore. There’s a multitude of recycling programmes and initiatives out there. TerraCycle recycles tonnes of waste we consider to be unrecyclable, from coffee capsules to pens to plastic gloves. Enval recycles plastics with a foil appearance while Polyprint recycles stretchy plastics such as bubble wrap, cling film and carrier bags. LUSH collects milk bottle tops to manufacture its product containers, Walkers takes crisp packets and Wyatt and Jack repurposes your broken or unwanted inflatables, into stylish bags and accessories! Locally, Thatcham Waitrose has a tetrapak recycling collection point while the Sainsburys in Calcot has a bin for your yoghurt pots and marg tubs.

I am sure there are many of you asking yourself this question in the current climate of change and movement to becoming more sustainable. I was there too, walking my dog, watching the litter dancing in the wind at my local park. Each day there was more litter and with winter approaching, it was harder for my dog to avoid it, until, yet again, she cut her paw on a discarded beer can, concealed by the snow.

Carrying the dog home, I was met by the faces of my children who tried to console the poor pooch; ‘Don’t worry girl, you’ll recover soon,’ they said. Their little hands patting the anxious dog was the push I needed. Disaster premonitions were racing through my mind that soon, it would be my children and my children’s children who would be dodging the litter. But, who would be there to take care of their wounds?

That night I cried, I cursed the slow government, the litter and the council. After all, what difference can one full-time working mum make? With insomnia kicking in, I went to fetch my phone to distract myself from the horrors building in my gut, like an invisible hand, churning it around squeezing it hard.
 ‘Insects dying on mass.’ ‘Whale found with 10kg plastics inside her digestive system.’ ‘If we don’t change, we will set in motion the destruction of the planet within 25 years.’

My Facebook distraction tactic hadn’t worked. Now, in full-blown anxiety attack mode, I finally came across a post on a local Facebook group from a mum who felt the same way. That was it. Panicking, I made the decision to at least cry on the shoulder of a stranger who was in the same boat. I contacted the site admin. The next day I visited our lovely Jenny, the eco warrior of Thatcham and she had a proposal for me.  ‘If you want to do something, you could set yourself up to be the local Terracycle drop off point, as I am sadly not able to do it myself. ’

I researched TerraCycle who never incinerate or landfill, but turn plastic waste back into a pellet form material, which is sold on to make fence posts, benches and many other everyday items. Tapping away, I created my account and linked it to Canine Partners charity. That one simple step felt like one little stone had broken away from my anxiety concreted chest. I circulated posts begging for a spare bin and a couple of days later, I had one that had been used for food waste. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’, I said to myself as I dived in with the bleach to clean it. There was nothing more entertaining for my boys than watching their short mummy disappear into the bin as I tried to clean the bottom of it. Soon, their mummy appeared with bleached hair, matted with brown rotten gunk, cursing and spitting some bits out of her mouth and nose!
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Bin thoroughly cleaned, I was ready for action and on 1st of January 2019, I began collecting for the TerraCycle programs I’d joined. By the end of the month, I’d collected 27.7Kg of waste and I was over the moon. I, me, this ONE small individual had prevented that much plastic waste from reaching landfill. Well, that was the beginning………

Since then I have been walking my dog, litter picking and enjoying the odd hedgehog scuttling along the grass in the evening, the muntjac giving me the look before crossing the path, the birds chirping away. And it turned out I wasn’t alone. Other mothers have joined me.

I have also visited many schools and given talks about plastic waste. I can talk for hours about how long each material takes to degrade and I explain that there are other recycling options out there when you start looking. The local council curbside collection isn’t the beginning, nor the end of recycling. I even had had an article published in the local paper and magazine.

Along the way, I’ve met plenty of amazing people that I never knew were out there. I realised that I am surrounded by a community of many who are doing what little they can and together, we do make a huge difference. Between January 2019 and today (25 June 2019), we have removed 694.5 kg of plastic waste from landfill and raised £974,31 for Canine Partners along the way.

And that’s not all. Together we have lobbied for change, raised awareness through our pop-up sustainable shops and we’ve even started a Sustainable Living Market that takes place every second month of the year and often sees more than 400 visitors pass through its door. I am still discovering new and wonderful examples of community in action in my area, such as the Hampstead Norreys Community Shop who recently won the Countryside Alliance Rural Oscars for the South East as well as best rural shop in Britain.

​So, after reading the above, are you still thinking that you can’t make a difference? Well, come and see me at GreenFest on 7th September in Hampstead Norreys. We can talk and figure out how 10 minutes out of your day or even a small change in your shopping habit, can kick that tiny snowball into running down the hill. Mine is still running down the hill but it’s now giantosaurus-snawballous-rex that just keeps rolling.