Natural and Organic Food

I want to resume the posts here at Organic Sanity by looking at some of the modern day things that we as a race do that is doing immesurable harm to the planet on which we live. Things that to an individual, or family group seem like not really a big deal. But when you add up all the families or indiviuals who run households in a country the size of Great Britain, then what we do collectively is a very big deal. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to get a country the size of the United States and it becomes quite scarey.

Multiply that number again by four and you get a country like China or India and it then seems almost hopeless. So what are some of the things we can do collectively to give this planet of ours some breathing space?

Notice I don’t say anything about trying to save it, because we’re past that now. Its damage limitation time and maybe, just maybe we might leave some space for mother nature to come back from the brink.

Its not just about the big overall picture of saving a planet when you’re more concerned about where the next monthly mortgage or rent payment is going to come from. Or where your next meal might be coming from, for that matter. Take the big picture down for a while because it is overwhelming. And when something is overwhelming, it looks an almost hopeless task to do anything about, so a a race, we generally tend to ignore it and hope it goes away.

Well, your grandchildren may not thank you for that attitude, but they might just understand it.

So I am, instead going to look at ways to limit the damage we all are already doing bu taking some very down to earth scenarios and making them look very achievable. Why? Because a lot of what we waste can be avoided by using some of that grey matter the gods have deemed to scatter inside your cranuims. Brains! Yep, we all have them so why don’t we all use them? Common sense is a term bandied about an awful lot, but how many of you actually believe you have a good grasp of what common sense actually is?

This series of posts will take that common sense and make it obvious. Obvious about what simple and almost unbelieveably tiny changes in the way we thing and act that can bring about a huge shift in the chances our Earth has of providing as much for our grandchildren as it provides for us. So let’s get started with the first of our articles on Cutting Waste.

Garbage

How can you cut down on the amount of rubbish, trash, garbage or whatever you want to call it? How can you cut down when you have a baby that produces a huge mountain of throwaway nappies for instance?

How can you cut down when you are so broke you hardly buy anything at the stores to eat in the first place?

How can you cut your garbage pile at all?

Well, just by thinking about the question, you are already getting the common sense portion of your brain into gear. When you look around you and take note of everything you put into the trash can, you are suddenly becoming aware of what you are throwing out. Then you work backwards and see what is coming into your house in the first place that is going to get thrown out later.

Then it hits you!

The shops and stores are producing most of what you as an individual or familay are throwing into the land-fill sites by the bag-load every day.

So what can you do about it?

Start shopping in stores that don’t pre-wrap everything. In our grandparent’s day, very little was pre-wrapped. When they bought fruit and vegetables those fruits and vegetables were on display unwrapped and naked in the display shelves and wracks of the greengrocer store. The store assistant weighed their stuff and put it into paper bags. They put the paper bags into a larger basket or bag that was re-used every time our grandparents went to the shops! No plastic carrier bags, in those days. The landfills were almost nonexistant because there was so little trash thrown out in those days.

Why?

Because there was so little pre-wrapping of goods in those days. Stuff came in cardboard boxes or paper bags and guess what paper and cardboard does when you get it wet and pile it up? Yep, it rots down like any other prganic material and does not produce any pollution. It can be mixed into a comppost heap and returned to the earth as good organic matter.

Am I stirring any thoughts or ideas yet?

We bring home with us a lot of plastic and that is tough to get rid of. If you pile up plastics and get it wet, it doesn’t rot down. It just stays there and tangles up with organic matter and retards its rotting down process as well. So the landfill sites fill up quicker and we start running out of places to put it. Its no good dumping it into the ocean, because fish can’t eat plastic - in fact it kills them. We eat fish and the more we kill unnecessarily, the less there will be for us to eat. But that’s a story for another post.

So what do we do with plastic that we have to throw away?

Use that common sense again. Separate it from the other trash, collect it up and store it in a big bag and when its full, take it to your local recycling centre., that’s what. Its not hard, not difficult to figure out. That little bit of extra can-do attitude will mean that little bit less plastic gets dumped into land fill or into the sea. More fish for you and less pollution for your grandchildren.

Ok, that’s it for this post, its long enough already. I’ll write more on this subject in the next instalment, so keep an eye out for it, won’t you?

Terry Didcott
Organic Sanity

Here are some rather shocking facts about pesticides that Natural and Organic Food blog has unearthed:

UK Government tests have suggested that one in every four items of food that you buy contains traces of pesticides. No less than one hundred and fifty of the most commonly used pesticides are potentially cancer causing. Some pesticides cannot be washed off with water, as has been previously believed.

Around 31,000 tonnes of chemicals are used annually by farmers in the UK to kill weeds, insects and other pests that attack crops. In 2004, around 40% of the fruit, vegetable and bread samples tested in the UK contained measurable amounts of pesticides.

There is very little control over the way these potentially dangerous chemicals are used and in what quantities or combinations in the non-organic farming sector.

The Food Standards Agency now recognises that the vast majority of people do not want pesticides in their food.

Modern pesticides have a devastating effect on the environment. Added to that are the very real uncertainties about the actual effectiveness of official safety regulation of pesticides. Yet unbelievably their use is allowed to continue unabated despite the fact that some of the enormous risks to human health are virtually unknown.

By way of a comparison with modern, intensive farming methods, where a cocktail of pesticides are used on arable land and the crops that we commonly eat, organic farmers with the Soil Association are allowed to use (and then only as a last resort) a mere four of the 350 pesticides that are in use. Although two of these chemicals are strictly controlled, the Soil Association wants to take this further and are actually phasing out one of these completely.

All the more reason for everybody to stand up and say a resounding “NO MORE” to non-organic produce and force governments and the farming industry into changing the way they operate completely, before it’s too late.

Terry Didcott
Natural and Organic Food

It doesn’t take much, but there are several small things that everyone can do that will go a little way to helping the environment.

First, I notice a lot of people don’t think when throwing stuff away. I don’t mean they become stupid the moment they throw something into the garbage, I mean they don’t think about what impact their action has when you multiply it a few thousandfold as everyone else does the same thing.

Landfill sites are bursting at the seams because people throw away so much stuff. A lot of it needn’t even go into landfill, it’s just that people don’t realize they can dispose of things in a different way that will have a huge impact on the rate at which landfills get filled up.

Here are a few things that just a tiny bit of extra thought will make a difference.

Plastic bottles. If there is no recycling bank near you, then the next best thing you can do is at least reduce the volume of the waster that you dump. That means squeezing up the bottles when they’re empty to make them as small as possible. That will in itself save a huge volume in landfill if everyone did this.

Milk and juice cartons. These shouldn’t be chucked in the bin whole either. It doesn’t take much to fold them into a small block and reduce their volume by 90%.

Paper and cardboard - don’t even throw it out. Why would you? If you have a garden then you should have a compost heap. If you have a compost heap, rip up paper and cardboard into manageable pieces and mix them into your heap. It all biodegrades with the rest of the composting material.

Kitchen waste. Again, if you have a compost heap, you should be throwing all peelings and unused leafy and vegetable material onto the compost heap. Some gardeners don’t like throwing potato peelings on the heap because they have a tendency to grow in the heap. What are they worried about? As the things grow, just turn them in and let the composting process break the additional plant matter down!

Incidentally, if you don’t have a garden or a compost heap, surely you know a friend, relative or neighbour who has and could be convinced to take your compost-able material for their own heaps.

These are just a few things you can do to help make a difference.

For one person to do these things the effect will be barely noticeable, but for a thousand people to do these things an impact will be felt!

I’ll post more ideas like this in future posts.

Terry Didcott
Natural and Organic Food