Reusable barrier bags

Do you know what a 'barrier bag' is?

You might not be familiar with the terminology, but chances are you are very familiar with the item: the single-use lightweight plastic bags that are available on rolls when you buy fruit and veg, or whole foods, so your apples and potatoes don't get in a muddle in the trolley.

I have for some years now tried not to use these bags, keeping items loose wherever practical. However, while it might be OK to have a few onions rolling around, soft things like stone fruit or small things like almonds really need something to contain them.

For my birthday last month, my caring and ever-thoughtful mother-in-law made me a set of cloth barrier bags. They are a simple rectangle, in various sizes, with a ribbon draw-string. The fabric is silk voile (lace curtaining) which means the checkout staff can see what is in each bag. 

So our May commitment is to remember to use them! We also intend to use paper bags to cover any excess need, to be added to compost when they become unusable. Fruit and veg shops generally provide paper bags for mushrooms, and they can easily be adapted for other uses. The wonderful Kakulus Sister in Fremantle provides them for their dry goods in general, which gave me the idea.

We also use these bags for storing some fruit and veg in the fridge, which so far seems to be working fine. There will be a few things that are very powdery for which we will have to use paper, as I think flour or the like would not quite be contained.

Initial Time: For me, zero. I'm not sure how long it took Tyson's mum to make them. She's very good at sewing, but even if you were less skilled it is a simple project. 

Initial Cost: For me, zero. To make yourself: simple ribbons generally cost $3-$5 a metre, although they also seem to turn up on all sorts of things, so if you are not picky about making them match you can probably find some around the house. Or use string. Wool. Old shoelaces. Whatever you can salvage. Fabric prices vary widely, but at say $10/metre your bags would cost about $1 each.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Remembering to take them and use them. They are stored with our cloth shopping bags, so in theory this is easy, but we are taking a while to get into the groove. Occasionally they need to be washed after use (mostly not). When empty, they need to be returned to their storage place rather than binned. 

Impact: 

Australians use approximately four billion single-use shopping bags a year. The average useful life of those bags is twelve minutes. Around 86% end up in landfill, where even if they are supposedly compostable they do not really break down, due to the highly compacted nature of landfill. Although most people report using plastic bags two or three times before disposing of them, ultimately they still end up in the bin. The remainder end up as litter, choking up our environment and particularly damaging waterways. Marine life is severely impacted by plastic waste. Once the bags begin to deteriorate, they contribute to 'micro plastics' - microscopic plastic fibres that are being found in sea creatures in increasing quantities. Including sea creatures we eat. 

At the other end of the process, producing plastic bags is a polluting process using non-renewable resources. China banned plastic bags in 2008 and it is reported to have saved 1.6 million tonnes of oil the following year.

I estimate that our family uses around 260 barrier bags in a year. There is some environmental cost in producing the cloth bags. Choice has calculated that a green shopping bag needs to be used 23 times before its production footprint is less than the equivalent in plastic. Given that our bags are of polyester fabric, I imagine we need to use them at least 23 times and probably a few more, so we pull ahead after about one year of use. 

While researching to write this post I discovered that a government campaign in 2003-2007 to phase out plastic shopping bags, which I had thought was ongoing, ceased in 2008. Plastic bag use leapt 17% the same year. Some States have gone on alone to regulate against single-use plastic, but not Western Australia. After this election I think I will write to whoever forms government to remind them that quite a lot of people would like those bags banned. If China, Rwanda and Bangladesh can do it, surely we can manage here?

Links/ References:

Discussion paper on phasing out plastic bags in Western Australia (2014)

Choice article discussing options for sustainable shopping bags (2014)

NSW EPA discussion paper on plastic bags (2016)

I say tomato

This month we finally bit the bullet and had a go at improving the ethics of our preserved tomato consumption.

I have known for quite a while that there are major ethical concerns about tinned and bottled tomatoes but doing anything about it just seemed too hard. Cheap preserved tomatoes are so easy to grab off the bargain shelf! But they are also almost always imported, with concerns about the working conditions of tomato pickers in other countries. It is ridiculous that we don't eat our own tomatoes: Australia has the ideal tomato-growing climate, with the things even surviving as weeds in abandoned gardens.

So after a week of unseasonal rain here in late January, Tyson was on the look-out at the farmers markets for over-ripe, excess or slightly damaged produce being sold off in bulk, and came home with a large box of very ripe tomatoes ready to bottle. (He also brought home peaches for jam, so it was a busy weekend!)

Our method was: Wash and quarter tomatoes (ends removed).

Squash tomatoes into oven-sterilised bottles with wooden spoon, removed air bubbles. Add a teaspoon of lemon juice to cover the top of each bottle before putting the lid on.

water level was much closer to the lid prior to boiling

Place bottles in water not quite up to their lids and boil for about an hour.

The bottles seal themselves as they cool. It was a very hot weekend, so we boiled them fairly late in the evening and sat them outside to cool so their heat wasn't added to our house.

We forgot to weigh the tomatoes, but think it was about 12-14kg of fruit. We ended up with 23 bottles of tomatoes. This should see us through about six months (although as Australians each consume on average 25kg of processed tomatoes a year, perhaps I have over-estimated how long they will last us!). 

The second part of our tomato commitment, therefore, is to buy Australian when our home-processed stores run out.

Initial Time: two hours

Initial Cost: $14 for one large box of tomatoes

Ongoing time or cost commitment: approximately the same again, once a year; about 50c more per tin of tomatoes once our home supplies run out and we are buying Australian (perhaps $26 more in a year?)

Impact: 

Almost 80% of processed tomatoes purchased in Australia are imported, mostly from Italy. Italy is a journey of around 9,200 nautical miles from Perth (17,000km), taking 39 days at sea. That is a lot of food miles. Despite apparent improvements in recent years, workers' conditions are not as well protected in Italy as in Australia and there are many documented instances of tomato workers, many of whom are African migrants and often without valid work visas, being treated not much better than slaves. Quality standards for farms and processing plants are also less rigorous in Italy than in Australia. 

The import from Italy has over the last decade nearly destroyed the Australian tomato industry. Several processing plants have closed (eg Heinz, Rosella). Due to the high Australian dollar, oversupply in Italy, and European Union subsidies to tomato farmers, it was possible for Italian growers to sell tomatoes to Australia at less than their own production cost. This is called 'dumping' and is actually illegal. About 18 months ago an inquiry finally blew the whistle on the practice, and last year the government established tariffs to stop it. As a result we are probably not going see as many 59c tins of tomatoes in the grocery aisles (and should be grateful, not grumpy, about this). Woolworths responded in August 2014 by signing a five-year deal with SPC Ardmona to source Australian tomatoes for their store-brand tomato lines. SPC is now looking to double the size of its tomato processing plant, which two years ago was under threat of closure. But for this hopeful news to become a good outcome, Australians need to abandon our baseless infatuation with 'Italian tomatoes' as a synonym for value and quality, and support Australian growers and producers.

Supporting Australian food producers is not charity. It is in MY best interests to have a robust domestic food industry. It is in MY best interests to have a healthy local economy with plenty of rural and manufacturing employment opportunities. For the reasons outlined above, and drought in tomato-growing regions of Australia for most of the years of this century, Australian tomatoes are generally more expensive. This is despite Australian growers being literally twice as efficient as their Italian competitors in how many tonnes of tomatoes they produce per hectare (150 tonnes compared with 74 tonnes). I am prepared to pay a little more for my tomatoes to support food security and Australian economies. Tomato farmers at present make about 4-5c profit on each 400g tin of tomatoes sold ($100-$125 per tonne after production costs) which is a pretty slight margin to be living on. At the bottom of this post is a bit more information about how to identify Australian tomato products.

So after all those reasons to support Australian producers, why are we bottling our own? Several reasons:

- 'Local' is a bit of a stretch for us here in Perth. The three surviving Australian tomato processing plants are in Echuca and Shepparton Victoria and Jerilderie NSW - at least 3,300km from me (Echuca). West Australians grow tomatoes too, and I would like to buy their produce when I can, which means buying it fresh from our local farmers' markets. (Supermarket tomatoes are not necessarily fresh or local: check out this short video from Local Harvest).

- The biggest Australian producer, and the one it is easiest to find on supermarket shelves, is SPC-Ardmona (based at Shepparton - the 'S' of 'SPC'). SPC-Ardmona is owned by Coca Cola, a company with boycott calls on it due to its involvement in torture and murder of union leaders in Latin America (who were protesting terrible Coca Cola work conditions) and destruction of water supplies for communities in India, as well as varied complaints in many other countries. I want to support Australian producers but I don't want to support Coca Cola, so I am balancing out buying some SPC with doing my own bottling.

- The amount of packaging used in commercial products leads me to want to do my own processing at home - even if much of the packaging for tomatoes is recyclable, not all of it is, and it still carries the energy use of producing and transporting that packaging. The jars we uses were saved from shop-bought tomato products and will be used many times over.

- Although tomato farmers pay their picking contractors appropriate wages, it is not always clear that the contractors pass a fair wage on to the individual pickers who, in Australia as overseas, are often migrants, minorities, non-English speakers, etc, who don't always have the ability to speak out if they are not being treated fairly.

total waste from our box of tomatoes: approx 1kg of ends and two bad fruit

- Buying bulk over-ripe fruit saves food from going to waste. It also means we are bottling the tomatoes in season, at the peak of their flavour, which is not always the case for commercial products. We have the option to use organic produce (although on this occasion we did not) and we know exactly what goes into the jars and don't put any chemicals or additives in (like the mysterious 'thickening agent' in one brand of tinned tomatoes on our shelf).

- Its fun! Really. Eva and I had a lovely afternoon together working on the tomatoes. She insisted on being involved for the entire process, long after I expected she would get bored. She loved getting thoroughly tactile with juicy, squashy fruit. She enjoyed the challenge of getting as many chunks of tomato into each jar as possible, and removing all the air bubbles. She is learning kitchen skills, like handling a sharp knife, as well as a sense that all manner of challenges are very possible to achieve. Being involved in processing our own food also teaches our children where their food comes from and, in my opinion, gives them a greater appreciation of what comes out of packages.

Links: 

The best article I read on the tomato industry (although note this is from May 2012, before the inquiry into dumping and the Woolworths deal, so things were looking very grim at the time)

Findings of the inquiry into Dumping  (Dec 2013 draft; April 2014 final)

A more readable analysis of these findings

About Woolworth's deal with SCP-Ardmona (August 2014)

Local Harvest - Melbourne-based group allowing you to enter your postcode and find 'local food' options near to you

A current social media campaign called 'No farmers No food' captures something of my reasons for trying to support Australian food growers and producers. (They also have plenty of catchy, shareable graphics to pass around)

How to identify Australian tomatoes:

Australia's three tomato processors are:

SPC-Ardmona, based at Shepparton Victoria; owned by Coca Coal Amartil. Tomato products are mostly branded 'SPC', but SPC also supplies to some other companies, such as Woolworths (but not all Woolworths tomatoes are guaranteed to be from SPC).

Kagome, at Echuca Victoria; a subsidiary of the Japanese tomato company of the same name. Kagome claims to be 'Australia's largest grower, harvester and processor of tomatoes'. They only sell wholesale to other producers, so you won't find anything on the shelf labelled 'Kagome'. Their website http://kagomeechuca.com/ has a graphic at the bottom showing specific products that are 100% Australian tomatoes.

Billabong from Jerilderie NSW, a family business who claim to be 'Australia's ONLY wholly owned, made, and grown cannery'. Their products are branded 'Billabong Produce'. I am investigating whether they can be obtained in Western Australia (check comments for updates).

Brands that are using 100% Austalian tomatoes (mostly supplied by Kagome):

MON

SPC

Beerenberg

Maggie Beer

Sabrands (Rosella)

HJ Chapmans (POPs Sauce)

Edlyn (Wood relishes)

Della Rosa Foods (pizza manufacturer)
Masterfoods 100% Australian Grown Ketchup
Dolmio Pasta Sauce from 100% Australian Tomatoes

Brands that use Australian tomatoes but sometimes blend with imported stock (depending on availability):

Simplot (Leggos)

Mars (Masterfoods Ketchup, Dolmio)

Symingtons (5 Brothers, Raguletto)

General Mills (Latina Fresh Pasta, Old El Paso)

Cerebos (White Crow, Fountain)

Campbells

Vesco 
Heinz

There may be others this list has missed, so its always worth checking with the supplier. Enjoy your tomatoes!

Grapes in a rental garden

Grapevines are wonderful. They provide good shade in summer, drop their leaves to allow sun in winter, don't need much water or loving care, and best of all: they grow grapes!

But in a rental garden, are they possible?

We started with a cutting in a pot. As it turns out we have been in the same rental house nearly seven years, but while our lovely vine was getting established in his pot, we could have relocated with him if we needed to. In the photo below he's been settling in for about six months.

By Mr Vine's second summer he needed something to grow up, and we helped him with bits of makeshift trellis in the raised garden bed - mostly recycled items heading for bulk waste, like a rusted clothes drying rack. 

 

But what I really wanted was for the vine to provide shade for the front of the house.

Our lounge heats up not just from direct summer sun, but from reflected heat off sunny bricks. So the challenge was to build a trellis so the grapevine could grow over the garden entrance as far as the roof, without putting up any permanent fixtures.

The main support was a branch salvaged when trimming the gum tree. The trellis comprises two lengths of thick wire, each with loops twisted into them, one lying along the gutter and one connecting the gutter to the gum tree support. Loops between the two wires are connected with pieces of clothesline.

Our vine has now spent two summers growing up the trellis and I am thrilled with this addition to our garden, and to our passive cooling measures for the living area. Grapevines need firm pruning but its not an excessive task. Thus far, only pruning a couple of times a year, the vine has been easy to keep away from the tiles and causes no problems along the roof line.

We know the vine has been through the bottom of the pot for years now. If we need to we can dig it out to remove it when we leave (but why would any landlord want it gone?). Hopefully it can be left to bless future residents.

The grapes are delicious, although they come ripe each year exactly when we are away on our summer holiday. Eva spent the weeks before we left this year telling all our friends to come and eat our grapes while we were away and we were delighted that one good friend did just that, so the harvest was not wasted.

Initial Time: well now... Putting a grape cutting in a pot took about five minutes. Building the trellis took me about five minutes (erecting the gum tree support post) and Tyson about an hour (twisting wires). Growing a grapevine has taken five years so far. We got edible grapes from the fourth summer.

Initial Cost: Zero. We were given our cutting by friends.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Zero cost. We water with recycled bath, shower or washing machine water through summer, top up the soil with home-grown compost and mulch with leaves off other plants around the garden. Pruning takes about half an hour two or three times a year. As its in a well-mulched pot, there are hardly any weeds.

Impact: Our bricks are shaded a little more of the day and reflect less heat in our lounge window and front door. I don't know if the temperature is actually much cooler but I feel cooler to have a green space rather than the glare of a brick driveway when I look out the window. As it takes so long to be cold enough for leaves to fall here, I have actually cut most of the leaves off to let autumn sun through. And we get to eat home-grown grapes! Which is cool, and also saves a bit on  food miles/ pesticides/ packaging/ etc.

This picture was taken last July - not much sign of leaves dropping off despite it being the middle of winter! Last year we had only one week between the last leaf falling and the first spring shoots emerging. Ah Perth. Not really a climate of four seasons. 

Rubbish-free lunches

Eva started kindergarten three weeks back, so we are into the world of school lunches.

We are committing to packing no rubbish into our lunch boxes.

If food needs some kind of wrapping, we use our washable sandwich wrap (such a thoughtful gift from my cousin! Thanks K&N)  Ours is from http://www.4myearth.com.au and they sell a range of other food storage type products, such as food covers (to use instead of gladwrap) and insulated lunchbox bags.

 

Reusable plastic boxes are good for things like yoghurt or just to separate out foods (so the carrot sticks don't end up in the sandwiches...)

However, food generally keeps perfectly well until lunchtime without any sort of wrapping.

This commitment also extends to our work lunches, when we are not working from home. When we are off to work in an office with a microwave, we generally take frozen food leftovers to reheat for lunch. As a standard practice we cook more than we need for dinner and freeze leftovers in single-serve boxes ready for easy lunches. (Cooking leftovers at dinner also means we can always include extras at our dinner table at short notice, and take a sandwich instead the next day. I love knowing we can offer this sort of hospitality)

We use and re-use takeaway 'tupperware' containers. They do eventually perish - after about twenty uses - and then they get washed and go into the recycling.

Initial Time: It takes no longer to pack a rubbish-free lunch of fresh unprocessed food. It does take a few minutes to cut up food and make sandwiches/ wraps that grabbing pre-packaged processed food would I suppose not need. There are whole sections of the supermarket I know nothing about because it doesn't really occur to me to buy packaged processed 'special' items for lunches.

Initial Cost: No packaging rubbish = no cost for things like gladwrap or little plastic bags. Reusable sandwich wraps from 4myearth cost between $10 and $15.

Ongoing time or cost commitment:  making lunches takes about 5-10 minutes a day, but the time is not particularly connected to the no-rubbish commitment.

Impact: This photo shows the rubbish from fifteen four-year-olds at Eva's kindy at one lunch time. The teachers noted to me that this was a pretty small rubbish haul compared to most days.

So, acknowledging that this was less than the average lunch rubbish, and a couple of kids were away, Eva's kindy class alone will generate at least this much lunch rubbish this year:

Only fifteen people need to read this blog and choose rubbish-free lunches for us to together save that much waste in a year. Actually in about half a year, as these kindy kids are not full-time students.

We might be only a drop in the ocean, but at least we're not another plastic wrapper in the ocean.

Links:

Four posts ( 1 2 3 4 ) from Little Eco Footprints about waste-free lunches - with helpful ideas of what food to pack

Special thanks to the teachers at McDougall Park Community Kindergarten for humoring my slightly strange photo request!

Australian native jam

Do you know Lilly Pillys? Those bright pinky-purple berries that grow in many Perth yards, in hedges and public gardens, and on rambly old overgrown properties? I love the way they look and I like their name - its sounds quirky-romantic to me. 

As of last month, I now also love that they are edible, that they are an Australian native, and that they grow in our neighbour's yard between our two driveways.

So we were making jam again.

Eva was so excited by the idea that we could harvest these beautiful berries and make something edible that she was the main motivation for the project.

It was Greg's idea, though, and he put me onto this recipe, which we followed. I checked the internet to be sure I had lilly pillys and found there are over 60 different species of lilly pilly and all of them are edible.

The recipe calls for one lemon and 1kg of sugar per 1L of lilly pilly pulp. We doubled the amount of lemon, and wouldn't have wanted any less.

Next time I think I would go for a 3:4 ratio of sugar to pulp, as the 1:1 ratio has given us jam that is sweeter than it needs to be.

pulp coming through the sieve - it really is that colour

BUT: it is surprisingly delicious, and very beautiful. 

no it didn't boil down that far - I tipped it into a bigger pan so I could supervise it less closely

Six jars of lovely jam - 2L of pulp, about 2.5L of jam once sugar and lemon juice was added.

As I put too much water in when boiling the lilly pillys, I was left with a couple of litres of bright pink liquid once they were all scooped out. 

This I put in the fridge and used as a herbal tea. With half a teaspoon of honey per large mug, heated in the microwave, it was fantastic!

I am so excited that I cooked an Australian plant! OK, I don't think its native to the southwest of WA where I actually live, but at least its not from the northern hemisphere...

This is now our third jam-making session in less than a year (see posts on strawberries and nectarines). We are a big jam-eating house, but even so we are more than keeping up a supply for all our needs and gifts for friends. I am therefore now prepared to commit to NO MORE BUYING COMMERCIAL JAM.

 

Initial Time: About 3.5 hours - although the stove-top sections didn't require constant supervision, so actual labour time was closer to 2.5 hours (1/2 hour harvesting; 1/2 hour washing and preparing; 1/2 hour boiling; 1hr smooshing through a sieve to get seeds out and thin the pulp - this is the really labourious bit; 1/2 hour cooking; 1/2 hour bottling and cleaning up)

Initial Cost: About $2 for a bag of sugar. We remembered this time to get lemons from Grandma, and (with our neighbour's permission) the lilly pillys were free. She found the jar we gave her too sweet for her taste but her grandkids loved it.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Half a day every three or four months to make whatever the latest seasonal jam will be.

Impact:

Australian household spend on average about $1 per week on jam, with each Australian eating around 2kg of jam per year. We are a net exporter of 'jams, spreads, pastes, etc' - around $12mill worth per year, a small portion of the approximately $625mill annual export of substantially processed fruit and vegetable from Australia, and a blip beside the approximately $1.6bill of processed fruit and vegetables imported. Food and vegetable processing in general employs around 75,000 people in this country. (more stats here - from 2011-12). So not buying jam is not about reducing reliance on food imported from overseas. Very little if any of the jam available in supermarkets is produced in Western Australia, however, so we are reducing our food miles for produce trucked across Australia (I really hope it is trucked. Surely we don't need to fly our jam around? Actually I would love to think it was brought by rail... there is always hope, surely?)

Commercial manufacture of food products involves all manner of inputs and dependencies, such as: transport fuel, transport network, communications, banking services, electricity, gas, water (HEAPS of water is used in commercial processes!), chemicals for cleaning, preservatives to extend product life, packaging materials (including their production and transport)...

Think about it for a jar of jam:

Lid - sourcing raw materials (mining), processing them into a workable form, shaping the metal into a lid, adding labels (inks, dyes, etc and sometimes paper), at each of these stages transporting the stuff to the place where the next stage happens, at each stage a business operation with a footprint of all it takes to run an office (at bare minimum) and possibly a factory or a mine site. Quite likely a mine site that flies workers in and out every day or so.

Jar - sourcing raw materials (mining), turning them into glass (I'm no expert but that needs HEAT!!), shaping into jars. And at each stage another round of transport and business footprints.

Label - sourcing raw materials (forestry), turning them into paper, graphic design work, adding dyes etc to print and finish, glue to attach to jars. Add transport. Add business bits and pieces like the office coffee machine, toilet-flushing for all those staff, and replacing the carpets every few years...

Jam - sourcing raw materials (fruit, but also sugar, preservatives, corn syrup - although to be fair the Cottees and IXL jars I have left over in my pantry from before the jam-making began both have very few ingredients beyond fruit, water, citric acid and pectin), all the inputs required for horticulture including many pesticides, and lots and lots of water; all that is required to fit-out a factory for production.

And each piece has more sub-pieces that have their own chain of impact - Where did the glue come from? Where does the dye come from? What chemicals are used to clean all the equipment needed along the way? What materials are the machines in the factories made from?

By comparison our lilly pilly jam used:  recycled glass jars; about 30L of water to wash berries and jars, gas to run the stove; electricity to run the oven to sterilise the jars; no electricity for light or heating or cooling as we worked during the day on a nice winter's day; petrol to transport lemons from Grandma to us (but we didn't make a special trip); and all the supply-chain stuff above for commercially produced sugar - especially HEAPS of water that it takes to grow sugarcane. Our equipment (stove, our kitchen, the stainless steel saucepans, mixing bowls and spoons, plastic lemon squeezer) all comes from somewhere and has its own footprint.

Impact on my lifestyle: The only thing I may miss is ginger marmalade, unless I can find an acceptable recipe to try, and a cheap-enough source of ginger.

PS: North American friends, we Australians use 'jam' for what you call 'jelly'. 'Jelly' here is what you call 'jello'. Not so great on toast.