The Independent was yesterday asking ‘Is it time to dig for victory again‘. This is a bit of a trend: the media is getting quite interested in the whole idea of self-sufficiency of late, probably spurred by the looming credit crisis (although the Indie is taking a green tack instead). PM, the other day, ran a story on the booming industry for fruit trees, which are being bought up like never before. The vendor they spoke to said it was a sure sign of impending recession. Not good.

Anyhow, the Independent report threw up some interesting stats, like the fact that the whole dig for victory campaign was spurred by the fact that blockades meant Britain could no longer rely on the 55 million tons of food it had previously been importing. My impression was that this pretty much fed the population - albeit frugally - but in actual fact it only provided around 10% of the country’s food needs.

So perhaps this 10% is the magic number for which we should all be aiming - to produce a tenth of our annual consumption of vegetables in our own homes, gardens or allotment plots.

It doesn’t sound like much until you realise that the campaign focused on growing only the speediest crops with the highest nutritional value, not the wide variety a home farmer might use today. And even then it required a certain amount of going beyond the minimum and eating the parts of plants that these days we would rarely touch.

“Little things once commonplace like pinching off the tops of broad beans – a fabulous spinach substitute – or trimming the tops from radishes and serving them as a vegetable are worth reconsidering,” says garden historian Caroline Holmes. (Source: Independent)

I’ve often wondered how much of what we cut off our food and throw away we could actually eat. Like the stem on a head of broccoli, for example, which makes up a great part of the weight for which you pay in the supermarket. It probably wouldn’t be very nice if you boiled it, but could you blend it into a soup?

I almost trimmed down the leaves from the tops of the sprouts at Christmas as they’re supposed to be like a slightly stronger cabbage, and I read the other day about drying the leaves from your raspberry canes to make fruit tea, which is very tempting.

As for the broad beans suggested above, though… well that’s a ‘hmmm’. Looking at them in the plot last night they looked far too much like sage to make them tempting as a stand alone vegetable.

But maybe I’ll give it a go. For old times’ sake.

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self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, vegetables

There are many reasons to become self-sufficient. For some it’s the simple enjoyment of standing on your own two feet, while for others it’s a desire not to be beholden to the whims and manipulation of the big-chain supermarkets.

That second group would get a whole lot larger if everyone was forced to read Andrew Simms’ extraordinary Tescopoly. Bursting with stats and facts it documents the big four supermarket groups’ (and Tesco in general’s) exploitation of the market for groceries, and the harm they do to their customers, suppliers and the environment by strangling competition and forcing food producers into impossible deals.

More worryingly, though, it documents Tesco’s drive into ever more areas, wiping out whole high streets by providing everything from cabbages to cutlets, baps to bank accounts, and ready meals to medicine. Now, as it moves into providing phone services, broadband and even legal services, its power over our day to day lives gets ever stronger, and we only feed its ability to exercise this control by giving it more and more information about who we are, what we like and what we do.

There is so much in this book that is incredible, extraordinary and frightening that picking out just one quote is close to impossible, but Simms’ analysis of the supermarkets’ ability to gather such minute information on ourselves sticks in the mine, and should be enough to have us cutting up our Clubcards in droves.

With the power of Clubcard to analyse the lives of Tesco customers, this creates some fascinating opportunities for cross-selling. Remember, 60,000 different customised promotions go out with Clubcard mailings. Should the computer notice that Mr Smith is buying a lot of condoms when Mrs Smith seems to be away (indicated by a break in her regular shopping patterns), and Mr Smith appears to be buying flowers and lingere when it isn’t Mrs Smith’s birthday, it’s perfectly imaginable that Mr Smith’s next Clubcard mailing might include a money-off voucher for the Tesco Divorce Pack. This would, after all, be simple, customer driver marketing logic. From Baby Club to getting divorced to making your Last Will and Testament, Tesco will be there to take a slice of all of life’s (and death’s) key moments.

Is this feasible? Certainly.

There are around 25 million [Clubcards] in existence, representing 14 million households. Perhaps 10 million cards are in active use. This creates an extraordinary eventuality. Shortly before its fall, the German Democratic Republic - East Germany, one of the most famous police states in the world - only had a population of around 16 million. That means Tesco almost certainly holds more files on British citizens than the East German state ever held on its own people.

But of course the German Democratic Republic was very different to the UK, and it neither built up its records with overt help from the supermarkets, nor shared with them what it knew about their customers. In the UK, however, that may yet happen.

A darker twist to such surveillance technology emerged when the UK government let it be known that it planned to link proposed compulsory biometric identity cards, designed to help control immigration, to the data contained on supermakrt loyalty cards. The idea floated was to allow two-way data traffic between the government and major corporations like banks and supermarkets. Information contained on the national identity database, set up to underpin the ID card scheme, would be made available to companies for a price. In the other direction, the police could be alerted the moment someone who was the target of an inquiry made use of a loyalty card or cash machine.

You could discount a lot of what is said in this book as paranoia had Simms, who is policy director for the New Economics Foundation and coined the term Clone Towns, not backed up his facts with an impressive array of references and stats that add weight to his argument.

I’d have liked to have seen some direct response from Tesco, rather than mere reported quotes, and there is no indication whether or not the company was directly asked to contribute to the work, but this remains an important and compelling read, and one that will make you think twice, and perhaps three times before shopping at the famous red and blue store.

Self-sufficiency, then, could be about more than the simple satisfaction of eating your own produce throughout the year. It could be about preserving your own privacy, fighting for the rights of small producers and helping to save the environment.

There’s loads more about Tescopoly, and local campaigns about and against the store’s further expansion, at tescopoly.org.

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tescopoly

Self-sufficiency might not come easily to everyone. Decoding the fairly simple instructions on the back of a seed packet shouldn’t be a problem, but what about baking bread, making cheese or herding your own flock of hens around the garden? That might take a bit more thought.

So the Soil Association has teamed up with Stony to run A Taste of the Good Life, a series of free classes in the essentials of self-sufficiency.

The classes fall into three main areas: harvesting, cooking and making, giving you a crash course in bread baking, bacon curing, flour milling, bee keeping, fleece spinning and creating your own herbal remedies, among other things. They’re spread around the country and run from now until the summer, depending on the course you choose.

There’s only one snag: to get a free class you have to join the Soil Association, which costs £24, so think of it more as a joining gift than an out-and-out freebie. Existing members get a 50% discount.

Full details can be found on the Taste of the Good Life pages.

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self sufficiency, self+sufficiency, soil+association, education

When it launched its online petitions site, the government can have had little idea of the trouble it would be letting itself in for.

Almost 1.8m British citizens signed up to the campaign against distance-based road charging. The government promptly said it would ignore them, so you have to wonder what was the point of the site anyway.

A quick hunt through the currently active petitions, though, shows that there are several green causes up for debate, and in particular focus is the energy inefficient lightbulb debate. Typing ‘bulb’ in to the petitions search engine turns up seven relevant campaigns, several of which overlap each other, effectively splitting the vote and counting against each other.

To ensure that they each get a fair hearing, I’d encourage you to follow these links and add your details to each of the campaigns below, all of which are in favour of long-life, low-energy bulbs. Note, however, that these petitions are only open to British citizens:

Petition to levy a tax on energy inefficient light bulbs so that their long term financial and environmental cost is visible in their retail price
Old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs contribute to climate change, and cost more in the long term for the consumer. New fluorescent bulbs are better for the environment, and the pocket. We would like the Prime Minister to make these long terms costs visible in the retail price of lightbulbs. This would be done by levying a tax on inefficient bulbs, and subsidising efficient bulbs. (this petition currently has the most support, so if you sign up to only one, make it this one)

Petition to Remove VAT on energy efficient electronics and ban energy in-efficient devices
VAT on energy efficient devices such as low-energy light bulbs and white goods rated “A” or above should be removed. This will promote the buying public to buy these. In addition VAT should be removed on solar-thermal panels, solar-electric panels and wind turbines. In parallel, a ban on normal light bulbs must be in place by 1st January 2009. Lastly, white goods with an energy rating of “D” or below must be phased out by 1st January 2009.

Petition to persuade the EU Commission to abolish Regulation (EC) No 1470/2001 imposing import duties on Chinese low-energy bulbs
EC Regulation 1470/2001 imposed anti-dumping duties on imports of compact flourescent lamps (low-energy bulbs)from China of up to 66.1%. EC By Regulation 866/2005 this was extended to cover imports from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Republic of the Philippines. There was a slight revision in 2006 by EC Regulation 1322/2006. Given the overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming, the Prime Minister and the EU ought to scrap such duties to encourage the greater up-take of this technology.

Petition to Ban the sale of non-efficient light bulbs in the UK
While individual energy-efficient bulbs are more expensive, the total cost of ownership is less as they fail less often and use less electricity. There now exist such bulbs that retain the traditional look and quality of light of normal bulbs.

Petition to Ban non-energy efficient light bulbs
Let’s ban the sale of non-energy efficient lightbulbs and make a real difference. And before anyone asks.. it will cost me too - I’ve just moved into house with halogen bulbs! I know the argument will be that it will punish people who can’t afford energy efficient light bulbs (even though they are much cheaper in the long run) but the government has forced people to switch from analogue to digital television, meaning that everyone has to buy a set top box - and yet we still have the option to buy lightbulbs which are (by the governments own admission) causing global warming. The government are always banging on about energy savings in the home being the key to saving us from disaster - make the decision for us.. ban non-energy efficient light bulbs!

Petition to mandate energy efficiency in consumer electronics
Currently some consumer electronics (for example washing machines) are sold with efficiency ratings. But the majority of household goods are subject mainly to safety regulations only. By creating a set of permissible guidelines for efficiency for a range of goods starting at some set point in the future - manufacturers will have a clear target at which to aim for. This might be in the form of maximum standby current, or maximum power consumption for each category. High power consumption items (such as incandescent light bulbs) where more efficient alternatives are already available should be banned altogether. The aim of this is to lower the average household energy consumption; the advantages of this are obvious.

Petition to legislate for local authorities and housing associations to provide at least one energy efficient lightbulb to its tenents
In order to decrease the amount of CO2 generated within the country social housing providers (local authorities, the church and housing associations and the government (armed forces housing) should given the funding to provide their tenants with at least one energy efficient light bulb.

The Archers has gone all green on us. The world’s longest-running soap, celebrating almost 60 years on air, is known for reacting quickly to changing world events, and even managed to incorporate a bird flu storyline into its regular narrative a couple of weeks back, when the disease cropped up at a Bernard Matthews farm in Suffolk.

Now, in the wake of the UN report on climate change, the characters are starting to take the changes in our weather more seriously.

For non-UK readers, the series started out as a short run of drama programmes for farmers, designed to help them improve their land- and animal-working skills, but proved to be so popular that it soon went national, and has run ever since. It has an audience of millions, most of which have nothing to do with farming at all.

Each 12-minute episode is largely fiction-based, but it has been known to dip into ethical and slightly preachy tones from time to time, so it’s perhaps no surprise that it is not talking seriously about the effect of wasteful consumption, and the small changes we can all make to green up our lives.

The BBC sends out a summary of every episode the following day. This excerpt from last Thursday’s edition, gives you an idea of the tack it is taking:

Caroline comes across Nigel in Underwoods. He’s musing on the shirts in the shop, all of which have come from abroad. Caroline is puzzled but later Elizabeth explains about how shocked Nigel was when he found out about the impact of climate change on the beech trees. Nigel makes a decision. He tells Elizabeth he wants to give up his car and get back on his bike. She is furious, but Nigel sticks to his guns. He’s going to do it. He’ll sell the car, and they’ll cope. He’s got to start somewhere.

The Archers is broadcast every weekday at 2pm and 7pm. The 2pm episodes are repeats of the previous day’s 7pm editions, which are considered the premiers of each programme. It is also broadcast on Sunday evenings at 7pm, while for those who have missed any episodes, an omnibus of all six editions from the previous week can be heard between 10 and 11.15am on a Sunday.

Readers outside of the UK can listen to The Archers through its pages on the BBC site.