Our Food

A small post to recommend the BBC series Our Food, currently available on iPlayer. If you can ignore Giles Coren's TV persona, I think it's fantastic (don't get me wrong - I love his writing, I just can't stand his forced style, and the way he interrupts the people he's interviewing). I'd consider my knowledge of UK food production above average, but knew little about some of the things like UK saffron or essential oil production!

Watch it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01fkcdp/

Bees!

I love bees, as you might guess! Today Jon and I went along to the Reading Beekeepers open hive event, and got to have a poke around - us possessing hives, but as yet no bees. It was brilliant!

I am utterly fascinated by bee behaviour, and suspect this may become something of an obsession in my life. The owner of said bees has many hives in their garden, and I'm pretty sure there was some inter-hive bullying going on. Bees 'talk' to each other by nuzzling each other and waggling their antennae around, but I'm sure saw a bee having its legs pulled by another bee - maybe it was some sort of helpful cleaning behaviour. Only time, experience and research will tell!

The entrance to a hive is hypnotic. I videoed one for a short while, but could watch this for a whole lot longer - I love watching all the different coloured pollens arriving and wondering where they've been. The way bees organise themselves to get in and out is amazing...

An inspirational day!

A year without supermarkets

For lent 2011 I gave up supermarkets.

I hadn't intended to at first, but two weeks in I realised that tea, meat, cheese, beer and chocolate had all been consumed (all previous lenten targets), but I hadn't been to a supermarket.

"Why not?" I thought.

So 5 weeks later, eating my Easter egg, I realised I had fed myself only from our local food co-operative and The Co-operative (the similarity in names still causes confusion). A couple of things dawned on me:

1. I was not spending any more money - if anything I was spending less, as I was not impulse-spending on stuff I didn't need

2. I was eating more healthily. Instead of stocking up on filled pasta and frozen pizzas (staple for the single 'professional') I was making curries, tagines and tartes. I was eating more veg.

3. I must have halved my carbon footprint. Processed foods like those I bought previously contained ingredients which came from I-don't-know-where, worrying in itself. I now knew where all my food came from - and my veg came from just up the road.

4. I did not miss supermarkets. Go to our local food cooperative and you can sit on a sofa and have a cuppa whilst leafing through a magazine, with music playing in the background, then do your shopping at a leisurely pace. Go to our local supermarket and there are JML adverts playing loudly on screens, harsh lighting, and mums screaming at their kids, then "guess the price of the trolleyload" at the end. No contest.

I mostly kept this up, but when Jon and I got married we vowed to ditch supermarkets for good.

So far the only products we have not been able to obtain have been custard powder (recently remedied, MUCH to my relief) and vegan margarine - a problem only as we have some vegan friends who I would like to be able to provide for.

We now only use The Co-operative to buy cheese, butter and satsumas - not perfect, but much better. We have our milk (organic, of course) delivered by the milkman - the height of luxury, and in my eyes an important service to support for housebound people like my grandad. Not to mention no mountain of plastic milk bottles to recycle - and a job for our milkman.

We feed two people a pretty much entirely organic diet for £30 a week - plus an occasional trip to the farm shop for some meat. If something's out of season, we don't get to eat it. If we can't afford something within our £30 budget, we go without - with some tasty alternatives created in the kitchen.

I will openly admit that I am not a fan of supermarkets, and the ease with which Jon and I cope without them makes me realise how superficial our reliance on them is. If I need to use them in future I will, but I'd much rather get our groceries from somewhere where the owner knows our names, and the money supports local business.

Olive oil #2

Ok, so the olive oil washing method didn't work for me. I tried it for two weeks, but since having horrendous acne as a teenager, it turns out my skin is quite on the dry side now - and this method dried my skin out horribly. I don't know if I was using the wrong oil (100% olive oil) but I couldn't bear my skin feeling that tight and itchy afterwards. Despite washing with oil, it felt I needed to put more on afterwards!

So now I'm back to what I did use for a spell as a teenager - soap, then vinegar, then water-based moisturiser. Yup.

The vinegar works wonders (I use it on my hair too), acting as a toner, and making my skin a bit more acidic after the alkaline soap - possibly an important benefit as Reading water is SO hard. I'm still using my Body Shop moisturiser in the daytime though as a) I still have some left and b) it has SPF 15, which probably does my skin more good than anything else I do to it! I will consider making my own when I run out as my foundation (also Body Shop) is also SPF 15!

No 'poo - week 1

Mid-shower, on Sunday 11th March 2012, I made the decision to stop using shampoo. Rather than leaving it a while (i.e. putting it off) I decided to jump right in - no time like the present, wot.

Rather than post every now and again I've decided to write a journal, and post it as and when. From the discussions I've had so far, people seem pretty interested in this, so I thought I should share.

Should you wish to try it yourself I should give some background info and some caveats: my hair is dark, straight, thick but fine and shoulder length. I've been using shampoo bars for about 2 years, so my hair has had a mega detox from conventional shampoos. I also normally only wash it every 2 days. This is important as from what I've read, my understanding is that the more chemicals you've been using on your hair, the longer it takes to 'detox' from shampoo. So if you're using Pantene or Herbal Essences I'd recommend moving onto shampoo bars first.

So, without further ado - this is my experience of going "no 'poo"...

Day 1 (Sunday 11/3) - Following a henna session on Thursday, after which I failed to remove all henna/shampoo, and a swimming session on Friday after which I had a brief and pathetic hair wash owing to a lack of hot showering facilities, I decided mid-shower that I wasn't going to use shampoo after all. My hair hadn't had a proper was since Thursday morning, so technically I had a head start (no pun intended)

So I washed down, wrapped myself in a towel and went to collect bicarb, measuring cup and spoon and lemon juice from the kitchen. I made up a 1 cup water: 1 tbsp bicarb mixture, but having not read the instructions properly, I made  a 3 c mixture (i.e. waaay too much) and only rinsed my hair with it rather than massaging it in, and leaving it on for 2 minutes. I then rinsed with a water/lemon juice mixture - not measured properly as my head was wet and over the bath and I had water getting in my eyes.

I was very surprised that my hair dried nicely - none of that weird greasy feel I get when my hair gets wet but I don't actually wash it. Overall, a nice hair day.

Day 2 (Monday 12/3) - Hair feeling 'heavy' today, but when brushed it looks ok. Partially tied back for lab work. I think it looks passable. Lunchtime conversation veered onto my no 'poo experiment, and it was observed that my hair looks ok (i.e. not like I hadn't used shampoo for 4 days!).

Day 3 (Tues 13/3) – today would be my normal hair wash day, but I decided not to, the theory being that the sooner it gets used to not being washed, the quicker it will adjust. This is not however based on anything I’ve read, but rather the experience I had as a teenager when the more often I washed my hair, the more often it needed washing. At one point I got to where I was washing it every day, with the result that it more often than not felt greasy by lunchtime. It was then that I cut down to every two days. On a number of occasions I’ve tried to get it down to three, but I just didn’t have the confidence to take the risk of having greasy-looking hair. Recently my hair has been managing three days on occasion, so I’m happy to give it a go.

I twisted my hair around a bit and put it up, and think it looked ok. So far so good.

Day 4 (Weds 14/3) – Eeeeeuuuurrrgh!

I tried doing my hair properly in the shower this morning. I put 1 tbsp bicarb in a measuring jug and measured 1 cup of shower (i.e. warm) water to make a mixture. I poured this bit-by-bit onto my head, starting by massaging it into the roots around my crown, and then around the rest of my scalp, scrunching up the rest of my hair at the base of my neck to squeeze the mixture into my roots. I think I may need more mixture next time, as although my hair is only shoulder length and doesn’t look especially thick, it certainly soaks up the mixture!

I remembered to leave it on for a minute or two today, then rinsed it out briefly with some water. Next was on with the lemon juice mixture – I tbsp. in 1 c water, again poured on my crown and rubbed around my scalp, though not so thoroughly as the bicarb. I can actually feel my hair getting smoother when I do this, presumably the acid in the lemon juice neutralising both the bicarb and the hard Reading water. I had to dash out of the house as I was teaching at 9 am and didn’t have time to dry or comb it – my granny would have had a fit! I just towelled it made use of my side parting to make it look less scruffy and tied it up i.e. not just scraped back like I did when I was 11!

However. Ugh! Today had to be the worst day so far. It dried out ok, and I didn’t think it looked too bad until I got home and took some investigatory pictures of the back of my head. While the hair around the front, sides, and back looks ok – the crown was more befitting a teenage boy. A quick search online revealed very little about the dynamics of oil production in the scalp – possibly because so few people do what I’m trying to do (or I used the wrong search words!).

Hair at sides looking ok...

 Hair at the crown... apologies for the general grossness!

I did find quite a lot about women finding that around the age of 50-60 their hair suddenly went really greasy around the crown – and that washing it more only made it worse! Equally I found a few stories about people cutting down their shampoo usage, sometimes altogether, who found that when they had to use shampoo (e.g. away on conferences and they’d forgotten their bicarb) found that shampoos made their scalps dry, sore and itchy. The more I ‘think natural’ the more I’m finding the ‘normal’ practices most people use really are bizarre. We are constantly fighting nature, be it in stripping the oil off our skin and hair, or trying to grow hectares of a single crop plant when that happens nowhere on the planet. I wonder how shampoo caught on if it made your scalp so dry, and realise I know very few people who could fill me in on the details.

Day 5 (Thurs 15/3) – an expected greasy day. Psychologically my hair feels thick and a bit dirty, but aside from my exceedingly greasy crown it doesn’t look too bad. I can feel the oils moving down the hair shaft, so it’s not just the roots but about two-thirds of my hair looking suspect. It does feel soft though, not at all like the slick greasiness I was expecting – and which I would get if I left a wash too long. 

When I first read about “no ‘poo” I assumed it meant no-wash as well, and envisaged myself looking like, well, a teenage boy  who has decided to grow his hair, but not assume the added responsibility of cleaning it. I’d heard schoolyard rumours that if you didn’t wash your hair it would eventually ‘wash’ itself, but didn’t quite understand how that worked. I guess the simple answer is: it didn’t! What actually happens is that if you wash it with something to remove the dirt, the natural oils in your hair return to normal. When you shampoo you strip out all the oil and your scalp overcompensates, desperate to return the balance. The more you shampoo, the more oil is removed, the more your scalp compensates; hence the problem with increasingly regular washings.

Needless to say, today saw the first of what I imagine will be a succession of interesting head bands!

Day 6 (Fri 16/3) - on with the hair band! Tied my hair back and UP to try and disguise my disgusting greasy crown. I also tried using some bicarb as a sort of 'dry shampoo'. I thought I was doing quite well until Jon asked me what all the white bits in my hair were. Not doing that again!

 

Day 7 (Sat 17/3) - my first expense as part of this project, I bought a larger quantity of bicarb from a small shop whilst visiting my parents (500g = £3).

Today was going to be a shampoo day, but the man in the shop freaked me out by telling me that I should be careful using bicarb on my hair as it's very 'strong'. I wasn't so sure about accepting advice from an ageing (balding) Spanish man, but even so, it made me think. This said, I'm not convinced it's any worse than bleaching/ dying/ washing your hair with Pantene...

So endeth the week. 

So far, so good...

Urban wildlife

One of the great joys of working from home is that I get to see the garden during the daytime. If I need a break I just wander into the bedroom or sitting room and gaze out of the window. If I'm lucky the birds will also be taking a snack break at the bird feeder.

But today I got a very special treat...

Can you see it?

How about now?

Isn't it bee-yootiful?

I will confess I have a very mixed opinion of foxes, probably due to their harassment of my pet (semi-feral) rabbit when I was small - and the knowledge that they'll be a menace when we get chickens. But I think they have every right to be here - their presence is certainly more natural than my imprisonment of a wild animal for my own amusement, or the production of food...

What I enjoyed the most was how it also seemed to be enjoying the birds, bees and sunshine. Perhaps we're more similar that us humans are ready to admit!

Some other attempted shots with my Canon Powershot A495 (i.e. cheap and cheerful) camera... (I hope one day to afford a proper SLR, but that ain't happening until I can justify the expense!)

 One of our goldfinches

One of our dunnocks

Weekly recycling - about time too!

Today I returned home to find a leaflet: "Your new recycling and waste collection service explained" (why the need for italics I'm not quite sure).

"Uh-oh" I thought.

But it turns out they're making our recycling service weekly in order to encourage people to recycle more (currently it's fortnightly). I suspect weekly collection of landfill waste will cease at some point soon...

About bloody time I say!

At the moment, by the time it's recycling week, the box is overflowing. Meanwhile the landfill waste goes out about once a month. If we had a wood burning stove for all the tissues and cotton buds to go in, I reckon we could get away with a bi-yearly waste collection (of plastic packaging)

If I can get up on my soap box for a minute, I get so irate at the stink people cause over the possible move to fortnightly waste collections. For a start, I don't even understand how people can produce that much waste - especially as the council provides an everything-in-one-box (i.e. idiot proof) recycling collection service. All you have to do is put things in a different bin! People complain about landfill and council tax, but don't seem to realise that waste has to go somewhere, and we have to pay for that luxury. Ok, rant over.

In short -

Go Wokingham Borough Council, I approve!