bitful

Eat Brit: day 1

Yesterday I started an experiment: I want to see how hard it is to nourish myself entirely with British produce for a week.

These days you can carbon-offset everything you do by paying somebody to plant a tree for you every time you fart. I just want to see how hard it is to avoid food that has been flown across the world and rely on nationally-grown produce for a week. I am also interested to see if there is a difference in price.

The day was off to a not very encouraging start when I had to have a cup of coffee. I was planning to have some herbal tea, but I noticed it was 'blended and packed from imported ingredients'. The oats in my porridge were Scottish though.

At the supermarket on the way to work I struggled to find some British fruit (unsurprisingly for mid-January), but left with a bag of English Cox apples that even had the name of the growers on it (I checked them out, they happen to be located in the main town as the supermarket's headquarters - a good sign).

Finding meat for my sandwich was harder. I had never read the labels, but it turns out I've been eating meat from a variety of countries. In the end I scavenged a couple of packs of English roast beef (made from 'assured topside of beef from farms in the UK' - and half price too), to be eaten on their own because I could not be sure any of the loaves on sale were made entirely with English ingredients. Even the buns I bake weekly, and that I was planning to eat for lunch, were made with Danish butter.

I did not know that the supermarket's own brand yogurts for my elevenses and afternoon snack are made in France, so I went for one of the leading brands instead. They are practically the same, but the raspberry one is smooth (what's wrong with crunchy pips?). Oh, and they cost 44p instead of 27. No indication of where they are made, their website tells me that not only are they made in the UK, but they also use milk from local farms. I like that.

I resisted the urge to pick up a Double Decker chocolate bar (made in Birmingham, I think) and settled for some sugar free Airwaves (made in Plymouth). Later in the day I also had to politely refuse a shortbread biscuit a colleague offered me, because I did not feel like asking him to read out the ingredients first.

I continued to make an exception for coffee throughout the day, but I switched to fairtrade. Not sure it makes a difference environmentally, but it sure silences a guilty conscience for a bit.

I stopped at our local large supermarket on the way home, and it took me more than twice as long to pick up the usual stuff because I had to read all the labels.

My dinner consisted of more UK beef, UK carrots and UK beetroot. Non-UK lemon juice on the carrots, and the meat was fried in olive oil (so cheap that the bottle does not even say where it is from, but I bet it is not Yorkshire).

In the evening I baked another batch of bread for my lunches, this time with English butter.

The first day was not too hard. It certainly took longer to shop, but the novelty factor kept me going. I think condiments and spices will have to be imported, unless there is a choice.

Yesterday I found it impossible to buy lettuce for my usual evening meal big salad; all I could find was from Egypt and Morocco.

But I was surprised that I enjoyed very much my roast beef at lunch (not a choice I would normally go for).

• Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page

 

Eat Brit: day 2

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.
Yesterday sourcing breakfast was easier (I just quickly went for the same stuff as day 1 ).

Lunch was leftover beef from the previous day's dinner, with some of the bread I baked on Monday night.

I had apples and yogurts and fairtrade coffee and tea throughout the day as on Monday.

My usual snack of supermarket own brand cheap sliced ham to eat on the way home from work and keep hunger pangs at bay had to be replaced by some leading brand roast chicken that I fortunately found at half price.

Dinner was lovely: hot smoked Scottish salmon slices (70% off normal price), roasted parsnips, boiled Brussels sprouts (produced not in Belgium but in the UK) and horseradish sauce.

Yesterday I found it boring to stick to just one type of apple. Boring, but not too hard. Oh, how I long to be able to alternate the pleasure of biting into a tangy Granny Smith and a juicy Pink Lady.

But it was surprisingly refreshing to upgrade from my usual tinned tuna to the lovely salmon.

Not doing too bad after all. However, my efforts could prove to be absolutely useless, as some people claim that it is more carbon efficient to import tomatoes from sunny Spain than grow them in heated greenhouses in Britain. I'd argue that yes, that would be cheaper because tomatoes are not in season in England now.

Although I am not entirely sure there is ever a season in this country for home-grown tomatoes.

 

Eat Brit: day 3

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

I won't mention breakfast or mid-morning and afternoon snacks, because they tend to be the same all the time (see choice of yogurts and apples from Monday).

Let's get straight to lunch. A very well deserved lunch, after a run with a colleague along the canal that still had some of the snow that fell early this morning along its banks. The run was very pleasant and the home-baked granary bun I had afterwards was very good too. I had filled it with some ham that was made from "assured pork from farms in the UK, Wiltshire cured and matured on the bone for succulence, hand decorated with wholegrain mustard", which I suppose sounds more appealing than my usual supermarket's own brand "reconstituted ham made in Denmark from pork of EU and Brazil provenance" (or something like this). Yes, "hand decorated with wholegrain mustard" - I guess they had to justify the 2 pound 68 price tag.

Dinner was mouth-watering scrumptous: sauteed thinly sliced UK potatoes, pan-fried UK turkey strips, grated UK carrots. I was going to cook the turkey with mushrooms, but I had to change plans when I looked up the "WM1 IRL" next to "Produce of" on the packaging and found out it was not a UK postcode.

Yesterday I found it hard not to pop down to the canteen for a can of Coke Zero (haven't entirely figured out where it's made yet).

But man, that Wiltshire ham was worth every penny.

 

Eat Brit: day 4

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

If my previous update mentioned that I now eat the same breakfast every day, this one can do the same about lunch, which was the same as day 3 (home-baked bread and Wiltshire ham), only this time the ham was "hand decorated with golden breadcrumbs". It is so obvious I do not want to think much about what I'll eat, and I am happy to grab the same stuff over and over if I find it filling and easy to get.

Dinner was good but I fear it was purely because I ate later than usual, as I was busy playing with Rabbitful who yesterday made me a very proud daddy when he learnt how to stream audio).

I had only had a small packet of smoked-ham flavoured Quorn on the way home from work, and I was starving. So I just threw some turkey strips in a pan, grated a carrot and microwaved a potato and it was surprisingly pleasing.

After dinner we felt like having a glass of wine, and it is only now that I realise that it was imported from California. Not even for one second did I wonder whether the grapes of that (incidentally rather good) Shiraz perhaps reached their plump juiciness in sunny Kent.

Yesterday I missed the kick of a couples of satsumas mid-morning, and the tang of some orange juice on my grated carrots.

But I enjoyed very much sinking my teeth into slices of Quorn knowing I was biting into something that never had a daddy and a mummy.

 

Eat Brit: day 5

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

Hurray for pears, and for my local supermarket that stocks two (two!) varieties, both from England. Gawd bless our plentiful land.

I wonder if you can tell that I am getting a bit bored with the lack of variety in the selection of affordable fruit.

I spent the morning on a training course for work, and when the mid-morning break beverages arrived, I sighed with relief when I saw that there were no fancy pastries (likely to be shipped frozen from France) but just a big thermos of coffee, some hot water and teabags.

And then a helpful participant popped out to get us all Jaffa Cakes and Chocolate Digestives. I had to have a couple, it would have been rude not to, and even more impolite to check where they were made, or if they contained as I thought with imported oranges and cocoa - and then say no.

Lunch was my usual home-made roll (of which I shall have to bake more on Saturday, as they have proved to be quite popular in the household this week) with roast chicken. Not something I've never had before, but I think it was the first time in a very long time that I was eating sliced chicken that had not been put together from several carcasses. This unheard-of luxury comes at a price, though.

I made an effort to half-heartedly cook a boring evening meal even if I was very tired (did this week feel unnaturally long to you too?), if you can call that the act of slapping a couple of steaks (UK beef) in a pan and grating a few carrots. On a more positive note, that was the last of the carrots I'd bought at the beginning of the week, and I'm glad to see the back of them.

I miss my salads. I cannot wait for Monday night, when I'll allow myself some leafy lettuce, crunchy cucumber and tender tomatoes, which I am now learning almost always come from sunny Spain - the lucky buggers.

But finding out for the first time that sandwich chicken can taste nicer than the packaging it comes in made me understand why some people spend more than I normally do on their lunches.

 

Eat Brit: day 6

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

On Saturdays I usually have a healthy version of a fry-up breakfast (low-fat bacon, poached eggs, sliced beef tomatoes, sauteed mushrooms in scant oil and baked beans) instead of lunch.

But yesterday the bacon was Danish, the mushrooms probably Irish (anyone know what WM6 IRL means?) and the tomatoes Spanish, so I had a couple of eggs and a roll of bread (multiseed, home-baked and still steaming hot). I also had forgotten to buy baked beans (surely they must be made in the UK - are they eatin in any other country?).

Frustrated and very tired mid-afternoon (I'd been up since sometime after four in the morning), I had one of the frozen éclairs I'd bought for tonight (Weight Watchers, the most delicious thing I've ever tasted that has only 81 calories). Half-way through, I noticed it was made in Belgium. Drats. Did I stop eating it? Well I was not going to send it back half-eaten across the Channel wasn't I?

I prepared a Thai beef salad for Dr B. while a hearty no-nonsense British dinner for myself was cooking in the steamer: baby potatoes, leeks and sliced green beans, to go with some pan-seared beef.

As I was watching Dr B. reach heaven with his meal (that I denied myself because all the ingredients except the Beef were imported) I knew that, Belgium or no Belgium, the two remaining éclairs were going to be my dessert last night.

Yesterday it was an extraordinary feat not to get depressed about the faded green/mousy brown colour of every single item I ate.

But as I walked past the frozen aisle without picking up the usual kilo of frozen chicken (I think it comes at under a fiver, and it is made in Denmark) with my half-price fresh breasts from poultry 'raised by Tesco's standards' (whatever that means) I felt like Noah single-handedly saving the whole animal kingdom.

 

Eat Brit: day 7

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

I had little time for Sunday lunch, so I just ate leftover steamed vegetables from the previous night, cold from the fridge, still in their plastic container while I was sitting at the computer.

Then I cooked some of the half-price fresh UK chicken that I had bought on Saturday. It was saved from burning at the very last minute as Dr B. inquired about the smoke, and it was in the end very nice, meaty and slightly chargrilled. I wondered if I would have enjoyed it so much had I not known that it was meant to cost three times as much as my usual low-cost frozen Danish chicken breasts.

The afternoon snack was three cans of Stella (brewed in the UK) from our local Royal Vauxhall Tavern. We just popped in for the show and a friend's birthday, then rushed home because Dr B. received a call from work (he is on support all week long) and I had to go make a pizza.

You see, Sunday night is 'share a pizza and Weight Watchers frozen dessert' night (formerly known as 'two pizzas and a tub of Haagen-Dazs each' night). Having established that the Weight Watchers desserts were made in Belgium and got rid of them on Saturday (they were lovely, thank you very much), all was left to do was concentrate on making a pizza from scratch.

I did not really have to make it, but it was fun, we have a bread machine and this way I could make two and top Dr B.'s one with imported produce like tomatoes. Yes, mine was what I think they call a 'white pizza' in Italian.

We ate watching part of 'The Trial of Tony Blair', but I grew very quickly tired of the caricature treatment that cancelled the surreal aspect they were trying to get across. So I switched to Project Catwalk and fell quickly asleep.

I have to rush to work now, but please come back later for a final post on the lessons I learnt by trying to eat only British food for a week.

 

Eat Brit: conclusions

I am trying to see how hard it is to eat only food that was produced in the UK for a week. You may Read all my Eat Brit posts on one page.

A few things I learnt by avoiding imported food and drink for a week:

• your choice of fresh fruit and vegetables is obviously limited, understandingly as it's winter, although I wonder if it gets any better at al in the summer;
• it is very, very difficult to find sandwich meat (sliced ham, chicken or turkey) that has not been put together from more than one animal "from the E.U.", without paying through the nose for someone to decorate each individual slice by hand with mustard grains or something;
• Spain and Italy have similar climates and I would have expected them to export in a similar way their produce, and yet most of the tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, garlic and chives I found were from Spain, with only some top-of-the-range cherry tomatoes on the vine coming from Italy. Either Spain is cheaper, or Italy is so entangled in bureaucracy that people have given up trying to import stuff from there;
• certain issues are still not very clear and would require further investigation. For instance, are the living condition of Danish chicken supplying cheap frozen breasts any worse than the previous owners of the fresh British ones that cost three times as much and claim to be reared to the supermarket's own standards? What are these standards? Perhaps that they never let chicken rot in their own shite in the dark with no space to move for longer than a week? I will have to look that up;
• also, is it carbon-gentler to eat a local apple that has been grown in an artificially-heated greenhouse, or to let it grow naturally in a sunny country and get it into the UK in a plane that is carrying passengers anyway? I think apples are kept in a chilled room since autumn (carbon emissions of a chilled room, anyone?) but Dr B. insists they are grown in greenhouses.

I have enjoyed and will stick to some of the choices I made during this week:

• leading brand yogurts (made in the UK with milk produced near the factory) versus cheaper imitations from France. I find no difference in taste, and I like the idea of supporting local employment and reducing the need to transport so much stuff. Although they are 15p more expensive each, which at the rate of two per day on a work day comes up to about six pounds a month. Ouch;
• fresh chicken breast is juicier, firmer, altogether more pleasant and savoury than frozen ones (around four pound 50 per kilo), and I might stick to it but look out for special offers and price reductions, because at full price it would cost me about 16 pounds more per month. Ouch;
• I did not really need to bake my own bread to make sandwiches to eat for lunch at work, but it was so delicious that I might treat myself for a bit longer;
• I am now so very off sandwich meat, I cannot stop picturing big vats of leftovers from more succulent cuts being liquidised along with a few bones and the occasional feather, then pasted together with gelatine for my, uhm, pleasure. If I can afford it, it's Wiltshire ham and if I can't, it's London Quorn.

There are just a couple of limitations I am not prepared to put up with:

• I like my fresh salads, I have a large mixed one three to four times a week, and I might cut that down but not give it up entirely. My wellbeing depends too much on that lovely mix of leaves, cucumber, tomatoes and peppers;
• similarly, I like fruit so much that it is an absolute pleasure to enjoy a larger variety. I'm not talking strawberries every day in January or even exotic stuff, but the occasional orange and satsuma, and a few pears now and then.

In short: I am prepared to pay more for national nicer meat, and possibly dairy produce, but will keep making concessions to fresh fruit and vegetables that we cannot grow ourselves.

And now would you please excuse me, I've got a breakfast of Sri Lankan mango, Venezuelan papaya and Indonesian starfruit (peeled and chopped in Kenya, then packaged in India) to attend to.