It is 5.45 on a weekday morning and I am lying in bed, listening to an
aggrieved stockman on Farming Today bemoaning the new EU regulations
concerning mince, when suddenly - Good God! What is that frightful noise? It
sounds to me like an early juggernaut. There is a sign at the top of our
road announcing that it is Unsuitable for Heavy Vehicles, but the lorry
jockeys treat it as more of a challenge than a deterrent. Urged on by their
sat-nav, they swing round the bend with the fine dash of Timmy Murphy
negotiating the Canal Turn, taking out the arrowhead railings of the house
opposite with a merry tinkle of shattering castiron, only to find themselves
stuck fast at the tight T-junction. At this point I rush out and give them
what-for while they retreat unhappily all the way back up the street to the
main road.
It may be early, but I see no reason to vary the tradition. I hurtle
downstairs in my nightie, zoom down the path, blood up, ready for battle.
Ah. Proceeding at a dignified pace down the street towards me is the stately
yellow form of a municipal dustcart, surrounded by a busy swarm of dustmen.
And - Oh dash it! - I have forgotten to put the rubbish out. Again.
A couple of months ago Greenwich council introduced an elegant new refuse
collection scheme. We, the refuse-producers, are issued with three different
sorts of binbags and a little green bucket. Into these receptacles we place
variously our compostables, our recyclables and (in the black bag of shame)
our non-recyclables. Then (and this is the bit that catches me out every
week), on dustbin day they collect them, not in mid-rush hour as they used
to, but early in the morning, when the roads are clear.
I am a fervent recycler, and when this scheme was announced a complacent image
flashed into my mind of what my binbags would look like on collection
mornings: a couple of hefty sacks of dry recycling, because of all the
newspapers we read; a few empty cans of spray starch in the black sack; and
in the compostables bag little more than dead daffodils and hedge trimmings
because when it comes to food, I am the leftovers queen, capable of
confecting a nourishing supper for two from the fag-end of a leg of lamb, a
handful of pearl barley and a couple of withered tomatoes. But here comes
the second of the hebdomadal shocks of our new collection scheme: the
scandalous amount of food I throw away.
It was reported this week by Wrap, the Government's Waste Resources Action
Programme, that food waste accounts for 40 per cent of household rubbish:
not scraps or peelings, but entire apples, oranges, tomatoes. According to
Wrap, we each throw away £430-worth of good food every year. If I had read
this statistic before Greenwich introduced its new waste-sorting scheme, it
would have been with a virtuous sense that it didn't apply to me. I buy and
cook with studied economy. I can't clap eyes on a chicken carcass and a
couple of moribund leeks without visualising the delicious risotto into
which I will shortly be turning them. Not so much as a fishhead passes
through my hands without being boiled up into stock. Or so I thought.
Except now that I have to dispose of my food waste separately from my other
rubbish, I discover that I'm not quite as thrifty as I thought. Just this
morning I found myself furtively tipping into the little bucket three lonely
old prawns, several lumps of cheese in picturesque states of mouldy decay
and a bit of topside that I meant to turn into meatballs but didn't get
round to. Total value when fresh: several quids worth; multiplied over a
year, several hundred quids worth.
A particularly horrible light on the statistics of wasted food is cast by two
further news stories: a survey of 11,000 British hospital patients, 28 per
cent of whom were found to be malnourished. And reports of a warning by John
Holmes, the chief humanitarian official at the UN, that food riots, most
recently in Haiti but widespread across the developing world, may signal a
“perfect storm” of rising food and social instability.
Of these stories, while the second is certainly the more intractable and
dangerous, it is perhaps the first that is more likely to persuade us to
amend our profligate food habits. Throwing out a chunk of beef when you know
that in Haiti people are surviving on biscuits made of dried earth may give
your conscience an uneasy pang. But disposing of that food when you know
that someone in the same street is malnourished brings the problem right
into your own kitchen.
It doesn't actually say so in the statistics, but I bet that there is a common
thread linking the food-wasters and the malnourished. In 30 years the number
of people living alone has risen from one household in five to one in three.
It is hard to cook for one. If you are youngish, hungry and busy, you will
tend to overcater. If you are old and poor with a fragile appetite, you are
likely to survive on tea, toast and tinned soup. Somewhere between these
tendencies the solution to the local, if not the global, problem of food
economy is asking to be discovered.
A couple of years ago my own overcatering problems were neatly solved when I
found that an elderly neighbour loathed his social services ready meals so
much that he'd rather go hungry than eat them. He spoke longingly of the
food his mother used to cook when he was growing up in Poland. So I asked
him what she made, he told me, I cooked it and we shared it. It was an
informal arrangement, and it worked. He ate, I didn't waste food, we each
made a new friend.
Probably there is someone a street or two away with whom I might usefully make
a similar arrangement - but the chances of our meeting are slim. It would
not, I suppose, take very long to set up a website by means of which people
with too much food and people with not enough could meet. But where there is
food, there are regulations, and before you know it the simple solution is
strangled in a noose of red tape. I still think it's a good idea, though.
Ephemeral nature of snow business
I see that 13-year-old Dakota Blue Richards, the child star of The Golden
Compass, has been called an “inconsiderate yob” after she and some friends
demolished a snowman in Hove last Sunday. “We put our heart and soul into
that snowman,” said its outraged sculptor, Abe Restato, a newsagent.
I went for a walk in Greenwich Park on Sunday afternoon, and was startled and
delighted to find the place turned into a sculpture gallery of frozen
effigies. It's only when the snow falls that you can see clearly how tightly
suppressed the British sense of playfulness and creativity must be the rest
of the time. There were snowmen, snow dogs and a commodious igloo. I was
admiring one particularly Andy Goldsworthyish production - an effigy of four
perfect spheres, decorated with twigs, when from behind me a teenager
launched himself in a flying leap and demolished it. I was just about to
morph into Mrs Brady, Old Lady and speak harshly to him when it struck me
that it is the nature of snowmen to be ephemeral. If Dakota Blue Richards
and her chums don't destroy them, the sunshine will. Abe Restato and I will
just have to get over it.
Statistical error
Housework is good for you, says a learned journal. A study published in the
British Journal of Sports Medicine reveals that just 20 minutes a week of
housework or gardening can boost mental health. Blimey. Where to begin with
the wrongness of these conclusions (which are, natch, the work of a bloke)?
There is space here only to remark that a) you can't clean an eggy saucepan,
let alone do anything more useful around the house, in 20 minutes: and b) my
son and cat would testify that just 20 minutes a week of housework are
sufficient to plunge an entire household into a state of misery that
persists for the remaining six days, 23 hours and 40 minutes.
