Go Greener, Australia

Breakfast: muesli
Lunch: leftover pumpkin pasta
Dinner: vegetarian Indian, at 2 Fat Indians in Mount Lawley.

For our last night, we wanted to go out to a nice restaurant that served vegetarian food. Some of the places in Perth are cafes that don’t open in the evening, so our choices were limited. We loved the food we had at 2 Fat Indians: stuffed mushrooms, black lentils, dum aloo, and nine vegetables in a korma sauce, with saffron rice and paratha. If you’re into Indian food, vego or not, I highly recommend it!

I’m glad we did the challenge - I’ve learned new recipes that will become part of my regular cooking, felt healthier, tried new Indian foods, shopped differently. It would still have been vegetarian if we’d eaten nothing but hot chips and chocolate all week, but we made an effort to eat healthy foods instead

What made it difficult was remembering not to eat meat after I got sick - because I had lower energy than usual, it was tempting to stick with meals I already knew, or to get take away instead. Other than that, it really wasn’t a problem at all.

It felt strange to be eating meat again today. We’d run out of milk, so had breakfast in a cafe before doing our grocery shopping - I had bacon and eggs and toast with juice. I’m not sure I’m ready to eat more than that; even in just one week I adjusted to doing without meat.

I’d like to try the challenge again sometime, only for 2 weeks instead of just one. I might wait until the weather gets cooler, as I think it would be harder. I already eat a lot of salads in summer, but in winter I rely on casseroles and roasts so it’ll be a challenge to replace those.

Apologies for not posting each day: I came down with a cold, seems like a stupid time of year for it.

Day 4
Breakfast: cold Milo
Lunch: leftover cannelini bean salad (me) and egg and salad sandwiches (Dave)
Dinner: vegetable soup

After work, we went to the bi-monthly Green Drinks run by Wilma from O2, and had such a good time we didn’t leave until about 8pm. By the time we got home we were starving but didn’t want to cook. Normally that’s the sort of time that we’d get fast-food at a drive-through, but we did the right thing and had soup at home instead.

Day 5
Breakfast: muesli
Lunch: steamed vegetables with rice
Dinner: pumpkin, feta and rocket pasta

Dave usually makes this pasta with lamb as well, but we thought we’d try a meal we’ve had before and just subtract the meat.

Day 6
Breakfast: cold Milo
Lunch: salad with cheese
Dinner: potatoes, green beans and egg

Another Peter Berley recipe - I’m less impressed with this one. It tastes great, especially with the balsamic, mustard and thyme dressing. But it was fiddly and time consuming to make, so I don’t know if it’ll be added to the regular recipe list.

Tomorrow is the last day of our little challenge. We’re going out for dinner at a place that’s supposed to have a good vegetarian menu; then I’ll post what we’ve learned this week.

Breakfast: cold Milo
Lunch: salad and fruit salad, at a friend’s place
Dinner: filo pastry parcels filled with pumpkin, feta cheese, silverbeet, garlic and sauted onion, served with our chef’s own tomato chutney (me) and spinach, mushrooms, feta cheese, roast pumpkin, spanish onion & sundried tomatoes tossed through fettucine pasta (Dave), from Cafe Villa in Leederville. (Apologies for the less-than-good photo - I had to use my phone camera in a sunny cafe.)

Today was a public holiday, so we went to a friend’s place during the day, and saw a movie (King of Kong) with other friends in the evening. Then we went out for dinner near the cinema. We were pretty happy with the options at Cafe Villa, and our meals were really tasty.

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with spinach and feta (also some lovely organic coffee)
Lunch: Cannelini salad with dill and garlic dressing, another Peter Berley recipe
Dinner: Tray-baked mushrooms with smashed potatoes and steamed vegies.

(Photos of all three at my Flickr account - click on the photo below to see more)

Dinner tonight is an old favourite of ours - it’s probably one of the first recipes we learned when we started to cut back on the amount of meat we eat. Jamie Oliver has a recipe for it, but really it’s just putting some herbs, olive oil and other flavourings over the mushrooms then baking them in the oven for 20 minutes. Easy and delicious.

The salad was super easy to make. I had leftovers (Dave was playing cricket again) so I’m taking them to work for lunch. Both this and yesterdays soup are *way* more effort than I normally put into a weekend lunch. Usually I just have a vegemite sandwich, but that seems a bit slack for a week when I’m supposed to be pushing my boundaries

Breakfast: my usual cold Milo
Lunch: Chilled Tomato Soup, recipe from Fresh Food Fast by Peter Berley
Dinner: baked beans on toast! Not very exciting, but I felt like I’d made enough of a fuss with lunch, and Dave was too tired to cook (he’d been playing cricket all afternoon).

The soup was like a summer version of a minestrone, or a complicated vegie drink It was pretty tasty though, especially with all the trimmings like spring onions marinated in red wine vinegar. Lots of chopping, followed by more chopping, but less than a minute to whizz up in the blender after that.

This morning we did our grocery shopping for the week. Last night we made a rough meal plan for the week, which isn’t our usual style. But we wanted to make sure we didn’t get stuck one night with nothing to eat after the shops had shut. Our grocery bill was about $20 more than usual, but this is cancelled out by the money we saved by not buying any meat. Fresh vegies, fruit and meat have all gone up in price lately, due to the drought and increasing petrol costs. I feel like we came out even compared to our usual weekly shop.

This week I’ve been posting about how eating less meat is good for the environment. Next week I’ll be putting my money where my mouth is, and going meat-free for 7 days. Dave is joining in too, and I’m going to take photos of what we eat and write about what we’re learning.

We’ve already cut back on the amount of meat we eat, but the idea is to push ourselves to do more than we normally would. In the past, I’ve used challenges like this to help me break old habits and start new ones (like giving up biting my nails, or eating healthier foods). I learn new skills and ways of staying motivated, and I’m more willing to do difficult things because I know it’s temporary. Afterwards I’ll be able to use the new skills to improve my everyday routine.

All our meals will be lacto-ovo-vegetarian, which means we’ll still be eating dairy foods and cheese. So we’re not quite herbivores yet, but we’re on our way! We’re going to eat out sometimes, to see how that works out. Hopefully by the end of the week we’ll have learned some new recipes, tried a new restaurant, and reduced our impact on the environment. Instead of posting two or three articles over the week, I’ll be posting a photo and a short description every day instead. I hope you enjoy it, and that the photos make you hungry

Yesterday I posted about how eating less meat is good for the environment. Today I’m going to show you some tactics you can use to gradually cut back on the frequency or quantity of meat you eat. I’ve put them roughly in order from easy to more difficult, so you can start with the slack options

Tasty treats

The next time you decide to go out for dinner, try a vegetarian restaurant, or one that caters to vegetarians. It’s a good opportunity to taste foods you wouldn’t usually eat, like tofu or lentils. And you’ll be able to see what kinds of things can be done when you don’t have to include meat in every dish. I love the nachos and breakfasts at Source Foods on Beaufort St in Perth, but would like to try more places. If you’ve got a good vego restaurant near you, let us know in the comments

Get educated

I was pretty grossed out by the details of how animals are farmed - it really makes you think about what you’re eating and can help motivate you to stick to your changes. Check out the information on factory farming at PETA’s GoVeg site (videos as well), or the SaveBabe website, and for a lighter take on such a serious subject, watch Moofeus free the pigs in The Meatrix (remember that although cows in Australia are usually kept in pasture, chickens and pigs are factory farmed here, and the slaughtering process is pretty bad for all of them).

Buy less meat

When you’re working out how much meat to buy, keep in mind that people only need one serve a day,which is 65-100g. That’s about the size of a deck of cards. If you don’t buy large portions of meat to start with, you’ll find it easier to cut back, especially if you’re the sort of person who has to eat everything on your plate. And since the price of meat keeps going up, this can save you a bit of money.

Buy only sustainable meat

When you’re at the shops, restrict what sorts of meat you buy. You could stop buying red meat; or restrict yourself to free-range or organic meats instead. That way, when you get home you’ve got little choice but to reduce the amount of meat you’re eating. Unfortunately, if your butcher or supermarket stock lots of sustainable meat, this won’t do much to help you - you’ll still be able to eat quite a lot of meat, and will have to try harder…

Learn to cook meat-free meals

This is where you might have to learn some new skills, although you probably already have a few favourite meals that don’t have meat in them: bruschetta and Dave’s leek and mushroom pasta are my faves. You can try replacing meat with things like tofu or seitan as well.

Taste.com.au allows you to search for vegetarian recipes. If you need a bit of inspiration, try some of the fantastic vego and vegan blogs out there: the photos at VeganYumYum make me hungry in an instant! I’ve also bought a vegetarian cookbook, Fresh Food Fast by Peter Berley, and try out new recipes from it often. If you’ve got any good recommendations for books or websites with recipe ideas, please let me know, especially if they’re Australian (converting ounces to grams does my head in!)

Set yourself a challenge

Decide on a challenge, and try it out for a while. Some examples might be: making Tuesdays meat-free; meat-free lunches; giving up beef; or trying one new vego recipe a week. Do it for a month and see how you go - it could become a permanent change.

Dave and I have been doing all of these except for the last one, but we’re tackling that next. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the challenge we’ve set for next week…

Last year I wrote about the 6 ways you can choose eco-friendly food. Mostly they were choices that you could make while doing your shopping, like paying attention to the source of your food, it’s packaging and how processed it is. These are simple habits that you can learn. There’s another important thing you can do, but it’s a bit harder than the first six. The 7th way to reduce the eco-impact of your food is this: eat less meat.

Why does eating less meat help the environment?

Agriculture causes nearly 1/5th (18%) of the greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, mostly from keeping livestock. Keeping cows, pigs, sheep and chickens for us to eat means we have to: clear land for them to live on (fewer trees to absorb GHGs), clear land to grow food for them (fewer trees again), transport their food (more GHGs), and provide water for them and the crops we feed them (when we’re experiencing the worst droughts in a long time).

Then there’s the whole business of turning them from living animals into meat, packaging that meat, and transporting it to our shops: not pretty, and racks up even more greenhouse gas emissions.

Farmers, shops and consumers can all work on making the industry more efficient. But of the emissions coming from livestock, only one-third of them are from things we can control, like transport and processing. The remaining two-thirds comes from the methane these animals are farting producing (12% out of the total 18%). So being efficient is great, but not enough.

By reducing the consumer demand for meat, we can reduce the amount of land-clearing for pasturing and feed-crops, reduce the pressure on our water supplies, and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. There really are a lot of environmental benefits in return for the effort you put in.

What are our options?

Becoming a vegetarian is an obvious choice, which as well as respecting animal welfare, is good for your health as well. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing: even eating less meat instead of giving it up completely will help your health and the environment.

Most Australians eat too much meat anyway - the average Aussie eats 200g of meat each day (and I know of plenty who eat more than that!). But the national health guidelines recommend that we eat only 1 serve of protein foods each day. That works out to 100g or a serve about the size of a deck of cards; and it doesn’t even have to be meat, it can be eggs or legumes or other alternatives. So we’re often eating more than twice the amount of meat we actually need.

The Cosmos article linked above notes that even a 10% reduction in the consumer demand for meat will help the environment. If we make sure we’re eating just the amount recommended to make sure we get enough protein in our diets, that would be a 50% reduction!

But eating less meat means changing the way we plan our meals, and the way we think about our food. It’s not a hardship, but it does mean you have to get organised and make an effort. Tomorrow I’m going to post some tips for reducing how often you eat meat, and the amounts you serve yourself. On Friday I’ll tell you about the challenge Dave and I are doing to help us set some new habits…

After showing off our vegie garden in the blog the other week, and making all of our visitors come out to take a look at it, I’ve had a few people ask me why we started growing our own vegetables, and if it was very hard to do. Dave and I had been talking about it for years, but when we read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she made it sound so good that we decided to just get stuck into it.

Step 1: Prepare your soil

One Saturday morning Dave pulled out an old, purple-flowered plant that hadn’t been doing well in the corner of our garden. Then he dug in some of our compost - see Greenfoot’s compost instructions too. We decided that was good enough, but we’re pretty lazy. If you aren’t in a hurry you could also put down some weed mats, or add water-retaining crystals to the soil.

Step 2: Choose your plants

We dithered a bit over which fruit and vegies to try, but it’s a no-brainer really: just choose your favourite foods. I’ve loved beetroots ever since I tried a Jamie Oliver recipe. Supermarket tomatoes taste bland, so I thought we could do better (and we did!). Basil seemed like a good bet to go with tomatoes, and apparently they grow well when planted together. Lemon and limes were an easy choice, since we use lots of lemons (lemon linguine, lemon roast chicken, honey and lemon drinks for winter colds), and Dave and I both like to drink Mojitos. Strawberries were Dave’s choice, since they’re his favourite fruit.

Step 3: Put ‘em in the ground

We picked up the plants from Bunnings and popped them into the ground based on the instructions on the little plant tags. Later, we got some stakes to keep the tomato bushes upright. Add some mulch to keep the moisture in the soil where it belongs - we got a bunch of pea straw from Farmer Jack’s and just kinda spread it around. We put the lemon and lime trees in half-wine-barrels from Waldecks.

Step 4: Maintenance

Perth has water restrictions, so the plants get the regulation 2 days of sprinklers a week. In-between, we sometimes hand-water them after work - and by “we”, I mean “Dave”. When he did the watering, he’d check for any bugs or weeds. Once, there were some bugs on the tomatoes, so Dave used an organic pesticide from Bunnings, and they went away.

That’s pretty much it - so far, everything is doing fine apart from the beetroot, which just didn’t seem to grow much. Peter Cundall from Gardening Australia could point out all sorts of flaws with how we’ve done it (I’m sure he’d want us to use more manure), but I think we learn best by actually doing something, even if we take a few tries to get it right.

Why is growing your own food good for the environment?

By growing some of our own fruit and vegies, we make it easy to reduce the eco-impact of our food: of the 6 ways to make your food eco-friendly, growing your own vegies helps with 5 of them. Food from our backyard is about as local as it gets, we know it’s seasonal because we harvest as soon as things ripen, we control the amount (if any) of pesticides and fertilisers used, there’s no packaging involved, and it motivates us to learn how to cook from scratch. So far we’ve learned mostly about cooking tomatoes (bruschetta, pasta sauce, baked with sausages, in salads, etc), but I’m looking forward to trying new things as we go along.

So if you’re not happy with what’s on offer at your supermarket, dig out a plant in your garden that you don’t like, and stick something tasty in there instead. Water it, stick some mulch on it, and see how it goes

A while ago I posted about Browne’s “Chill My Ride” competition where you could win a Hummer. A few people who read my post contacted Browne’s parent company Fonterra to complain about this. Eloise Dortch (read my interview with her here) received a reply to her letter from Paul Murphy, their Marketing Manager for Fresh Dairy. Eloise and Paul have agreed to let me show you some of what they wrote.

When Eloise wrote to complain, she said that although she was a long-term customer of Brownes because it’s a local business, she didn’t like the current “win a Hummer” promotion. She explained why Hummers are bad for the environment, providing facts and figures.

“Perhaps you heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, recently got rid of his Hummer? That was because a Hummer emits an average 11 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year. This is nearly three times as much as the average small car. Or put it another way: 11 tonnes-a-year compares to 14 tonnes-a-year that the Federal Government says Australians currently emit per person. Imagine what would happen to our total emissions if we all drove Hummers.”

She then went on to say that she would reconsider her boycott if the promotion was ended.

Paul Murphy replied that Fonterra, as one of Australia’s leading dairy companies, was aware of the environmental problems caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and had been working on improving the issue for some time. From his letter:

During the period 1998 to 2006, Fonterra has achieved a 21 per cent reduction in the total amount of carbon emissions from its dairy operations (approx 78,000 tonnes per annum).”

Fonterra participated in the original Greenhouse Challenge program established in 1995 - this was a voluntary program, and many companies didn’t do much after joining. I think a 21% reduction in emissions represents a serious effort. He went on to say:

I apologise if our ‘Chill my Ride’ promotion appears to indicate that we are not sensitive to environmental issues. Your feedback certainly prompts us to be more thoughtful when developing promotions in the future.”

Eloise replied:

“A cut in emissions of 21 per cent over nine years for such an energy-intensive industry is reasonably impressive. However such a simple thing as this poorly-considered promotion has for me undone any good that such environmental policies achieved for your company’s image. To quote a friend who saw your response: “Being good in one area doesn’t give them license to be bad in another.” “

Like Eloise, I’ll be boycotting Brownes while this promotion is running, and if they choose to do anything similar in future. This promotion is irresponsible and undoes the good work put in by many people to raise awareness of the problems caused by the pollution from our cars (or our enormous ego-substitutes, depending on what you drive).

However, one of my additional reasons for not buying their products anymore was that I found out that Brownes was no longer a locally-owned business. As regular readers will know, eating locally is one way to reduce your eco-footprint.

But while I was emailing Paul about this article, he mentioned that although Fonterra owned Brownes, Brownes products are still made from milk from WA farmers, and are still produced here in WA. This meets my own requirements for local food: although I’d prefer to see the profits stay in WA, keeping the source food and production local means that (for Perth residents at least) Brownes is still a lower-impact option compared to eastern states brands.

I hope in the future that Fonterra will make sure it’s marketing is in line with it’s day-to-day efforts to have less impact on the environment. This is why I think that it’s always worth the effort to write a letter to a company whose operations you disagree with: you never know what you might learn, and you might get them to reconsider their decisions.