Keep Peat in Bogs not Bags

Mushrooms, for peat’s sake? It seems Britain and Ireland’s mushroom growers use nothing but peat from our extensive CO2-storing peat bogs, adding to the continued decimation and massive CO2 emissions caused by the gardening trade. As part of its campaign to save our heritage from the effects of climate change, the National Trust has removed…

Organic and Cheap?

Organic food is produced without agrochemicals but generally costs more. Perversely, some marketing for organic food leads us to believe it’s only for the wealthy, presumably because the marketing is based on its high cost or because they believe it must taste better, and usually it doesn’t. It’s just better for nature, the farms and…

Good Coffee

80% of coffee is grown by smallholder farmers, a population of 125 million spreading from Brazil to Vietnam. The farmers are sadly but typically the ones to see the least profit from their coffee – “large holder” farmers often stop producing when the coffee price on the international commodity markets drops too low, and smallholders…

Chocolate

Recently chocolate has been getting a lot of bad press because climate analysts have started to flag up the enormous and damaging land use changes that cocoa agriculture causes. 70% of the CO2 in chocolate comes from the cocoa. The rest would be from the milk, transport, factories and so on. Before you feel bad…

Diet and CO2 Emissions

The first of November was World Vegan Day, a reminder that a totally plant-based diet is the everyday reality for about 1% of the world population. Reducing our CO2 emissions is imperative so we could pick up some useful tips here, because reducing the amount of meat we eat is one of the top things…

Pesky Pumpkin Remains

Halloween sees people the world over getting creative with pumpkin carving and results in tons of wasted pumpkins if people don’t have the means, the time or the oomph to make good use of this great veg. The main rule is to make sure it doesn’t end up in landfill, where the rotting vegetable matter…

How to cook pasta and save energy

The furore in Italy is a paygrade above the average Brit’s palette, but cooking pasta badly is easily done. Here is a method to cook pasta and save energy and keep it tasting good. The instructions are simple: Sources (get it???) below. Links and Resources to cook pasta and save energy