Urban Food Fortnight - Growing Communities garden open day

Since my moment of sustainable 'revelation' around 6 months ago, I've realised that there is in fact quite a lot going on in London when it comes to sustainability. Though its status as a metropolis might seem to defy all and any attempts at living more responsibly, I have discovered that there is plenty happening if you know where to look. 

A case in point is this year's Urban Food Fortnight, a two-week celebration of London-based growers, producers and sellers, all working towards the promotion of urban food production. Coordinated by organisation Sustain, it includes a variety of events, such as beekeeping workshops, tasting sessions, markets, and community garden open days. I found out about it from TimeOut magazine, where it featured as a tiny little advert at the back. Lucky I saw it! 

Having already missed one week of the UFF, I decided to get my act together this weekend and visit one of the market gardens planted and maintained as part of the Growing Communities initiative. Based around Hackney, Growing Communities various market gardens are used to grow food to sell to Londoners, either as part of their organic veg box scheme or at the near by Stoke Newington farmer's market. The idea is to be able to provide food grown locally and without the use of artificial substances, which is not only good from a sustainability point of view but also for the communities and people involved in the growing. Under the tutelage of head gardeners, volunteers learn to tend and pick the produce grown in the gardens, pack it up and distribute it to markets and to a small number of cafes and restaurants. 

I visited the Allens Gardens market garden near Abney Park, a small plot surrounded by quiet houses and tall trees. 

The garden is mostly made up of raised beds planted with a variety of salads and leafy vegetables such as spinach, lettuce, kale, chives, and herbs. To foster biodiversity on the site, there are also brambles, nettles, fruit trees, a grape vine, rhubarb and gooseberry bushes. When I was there I saw ladybirds, wasps, bees, and all other manner of insect life. As one of the apprentice volunteer gardeners explained, the more types of bug there are the less likely they are to eat the plants, as they are too busy eating or being eaten by each other. 

As it's now autumn, the growing beds weren't at full steam, but there was still produce being grown. When it's ready to be eaten, it is packed in bags, then placed in chiller boxes that are delivered by volunteers on bicycles, which keeps costs as well as carbon-expenditure minimal. A pretty admirable way of doing things, in my opinion. The site is also home to a specially-built eco-shed and composting toilet! Didn't have the courage to look at that, but I did take a picture of the sedum roof on the shed: 

I hope that market gardens will become more common around London as people become increasingly aware of the economic and environmental benefits of "insourcing" our food production, as opposed to outsourcing it as we have been doing for so long. It is also good to know that modern society includes people with the knowledge and skills needed for low-level, organic and sustainable farming; we will probably end up relying on these individuals to teach us how to provide for ourselves if "Peak Oil" scenarios do come to pass. 

Product review - Retap reusable bottle

One of the first small steps I took towards a more sustainable lifestyle was to ditch bottled water and plastic cups, and invest in a reusable bottle. Though plastic can be recycled, recycling expends energy, plus plastic can only be recycled so many times before ending up in landfill, where it leaks chemicals as it slowly decomposes (for more on this it is worth visiting Beth Terry’s My Plastic Free Life blog, which has far more detail on why plastic is essentially the source of all evil).

The alternatives are numerous, and though they do include plastic options (including the popular ‘Bobble’ water bottle), I didn’t ever really seriously consider those for the reasons above.

Here are some of the bottles I did consider, organised by material:

Steel
- Sigg bottle
- Klean Kanteen

Glass
- Lifefactory bottle (glass in a silicone protective case)
- Bamboo bottle (actually glass sheathed in bamboo)
- CamelBak Eddy glass bottle (glass in silicone again)
- Retap bottle

My primary requirement for a reusable water bottle is that the water doesn’t taste weird. I’ve got a metal canteen that I take camping etc., but frankly it imparts a slightly metallic flavour to anything you put in it, so I’m keeping it for heavy-duty use only. For everyday use, I plumped for a Retap bottle. Retailing at about £10-£12 online, it is made from borosilicate glass (tougher than ordinary glass), with a BPA-free plastic/rubber lid. (Yes, plastic is in there, but with lids it seems unavoidable.) Uncharacteristically, I chose a pink lid!

I confess, I was a bit sceptical about this bottle, despite deciding to give it a chance. Aside from the fact it is made from a highly breakable material, I was worried the push-on cap wouldn’t actually keep the water in the bottle. Happily, my fears were unfounded.

I’ve had my bottle for almost a year, and have found it to be strong, water-tight, and very easy to clean. The tap water I fill it with doesn’t take on any unpleasant tastes as it can do with metal bottles, and the bottle can be shoved in a bag and carried around with very low risk of breakage or leakage. I’ve never dropped it on a hard surface, and I imagine it might shatter if I did, but I’m pretty good at being careful with it, and don’t have any kids around that could accidentally knock it etc.

Initially I cobbled together a very basic ‘sleeve’ for my bottle out of left-over sewing scraps, but have since been brave enough to carry it around without, with success.

The only cons I can think of for this product are: The glass could do with some additional etching or texture on it, as it’s quite slippery when washing. Until this happens, Retap needs to sell sleeves for their bottles to help people grip them!

Aside from that, I heartily recommend it as a serious contender for anyone looking to reduce their water packaging waste. Importantly, it combines substance with style; its sleek, minimalist design means it looks good standing on a desk, or in a bag. Though I wish it wasn’t so, I suspect that a lot of ‘eco’ or ‘green’ products fail to catch the eye of the mainstream consumer due to their hippy or adventurer aesthetic. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t buy a steel water canteen, because it they think it might not match their outfit, or give out the wrong message. Sad but true! I’ve had lots of comments on my bottle, some incredulous, but mostly complimentary.

Shop review - Unpackaged

Now that introductions are over, I thought I’d start in earnest with a review of Unpackaged, a London shop that has made a name for itself selling everyday food and household products with little to no packaging. 

I first learnt about this shop after reading a book called ‘Zero Waste home’ by US-based sustainability and zero-waste enthusiast Bea Johnson. The book - and original blog - offers tips on how to live less wastefully, and includes particularly useful suggestions on reducing packaging by taking your own reusable containers when shopping, and refusing packaging when it’s not truly needed. 

After absorbing her wise words, I did a lot of googling to see if I could apply her advice on shopping packaging-free here in London. Then I found Unpackaged: 
 

The neat rows of sealed produce bins, shelves of oils, jars of sugar, tea, seasonings and sweets, and tables of organic produce are an inspiring example of how elegant and modern sustainable shopping can be. Customers bring their own reusable containers, have them weighed (‘tared') at the counter when empty, fill them up, then have them weighed again with the container weight deducted. If you don’t have a container handy, recycled paper bags are available for free, or you can buy glass bottles and tupperware.

Whilst I found that fresh produce was generally out of my everyday price range, and also not altogether that sustainable (dried pineapple from the tropics for instance), basic, locally-sourced dried food items and household things were no more expensive than regular supermarket versions. In fact, they are often cheaper!

Example: Empty fairy liquid bottle, refilled with ecover washing liquid = £0.93p approx.

So that’s where I get my household cleaners and selected store cupboard items. It works out cheaper than buying them in the supermarkets near me, and any occasional extra expenditure is balanced out by the huge reduction in packaging I’m putting into landfill. If anyone lives in north east or east London, I highly recommend a visit.

First post

Welcome to my blog, The Bashful Activist. It is still in the process of being beautified, so bear with me while I make that happen. In the meantime, here’s a description of what this blog is for.

At its simplest level, it is an attempt to share information about and experiences of living as ‘sustainably’ as possible in London, UK, where I am from and live. A recent convert to the idea of sustainability in its various modes, I follow a lot of interesting and inspiring blogs from all round the globe, however many of them document the journeys of those living in rural areas where true self-reliance is possible, or in urban locations that are far more advanced in terms of sustainability. So I thought I would start my own small information hub here, for those in a similar situation.

As the blog’s title suggests however, it will also house general thoughts on ‘activism’, and explore why, despite the worrying or upsetting or irritating information we are bombarded with daily, ‘activism’ – humanitarian, environmental, legal, otherwise – is still seen as the preserve of radicals, students or modern-day saints.  

It’s undeniable that activism in the ‘traditional’ sense often seems incompatible with the lives most people lead. Most people probably don’t have the means to dedicate themselves to full- or even part-time change-making, particularly as it doesn't often follows a schedule you can plan for in advance. It’s also hard to deny that there are ‘traditional’ activists out there who are unwilling or simply unable - despite their strong convictions that they are doing something good - to share this conviction with ‘normal’ people and thereby introduce these convictions into the mainstream. Perhaps it’s down to some sort of snobbism, or maybe it’s just because they are so caught up in what they are doing; either way I believe it can give the impression of a volunteer/activist ‘elite’ shut off to the average citizen.

That said, history shows that normal people can start something monumental. Rosa Parks is an obvious example; her simple act of sitting where she wasn't supposed to sit played a central part in the American civil rights movement. Which convinces me that ‘activism’ is not the sole preserve of the great and the good. The more people view themselves as capable of demanding and enforcing change at a grass-roots level, the more likely we are to succeed in creating a future worth looking forward to.  

As the wife of an acquaintance advised me not long ago, it’s about understanding what you can do, and doing it, instead of feeling demoralised or debilitated by what you can’t do, for whatever reason.