Notes from LET'S TALK: Food & Waste

With enormous thanks to Steve Richardson for gathering and categorising all the thoughts and ideas that were written down by the participants of the 2 talks held in September 2022.

Introduction
This paper records all the ideas written down by participants during the workshop. The ideas have been sorted into categories for the sake of clarity.

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LET’S TALK: Food
a talk for Great Big Green Week
Flookburgh Village Hall
26th September 2022

Composting and Fertiliser

  • Increase fertiliser not sustainable
  • Energy was cheap to produce fertiliser
  • Community composting
  • Community leaf mould collection
  • Other areas council collect peeling etc and compost
  • Share green waste etc so neighbours can put food waste on a communal neighbour’s compost heap


Foraging

  • What wild foods grow well on Cartmel Peninsular?
  • Learn foraging ethically in nature
  • Foraging in hedgerows for food
  • Find out where to get hazelnuts and [sawpluie?]


Dealing with Gluts

  • More info on food clubs
  • Winter venues for the sharing group and to see it grow
  • Using everything
  • Less waste food is a good thing in theory, but what about people who defend on it.
  • Gluts from locally produced food, e.g. tomatoes
  • Importance of preserving food, especially fruit
  • Seasonality
  • Don’t waste food
  • enough of us to make it happen (jane from glut club) engaging/inspiring
  • How can we approach the holiday let owners about harvesting their fruit trees?
  • What can we not freeze?
  • Sweet potatoes freeze well
  • Carrots, peas, swede, turnips onion mashed potatoes celeriac and cabbage freeze well
  • Stigma of free foods i.e food groups maybe call it another name, like community waste club
  • Remember processing food like slicing and salting runner beans
  • Glut club maybe we can use home produce to make and share cooked dishes but how to do it safely?


Where to Grow Fruit and Vegetables

  • Station area we have space
  • Parks were used in the second world war
  • School market gardens
  • Gorilla gardening
  • Holker Hall?
  • Growing on any spare land
  • Need more allotments e.g. in Flookburgh, maybe go through Bruno?
  • Grow in spare land in villages

Community Horticulture

  • Gardening and flowers
  • One allotment is too small for crop rotation
  • Community garden for fruit and veg
  • 1.5% to 3% land for fruit and veg
  • Growing and using spices and herbs
  • Allotments need greenhouses
  • Like the one at l'Enclume
  • Voluntary community market gardens
  • Four to ten people sharing allotments
  • Cartmel peninsular needs to famous for a fruit or vegetable
  • Asparagus
  • Runner beans
  • Community allotment/farmers?
  • Big greenhouse which could be shared or used
  • Bees need fruit and vegetables need bees
  • Witherslack orchard, pickers, pruners, and eaters needed, how can we help?


Engaging Children and Young People

  • Teach children to grow cook forage
  • Soup and bread getting youngsters on Saturday morning to bake bread and soup
  • Growing cress in eggshells
  • At school nurture stuff to take home
  • Gardening lessons at schools
  • Gardening with children/school
  • How to grow on a pocket handkerchief
  • Gardening cup for schools, volunteers to help John to judge
  • Forest school grow and cook
  • Bean sprouts in a jam-jar with water?


Cooking and Meals

  • Share recipes
  • Eating all your food without leftovers
  • Eat more vegetables than grains and meat
  • Importance of good nutrition
  • Cook from fresh every meal
  • Cooked in season
  • Role models
  • People you know or knew


Soil

  • Finding the Mother Tree connection
  • Industrial farming driven down unit cost and damage the soil
  • We want to know more about soil
  • Fertility of soil not sustainable
  • Future learning soil course
  • Lancaster uni offers a soils course on future learn free


Early Inspirations

  • Apples for scrumping, making apple pies
  • Picking blackberries
  • Gardening with parents
  • Picking hips to get 3d a bag in 1948
  • Raiding orchards
  • Potato picking in October half term
  • Hens when we were young in the war.
  • Had a small plot of my own in a garden
  • Learned from parents and grandparents
  • Scrumping and to make wine, e.g. rose hips
  • Rhubarb and custard
  • Helping the baker deliver his produce to homes
  • Assisting the milkman on his daily rounds
  • Scrumping as a kid
  • Visited Germany as youngster and learned to love pumpernickel and quark
  • Working on a market and seeing different foods


The Olden Days

  • Grandparents grew vegetables, dahlias, chrysanthemums
  • Bread and dripping
  • In the war my parents ate potato peel pie
  • Wartime- swill saved for pigs, Monday is leftover day
  • Decorating a cardboard cake for a wedding
  • Tealeaves used twice
  • Save the fat
  • Stock pot used the bones and peelings
  • Butter or jam on bread


Sharing

  • Can we visit John Eakin's garden?
  • Share tools, knowledge
  • Share tools knowledge labour greenhouses
  • Tool share
  • Share books, magazines, knowledge
  • Seed swaps
  • Knowledge/Skills swap
  • Home brewing
  • Seeds, chilli peppers will they grow and prduce plants?
  • Look at incredible edible in Todmorden
  • Is olio used locally?


Bigger Picture

  • Means of production as close to consumer
  • GVA hides many costs sustainability and environment
  • Processes does contribute to GDP of host country and exporting country
  • Needs to be a policy change at government level
  • Supermarkets?


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LET’S TALK: Waste
a talk for Great Big Green Week
Grange Over Sands Methodist Hall
27th September 2022


Food Waste

  • Food cooperative e,g, [suma] delivery to an area each month or ask fletchers to get in from [suma]
  • better coordinated food deliveries from supermarkets locals can organise or pressure supermarkets
  • grow your own fruit and veg
  • always baking
  • grow your own fruit and veg
  • less meat as it was expensive, a treat
  • grandad had a noose in the cellar for removing the heads and feet of chickens
  • grandparents never wasted food, leftovers were repurposed
  • never left anything on the plate
  • no food wasted cut mould off cheeses
  • love food hate waste
  • food planning frequently
  • batch cooking and freeze
  • community food shares and cooking
  • one pot and slow cookers
  • Ate what they needed
  • Soups and stews, chutneys, and jams
  • chickens
  • anaerobic digesters
  • Could we have household food waste collected alongside everything else
  • money recycled to buy seeds and plant to go to community growing, feed schools and vulnerable people
  • food clubs, glut club for garden produce
  • ration book


Compost

  • share compost heaps
  • ten thousand compost bins
  • compost


Textiles

  • make their own clothes, darning and cobbling
  • textiles stop buying clothes
  • swaps and swishes, quality style not fast fashion
  • knitting, reuse wool made clothes, rag rugs, quilts
  •  textiles, which are more energy efficient to mend, natural or man-made?
  • patchwork
  • knit, unravel, and reknit
  • make your clothes
  • darn socks
  • leather elbow patches
  • water use for manufacturing also textiles look at Aral sea and cotton
  • nappies (cost of washing, drying, NHS contact
  • clothes swap
  • ban disposable nappies
  • Clothing repair, pass on, charity shop, avoid buying knew
  • Dad’s pants for dusters


Plastics, Paper and Packaging

  • Buy items loose packaging costs us and the earth
  • burn plastics recover CO2? e.g. greenhouses next to incinerators
  • should we put soft plastic in the bin in the coop or in household waste
  • shopping bags paper
  • shops could have a sign to say you can bring your own containers, bags, or supply paper bags
  • ban tetra packs
  • municipal water fountains
  • what’s a good way to reuse magazine (especially glossy magazines)?
  • swap shop event for books, magazines, puzzles


Glass

  • bottle return scheme
  • milkman delivered
  • bottle return scheme
  • back in the day 10p deposit for pop bottles so they were reused


Energy

  • tin bath
  • my grandma only had one frying pan and cooked on fire
  • I had a mangle and a dolly
  • tin bath once a week shared water
  • insulate
  • check and save energy fridge 5 degrees freezer -18 degrees
  • are there no effective filters for incinerators?
  • working with daylight


Repair

  • my grandma fixed everything and seldom threw things away
  • always repaired make do and mend
  • grandma fixed everything
  • things were made to be mended, now built-in obsolescence
  • collecting and repairing toys
  • library of tools, men in sheds
  • make do and mend
  • set up shops attached to repair café
  • things lasted longer like electricals
  • planned obsolescence
  • make do and mend
  • peninsularepaircafé@gmail.com


Litter

  • more bins and triage bin/dog poo in public places
  • keep Britain tidy
  • tv campaign to keep Britain tidy
  • more dog poo bins

Campaigning

  • Advertising we're sold didn't buy greenwashing
  • Ethical consumer to find out where to buy
  • no tv showing adverts
  • advocate, signposting
  • very local leaflet with neighbours, what three things can we do locally
  • media campaigns
  • Social justice


Sharing and Working Together

  • Facebook marketplace
  • freegle
  • freegle events cumbria cc
  • library of things
  • directory of local places to take things
  • gumtree, freegle marketplace
  • donate unwanted items to charity, e.g. St Mary’s Hospice
  • library of toys
  • join other organisations
  • discuss with family friends contacts
  • craft [destach] event for our creative community
  • what can we do together?


Waste Treatment

  • What happens to the stuff not recused
  • how much of our separated waste recycled and reused in the UK
  • waste by volume not weight would look different.
  • W&F recycling clarity complex
  • tip stuff recycled like triage
  • Why isn’t there the same things recycled in every area


Miscellaneous

  • convenience take what you want and then pay for it?
  • What can we do?
  • we are working harder to recycle more
  • make use of unsaleable items
  • see Gathered by Rankin Flookburgh Area



Steve Richardson