June blog

"That friend with the
bigger car and salon tan
is so last year"

We’ve covered the planet in maize so that we can pump the new biofuels into our SUV’s without increasing the hole in the ozone layer. Brilliant!

Now we discover that all those crops that are no longer being grown in order to make way for planet solutions means that there’s a famine in the third world. Oops. Shouldn’t somebody have thought of that?

Suddenly anyone with a back window sticker proclaiming “this car runs on biofuels” is guilty of the death of millions by starvation and liable to get beaten up like models wearing fur. A bowl of rice is about to become a luxury item because harvests are low. But this doesn’t matter because, economists have just realised, the people who used to survive on rice - most of Asia - are now rich enough to eat meat. However, as it takes eight times as much grain to put a Big Mac on your plate as a bowl of, well, grain, there’s another reason why switching from edible crops to biofuels was a bit of a no-brainer.

Carbon emissions labelling of foods has just hit UK supermarkets meaning you now have the moral choice to choose between fair trade products which keep third world farmers alive OR saving the planet.

Help! It’s all about as clear as US policy for post-Saddam Iraq. Sometimes it’s downright suspicious too. Look at carbon offsets. You want to fly around all day in a big fat jumbo? All you have to do is bung a few quid to a carbon offset operative, or whatever they call themselves, they plant a tree in Africa and hey, presto: guilt free trip!

Forgive a note of cynicism but are some people - probably those carbon operatives - making a wad of money out of this like black-marketeers in a time of sanctions? It sounds too much like a brilliant marketing wheeze like feng shui or bottled water (which we now know is really, really evil as it takes ten litres of water and a factory load of emissions to produce a few glugs on a hot day ).

I mean, give me the cash and I’ll rearrange your furniture, plonk a twig in the ground and let you fill your bottle from my garden well any time.

Nevertheless, some good has come out of it all and that’s the great news that it’s now cool to be a penny-pincher. Conspicuous consumption , overloaded credit cards and waste are out and you no longer need be embarrassed about buying eco (as in eco-nomy not eco-logically sound) bulk packs or turning the heating down. You can serve spag bol and cheap plonk to guests, not worry if the stair carpet is worn and send the kids to school in patched trousers.

We are now in the PCC (post credit crunch) era and meanness is the new lifestyle choice.
Frankly, this is a relief to most. Your hair doesn’t have to be permanently glossed, the garden immaculate and it is positively good to venture out in last year’s summer dress.

Better still, that friend with the bigger car and salon tan who used to make you feel a bit of a slob is now sooo last year.

A recent report says that children who grow up with less are more contented. (Although when I tried this theory on my teenagers I was met by alarming discontent: hang the washing outside instead of bunging it in the drier?? Mum, are you serious? I guess the contentment comes later on).

But figures reveal that a tiddly west European country like Great Britain throws out £10 billion worth of food every year. This would be obscene even if we were on the brink of a worldwide glut rather than a famine.

OK, no-one but the eco-hardliners wants to go back to darning tights, reusing tea bags or reading in bed by candle light. We don’t want to trek to Spain on a donkey for two weeks sunshine or forage in the woods for supper.

But I defy any reader of this magazine to not go shopping for a week and still find enough to eat at the back of the ‘fridge, freezer or kitchen cupboard.

Or try seeing how many items on your “must have” list could correctly be reclassified as “luxuries”.

Since this June edition of the magazine has, inevitably in Normandy, a remembrance theme, one last thought: the idea that recycling is some sort of new idea must leave the veterans rolling in the aisles.

But their recycling wasn’t about bundling rubbish into different coloured bin bags, driving (carbon emissions) to a dump and having the waste taken off (more emissions) for melt down (yet more emissions.) It was about reusing things. Think Blue Peter.

Anyone who, like me, grew up with parents influenced by the war years (or, like my husband, grew up in the consumer desert of the Soviet Union), knows perfectly well that yoghurt pots and broken furniture have their second uses. Cutting out waste is in fact oddly calming.

If nothing else, it’s a cool way to get your finances in order before we all get credit-crunched, starve to death or are fried by excess sunshine.

Send us your best money-saving, waste-reducing ideas to editor@therendzvous.info