2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

Watty1

I had to google mulesing and now rather wish I had not.  i did not know such things happened. Of late I've been struggling with animal production and at the same time having kept sheep I know no one would keep sheep if we did not eat them.  They seem to spend their lives thinking of creative ways to die or to be inconvenient to their human careers.  Their fleeces are not worth much so eating well cared for lamb and sheep seems the only way to keep the cuties in the countryside.  (non meat eating friends were horrified when I mentioned this)

I'm trying a few vegan meals a week and love the Rose Elliot Bean cookbook which has some war time suggestions in (it is a very old copy).   Butterbean and tomato soup from this has been a firm favourite for years from a time when I needed to be frugal. And I need to be once again so out came the book.

PollyWollyDoodle

I am with you Watty - no offence to any vegetarian/vegans, and I eat meat infrequently because I choose only to buy higher welfare meat which is expensive. But I always say that pigs would be extinct by now, if we didn’t eat them - they don’t even produce wool.  The best way to preserve a rare breed is to eat it occasionally. 

dND

I agree with you @Watty1 and @PollyWollyDoodle.  Having kept animal - chickens and alpacas - if they didn't have a monitory value, they wouldn't exist.  And I've also grown soya as a crop and to be honest it was an environmental desert. Soyabean is self-fertile so doesn't support pollinators.  Ethical food (and clothing), is a very complex matter.
 
In my own case, I'm striving to eat less meat and better quality meat.  By that I don't mean sirloin steak over stewing beef but the aim is to support farmers direct, and to reduce food miles and also to use the lesser known cuts so moving towards nose-to-tail cookery.  It's going to have to be a very gradual process as I only have a basic state pension but if I don't make a start it will never get done.  I did it with eggs.  I went from the ultra-cheap imported trays to the certified barn eggs and then to the free-range and then to my own free-range chickens.  I now no longer have the space or the money for my own chickens so I'm back to free-range and those as organic when the price is affordable to me.  I also wear leather shoes as you wouldn't want to be within a mile of my feet when I wear synthetic upper shoes. 🤣

What's important is the way we treat the animals we keep for food or clothing.  Big suppliers only want big profit - a consequence of being in a capitalist economic system.  They don't want checks on their production methods - as an aside I read today that Rothampsted is under threat; it's findings frequently go against what big agriculture demands.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/08/uk-leading-agricultural-research-facility-rothamsted-facing-funding-crisis

Getting back to the ration; I've been good and not bought anything for a while either on ration or secondhand.  I should be getting the keys to my new-to-me house tomorrow so have told myself that I have to wait until I unpack and see what I actually own and what I can repurpose.

PipneyJane

Good luck with the move @dND.

May I say that I totally agree with your sentiments re nose-to-tail cooking.  Growing up in Australia, my parents would fill our small chest freezer by buying a hind-quarter of beef and a side of “yealing lamb” from the butcher.  This meat would be jointed, pre-packed into trays and prepared to my parents preferences (e.g. trimmings weren’t minced; they were “stewing beef”).

Even though I patronise our local butcher, I can only imagine their shock if I placed an order like that.  Not that I have a chest freezer - no space - but a girl can dream. 

- Pip


ETA:  yes, I have helped prepare and pickle ox tongue, but never in this country 

Laura_Elsewhere

I'm another who tries hard to buy my food so I am supporting the more ethical suppliers who cause least pollution and care best for the animals- I was vegan for a while back in the 1990s when you had to make everything from scratch, mostly grown locally, instead of a vast range of ready-meals and fake-meats made from rainforest-destroying soya flown halfway round the world...! I am a meat-eater now but I have become increasingly selective about the source of my meat and dairy. 
I think many of us meat-eaters would struggle terribly to cope on the amount of meat available during rationing! We try to eat a bit less, but as others describe, better quality in the real sense of the word. 

Meanwhile... Our old furniture was collected this morning by two very cheerful and efficient chaps, to go to the local hospice charity-furniture-shop, so now we have vast amounts of Stuff everywhere and no furniture! Poor Mr E has to go and dismantle it and bring it back, bit by bit, in the next week, interrupted by a two-day trip for a funeral (nobody very close). 

I have decided I want a couple of longer looser thin jumpers- I have a good one but it's coral-pink which doesn't go with a lot of things, so I plan to use the funeral-trip to visit a street I know with several charity shops, and see what I can find. Men's thin wool jumpers, you know the sort. My cardigans are only waist-length as I knit them to wear with skirts and dresses, and I am wearing jeans just now in the flat (as skirts knock things over too easily when there's this much!) and my middle keeps getting draughty! 

Laura_Elsewhere

Liverpool_Anne said:

Hi all, my understanding is that mulesing is banned in the UK but is practiced in Australia and was practiced in New Zealand but has recently been banned there so if you are buying wool from UK sheep it is from mulesing free sheep. I think we need to be careful with imported wool that is used in fabric manufacturing 

An awful lot of knitting wool is produced in the UK by UK companies but using imported wool, and it's not always at all clear whether or not the animals have been mulesed. And I assume the very cheap jumpers and so on in the fast-fashion chains will ALL be from mulesed sheep as it's so much cheaper, if all you care abiout is the profit per animal... 

Wraithlady

thriftwizard said:

I'll be happy to teach you all to spin, ladies! With wheel or spindle - wheels are faster but don't necessarily produce a better yarn, and you can't (usually) take them to the pub - you can take a spindle anywhere. But there's plenty of room here in the village hall if you can get hold of your gran's wheel... there's plenty of fleece out there, quite often for free.

I have both, having inherited my OH's great-grandmother's wheel (the repairer said the 'newest bits' were about 200 years old) but the treadle is rather worn. I have watched Utube videos on drop spindles and on spinning wheels but it's not really helped. So, yeah, any help is welcomed.

Laura_Elsewhere

I'm stubbornly ignoring spinning... This is a Very Small Flat and it's already got an awful lot of wool in it- I don't need to add fleece! Especially as the free fleece usually isn't cleaned and we have nowhere I could sit outside unless I just sat on the concrete kerb of the communal carpark to clean and comb it...! 

Liverpool_Anne

Hi all
@Laura_Elsewhere, yes I understand lots of the wool spun in the UK is from imported wool which is why I said if you are using wool from UK sheep . Maybe we need a country of origin on wool labels similar to food to help clarify this for people. There are websites that list museling free brands so that might help some people .

@thriftwizard I would love to learn to spin but unfortunately I think we live to far apart as I would gladly pay you to learn

Can I just reiterate that I have no worries about other people eating meat, OH is a meat eater but when I went veggie in the 80s there was no such thing as organic meat and even free range eggs were few and far between so at that time I felt I had no option except to be veggie such was the low level of a lot of animal welfare at the time. As I have aged I have realised that I can't "save the world" so I just do what I can and feels right for me and let other people choose what is right for them. I have frequently heard that without food production many farmed animals would not exist, or not in the numbers they do in our countryside which is why I am only concerned about their welfare
Take care everyone

PipneyJane

Hmmm….. all this talk about mulesing, etc, makes me wonder about my stash.  Because I do most of my yarn buying at shows, I think most of it is from British small producers, because those are the gems you can’t find elsewhere (e.g. Wensleydale Long Wool, the chap from Caithness who sells from his own flock, BFL from Blacker, etc).  

The rest probably doesn’t comply with the ban. Some is Australian, bought when home; some is from New Zealand, bought while there in 2018 (there’s a lovely yarn shop in central Auckland, in one of the arcades); some is from blow-outs when I’ve not been able to resist the siren call of “the sale”.  In some respects, the latter is quite shameful, since there’s at least £60 worth of an angora blend upstairs, jumper weights of blue and pink, that will never be knitted because I was shopping online, hoping for more of a pastel shade and didn’t send it back in 2007!  (2024 challenge to self:  to sell this stuff on Bay-of-E.)

In other news, for the first time since the end of October, I have been knitting!  While in the hospital, I finished the sock that was lurking in my handbag - that was hard to do since I still had lymphoma brain, so struggled with the toe - and I’m half way through knitting its partner. (I’m on the heel.). I did have to frog the latter once because I forgot the rib for this pair was K1 P1 not the usual K2 P2.

- Pip