Next steps; grip-relaxing bimbling, and avoiding the temptations

Watty1

A good point on the heavier on the fruit and veg and, if I had thought it through, i would have remembered the local stores usually drop that off fruit and veg at the food bank in the church. The church has a fabulous food bank (with fridge too) and the shops drop off all the fruit and veg there so I am happy that goes to where it is most needed as anyone can just pop in and help themselves so it is not one of the places one has to be referred to / have vouchers for.

A sad fact that so many do need to use the food banks and I love that it is so well supported by the village shops (the bakery drops off all unsold at the end of the day too).

rtandon27

@Suffolk_lass - I really do like your phrase 'conscious eating' - I have recently gone back to keeping snack pack-ups ready for my work days and find that helps with my mindless snacking from the sharing table. My rule to myself is 'eat the healthy thing' first and it almost always stops me from going for the sugar-laden junk. Result is that the bloating has vanished along with two pounds. …and of course the indicator is that the jeans are more comfortable.

The food fridge at our church was shut down as most of the folks who needed to use it were not about to prepare anything from scratch! In fact the boxes of donuts I donated one week from an 0li0 pickup disappeared in minutes. One week, I ended up taking home far too many punnets of mushrooms, slicing & cooking them down and making galettes for the drop in centre (donating the pastry cost). There was not a crumb left at the end of the day - but the whole lot would have gone in the bin (not even composted) had I not rescued them. It irks me that in our community, folks have enough to turn their noses up at free fruit and veg and yet there is still a need for a food bank.

Suffolk_lass

That may very well be the case where you are @reandon27 but I am also conscious of those in B&B accommodation where a kettle is the only thing provided to them. If that is the case I feel sure that your homemade galettes would have been so much appreciated. What a treat after SM tins (that can potentially warmed in a bowl of hot kettle water) or ready-meals. And as for the donuts? they fall into the "OMG a treat!" category that is simply unaffordable for many, in my head. Maybe I am kidding myself

rtandon27

@Suffolk_lass - I completely get where you are coming from in regard to the kettle and no cooking facilities available and if I were living in the big smoke I'd most probably look at it from this lens.

I think in this case I was thinking of our particular circumstance at our small town church & community. I actually know the folks who the community fridge was set up for, not to mention the volunteers (& I volunteer at the centre) - I'm really turned off by the general laziness & the reactionary 'just bin it' if it's not taken. Precisely why I have been known to cook up rather than waste. There is a huge difference between a hard working single mom who needs to rely on convenience foods because there are not enough hours in the day and not enough money in the coffers, and a single mom who can't be arsed and sits around spending what little she has on fags and then feeds her children pot noodle & donuts because they are easy/cheap/free when there is perfectly good free fruit and veg that they can be fed as well.

That being said we do have a really lovely volunteer who teaches family cooking classes & is always oversubscribed, but truly it's because the children want/need an after-school activity rather than any interest from the parental units to learn how to keep their children healthy. At least everyone gets some proper nutrition in them once a week during the weeks the programme runs.

foxgloves

We are enjoying Tim Spector's current TV programme. The segment of the programme where he goes to see how a food scientist constructs various UPF items is very interesting. Like you said in your post, @Suffolk_lass, I enjoy an unhealthy treat as much as the next person, but as someone who has always cooked & makes meals from scratch, it really shows up how much closer so much of this UPF is to products of a chemist's factory rather than actual food. There's a lot to be said for the saying about checking ingredients & leaving anything your Granny wouldn't recognise on the shelves. If I am cooking a meal, I am reasonably confident I could nibble or taste any of the ingredients (well, not raw meat, of course) because they are food. I wouldn't be able to say the same about all those little pots of white powders, low-grade palm oil & chicken skin. Interesting stuff. Time to read his book again, I think, as it certainly caused a big increase in my consumption of extra plant varieties last time & I like his non-hysterical approach.

Suffolk_lass

The Chris VT book is good too. As was the programme on sounds he did about UP Chicken

foxgloves

Yes, it is. I borrowed that one from the library.

liselle

The Foodbank I volunteer at provides a fruit n’ veg box for all customers, in addition to donated fruit.

Suffolk_lass

Thanks @rtandon27 @foxgloves and @liselle (and welcome here, liselle). It's good to reflect on these things and hear others' experiences. Here in our village (in itself it is fairly affluent) all the surplus fruit and veg gets used as a rule - with the stall on the community garden being the place to put it. Others help themselves as they walk through, walk dogs, or spend time there, helping, just sitting for the company or whatever. The food bank to which I donate is on the other side of one of the two nearest big towns.

Turning to this household, I shopped yesterday. While building my list I found several of my regular OB products are showing as discontinued. While bran flakes and ginger biscuits are really not an issue, cream crackers are, and the big one is the cheap cat litter our elderly indoor (Stealth) cat relies on. A quick scoot round online to check other SM equivalent contents and Asbo do one for a penny less (not when our fossil fuelled journeys are taken into account though) - cue WhatsApp to DS&P to ask them to pick up 2 bags each time they shop there (for which we will obviously reimburse them). Anyway, I went to a person at a checkout who told me they are doing a major rebrand (ho hum, more food inflation is anticipated here). I presume that was at the root of the empty shelves in many places. I did manage to get most things on my list, and inevitably two or three things not on my list. Combined with my list showing single quantities when I wanted multiples, the overall bill was nearly double what the list originally indicated.

Naturally I have to check and I feel shocked that the exact same cheese I was paying £5 for before Christmas, is now £7 a pack, and lots of things that were £1.10 are now £1.25. Greek yogurt is almost double what I was paying. My trolley was mostly F&V, thank goodness. My £300 target for February is already looking somewhat precarious. My response is to buy less, make meals that we don't use cheese in, except by exception. Good old Mac and cheese with smoky bacon on a Saturday for supper will be a very occasional appearance. Pasta with a simple (homegrown) tomato sauce of some kind (garlic, basil or chilli) is where we are going instead. Oh and I did buy a chicken to roast. Shocked that the former 3 for £10 are now £5 each. I shall need to bunce it along in true rubber chicken style

Today I must finalise our response to the initial letter from the solar installers, to get that posted and emailed this morning. Their initial "you do this to do that" response, completely fails to address the primary concern of electrical fire safety so I am spelling this out and emphasising this is why the installation is completely turned off, until it has been inspected and reviewed formally by them or by an approved local installer without compromising the warranty.

And I must build some brood frames for the different specification of beekeeping kit that I may sell on.

Regarding my conscious eating, I had a day of two treats yesterday, so my body knows I am not starving. With a stir fry kit for supper. I won't weigh in until Monday. Probably just as well!

KajiKita

@foxgloves i went for job interview once at the factory that makes all the r1bena. I asked where they got the blackcurrant base from as I knew it used to be farmed and harvested locally. Germany was the reply. I walked around the plant that this ‘liquor’ was stored in and you could literally smell the (in my mind, non food) chemicals in the air.

I haven’t touched that product from that day to this …

KK