Thoughts from a motorway service station

Some interesting thoughts from Alison:

It was a hot and sticky August day and the threat of rain was in the air. We pulled off the M40 on the way back from another carbon-intensive wedding in London to fill up our (reasonably fuel efficient) car. My husband dealt with the fuel payment (can it really cost £70 to fill up a 1.9 litre engine car these days?!) and I walked back to the actual services to buy some lunch.

The services resembled a cross between Alton Towers during the holidays and that old favourite TV programme ‘Supermarket Sweep’. There was a hideous queue for the ladies, every seat (inside and outside) was taken with families on their way to or on their way back from holiday destinations and people were literally throwing themselves on food wherever they could grab it from.

But quite aside from the enochlophobia that suddenly came over me I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of consumption that was going on in those 50 metres squared. Cappucinos, fast food, packaged sandwiches, sweets, crisps, fruit (not much), canned drinks. I stopped and looked around me and could not see one single person without their mouths open stuffing food and drink into it.

I freely admit that on this occasion I joined them. I usually try and make our own lunch/dinner in the car, not because I’m an eco-warrior, but because I refuse to dish out for the extortionate prices they charge you at the service stations (talk about a closed market). I paid £10 for two lots of sandwiches and two bags of crisps – ouch.

If this much consumption of food and drink and this much waste was being generated at this one small service station off the M40 at that precise moment in time (which probably accounted for 0.00001% of the UK’s population), how much was being consumed and wasted around the world at that moment? A scary thought.

So what can we do? Make our own sandwiches? Well yes, but that may not be the long-term, universal solution of choice. Somehow we have to wake people up to the reality of having a finite amount of space and resources on this earth. Organisations and the culture therein can play a big part in this – what type of culture do you advocate at your organization? Do you have a Green Travel Plan but your Directors still turn up to work in their 3 litre engine sports cars? Do you order in food for meetings from local companies but then always thrown half of it away?

We have to learn to complete the sentences which we are beginning to start. “We have a Green Travel Plan…..and everyone in our company from the top to the bottom is committed to trying to uphold the plan and reduce carbon emissions”. “We order food locally…….and have implemented a system to ensure that we do not over-order and that leftovers are distributed to staff”.

We are still thinking one dimensionally about resource efficiency and consumption – it is time we stopped leaving things unsaid.

ECUS BBQ

We had a barbecue after work on Friday. Follwing a sunny intervals kind of week, Friday had a glowering look. Inevitably, as packing up time approached, the drizzle settled in. Cunningly I had failed to finish my presentation (BREEAM* awareness and rather a struggle) so I let the more efficient people faff. As the rain intensified and the light levels diminished (heading for dreach) a flurry of emails drifted into the right hand corner of my screen. Should we cancel? I hacked away at my presentation, reducing the 187 slides to 80 (still too many I know), whilst the bodging began. When I finally left the post-operative remnants of my presentation the building was eerily empty but there was a substantial jolly racket outside. The double doors of the garage had been opened and a huge blue tarpaulin stretched over the yard, held in place by straining bungee cords. Two barbecues were tended by the inevitable men; Tom, one of our ecologists sported a woman in underwear and stockings type of apron (sartorial elegance for BBQs) and John, Shona's chap, was togged out most attractively in a red and white spotty pinny with layers of ruffles. At the back of the garage, among the accumulated rubbish, a tiny MP3 player was attached to a set of speakers and pumped cheerful music out into the gloom whilst geoscience's coolboxes, only slightly grubby from carrying soil samples, had been filled with ice and beer.


You can probably imagine the rest. Billows of smoke, burnt sausages, toddlers splashing in the puddles, increasingly loud chatter, intensifying rainfall, darkness gathering and a huge amount of fun. Oh, and someone, usually Catherine, occasionally emptying the accumulated rainfall off the tarp to avoid collapse. The beginning of the break-up came as toddlers got increasingly grumpy and were carted off to their beds. We stacked chairs, let barbecues cool, finished up all the open bottles and wandered off into the night. Ed and Ali kindly gave Sally and me a lift home through the deluge. The young ecologists set off for the pub and then probably the clubs.


Would it have been so much fun if it had been a sunny evening? Well yes, probably. But the adversity was fun too. We're quite good at that.


* BREEAM - building research establishment environmental assessment method


Now with additional apron photo - sorry about the blurriness - it was taken on Catherine's phone.

Selling the perfect food factory - Comment from Alison

There appears to have been a shift in TV adverts selling food. And it seems to have happened rather abruptly. One day I am being bombarded with the health effects of buying and eating certain breakfast cereals, snacks, yoghurts and the like eaten by perfect people and perfect families in beautiful natural surroundings, and the next I am being ushered into witness the delights of the food factory and/or fields themselves.

Selling food on TV has always had a strange fascination for me – perhaps because I like food, or perhaps because I find it strange that we have so much food and so many different brands that cheese can no longer just be cheese. When I was 8 or 9 I would draw the final snapshot of TV food adverts. My favourite was “Du pain, du vin, du Boursin”. Even that advert has now had to change to differentiate itself and become darkly humourous with the addition of “du Tracteur” to the end of the sentence. I’m not sure why anyone would link being run over by a tractor with a French soft cheese, but then I’m writing about it here, so it must have made an impression….

Anyway, back to food factories. Anyone who has ever been to a food factory will know that they are interesting places. My first visit was to a frozen pizza factory in Germany when I worked there for a year as a trainee accountant. I didn’t eat frozen pizza again for a long time. This was not because the factory was in any way dirty or unhygienic. Quite the opposite. It was spotlessly clean and sterile. All the employees were covered from head to toe. There were, in fact, more machines than there were people anyway. And my lasting memory is of huge vats of tomato sauce and grated cheese. In short, it completely destroyed my view of how pizza should be made (in a stone oven, outside, somewhere warm in Italy). I was horrified by the industrial nature and scale of food manufacturing. And it is a memory that has stayed with me for a long time.

Recently this memory was compounded by my other half’s visit to a chicken factory. Once again he said it was spotless. But the way he described the chickens being killed, plucked, sliced and diced and then packaged put a grim picture in my mind. Mass production of food is not pretty.

Yet the TV adverts say otherwise! And that is where my problem lies. The images portrayed to us by many food producers selling their wares on TV at the moment are simply not factual. Bakers dancing round a warmly lit bread-producing factory with smiles on their faces and loading individual pieces of dough into baking tins; salad growers picking individual salad leaves by hand whilst singing; chip manufacturers adding a dash of seasoning to individual frozen chips in a factory that looks more like it should be on a children’s cartoon. Food factories and commercial agricultural farms are simply not like this. And spare a thought for the workers in the factories and on the farms. I can guarantee they do not spend their days laughing, dancing and singing. In fact of the 1 billion poorest people in the world, I understand that over 50% of them work in food-related industries.

So is this a form of false advertising? Perhaps. There are many other issues at stake here as well, such as society’s demand for fast food that is not fresh. The demand for cheap food. The necessity of feeding nearly 7 billion people – it can’t necessarily all be done organically on local farms.

But that’s not really my point here – it’s the false image we are providing to the potential consumer of the product. Everyone should have the opportunity to visit a food factory and make their own minds up, but we should ultimately all be aware that food production is no different to the production of any other commodity these days.

Too tired to blog...

Well obviously not too tired to write stuff but too tired to do serious critical reading before recommending a few very interesting articles I've come across recently. Real Soon Now.

I'm currently being rather impressed with the Travel Lodge in Romford, even though it is market day tomorrow and there are numbers of people dragging the metal stall structures out and setting them up which is a rather noisy process. I'm also rather impressed with Romford and the opportunities to walk out of the hotel and find wonderful food. This is my fourth evening and I'm going back to the Italian. No offence to McDonald's which provided me with fresh palatable food whilst I stayed in Heathrow over the weekend but they have a fairly small selection of vegetarian food. Ciao Bella has a much wider selection, thank goodness. When you are away from home a lot, being able to find good, healthy food makes a big difference. Tomorrow I go home and hope (against hope) to find some food left in the house that I can cook with. Otherwise it's pasta and pesto again. If there's any pesto left. It's a great life if you don't weaken!