A Buy Less message from America

-Will

Pants, plants, bread and shed. And everything else.

So here we are, we are connected once again and back in the world. We are moved into our new house and are settling in well so far.
Since the move, as a result of all this time on my hands, I’ve taken a fairly hyperactive approach to living a simpler, more ‘hand-made’ life, and have spent my time scurrying around fixing, cooking, cutting, planting, sorting, baking, bathing and sleeping. So as a slightly chaotic first entry, all I'll try to do is document a few of the things I've been up to.

One of the first things I made sure I did, as the year is creeping on, is dig and plant the garden. We only have a small space here, so it'll be an experiment to find out how much, and how efficiently we can grow in it. Fortunately it seems as though, at this time of year, certainly, most of the garden is in sun for most of the day, so I just dived in and dug a couple of beds and got sowing. As it was already mid-June we were fairly limited with what we could plant from seed, and some of the things I've planted I'm pushing it a bit with, but I'm hoping very much that we should have at least a few successful crops, and as the year goes on I can extend the beds and plant things at the right time. Will is also doing his best in the evenings to get the shed up, and it's been really nice establishing ourselves in a garden again.

I spent a dull day fixing a huge pile of Will's pants and other garments, and found a really good solution to hems that have completely disintegrated, which on many of Will's pants they had, and that is using old ties. Let's face it - ties are useless, nobody wants them. They are however pretty sturdy, have a range of widths on every one, and conveniently already have a sharp crease in them. Luckily, for reasons unknown, I've been collecting them for the past few years from charity shops with an inkling that they might come in handy one day. Just cut away the old hem and slap a new, ready-made one on. Alright, so these pants might not be winning any prizes for being the smartest undergarments, but they are pretty striking and should at least last a few more years.

(Sorry Will for putting your pants on the internet)

As we’ve not had the phone or internet we haven’t been able to order our usual organic vegbox, and have also not had a weekend to get out and find a farm shop or wholefood shop to buy our dry goods from, so have had to make a trip out to an out of town supermarket. We were pleased to find that we were able to buy entirely from the store’s organic range, however without the internet or books available we still felt unsure as to whether we were being responsible in our choices of what foods to buy or not, and this is something that needs work. As well as this, all of the food came with an alarming amount of non-recyclable plastic packaging. Something that we are working on though is also cutting down on our portion sizes and making food last better, and this is something that having a regular vegbox has really helped with, in that we are having to ‘budget’ our vegetables for the week ahead and not be wasteful.

I have also spent a couple of happy weeks baking loaf after stupendous loaf of bread, and making massive amounts of houmous from dried British Fava beans (courtesy of Hodmedods, a superb company from whom we bought two enormous bags of dried beans and peas last year - and which we're still working through). Something that we've really been sticking to is using as little energy as possible when cooking. This has meant using the slow cooker a lot, and at times when we've had to use the cooker or oven, filling it to make most use of the power. This is another thing that has made us aware of how much food we are consuming and how best to make it last, and it's been a new approach that's been easy to settle into.

Rye don't we do this more often?

I will share a recipe as I'm here. It's not my own and I can't take any credit for it, but it's one I've used again and again, and is not only fool-proof, but perhaps the quickest, easiest bread recipe in the world. It's the Grant Loaf, so called because it was invented by Doris Grant, a lady well ahead of her time singing the praises of unprocessed wholefoods and condemning processed carbohydrates in the 1950s and 60s, and whose book Dear Housewives I fortuitously came across a few years ago at a church sale.
This is a slightly updated recipe on her original, and uses dried yeast.
In place of the sugar I use either jaggery or molasses, and both work well. Other than that I follow it to the letter. This recipe makes a really delicious, though quite dense bread.

No need to kneed

I also visited the local library last week and took out Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food, which has had me totally absorbed, and shocked by how completely I've been sucked into the ideals of 'nutritionism', and am hoping to soon get my hands on The Omnivore's Dilemma as well. Although I have for the past few years taken food quite seriously, it's becoming evident that I've been acting somewhat misguidedly and am desperate now to learn everything I can, but to also really start listening to myself. As Pollan quite rightly points out, our parents' parents, and their parents didn't need government guidelines and fancy packaging boasting the nutritional content of 'food products' to nourish themselves, and I'm not sure I do either.

Anyway, that's probably enough for now. From now on I’m hoping to blog on a semi-regular basis with updates on what’s going on with us and changes we’ve made, things that I’ve learned and the impact they’ve had. For now this is just a bit of a catch up and our starting point, although already I feel we’ve made more of an effort to use less and buy more consciously where we have to buy at all. We have also been discussing things that we can do in future to improve our ability to grow our own food, store food, and make things that we need rather than buy. We also have our wedding coming up in just over three weeks so there will be a vast amount of cooking and making needed for that, so things will be a little hectic around here for a bit.

-Jess

Hello from Jess + Will

As a pair of vegans you would think it comes with the territory that we generally try to do what's best for our environment and whoever inhabits it. We take our decisions quite seriously, particularly when it comes to what we buy and eat, and generally cross our fingers and hope that we're doing more good than harm in our day-to-day lives.
Having said that, I certainly know that I'm guilty of, every day, behaving in ways that I know to be harmful to my environment and to myself, things like:

• Eating too much
• Drinking too much
• Eating  a lot of imported foods
• Being careless with soaps and other harmful materials
• Buying things I don't need
• Buying things of dubious origin or without considering their origin
• Spending far too much time on the computer
• Throwing away things that I can fix or repurpose

So there's obviously a deal of room for improvement. And a lot of the issue is (obviously not excusing buying, eating, computering too much, I know what I need to do about that...) I just don't know how I can make the right decisions about what I buy or engage with, because it's just so easy to make mistakes. Well, we're moving house and I've been faced with the amount of stuff I own and have been pretty much repulsed (I'm sure not the first person to have this response to their possessions), and although yes I would say that I am someone who likes to have their 'home comforts' around her, I have plenty now, so I certainly don't need to buy anything else. I want to know why it is that although I know what I'm doing isn't right, how it's so easy for me to blot this out as I go on consuming consuming consuming, and wonder if this is a major contributing factor to my general sense of malaise.
Certainly I've also suffered ill health as well as emotional upset as a result of my lifestyle, and have essentially, despite my consciously 'healthy' diet and lifestyle, been abusing my body by putting things in it that I know to be worthless, difficult to digest, or damaging, and subsequently I am left with long-term health issues that I strongly believe a more intuitive approach to food and other activities would remedy.

On our way to happiness & harmony

Well hey, I don't have a job at the moment, so I have a choice to either use my time watching cat videos, or I can take this time to figure out what the hell I'm doing with myself, and scratch some of the itches I've had for long enough. So that's what this is. Will and I are moving house tomorrow, we're getting married in a month, and we're starting a new life. We're going to figure out what we can do, and very importantly stop doing the things we shouldn't be doing.
I think what's key to say here is that we are young, we don't have a lot of money, and I know next to nothing about what we're going to do (Will knows a little more, he reads..) so if there are things that we can do to make a change then they are things that anyone can do. I'll blog about the things we do, and how we do them, and I'll share what we learn on our journey. As we fix, make and reuse things, cook with seasonal fresh ingredients, and figure out what we're going to do about soap, we'll document what we're up to, and why. So until next time!

-Jess