Together For Trees

Tesco have a really good campaign running at the moment that helps to educate people about the importance of the rainforests and their influence on all our lives. As with my ‘one small step’ philosophy, Tesco want to encourage people to make small changes in their lives that together will have a huge impact on halting the destruction of the rainforests. If you’re looking for some inspiration to motivate yourself to start taking those small steps, I think it’s best to let the facts speak for themselves. Full information can be found at www.tesco.com/trees.

• Rainforests regulate the climate, store carbon, clean water and provide a home to animals and birds. They are often referred to as the ‘green lungs’ of the planet because much of the oxygen in our air comes from rainforests. The trees and soil also store a huge amount of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. When the trees are cut down those gases are released back into the atmosphere, heating it up and contributing to global warming. The destruction of the rainforests creates more carbon dioxide each year than the emissions from all our planes, ships and cars put together.

• An area the size of a football pitch is destroyed every four seconds. That’s almost eight million football pitches a year. 50 years ago, it is estimated that the rainforests covered 14% of the Earth. Now they cover just 6%.

• The rainforests support more than one billion of the poorest people on the planet.

• An estimated 140 animal and plant species are lost every day through the destruction of the rainforest.

• More than 70% of all land-based species exist only in the rainforest.

• There are a huge number of items that we use everyday that originate from the rainforests, including grapefruit, coffee, tomatoes, chocolate, plant ingredients for modern medicine, oils to make cosmetics and detergents, coconuts, avocados, figs, lemons, limes, bananas, squash, pepper, tumeric, cayenne, vanilla, cloves, cinnamon and ginger. There are still many more to be discovered.

Oatmeal Biscuits

Today I’m going to share with you a recipe for one of my favourite snacks, oatmeal biscuits. They taste great on their own, or you can add a bit of humus (see picture below), and they go great with soup. OK, I know the recipe doesn’t follow the rules of the plant-based diet because it uses oil (in the soya spread), but they are vegan and they taste great.

Ingredients

75g/3oz/⅔ cup plain flour

2.5ml/½ tsp salt

1.5ml/¼ tsp baking powder

115g/4oz/1 cup fine pinhead oatmeal (oatbran also works)

65g/2½oz/generous ¼ cup soya spread

1. Preheat oven to 200ºc/400ºf/Gas 6 and grease a baking sheet.
2. Sift the flour, salt and baking powder into a mixing bowl. Add the oatmeal and mix well. Rub in the soya spread to make a crumbly mixture, then blend in enough water to make a stiff dough.
3. You’ve got two choices at this point. The original recipe states ‘turn out onto a worktop sprinkled with fine oatmeal and knead until smooth and manageable. Roll out to about 3mm/⅛in thick and cut into rounds, squares or triangles. Place on the baking sheet’ If you’re like me, though, and you prefer to do things a bit more rustic and can’t be bothered to clean up your worktop afterwards, you can instead roll some of the mixture into a ball in your hands and flatten it straight onto the baking sheet.
4. Bake for about 15 mins or until crisp.

The symbolism of me

Whilst in a pilates class recently, I suddenly realised that my purple yoga mat and orange water bottle are very symbolic of me. Not only are purple and orange my favourite colours, but both items represent my commitment to living a healthy, environmentally aware lifestyle in a very simplistic way. I was so inspired by the composition that I set it up again when I got home and took a photo to show you. I’m so glad that I did capture it on my camera as well, because my water bottle broke a couple of days later, leaked all over my lunch bag and I had to get rid of it.

Don't Be Dictated To

My recent post about The Occupy Movement has got me thinking more and more about how we should stand up for what we believe in. One of my pet hates is when people tell me that I shouldn’t be so stubborn, and I should just back down to other people because it makes life easier. Why should I? If everyone did that, laws would never change, technology would never develop, our human rights would be ignored and we'd probably all still be living in caves. A few years ago, I was lucky to work with a young Hungarian woman who had grown up during communist rule. She taught me that when you are fortunate to have freedom, you should use it as much as possible.

For anyone who has been living under a rock the past few weeks and doesn’t know, we had local elections here in the UK on Thursday 3^rd May. For the month running up to the elections, my letter box was bombarded by junk mail from the two main political parties in my neighbourhood. I found the literature from the Welsh Liberal Democrats to be particularly arrogant. First of all, they announced to everyone that they had been ‘running’ Cardiff since 2004. We live in a country that is governed by the National Assembly which, unlike England, is designed so that our politics aren’t about a particular party ruling over us. The Lib Dems then had the cheek to tell us that our only voting options in Roath are the Welsh Lib Dems or the Welsh Labour Party. Wow, I thought, that’s really strange because when I go and vote there are at least another four options on my ballot paper. Surely the fact that we are lucky enough to have the vote in the UK means that we have the choice to vote for whoever we want, otherwise we might as well live under a dictatorship. If every person in my neighbourhood didn’t listen to the propaganda about there ‘only being two political parties in Roath’, that accepted norm would probably soon disappear. So my message is to stand by what you believe in. And remember, it only takes one person to knock the balance the other way.

What's Your Occupy Movement?

As I have said in earlier blogs, what started as me recording my efforts to follow a plant-based diet has evolved into a platform for me to talk about all subjects that affect our future as a species. I think it would be naïve of me to not include the recent coverage of the Occupy Movement in that. In recent months, the Occupy Movement has taken up a lot of column inches, but the most poignant for me is a photo essay by Tom Campbell in The Big Issue. Rather than focus on the political aspects of the movement or it’s ramifications on recent history, Campbell chose instead to base his essay around a series of portraits of some of the individuals involved.

The portraits are a stunning collection of art. I have scanned a couple onto this blog, but my meagre attempts at reproduction do not do the artist justice.

It has been said that a picture speaks a thousand words, and Campbell’s photos are definitely proof of that. Even if you don’t read the accompanying text, by looking at the photos you begin to see the story of the subjects, and the passion with which they live their lives. These people have built a community, and it is a community that will stay strong and continue no matter how many times they are evicted and moved on.

When it comes to my personal opinion of things such as the Occupy Movement, some people would describe me as being ‘sat on the fence’, but I see it more as being open-minded. In any debate, I always try to see things from the viewpoint of every side and understand where they are coming from and why. With campaigns and demonstrations such as the Occupy Movement, regardless of what the outcome is and how much they achieve towards making the world a ‘better’ place, I think the important thing is that someone is doing something. It makes me question why more people don’t stand by what they believe in, and why they don’t share their views. When I first turned vegetarian, for me it was a private thing and I disliked other vegetarians who were trying to convert the world. My opinion was that it was everyone’s choice what they ate. Now that I eat a plant-based diet, and I understand the importance of everyone following a more planet friendly lifestyle to preserve our species, I shout about it much more, hence this blog. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not trying to convert the world, I just want everyone to be more educated about the issues that are important to us. We don’t all have to drastically change our lives, but if reading this blog helps one person to make one small step in the right direction then it is worth it.

What the Occupy Movement is showing us is that we don’t have to just sit back and accept the norm. Just because we live in a world that is controlled by big business and leaders, it does not mean that it always has to be like that. In the same way, just because we have been told in the West that eating meat is good for us, it doesn’t mean that we can’t change. After all, before Christopher Columbus came along, everyone knew that the Earth was flat. The greatest gift we have as humans is education. We all need to listen to each other, learn from each other and absorb as much as possible. As the Occupy Movement has shown, if we’re stronger together then we don’t need leaders. Maybe if we were all more open with our own beliefs, we would find it easier to be accepting of other people’s.

Israeli potatoes - really?

As you may have noticed, due to the change of season here in the UK I have been a bit (OK, a lot) obsessed with local, seasonal produce recently. One of the great things about following a plant-based diet and writing this blog is that it instigates discussions and ideas sharing with other people. Only the other day I was talking to one of my friends about buying British. Like me, my friend tries to buy local whenever possible, although she does admit that pineapple is a weakness for her. With all the will in the world, I don't think we'll ever be able to grow descent pineapples here. My friend had noticed, however, that our local Co-operative is selling potatoes from Israel. Really?????? Although we may not have the most exotic choice of fruit and vegetables in the UK, the one thing we can grow really well and in abundance is potatoes. So why do we need to import them from Israel?

Strawberries

Oh my gosh - I am soooo excited. There are loads of fruits and vegetables coming into season in the UK at the moment. I popped into the supermarket earlier to pick up some salad for my lunch tomorrow and also found British strawberries. And they taste delicious. For anyone outside the UK who is reading this, if you ever visit our beautiful shores then I recommend you try strawberries whilst you're here.
Although I love all fruit (apart from grapefruit, I could never get my head round that), strawberries hold a special place in my heart. When I was a kid growing up in Blackpool, my parents used to grow strawberries around an old corrugated iron swimming pool that stood in the middle of our garden. And boy did they grow. We used to have buckets and buckets of strawberries every week in the summer, they grow so well here. One of my fondest memories of my chilhood is standing on a stool in the kitchen, helping my mum to wash and hull them all.