A good life--Inside the cupboard

I have to admit that it's a struggle to think of things to recount about life inside my kitchen's store cupboards before the ethical auditors arrived. Suffice to say that the ordering and stacking within each cupboard tends to be a little slapdash. Logic determines that tins sit beside tins and spices next to, say, herbs, my preferred cupboard layout tending to be a reverse mirroring of the sequence of supermarket aisles we have just visited: basically, things are placed into cupboards in the opposite order into which they were placed into the trolley.

The auditors: Hannah Berry , writer and researcher at Ethical Consumer magazine; Mike Childs, campaign director of Friends of the Earth; Renee Elliot, council member of the Soil Association and founder of Planet Organic shops

Renee squeals with joy. "One thing I enjoy hugely is ferreting around in other people's food cupboards." Mike and Hannah seem less excitable as they watch Renee start to place items from my family's store cupboards on to the kitchen worktop.

After a few minutes, spread out before us is what looks to me like a harvest festival display of canned baked beans and chopped tomatoes, packets of pasta (seven varieties), pots of spices and cartons of juice. There is also bread, rice, wine, beer, condiments, packets of nuts and dried fruit, and an assortment of teas and coffee. Only by getting it all out do I realise how much of it goes untouched for months at a time, lost at the back of the cupboard.

"An ethical store cupboard should be a relatively empty cupboard," says Mike, "with just the essential ingredients to add to your diet of fresh, locally sourced organic food. Nuts, dried lentils, pasta, flour and rice all come in handy, as well as seasoning and spices. But given that it is often not practical to go and buy fresh ingredients every day, tins of tomatoes and ready-soaked beans, for example, have a role to play.

"You should be careful not to overstock your cupboard though. Dried goods like pulses do have a shelf-life, as do tins. There is no point in stocking up on useful ingredients that you are not going to eat." I think he's referring to the cannelloni beans we always say we're going to soak but never find the time to.

Renee thinks we are doing well to buy certain everyday items in bulk such as pasta and rice, thus reducing the need for excessive packaging. She is also pleased she hasn't found too much tinned produce: "I'm not crazy about tins. Not from an ethical standpoint, but because they have so little nutritional value. Frozen is better, in general."

Jane and I receive a hat-trick of back slaps when Hannah comments that she hasn't spotted much processed food either. However, she chides us for having lots of perishable items in small packets, such as dried apricots, mixed nuts, tomato puree, and jars of mustard.

But it's the sight of my homemade muesli that rather surprisingly raises Hannah's hackles. I thought this would have pleased the ethical auditors, given its reputation for being the lifeblood of eco-warriors (and, yes, Guardian readers), but when I announce that I make it by mixing Quaker oats with supermarket own-brand bran flakes and raisins, Hannah winces. "Quaker is owned - as is Tropicana, which makes your cartons of orange juice - by PepsiCo, which is a significant financial supporter of the Bush administration," she explains. "Along with General Mills, which also makes your tins of Green Giant sweetcorn, and Nestle USA, it is part of Grocery Manufacturers of America, a powerful food, beverage and consumer brand association which consistently opposes proposed restrictions on marketing in schools and is a fierce lobbyist for GM technology."

Hannah is now on a roll and starts holding up item after item, pointing out which multinational is behind each brand and why I should be concerned. "Your Twinings Earl Grey tea comes courtesy of Wittington Investments, owner of the UK's third largest animal feed manufacturer, ABN, which is one of the biggest users of GM crops in the country. Another of its subsidiaries conducted field trials of GM oilseed rape."

I explain to Hannah that I've never even heard of Wittington Investments. She says that, like me, most consumers have never heard of the largely faceless holding companies that now own many familiar names. More importantly, most consumers are blind to these companies' other activities and investments, many of which may not necessarily chime with their ethical standards. Hannah then somewhat deflates my pride at having some organic produce in our cupboards. "You should learn to recognise which brands are just the organic face of the same old multinationals. Seeds of Change, for example, is owned by Mars. Meridian, which makes your organic sesame oil, is owned by Hazelwood, one of Europe's leading manufacturers of convenience foods, which in turn is owned by Greencore, which, by its own admission, is Ireland's largest sugar manufacturer. It also claims to be at 'the forefront of developing the next generation of pizza, quiche, ready meals and novelty cakes'."

But Renee takes a very different view: "A question I get asked a lot is whether organic retailers, such as myself, should sell products from the so-called 'big bad' companies who now have a range of organic foods. I say a resounding 'yes'.

"Firstly, I think you're on dangerous ground when you start judging the 'ethics' of companies of which you do not have an intimate knowledge. Secondly, if you buy organic products from a company you have judgments about and sales of that product do well, the big boys will put more money into organic agriculture because they will follow the market and the profits. Surely it is good that companies you consider 'bad' are supporting sustainable agriculture?"

Mike, meanwhile, is rummaging through our tinned produce. He holds up a tin of kidney beans. "Some food cans are lined with a chemical called Bisphenol A, which is a suspected hormone disrupter," he says. "Some research has shown it to advance puberty in mice. Therefore, you might want to cut down on the amount of canned food you use.

"But you should think about where food comes from, too. A lot of typical store cupboard ingredients are grown or produced in the developing world and imported to the UK. When local alternatives are not available - tea, coffee and rice, for example - you may instead want to look for Fairtrade products to ensure that the growers are getting a fair price."

Hannah is now looking at the label of some cans of lager. I can sense more coming about the omnipresence of multinationals in my cupboards. "These Stella Artois are made by Interbrew, the world's second largest brewing conglomerate. Your cans of Guinness are made by Diageo, which also produces Smirnoff, Baileys and Johnnie Walker among its many brands."

Hannah moves to the bottles of wine: "Thankfully, your wine from Australia and Chile uses real corks. The proliferation of plastic corks is causing profound problems for Europe's cork dehesas, which are sustainably managed habitats rich in wildlife. Also, vineyards account for 10% of farmed land in parts of Europe, but are responsible for over 75% of the pesticides and herbicides used in those areas."

Mike returns to the origins of the wine. "Your wine supplies do seem to have clocked up a fair few 'alcohol miles' en route to your home. Wines from, in particular, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have grown in popularity in recent years, which is bad news for the climate as they will be contributing to climate change in transit. If English wine is not to your taste, stick to European wines, and support small vineyards where you can. And when it comes to drinking beer, support local brewers rather than buying imports. The Campaign for Real Ale has plenty of data on where to get quality beer from micro-breweries."

The point that Hannah and Renee debated about whether to buy brands owned by multinationals fascinated Jane and me. Each seemed to have valid points, but while we agreed that we would now try to boycott food firms that may be linked to activities such as, say, selling military hardware, workers' rights violations or animal testing, we did wonder how realistic it would be to be to avoid these. Did it mean we would have to take copies of all the multinational's annual reports as we traipsed round the supermarket? Or should we just suspect the worst and simply try to avoid all multinational-owned brands? And would that be harsh, as Renee argued, on the multinationals which are offering organic products?

The answer seemed to lie partly in the fact that we were soon to start receiving our weekly delivery of a box of fresh organic fruit and veg, which greatly reduced our desire for tins of things such as sweetcorn and baked beans. Changing the staples such as pasta, rice and tinned tomatoes to organic brands also proved to be fairly easy. We found it hard work worrying about every single item we bought. There have been times when Jane has been ready to throttle me when I say, "Hang on, before we buy that, perhaps we should wait till I've run the company name through Google to see if it throws up any nefarious links."

To counter this we started to add extra items to our box delivery schemes. Along with fruit and veg, the company also offers a wide range of basic pantry items, as well as bread, organic wines and beers, and even meat and dairy produce.

We have started to use more of the local shops, and have tried to reduce our contact with supermarkets - the temptation of buying needless "treats", or the allure of the "two-for-one" and "100 extra points" deals - by receiving our shopping via their home delivery service. But we have failed to strip them from our lives entirely, despite hearing at length about their pernicious influence on our lives.

· For more about Leo's experiment, and the chance to post your own views and tips, visit money.guardian.co.uk/ethicalliving.

Good grief! I wonder how much extra time and money these people are spending to soothe their consciences about the FOOD they eat?

This man has to apologize for everything he and his family does, from eating, to cleaning their house, to using medicine when they are sick. That in a nutshell is how sustainable development operates.

If you follow the link there is a series of articles.

Thanks, it should be worth a laugh!

Articles like this make me want to go oppress some third-world people or eat endangered species.

Thanks!

Always enjoy psycho-anylizing the ostensibly intelligent whack-jobbers.

My favorite food is cold, in-the-can Spaghettios...with the little weenie slices. That's total sanity.

My favorite food is cold, in-the-can Spaghettios...with the little weenie slices.

You can always eat endangered salmon and unsustaianable beef to round out your diet. The sustainable development crowd says cloven hoofed animals harm our environment. Their little hooves get mud in streams when they cross them.

This person has to be told, and willingly accepts, how to live down to the tiniest details of his life.

Don't keep enough food in the house? No problem. Stop purchasing a healthful and economical food product because you don't like president Bush? No problem.

The perfect socialist citizen.

I thought it was going to be an article where we were told not to each carbs, fat, etc. The Tweenkie and Spaghettios police :-) I like the Spag O's too (the regular kind).

13 posted on 08/14/2004 11:02:33 AM PDT by PersonalLiberties (An honest politician is one who, when he's bought, stays bought. -Simon Cameron, political boss)

There is a whole series of articles on this mans acceptance of socialist controls on his entire life, from his food, how he cleans his home, commuting, vacations, everything. He'd already married and had children, so the socialists missed out on that one.

I spoke with a gentleman from Ireland about two days ago-- he moved to the Monterey Bay area several years back. He said our society requires social engineering because we drive cars and want single family homes. If the socialist paradise he left was so wonderful, why did he come here?

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