Looking for a more ethical wipe?

Hands up who has ever sat down and given some serious thought to wiping their bum?

Do you like a plush ply when you’re on the throne? Something scented? A touch of aloe vera? Or are you of the opinion that you only need budget bog roll to attend to your botty?

It might be a less-than savoury subject but every year companies like Andrex and Charmin spend thousands (and rope in cuddly puppies and cartoon koalas) to persuade us to purchase their paper.

And when you walk around the average supermarket loo roll always seems to be on offer.
But despite the special offers toilet tissue isn’t cheap - with 16 rolls of Andrex coming in at around £6 depending on where you shop.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the hardware heaven that is Wilkinsons and bought some seriously cheap bog roll.

But are there other things we should be considering besides the price? Have you ever paused in your potty habits to consider where your toilet paper has come from our how it will be broken down once you’ve hit the flush?

Did you know, for example, that recycled toilet tissue takes 50% less energy to produce than virgin paper?

Or that when you use a loo roll with a scent or special “feature” (I have no idea how best to put that!) it includes extra chemicals that enter the sewers and water system when you flush it away?

I found an article on the Ethical Consumer website which rates well-known brands out of 20, taking into account impact on the environment, animals, people, politics and sustainability.

Top of the pile is Ecoleaf toilet tissue, with a rating of 16, followed by Essential recycled toilet tissue at 14, Traidcraft at 13.5, and then Andrex at 10 and Charmin at 9.

Interestingly the supermarkets’ own brands come out right at the bottom (no pun intended), with Asda Shades scoring 0, Sainsbury’s Revive recycled loo roll at 1.5, Morrisons recycled toilet tissue scoring 2 and Tesco Value scoring 2.5.

Unfortunately you have to subscribe to see the full report and its not clear when it was produced, but it appears the supermarkets are lagging behind (again no pun intended).

Neil and I are coming to the end (AGAIN, no pun intended!) of our Wilkos loo roll so I set out yesterday lunchtime to see if I could find an ethical alternative.

The World Wildlife Fund offers some easy advice for shoppers trying to make more ethical toilet roll purchases on its website. It suggests looking for a high recycled content, the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) logo that indicates the paper has been produced from sustainable wood sources, and avoiding the whitest products which tend to be more heavily bleached.

And I have to say the bog roll hunt turned out to be much easier than I thought - I scored a jackpot in the first shop I went into, although admittedly I did choose carefully. I found Ecoleaf Toilet Tissue (the one rated most ethical) at SoundBites - the wholefoods shop in Derby.

And at £1.99 for four rolls it wasn't bad on the back pocket either. A quick look on the Tesco website tells me that the supermarket sells four rolls of Andrex for £1.99 and its own brand Luxury Soft toilet tissue retails at £1.89.

This a great news as I was thinking that if it had turned out to be more expensive I may have had to introduce a three-sheet per sitting rule, which might not have been well received at home!

The Ecoleaf packaging (which, incidentally, is fully compostable) tells me that the toilet tissue is made from 100% recycled fibres sourced within the UK, including from kerbside council recycling collections and greetings card manufacturers' waste. Suma, the firm that makes Ecoleaf, also works with a community group called Treesponsibility to plant trees.

Looks like we'll be enjoying a guilt-free wipe from now on....

Am I ever tempted to just nip in?

Yes. Of course. I'm only human!

I was chatting to a friend yesterday about the blog and she was full of praise, but then she leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered: "But aren't you ever tempted to, you know.... just nip in....?"

She was of course referring to an illicit trip to the supermarket. And yes, I must admit that although I've been enjoying my challenge so far, there have been moments when I've been tempted to execute a supermarket raid, perhaps in disguise with one of those long brown macs usually favoured by flashers. And dark glasses. Like a D-list celebrity at an airport.

I haven't, obviously. That would be letting the side down. But I don't mind admitting that old habits die hard.

I fell to pondering about what exactly I've been missing about Tesco and chums, and came up with the following list of moments when I have, for just a couple of milliseconds, hankered after those brightly lit aisles and blipping tills.

• On my way home from work I pass not one, but THREE huge Tesco Extras. It's like running a daily commuting gauntlet. A bit like that programme Total Wipeout with Richard Hammond where the contestants have to boing over three huge balls - but with the supermarkets as the balls. It's especially hard when we've run out of something and I know that a five minute detour into the supermarket could save me a 30 minute walk into town on my lunch break. Currently, for example, we've run out of washing powder. On the bright side this means I've not had to do any washing (or ironing) for the last few days but on the not-so-bright side I'm now running out of pants.
• Sometimes I've found myself really craving a Morrisons salad bar lunch. I know I could probably knock up the elements myself at home (pasta salad, coleslaw, sweetcorn and those little crispy croutons) but it just wouldn't taste the same. And the bollocking I occasionally got at the checkout for trying to cram too many little potatoes in mayo into a regular plastic tub thingys used to brighten my lunchbreaks no-end.
• When it's raining pulling into a supermarket car park and making a mad dash for the door (I do that stupid 'lady run' that as a child I used to mock my mum over - sort of a straight-legged trot with arms clamped to sides) is so much better than having to face a walk into town or dashing (lady-running) from shop to shop.
• I used to have a naughty little habit where sometimes (okay, okay, at least once a week) I'd grab a supermarket cheese and onion sandwich and a bag of Cool Original Dorritos on my way to or from work, just as a snack. And I don't know whether it was the cheap bread, the fact that they were cut into triangles, or the specific ratio of cheese to onion and mayo, but those sarnies are impossible to reproduce at home. And I miss them.

But the good news is that most of those reasons are stupid, glutinous or lazy, and there are only four of them, so generally things are going well. And I do have quite a lot of pants so I reckon I can last a few more days before hitting crisis point.

Finally I'd like to apologise to the lady who prompted this post - I had promised her today's blog would be about making more ethical toilet tissue choices but I've become side-tracked by her question. Don't worry Georgina - the bog roll is still on it's way and will be on here tomorrow!

Some more totting up

"The crazy thing is, I bet if they put those burgers back on the shelves and priced them at 10p there would be some people who would buy them."

David and Sylvia know what's in their meat

That's David Prince's take on the horse meat scandal and the sad thing is, I suspect he's right. Some people have such a poor attitude towards food that they really wouldn't care where their meat came from as long as it was cheap.

Neil and I have just returned from a trip to Highfield House Farm Shop near Chesterfield, and we got onto the subject  after having a laugh at the new sign farmers Sylvia and David have erected on their counter, which says "No horse meat here! Just 100% pure beef from your trusted local butcher."

It pretty much echos what I said on this blog when the scandal first broke about finding a good butcher if you really want to know what animals you are eating and in what conditions they were raised.

But shoppers have short memories and I reckon 'horse meat-gate' will blow over pretty quickly. Indeed, I've just driven past the huge Tesco Extra in Chesterfield and the vehicles were queuing to get into the car park. I visited the supermarket's website two days ago to compare the prices with those of our veggie box and a notice flashed up explaining what the firm is doing in response to the horse meat findings. But I've just logged on again to take a closer look and I can't find it, so it appears it's already been taken down.

Before starting the challenge to avoid the supermarkets just over a month ago, Neil and I would have been in that traffic queue heading for Tesco. But this morning we went up to Highfield House Farm Shop instead. 

Today's purchases from Highfield House Farm Shop

I know I've been waxing lyrical about how liberating it is NOT to shop on a Sunday, but we've had a really busy week, we've been out of butter and bread for four days now, so it was a case of needs-must this morning, and luckily the farm shop is one of the few places we've found addressing the convenience issue by opening seven days a week.

Unfortunately David and Sylvia's shop IS more expensive than the supermarkets. We're content to be getting great quality food from local producers and supporting local businesses, but we also realise that in order to do this we need to shop with a bit more care, so we wrote out this week's meal plan before heading to Highfield House. Our shop came to £30.50, but we're happy that alongside our £12 veg box delivered on Wednesday's that should feed us for the week.

I've listed our complete shop below, and how a comparable shop if we'd been to Tesco would have measured up. The Tesco shop came to £22.77 - with the biggest differences in price being in sausages and bread. This was £7.73 cheaper than Highfield House, but if you see yesterday's blog we saved around that total with our vegetable box delivery - so this week we've about broken even with our local shopping compared to if we'd been shopping at Tesco.


FROM HIGHFIELD HOUSE:

• 258g rib-eye steak from a Derbyshire farm - £7.89
• Six Old English sausages from free-range pigs 585g - £5.10 (note - Neil says these are so large and meaty he will probably eat two at a time, rather than his usual three so they should go further)
• Six white bread rolls - £1.69 (I'm afraid Tesco does pee all over these - we're used to buying a dozen for £1 at the supermarket)
• Six free range eggs - £2 (Not-Roger is cheaper at £1.25 but we missed him this week)
• 255g mature white cheddar - £2.01
• 165g lemon crumble Wensleydale cheese - £1.93
• 230g honey roast ham - £4.66
• 250ml Longley Farm Jersey double cream - £1.35
• 1 litre Woodthorpe Grange (Derbyshire) whole milk - £1
• 250g Carron Lodge unsalted butter - £1.49
• one white cabbage - 89p
• one garlic bulb - 49p

SIMILAR SHOP AT TESCO:

• 390g Tesco Finest rib-eye steak - £7.80 
• Six Tesco free range sausages 350g - £1.39
• Kingsmill six soft white rolls - £1 (or two packs for £1.50)
• Tesco free range eggs - £1.49
• 250g Tesco British mature cheddar -£1.88
• 175g Tesco Finest Wensleydale with cranberry and blueberry cheese - £2
• 125g Tesco honey roast ham - £2
• 300ml Tesco fresh double cream - £1.10
• 1 litre Tesco whole milk - £1
• 250g Tesco unsalted English butter - £1.49
• Tesco white cabbage - £1.12
• one garlic bulb - 50p

Our veg has the edge....

I’ve vowed this month to keep a more careful tab on how our non-supermarket shopping is totting up.

I’m starting with our veg box. As regular readers will recall, we have a weekly organic fruit and veg box delivered from our local superhero greengrocer Banana Bob (who sadly doesn’t operate in yellow and blue Lycra).

This costs us exactly £12 each week and we get a seasonal variety of potatoes, fruit, vegetables and salad stuff.

I’ve taken the contents of this week’s box and priced up a similar shop at Tesco using the supermarket's website, which came to £17.49. So that's a £5.49 difference.

However, it’s not an exact science because the weights differ slightly. I’ve gone for the closest measures possible but I could only find some of Tesco's organic produce in bags, so for example I've had to choose a 700g bag of organic Tesco carrots as the nearest comparison to the 400g we got in our veg box. Also I couldn't find organic options on the Tesco website for all the items we got in our veg box, so I’ve had to price them up with the regular non-organic varieties offered instead. So, for example, I've had to use the price for a non-organic Tesco aubergine in comparison to the organic one in our veg box. 

Our organic box contained:

This week's veg box - nosy rabbit not included!

400g carrots
350g parsnips
450g leeks
1.5kg potatoes
300g broccoli
One red pepper
One aubergine
Half a cucumber
One punnet cherry tomatoes
Two white onions
One red onion
One bunch of bananas
Four oranges
Four apples

The Tesco shop I priced up on their website was:

Carrots: organic 700g bag - £1
Parsnips: organic 500g bag -£1.50
Potatoes: organic 1.3kg bag - £2
Leeks: organic 400g pack - £2
Broccoli: organic 300g bunch -£1.20
Red pepper: no single organic peppers available so priced up one normal one - 80p
Aubergine: no organic available so priced up a normal one - £1
Cucumber: organic cucumbers were £1.25 for a whole one but no halves, so I’ve halved the cost instead - 62p
White onion: no single organic onions, only bagged ones, so I’ve priced up two normal ones - 19p each
Red onion: again organic only available in bags, so priced up a single normal one - 19p
Cherry tomatoes: one packet - £1
Bananas: fair trade organic bunch - £1.40
Oranges: organic four-pack - £1.90
Apples: Gala pack of five - £2.50

Clearly this working out of mine is rather rough but I think we can conclude that our vegetable box appears to be better value than the supermarket alternative. Although the Tesco shop included a greater quantity of carrots and parsnips, several of the items I priced up were not organic.

Food for thought for those who think supermarkets offer the best value for money on fresh produce....



First month completed!

As any addict who goes cold turkey knows, it’s important to mark milestones and give yourself credit for small achievements. So I’m proud to say that today marks my first full month without supermarkets.

It may not have been heroin or crack cocaine, but my habit was pretty serious. I estimate that I’d have shopped in the supermarkets a whopping 20 times last month - including visits to my local Co-op and Tesco petrol stations as well as the big superstores.

Instead I spent January walking into town on my lunchbreak to visit delis and market stalls, popping to the row of independent stores round the corner from my house and frequenting a number of local farm shops.

So far I have learned:

• My balance is really poor.
• Follow the old folks - they know where it's at.
• That smell in butchers' shops lingers in your nose for hours afterwards.
• Wilkos is the best place on earth (yes, even better than Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China).
• Love can be found at farmers' markets.
• Savvy shoppers use tartan trollies.

And on a more serious note, here are some of my highs and lows so far:

HIGHS

• People really can be wonderful and when you avoid the supermarkets you get to meet so many more of them - from market stall holders and farmers to greengrocers and other fellow shoppers. Away from the stress and bustle of the megastores people are much more inclined to stop to chat and shopping trips are more pleasurable. It has also made me feel more connected to my local community.
• Local shopping certainly turns up some food gems - we’ve enjoyed locally-produced cheeses, artisan bread, organic fruit and veg, and Neil has been thrilled with the farm shop meat I’ve been buying. When it comes to quality and taste we’ve been reaping the benefits of avoiding the supermarkets.
• It’s much MUCH easier to find out where your food comes from when you’re shopping local - you can even find out which farms have produced your food and what kind of conditions livestock have been kept in. Remember the scandal when horse meat was found in supermarket burgers a couple of weeks ago? You certainly don’t get that if you get to know your local butcher.
• Going supermarket-free has helped me reclaim my lunchbreaks. Instead of eating at my desk I’ve had a reason to step away for half an hour and do a bit of shopping at lunchtime. Ditto my Sundays - when the local shops are closed your time is free to do other things and you still find you have plenty of food in your cupboards to tide you over to Monday.

LOWS

• Shopping does take a bit more forethought and planning. I’ve been jotting a shopping list into my diary so I can pick things up when I’m out and about. I did initially try doing it all in one go on a Saturday morning, but without having everything under one roof and a supermarket trolly to carry it all, it proved to be a bit much. Now I’m finding the continental way of shopping almost daily for what you need a little easier.
• Sometimes it’s just a bit tiring in terms of effort. I must admit that my heart has sunk once or twice at the idea of dashing into town on my lunch break, especially when the weather has been bad. We’ve currently run out of washing powder and I’ve got a busy couple of days ahead so I’m trying to think of a way to fit in a trip to a hardware store - dashing into Tesco on my way home from work would admittedly be much easier.
• Because of the bitty, bobby nature of my new shopping routine it’s been tougher to keep on top of our budget and I’m not entirely sure where we’ve been saving and where we’ve been spending more. I’m going to try to keep a tighter rein on this in February by jotting down the cost of things as I’m shopping, and then comparing this to supermarket prices online, so hopefully I’ll then have a clearer idea.

To conclude, so far so good and I’m definitely enjoying it enough and reaping enough benefits to want to keep going. But I do concede that the issue of convenience needs to be addressed to make shopping local more popular. The current 9am-5pm Monday-Saturday opening hours operated by most shops do clash with work, and I think a lot of people would find it easier to visit their local butcher or greengrocer if they opened at 8am or shut at 6pm instead.