Staff Shopping Month

Throughout January our Board Member, Catherine Ross, completed our Shopping challenge. Read how she got on....

"The three goals I set myself for the shopping challenge and how I got on is set out below:

1. For one month buy only local meat (either organic or high welfare) and buy only sustainable fish. Otherwise, eat vegetarian.

I've pretty much managed this. When I've bought meat and fish myself, I've tried to stick to the rules, but it's surprisingly hard. For example, my kids love filled pasta and the meat in them is not sustainable. Also, my daughter can be quite fussy and the first sustainable fish I bought (sprats and mackerel) she refused to eat because they "look like fish". But I found some dab fillets in breadcrumbs and those were a success! I couldn't find meat from Hertfordshire, but the local farm shop sells meat from surrounding counties and we've eaten a lot more vegetarian food. I'm not sure the kids have yet noticed that they haven't had their favourite heavily-processed sausage this month! The trickier thing is at other people's houses, where I've got no influence and don't want to cause waves. So we still ate quite a lot of non sustainable/high welfare meat and fish over the month, but less that we normally would.

2. Try and use my local Wholefoods store. Can I move away from individually wrapped little snacks for the kids to bigger jars?

I've been to the Wholefoods shop a couple of times now. Some successes (chopped apricots) and some disasters (bran sticks that taste like shredded cardboard). I'll keep going if for no other reason that the produce is less packaged.

3. Try Willows Farm Shop, Carpenters Nursery and the farmers market. What can I source locally?

I've been to the farm shop a couple of times but neither of the others. No good reasons except that daily life got in the way. The farm shop is good for (relatively) local meat but otherwise there isn't much local produce except the kinds of fancy preserves and biscuits that don't form part of a normal weekly shop. Local goats cheese was a treat for grown-ups but there was no 'normal' local cheddar which the kids would go for.

I didn't organise a 'swapping event' like the Big Swap, but I did take part in one organised by the school PTA: they held a sale of second hand uniform, books and DVDs donated by parents on behalf of the PTA.

From this I would score myself a 6 out of 10!"

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