How Bad are Bananas

Buying the trout pate earlier in the afternoon at Kilnsey Trout Farm a

On Thursday 23rd Sept  Bentham Local Food Week had organised a talk by Mike Berners-Lee based on his book "How bad are bananas? - the carbon footprint of everything". I think this is a great book and had bought it when it first came out in May.
It has lots of useful facts to quote (if only one can remember them).

Here I am holding the book and next to it the trout pate  I bought at Kilnsey Trout Farm in the afternoon.



 The Bentham Environmentally Sustainable Town group had a competition in our Jacob's Join Meal to see who could produce food with the lowest footprint. I contributed the trout pate.

Mike was asked to be the judge. He wanted to give the first prize to the delicious apple - danish pastry that someone had made but she had gone home. So then he gave joint first prize to the two breads, one made from a mill at Grewelthorpe near Ripon.. Wheat has a low carbon footprint - only 1 kg CO2 produced per Kg of wheat. (I need to check that)




I won't give his talk - you can read the book.


But he did emphasise that we should work out which things had a big effect on carbon footprints (e.g. flying, or buying a new car, buying tomatoes gown in this country in heated green houses in January) and which things had only a tiny or lesser effect - e.g. plastic bags, buying food that has been shipped to this country..


He also told us how important it is to make our views know to supermarkets. They are more likely to do "Green things" if they think we care. He does research for Booths.

I asked "If Booths do this "green" research, why don't we know about it?" His reply - "The press release only came out two days ago.." I have searched and found a press report on 21st Sept  - Well that is NEWS.-- Ah I've now found the page on BoothsWebsite - here's the link to the short report- http://bit.ly/93zAys

We had some discussion on meat sheep and cattle.- Mike was very diplomatic. Meat has a huuuge carbon footprint . But Bentham is a livestock area. The chairperson had a copy of Carbon Fields by Graham Harvey which praises the carbon storing capacity of unploughed fields.

I said how I had appreciated the fact that he says that if one wants to invest money to save carbon then investing it in "Save the Rainforest" schemes is one of the best ways- that for £3-00 one can save a ton of CO2.

.... and that would anyone like to buy some of our "Rainforest-save" greeting cards?. One friend kindly bought two.. Well that  is £3-00.  !!!!!  (I'm not sure if the charities we give our money to have quite that rate of saving carbon..)

I also raised the topic of COP10 Nagoya Japan- The Biodiversity Conference that is taking place 18-29 October, and tell people how important it is..