UKH

How much difference do people think it makes, environmentally, if you make the majority of your food at home from scratch rather than buying it premade from the supermarket? I'm not just including meals in this but also staples such as bread, and treats like cakes, biscuits, etc.

I have some time off work at the minute, and I've been baking quite a lot to try and fend off the boredom. I've just baked my first ever loaf of bread this morning, made pizza dough and sauce for homemade pizza the other night, crumpets from scratch (delicious!) and a banana loaf to make use of some otherwise inedible bananas. It struck me how quick and easy the majority of things actually are to make at home, especially with no-knead dough recipes and similar. Once I move back onto the canals I'd like to aim to not buy anything I could sensibly make at home, and reduce my grocery shopping as far as possible to basic ingredients and fresh produce.

I don't need any encouragement from an environmental perspective, as the fact that homemade food is much less bland and much more delicious is motivation enough for me. I am curious though: how much of a difference will it make to my own environmental impact, positive or negative. Anyone care to offer an opinion?

I guess, let's say supermarket bread, uses less energy per loaf simply because they're baked en masse. Big ovens mean economies of scale. 

Transport costs and the like apply equally to the flour you have to buy anyway. So locally grown and milled flour might reduce the environmental impact? One can never assume that local is greener though simply because there are so many factors to consider.

Answer : I don't know. 

We cook all our stuff from ingredients although that’s motivated more by convenience, quality and flavour preferences than by eco concerns.

I suspect the ruthless drive for profit with supermarkets makes them more efficient in their use of raw foodstuffs for some things.  Look at supermarket mince and derived products - that stuff must be made from offcuts a village butcher would feed to their dogs...

Much less wastage if you make the effort to cook it compared to the large percentage of bought food that is chucked away.

I have looked at it .  There's a massive range of quality and fat content and to dismiss it all with a throwaway comment makes about as much sense as dismissing sliced bread. 

Forgive my ignorance - I gave up on supermarket meat a decade ago.  Even “taste the finest difference” style stuff was crap.  Back then the fat content was still higher than the minced steak (largely offcuts) from our local butcher.  Water content too... 

Perhaps it’s improved in the last decade.  After all, horse meat is pretty lean...

There should be a rival top 40 posters chart which measures the number of times a poster uses morally charged language against businesses which are trying to outlive their competitors by daring to make a profit. For retailers it's a battle for survival today.

Nevertheless, I agree that they will be exceptionally efficient.

Pretty much as I suspected: mass-produced food is obviously more energy-efficient to produce, but at the expense of greater wastage and more packaging. Packaging in particular offends me - do we really need netted garlic bulbs? - and so making things from scratch cuts down on that element significantly (though sadly not on the netted garlic bulbs).

Cooking on a narrowboat in the colder months comes with the advantage that I can cook on top of the stove for very little additional energy. Need to heat the boat regardless, so may as well make ue of the heat for cooking too! Best work on some good casserole and stew recipes.

"Crap" is a relative word. If you live in a world where your butcher is as perfect as Delia and Jamie would like, you probably get decent quality mince. But to claim that it's automatically better than, say, Tesco or Lidl's 5% fat product is a shaky assumption.

Perhaps we should start a new thread about offensive packaging. Garlic bulbs would be well down my list.

Supermarkets haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory - all extending their supplier payment terms to sweat a profit out of smaller businesses too powerless to resist and just as desperate to survive.  Coincidentally (and not at all quasi-monopolistically) raising their supplier payment terms to 60 days then 90 days - absolutely no pity or empathy for the small businesses they’re sweating - exactly the sort of behaviour “ruthless” is appropriate for.

Quite.  People get ruthless when survival is at stake, why wouldn’t businesses?

I think chain restaurants, supermarkets, conglomerated farming and so on all drive efficiency incredibly and that it’s a net win for the environment - ruthlessly efficient land use to food output means more land free for biodiverse non-agricultural use.  Can’t say I look forwards to the day kitchens are banned and we’re all fed at the village refectory with the scraps going in to the bacterial digester but that day could be coming.

Jet washing the last gram off a bone and grinding it up with ligaments, tendon and other bits is something I can live without. Especially when they sell it at meat prices.

The stuff I shoot and then butcher myself I divide up into various quality. The lower quality stuff is for stewing, then I trim all the remaining meat off the off-cuts or bone and make sausage. I'd expect any decent independent butcher to be doing the same. 

I live in the land of Category-D villages - I left Delia and Jamie land almost 25 years ago.  The village down the road where most houses are sub £100k has better mince than I’ve ever had from a supermarket.  So does the up market village the other way.  So does the local town butcher.  In fact I’ve yet to have mince from a butcher as bad as that from a supermarket.

Well, this escalated fast.  It’s not just about the fat % mind you - even the low fat supermarket stuff I used to buy was crap in comparison and not notably cheaper.  Perhaps it’s improved in the last decade.

Low in fat... high in ground up cartlige, ligaments and tendons..  yum yum..

Although home made chicken stock does allegedly dissolve out much of the goodness from these that are good at helping our soft tissue repair. 

Regardless of the cooking efficiency if you buy your ingredients in bulk and cook in bulk, you'll be buying a lot less packaging that is binned immediately. 

Really? Individually-packaged garlic bulbs are right at the top of mine. They're the perfect example of redundant and pointless packaging. They're garlic bulbs - they're self-packaged!

France seems to get this right more often than we do. Most veg in most French supermarkets that I've shopped in is loose for you to bag yourself and weigh. Ok, it would be better without the plastic bagging (and if you're only buying a few of something you can always stick the label to the produce itself), but it's still an improvement on a small wrapped carton of, for example, mushrooms. And usually fresher.

 What  do you do with it after you've cooked "in bulk".?

You would need to qualify "as bad as" and tell me what it is about the taste and texture of supermarket mince that falls short  before you start to convince me. I could just as easily say that M&S mince is better than any farm shop mince I've ever had and it would be completely invalid as far as you're concerned, wouldn't it?

Is t'Hovis lad still riding 'is bike t'top of t'hill to get to you...?

I'm sure I can hear the New World Symphony leaking from your post...

Eat or Freeze 

Do you believe M and S mince to be superior? What about Waitrose? 

No, that was an example of what I could say being valueless.I've never set foot in a Waitrose in my life and couldn't tell you where the nearest one is.

In reality I've had both  good and bad meat from every type of outlet you can name: local farm shops, High Street butchers while on holiday and supermarkets  ranging from Aldi to M&S. It's a complete fallacy to claim that with a product like meat ,  one source is automatically better than another - a bit like those misguided folk  who insist on telling you that Guinness brewed in Ireland is always superior to that which you buy in England, It just isn't.

No, it’s not like that at all.  Really quite far from it...  Unless the Hovis lad was in the million candlepower spotlight of the police helicopter whilst his neighbour was going on a stabbing spree...

“Needs boiling in red wine for 10 minutes to not taste like school dinners”, “bone surprise” and “only spinal matter can be that slimy”?  

No because you’re talking about subjective personal opinion.  I never tried to dress my first post up as anything other than my opinion although - like almost all posters in almost all posts - I don’t go round prefacing each post with a disclaimer that it’s personal opinion...

To rephrase my first post “Disclaimer - in my personal opinion I have always found mince from every supermarket I have tried to be crap.  I have never enjoyed eating it due to my personal perception of flavour and texture.  I have always been happy with the minced steak offcuts from various local butchers and the minced mutton from a local farm shop.  Other posters tasted and experiences may vary.  I note that supermarkets have more drive and ability to exploit sub grade meat in the production of their mince.” 

Well, to use your words, perhaps it's improved in the last decade.

Quite possibly; that was my immediate response after all.

I can’t see me going back to trying it.  I like seeing a recognisable chunk of steak go in to a grinder and my mince come out.  Where as what goes in to that supermarket pack is a total mystery give or take concerns over the use of food dye to make it look fresh and the odd horsemeat scandal...  

Greater packaging waste is an interesting topic, I wouldn't say mass produced food is certain to have more packaging take a loaf of bread from hovis or similar:

Most of the ingredients won't see any packaging, flour and anything grain based will be tankered into silos. Smaller volume stuff is probably in tonne bags or ibcs which aren't perfect but can be re-used or recycled. The first time packaging gets involved is the finished product (in all fairness getting 20+ slices of bread down a conveyor in close formation without a bag is harder than a difficult thing.

Your home baked loaf will have had all of the ingredients packed into bags, in boxes which were over wrapped for shipment...

Life cycle waste and energy costs are often more complex than people appreciate but I would agree you can't beat a home made loaf.

As you well know Wintertree, unless you will partake in a double blind taste test you can't even trust your own opinion yourself. Confirmation bias and all that  

The local butcher I previously used would buy local animals at the local auction market. He would then have them processed at a local abattoir and bring the whole carcass back.

I think folk might notice if he starts shopping at a horse market. The same can't be said for supermarkets.

That said, nothing wrong with horse meat provided it's not from animals pumped full of drugs not normally used in the food chain. You should get what you pay for. 

The problem with that is trying to find a chef who can’t immediately tell freshly minced steak from the stuff that comes out of a supermarket - unless you cook robotically you can’t truly double blind it...

Been thinking about your " all supermarket mince is crap" comment so while out on my Sunday morning walk I put together a further list of Ratnerisms.

Over the past twelve months I have heard people tell me:

all sliced bread is crap (already mentioned);

all blended whisky is crap;

all New World wine is crap;

all lager is crap; (usually followed by a claim that it's "full of chemicals")

all foreign food is crap - 

and moving away from food and drink-

all modern music is crap;

all Italian cars are crap: (yes, really !!!)

all American tv shows are crap.

I'm sure you could provide your own list, not necessarily things you agree with though. 

Yesterday was my first ever attempt at baking a loaf of bread, and it surpassed any loaf that I can remember buying from a British supermarket - from cheap sandwich bread to fancy loaves. Better texture, better taste, and fresh. There's simply no comparison.

All lager is crap because it tastes like malted wee

Can’t say there’s much in life I’m prepared to write off entirely as “all crap” but supermarket mince is up there.  Unless there’s a supermarket that takes fresh steak and freshly minces it rather than having it sat on a shelf and in warehouses for several days.

Its like lemons - until I had a freshly picked lemon off the tree in Sardinia I didn’t realise quite how crap all lemons imported into and sold in the UK are.  

Except supermarkets aren’t recovering bits of lemon off bones and ligaments and reconstituting it into a semblance of a lemon, they’re not pumping lemons full of bulking water and yellow food dye, and they’re not occasionally passing horse (grown outside of the food safety paperwork trail) as lemon.

I take it you're not fond of haggis, then, supermarket or otherwise.

Strangely enough I find that some supermarkets like Morrisons  and M&S are now offering cuts/types of meat that even the most accommodating and genuine butcher can't or won't match: things like rose veal or calves' liver are impossible to buy in local butchers and farm shops (of which I am blessed with a wonderful choice).

Thanks for adding imported lemons to the list, by the way.

I must add malted wee to my bucket list so I can make a valid comparison.

I wouldn’t use haggis to cook burgers with, for sure...   

I don’t think it’s at all controversial to say that fruit ripened on the tree is superior to stuff picked early and left to ripen in shipment to somewhere hundreds or thousands of miles away.  I just didn’t know how much difference it could make to a lemon until I had one off the tree.

That's what we do with it.

That Hovis lad is selling drugs door to door and tipping off local burglars as to who's away on holiday.

I

Well now that you've mentioned it that gives me an idea : might be better with minced lamb, ratio of 3:1 meat to haggis, the more I think about it the more I like it. Only from sheep whose name is on the butcher's shop blackboard, naturally.

Is Guinness still brewed in the UK? I thought the Park Royal site was sold off for housing years ago

No wonder it tastes the same, then,

Guinness does not 'keep' well if left to sit in a barrel for any length if time which is often the case in UK pubs. In Ireland the beverage is still drunk in vast quantities and it is not uncommon for the barrel to be changed several times in one day. I have no doubt that a barrel delivered from St James Gate to a pub in Kerry tastes the same as a barrel delivered to a pub in London. The chances are though that for the latter that barrel will still be half full two weeks later where the former would have been emptied within 24 hours of delivery. That does make a difference to the taste.

I find this incredibly hard to believe. There has been a revolution in supermarket bread in the last couple of years with all the major ones now offering an excellent range of artisan breads baked fresh in store.

I agree that sliced bread is basically a different food, but I doubt many casual home bakers are turning out malted sourdough, or cornbread, or even baguettes at the quality that can be achieved in supermarkets. I'd say I can match their standard in-store white loaf on a good day, slightly cheaper if you discount my time (though I have no idea how much running my oven costs).

Shop.

Shop bought.

Thanks

If you've ever tasted the same beer from the end of a 2 day old barrel and then the start of a fresh barrel you will understand this point. Once oxygen enters the top of the barrel, oxidation begins to happen very fast. It's the reason why retailers prefer keg where the beer is pasteurised to death and blanketed in CO2.

You can buy bread makers and ready made mixes of all varieties. I appreciate this isn't quite the same level of home bread making. 

The same with pasta. There is point where home made is perhaps only possible if you have the time and some reasonable skills. 

But there are many things that can be made quickly and at least equal to in terms of quality; soup for example. Many so called gourmet soups aren't that good and it's often just the additives like salt that are secretly tickling the taste buds. 

My brother in law has recently started selling his beef cattle directly to Morrisons, rather reluctantly as the farm  had always supported the local market but he gets a far better price from Morrisons.

I was a bit surprised when he told me how stringent the Morrisons buyers are and how they visit the farm and select each animal they buy.

I always thought Guinness was completeley pasteurised and that the top prt of the keg would be filled with gas (nitrogen?) to keep it stable. Or maybe your explanation fits in with the rise of Guinness vibrators on UK  bar tops. (Which none of my Irish friends have heard of)

That'll be ungassed cask ales, a touchy point with diehard CAMRA dudes! ie a cask should be ungassed to be real. I prefer non oxidised ale, either way.

Full marks to Morrisons. Would be great if more did that and labelled it etc. 

Hmm, I've got a mate who manages a slaughter house, he recommends that everyone buys their butcher meat from a particular village butcher, if not then Aldi, after that he says its fair game - other butchers and other supermarkets tend to get lesser quality meats according to him - and he has no connection with the particular village butcher he recommends.

Home made bread is better than store bought, just more a faff so only do it at weekends.

Home made sloe gin/vodka is great, far better than shop bought stuff - as is the rhubarb gin etc

Home made wine though, as much as I enjoy the process, and the drinking of it, is not as good as wines you can buy (at a reasonable price, not the cheap rot gut stuff which is worse than my home made stuff)

Home grown veg is also great, although you I always end up with feast or famine with my veg.

Home grown garlic is easy to grow, and satisfying - but no point in home grown onions, better to buy these.

You are, of course, correct. I bought it at the shop and stored it in my stores. I blame a long relationship with a Canadian for these language problems of mine.

Ok - better than any loaf not baked in-sto....shop that I've ever bought, because I can't remember ever buying a loaf from a supermarket bakery. A lot of that has to do with it having come out of the oven a few hours earlier, I suspect.

Baguettes in this country are very often a foul and poor imitation of the real thing.

Going back to the original question about the environmental impact, it seems like a very complex and interesting question. Is anyone aware of any research into this? I suspect the answer is complex, depending on the type of product and supply chain involved and will always rely on a number of assumptions.

Personally, I try and shop in a way that produces minimal packaging (so local produce from green grocers and 'scoop and weigh' style for dry goods). I also avoid meat (especially red meat) to minimise carbon footprint. It would be nice to know if this is the right approach!

This is only a net win for the environment if we can change the way produce food so that we are not causing soil erosion/degradation as a result of chemical use and mono cultures. Healthy soil is good for biodiversity, carbon sequestration and water management too!

I haven't read the whole thread to see if its been mentioned, but Ethical Consumer do a supermarket report and score each supermarket out of 20 based on a range of indicators. Asda scores 0 out of 20. Morrisons and Sainsburys about 2.5 out of twenty. So in theory, it would be easy to beat them environmentally and on many other factors. They seem like nice go ahead places, but if you look into it they source the cheapest food produced in the most damaging ways (or at least Asda does). To get access to the report I think you need to sign up to the Ethical consumer.