The importance of conserving energy

I write a piece for a monthly magazine that is circulated around Glasgow's West End (it also has a website www.ctglasgowwestend.co.uk). Never one to waste material I thought I'd put it up on the blog as it applies to books as well as food.

Last month I was extolling the virtues of ‘slow life’. It turns out I come from a long line of slow-goers. My father spent his last 20 years teaching at the University of California and here is how a friend described him cycling through the campus.

‘Ninian would ride leisurely, just at a pace necessary to keep him upright and moving forward, and he would be passed by other bicyclists, skateboarders, roller-bladers, and those walking alongside of him. But it was his kilt that turned many a head.’

Like him, I’m all in favour of conserving energy, which is why I was so concerned at the recent statistics regarding the amount of food that gets thrown out each year in the UK. It includes 1.3 million unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 whole chickens and 440,000 ready meals (much of which is still within its sell-by date).

The monetary amount at £10 billion is staggering enough, but imagine the amount of energy going straight into the bin. The energy involved in growing the food. Then harvesting the food. Remember, much of the picking is done by a workforce that has to work long hours to earn a decent wage.

Then there is the packing of the produce and sending it off to the markets and supermarkets. If we’re talking yoghurts, then there’s making the plastic pots, designing the most appealing packaging, marketing and advertising. If it’s chickens, it is the feeding of them, the slaughtering, the plucking, and the shipping. If it’s ready meals, it’s the packaging, cooking, testing, nutritional labelling, marketing, advertising and shipping.

This is all assuming that the food is coming from the UK. What if we are talking about apples from New Zealand, grapes from South Africa and tomatoes from Holland? Then add in the effort of producing the oil to airfreight them or transport them by lorry. At each stage humans are involved doing their jobs to get all the stuff to market. And once it is in the shop, there are the shelf stackers, the check-out assistants.

Let us not forget ourselves, the consumers. We have to think about the shopping, do the shopping, take home the shopping, unpack the shopping. Then we have to pay for the electricity to store the shopping in our fridges and freezers. Let’s not even go into the energy needed to earn the money to pay for all this shopping.

And when it turns out that we have lobbed it in the bin, then the council has to organise the cleansing department to empty the rubbish and take it to landfill sites.

The reason for all this waste? From listening to comments on the radio and TV, it’s because people are rushed and harassed – either when they’re in the supermarket or when shopping online. They just grab, dash and part with cash. If they could just slow down and plan each meal, they could probably save a trolley-load. Easier said than done. But worth thinking about.

With around 200,000 books published each year in the UK alone, it is another mountain of energy used up. As many of the titles barely see a shop's bookshelf, it is quite probably another huge waste of energy. For the author who had thought he had scaled the mountain, no doubt it is very soul destroying. I think the answer is to be much more stringent about what gets published. There can be too much vanity tied up with publishing - both the author and editor's.