Feed Yourself For Less

Many people are bemoaning the prices of food and everything else which is going up and one of the issues are food manufacturers and retailers having to hike their prices during covid and they never come back down to pre covid prices as manufacturers and retailers exploit this situation solely for profits, so let’s look at example. Lurpak was £2.75 prior to covid and went up to £6 and has slowly come down in price, but not to £2.75 but £3.50 and that is in Tesco and Morrison’s so this would be the retail prices currently being charged; and covid is still being used to hike prices.

Food markets are not confined to one single country as your bag of potatoes comes from multiple countries as they work on the rotation system and they use the economies of scale to achieve low prices with reasonable profits for themselves and retailers, so again how does this work. This works on a system of production rotation and this provides the potatoes and the seed potatoes for their next crop, these seed potatoes go to the next producer in another country who produces potatoes and a single years potatoes in the UK come from over 6 countries as they have to be planted, grown and harvested and the growing takes time. Any problem with the production means not only do you lose potatoes for a few months, but you also lose your seed potatoes and your ability to grow your next crop; and yes it is that fine and tight.
As an aside many of the UK’s potatoes come from Egypt, but isn’t that a desert, yes but we export lots of peat for them to grow our potatoes for us and while Governments have tried to stop peat in compost they haven’t tried to stop commercial harvesting and exporting of peat as this makes profits and profits make coffers filling taxes. Only Scotland don’t play within this system as they grow their own potatoes and keep their own seed potatoes plus a contingency and only then do they sell any seed potatoes if, and only if they have a surplus.

Many remoaners blame Brexit and once again they are ignorant idiots who don’t understand food production and the plain fact that Brexit was not, and is not responsible for food and food prices as we source many foods from other countries as EU sourced food was generally expensive and we could source it cheaper. In simple terms many countries produce food and still have starvation problems among their own population and this is despite having enough food their Governments and large corporations would sooner sell it to other countries.
Food is a commodity and like any commodity it sells for the highest price and the world’s richest countries can afford to buy their food at higher prices than inhabitants of the country can afford to pay for it and it gets sold to the highest bidder. Quality is a major issue and again the EU dictated our, and the rest of the EU’s standards for food quality which were set remarkably high to prevent EU members buying from other countries around the world and their ideology of being independent and self sufficient was merely a pipe dream as they were caught out several times importing low quality foods from non EU member states, so another deliberate attempt to deceive and control EU members.

Quality is a major issue as countries like China have tried taking over the world by commerce and by ripping off other companies products and making them cheaper and to an inferior quality and selling them around the world and this strategy also applies to food. China has a poor environmental record and they were building lithium batteries in the open and dumping the highly toxic waste in rivers and other water courses and this highly toxic waste water was used to irrigate crops and other industrial pollutants were abound and the massive cancer rates around these major industrial production sites confirmed this. China has another well documented trick of producing something solely for testing and certification and steel was one such thing and they were selling steel to the UK with full certification and when things began collapsing these standards were examined and none of the production steel complied to these standards and major structures such as portal framed building rely upon these certified standards to design these structures to be safe. They produced batches of steel over the minimum standards just to get the certification and what they sold after was of poor quality and not to standard and this applies to many items.

In another vein, those openly producing these lithium batteries had a limited lifespan of around 10 years and China was openly killing its population for profits and much of it was attributed to dumping toxic production waste on the land and into water courses and of course the toxins leach into the ground through dumping and into the food by using contaminated water courses for irrigation.
Other countries food standards are not generally of concern and countries such as Canada or Australia operate to different standards to the EU and this was used by the EU to prevent them importing foods to EU members. Does this mean they are to lower standards? Actually no not lower, just different and we don’t hear of people dying from poor quality foods in these countries, just over consumption of it and getting heart attacks, strokes, and long term illnesses such as diabetes and many countries process their foods differently to prolong their life. Many of heard of the way America treats its salad crops, similarly a lot of what America do overlaps with Canada who operate similar systems and many of these systems may be used in different guises around the world.
Many poorer countries have food safety concerns and the fact they sell their food to richer countries while their populations are starving really says it all, money is more important them starving people to their Governments and this further heightens safety concerns as they will be less likely to enforce their own standards if they lose money and these concerns are very real and the agricultural community are voicing some serious concerns. Meanwhile the UK farming communities are also being hit hard, partially because of Brexit and this is mainly because the subsidies they claimed they would pay farmers simply haven’t been paid and this is putting many farmers under and we lose the food they produce and the farming land as it is mainly sold for building homes on so the double whammy. Recently UK farmers have been protesting and with good reason as most UK milk is sourced from France who have dairy farmers getting huge subsidies and other areas are also being hugely impacted due the EU policies of pay EU members huge subsidies so other countries cannot compete.

Production quotas and capacities are very concerning as even first world countries are under more and more stress to produce more crops from the same quantity of land and since WW II the UK has embarked on chemicals to increase production and some of these chemical growing systems have been found NOT to be safe, yet politicians never stop them being used. Originally the traditional fertiliser was muck and this was generally derived from beasts such as oxen and latterly cattle and a system of crop rotation where you grew a crop in one field, the next year you grew a different crop in that field and the third year saw the field left fallow with no crops to allow it to recover. Now they have replaced muck with chemicals and they grow in all fields all year round and never leave them fallow and this has moved further to something called cradle to grave systems in which you apply chemicals just before you plant or just after you plant and apply chemicals regularly until a couple of weeks before harvesting.
Many crops are in demand all year round and this means a lot of produce has to be grown under glass or in huge greenhouses covering acres of land and as the UK are the world leader in pepper production they are grown under glass all year round and here is the first problem. Growing under glass is done in soil in rows and this soil is chemically enriched; and in many circumstances no soil is used as they prefer hydroponics in which chemical infested water replaces soil as soil marks crops and it needs a lot of chemicals regularly and often and these under cover systems are so controlled they don’t even allow insects in to pollinate plants as they do it manually as insects eat crops or damage them and damaged crops don’t sell. If you sell carrots then you expect them to be reasonably straight, but does it really matter and does it matter when they go into processed foods such as ready meals or soups where they are cut into small chunks as the carrots original shape doesn’t matter at all. This brings us onto food waste and how much food is wasted because it doesn’t conform to a shape or size? According to official figures it is around 10% but as we all know official figures are very conservative and according to farmers who have crops rejected, this figure is close to 20% so here is the issue, why is so much food being wasted just because of its shape or size when people are starving.

Now to the UK farmers concerns and they are lack of production due to various factors and the quality of many foods which have been shown to be dangerous to health and much of this is attributed to the chemical cocktails they are grown in and we can actually show some interesting facts. Cancer is still being blamed on smoking and this is a huge lie and can be shown to be a huge lie as years ago around 25% of the population got cancer when around 80% of the countries adult population smoked and now the population has grown immensely from then and less than 20% of the population smoke, so the cancer rates should also have dropped them to around ¼ of what they were. Actually they have risen immensely and now we have around 50% of the much larger population contracting cancer when only about one quarter of the original smokers now smoke; what makes more interesting reading is that cancer rates have risen proportionally with the amount of chemicals we put into food at both the growing stages, and the food processing stages; how many people realise just how much sugar is added to food and yes that includes your sliced and ready prepared meats and your wafer thin ham has a lot of sugar added to it.

We can conclude that these chemical growing cocktails cause more problems than they resolve and that the ultra and highly processed foods need avoiding and we need to make it attractive for our farmers to produce more home grown foods more naturally and this means stopping the illegal immigrants and building homes for them and keeping farming land for farming. Let’s be realistic and clearly state the UK has never been self sufficient in food and in some conditions this is a major problem and WW II saw us importing so much food the Nazis saw the food convoys as a legitimate target and today unscrupulous countries provide a lot of our food and it is often sub standard in its growing and harvesting and often its treatment after harvesting and it can have many benefits. In reality cutting the chemical input of our food can cut cancer rates massively and this means a huge saving to the NHS in not having to treat it; now there is the climate agenda which is total B/S but not importing foods means fewer ships burning tonnes of fuel per day and everyone benefits except medical suppliers especially of cancer treatments.

Now we understand some of the problems and what can we realistically do? Avoiding the ultra processed and highly processed foods is a start and switching to natural alternatives is another where sugar which is highly processed can be replaced with honey and then we can work with foods proven to be a health benefit to you. Removing the ultra and highly processed foods has an immediate benefit of cutting down your chemical absorption from not absorbing the masses of chemicals in these foods as the processing replaces and the mass of sugar based sweetening agents or substitutes they use to replace them. Beer is a popular product and the product of historical indoctrination and very clever and slick marketing as beer is a fermented product and instead of malting the grains to extract natural sugars and ferment them, they want consistency and add something called “brewing sugar” which is not actually even sugar as it is a complex chemical cocktail looking similar to flour as a solid form, but even comes as the more complex and more highly processed liquid version. Parts of Germany actually forbid the addition of sugar to alcohol and their brewing industry does not suffer and neither do their products

If fermented products are bad for you then what about bread? Yes it is bad for you and never follow the marketing hype as brown bread is NOT better for you as they all have sugar added so they can be fermented to rise so never fall into this trap as most bread is frozen as dough and has even more chemicals added to prevent storage problems. How old is your fresh bread? Much of the dough is made up and on average stored as frozen dough for around 2 years so your fresh bread is not actually fresh at all as in any emergency or world event creating grain shortages the British population would still get bread and much positive publicity for politicians who will take the glory which in reality should go to the bakers.

Growing some of your own food gives your body a break from chemical infestation and if you use 25% of your freshly grown food grown naturally it will be slightly more expensive than shop bought items, but wait, is it really? Your shop of choice may be cheaper for chemically grown food, but what about organic food? Yours suddenly becomes much cheaper. Enter the chemical toxicity factor and the fact your health suddenly improves if you can replace 25% of your food with naturally home grown and this means the risks of chemical toxicity related health conditions also drops, you have less time off work with food related issues and you earn more money; you put less stress on your immediate and other family members which also improves their health. If you use something such as our salad bars with around 6-8” (150 – 200mm) depth of compost you can grow most salad crops and most of your summer salads are covered so you can afford those healthier eggs or meats to go with it.
Similarly, if you take up out tonne bag challenge you can grow much more produce and have a wider variety and grow for fresh produce and produce for preservation and some can be bottled/canned, pickled, dried, or frozen and if you plan your growing similar to a military operation you can get an immense quantity of food from 1M square of ground. You may like building a raised bed or two for growing and you may just plant a little of your garden with food and remember every little helps with produce and health benefits.

You can set up your own compost heap and ideally 2 compost heaps so you can keep them balanced, so what do I mean by balanced? Basically a compost heap works by having a balance of greens and browns and no the greens are not eco warriors, to this you add something such as hollow grass or straw to let some air in and nature does the rest. Contrary to popular belief, compost heaps do not smell if done correctly and you complete the circle of growing as you have next year’s growing medium being produced by nature. You use 2 heaps to keep your greens and browns balanced and if you get too many greens on one heap you can put them onto the other heap and balance it all out and as it rots down it exudes a brown liquid and this brown liquid is good and it soaks into the ground and when you move your compost heap next year this is now prime growing land and well enriched.

You can make many of your own feeds and save yourself a lot of money and this is easily done and one of the best all round feeds is comfrey and if you cannot or do not grow it you probably know someone who does and as it is rampant they will usually give you some; put this in a barrel and half fill it with comfrey, fill up with water to the top and leave for a few weeks and draw the liquid off and you have your own feed.
If you eat bananas then half fill a 2 litre bottle with water and as you eat bananas you save the skin and cut them up and add three skins to your bottle and top up with water and leave for a month and you drain the liquid off and you have feed high in potassium.
If you go to the coast for the weekend or for the family holiday you collect seaweed as this has natural sea salts which is one of the best feed producers going and if you dry it out in the sun before bagging up you can get quite a quantity of feed for your garden.

Does it end there? No because you can get a lot of your seeds for free if you know how and while some may take a little work, many are freely and readily available and the most obvious seeds are from tomatoes, cucumber, melons, runner beans and of course there are a lot more; you collect and dry these seeds by putting them on kitchen roll on the kitchen windowsill and let the sun do the rest and dry them out. Next you create nature so you put your seeds in small brown envelopes and you create winter by putting them in the fridge and replicate winter temperatures for a few months and when you get them out they think winters over and its growing time and when you plant them they germinate and grow.

You have everything around you that you need and all you need is the impetus to do it and once you produce your own compost you have compost to plant your seeds in and to fill your salad bar or your 1 tonne bag or simply to refresh your raised beds or garden area you intend growing in and remember your 1 tonne bag will grow throughout the winter as well as the summer. If you replace growing medium you don’t waste the old compost as you err?????? Compost it and you can continually compost it and keep using the same compost for generations and recycle the already recycled as compost is the gift which keeps on giving.

You have your seeds and you can plant in your home or in a greenhouse if you have one or simply leave them to the point where you can plant them straight into the ground; you can phase your planting so you plant seeds under cover to get your earlier crop and then plant outside later so these come later and extend the growing season for as long as possible. You can make your feeds over Autumn or throughout the summer and leave it to brew and bottle the liquid so you can dilute it for feed and make your own feed for a couple of hours work, the same amount of time it may take to go to the shop and buy it; you save petrol, car parking charges, and the cost of purchasing it so basically the same amount of time to save you money. What do you do with your feed crops? Compost these as well.

It is all there at your finger tips and by year 3 you should have composting down to a fine art, produce plenty for your bags, containers, or just to refresh your beds or garden and collecting and drying many of your seeds and producing your own feeds to feed your crops, and the cost of your organic and chemical free food will be about the same price as the chemically infested food from supermarkets or even less.