Hugh on Plastic

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been involved in a few food-related campaigns since leaving River Cottage.
He had a campaign to stop discards of fish from trawlers called Fish Fight, which was successful in the EU, and another to try to get us choosing free range chicken.

Earlier this week was the first episode of his new documentary on Plastic, which has the amazing statistic that there are almost 20 billion pieces of single use plastic stored away in households in the UK. He also wrote an accompanying piece in 'The Guardian', focussing on the role of supermarkets.

I showed episode 1 to one of my groups and they were amazed...


The Guardian piece here suggests that

This brilliant #WarOnPlastic show estimates that 19.5bn bits of plastic are in our homes right now. My project predicts that we throw away 295bn per year. Divide one by the other, it would mean the items in our homes right now would last just under a month... not unrealistic pic.twitter.com/ddJdhtPqUS

— Everyday Plastic (@PlasticEveryday) 10 June 2019

You click, we pick...

… and similar slogans appear on a growing fleet of vans which is criss-crossing the Norfolk countryside delivering people's online grocery orders.
When we first moved into our village, our postcode drew a blank in terms of deliveries, but we could now get our shopping delivered by any of the main supermarket chains for a small additional charge, or we could wait to be tempted by discounts on our first order, or free delivery options.
I've been thinking about using this as a context for some work, to tie in with our Year 7 unit on Food, which has already encompassed all sorts of interesting discussions, and there was an article in the Guardian today which has helped me make my mind up to put something together. It also ties in with the ideas behind the CILT resources that I authored, and which have now gone live on the website.

How green is online shopping?
Is it preferable to have a small van delivering to lots of houses rather than lots of individual cars heading to the store?
What about the packaging involved in getting items to customers?

More to come on this as the resources get developed...

Surrogate Shopping

Just been digging around in the Sainsbury's Archive for a project, and came across an article in the Sainsbury's Journal from 1997.
It was on SURROGATE SHOPPING, and described an idea where people would not need to go to the supermarket to do their shopping.

It's interesting that it's taken fifteen years for this to become part of our lives, although there are still a majority of people who haven't given it a go.

Worth visiting the archive of Sainsbury's - lots on the way that supermarkets have developed...

Where does Christmas come from ?

For many families, Christmas (or at least the decorations, toys, food and other items) come from Waltham Point: the main distribution warehouse for Sainsbury's stores in the SE.

Waltham Point lies next to the M25.

Some good images in the Sainsbury's article which provide a lot of useful geographical background for this as a possible thing to explore: the whole area of transport has a key link. Some years ago when I did my degree at Huddersfield, there was a new degree course on Geography and Transport.

This GUARDIAN ARTICLE also links the contracts for producing materials for DISNEY.