Nothing to Lose but Your Chain Stores

November is carnival season in Somerset.    The Somerset County Guy Fawkes Carnival Association carnivals begin in Bridgwater on the first Saturday of the month, and yesterday evening my friend took her children to the Shepton Mallet carnival, with a flask of hot chocolate and some sandwiches, as her children aren’t keen on the burgers sold from the vans.  The carnival circuit starts in Devon in September, but these illuminated processions in Somerset in November take place to commemorate Guy Fawkes’ attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament. 

On a completely unrelated note, at the start of December I’m going with my mother, PDB11 and Doom Metal Singer to listen to one of the Carnival Band’s Christmas concerts.  Their lively performances of well-loved carols like Angels from the Realms of Glory, less well-known carols like Dancing Day and the desperately sad Coventry Carol, (both of which I had seen mentioned in The Children of Green Knowe as a child, but never actually encountered until, as a student, I heard Maddy Prior singing them) and, in recent years, thoughtful original songs like Bright Evening Star, are part of what helps me get into the right mood for Christmas.

To me, though, as an etymology geek, the word ‘carnival’ suggests ‘farewell to meat’.  Does it hint that Advent should be a fast like Lent, with the greasy burgers from the vans to be the last meat before going vegetarian until Christmas?  My friend commented that Bridgwater has a strong anti-Catholic tradition (hence celebrating Fawkes’ failure), but at the same time, the tradition of alternating seasons of fast times, feast times, and carnivals before fasts, is a Catholic one, so it seems as if Catholicism and Protestantism have collided.

Of course, for most people in western countries these days, the preferred way to mark Advent is with Advent calendars offering a treat for each day of December, as a foretaste of the celebrations to come.  But, as I discussed last year, I think there is a lot to be said for giving something up instead.

In past Lents, PDB11 and I have tried going mostly vegan, which worked fairly well as we’ve managed to get into the habit of not eating much meat anyway.  I’ve tried taking up voluntary work, which has half worked – I’ve managed to hold down my job at a charity shop for nearly two years, and mostly enjoy working there, but I was asked to leave working in the café until I’d learned to control my temper.  Trying to fast completely one day a week just made us feel depressed, which isn’t helpful when we’re struggling with moods anyway.

One challenge which we had tried for Advent in the past was Live Below the Line.  The idea is to try living on $1.50 (£1.18) per day, to understand better how difficult life is for people living in extreme poverty.  There are various ways you can use this to raise funds to donate to charity, either by asking people to sponsor you, or, as we did, simply by donating the excess money we would otherwise have spent.

We didn’t actually manage to keep to the target, but did manage to spend only around £2 per person per day on food in 2018.  The trouble was that this mostly meant buying the cheapest available food from cheap supermarkets – who compete with each other to keep their prices as low as possible, which means paying whoever produces their food as little as possible.  Needless to say, this isn’t good news for farmers and farm workers, animal welfare, or the environment.  It certainly isn’t good news for independent shopkeepers who don’t have the power to push down prices the way the chain supermarkets do.

Note – I realise that many people don’t have any choice about where they shop, either because they can’t get to a range of shops or because they don’t have much money.  Part of the problem is that if big chain supermarkets keep food prices low, the government’s idea of what the cost of living is, and therefore how much the minimum wage should be and how much benefits payments should be, is based on this.  So if you can’t afford to shop anywhere that isn’t Lidl, I don’t mean this blog post to make you feel guilty.  This post is considering how people who do have a reasonable amount of money should use it.

Anyway, when I suggested to PDB11 that we might try Live Below the Line again, maybe seeing whether it was possible to get enough protein if you were poor and avoiding meat (since there are ethical problems around intensively reared bacon and chicken), not surprisingly he wasn’t keen.  Recently we have been trying to get into the habit of buying most of our groceries from independent shops, including farm shops, farmers’ markets, and independent greengrocers, bakers, butchers, cheese shops and so on, and it would be hypocritical to give to charity the money that we had saved by not paying food producers a fair price.

One of our favourite shops is Christine’s Sustainable Supermarket in Bradford-on-Avon, which specialises in selling fair trade, organic, zero-waste and mostly vegetarian food (apart from a small selection of sustainably caught tinned fish) and environmentally friendly cleaning products, as well as nice bread.  We learned about this shop after seeing it recommended by Ethical Consumer, and have been going there either fortnightly or sometimes weekly since.  It’s small (the sort of place that’s crowded if there are any other customers apart from us in there), always friendly and welcoming, and now has a box for donations to the local food bank.

Bradford is a good shopping town, with, amongst other attractions, a good farmer’s market, greengrocer (Bloomfield Fruit and Veg), cheese shop, butcher, bookshop, and second-hand clothing shop.  However, it does take two hours in each direction to get there by bus.  Until recently, the other independent shops we frequently bought groceries at were Farrington’s Farm Shop in Farrington Gurney and Thorner’s in Pylle, which have plenty of fruit and vegetables and good meat and cheese.

Although these are much closer to home – they’re within walking distance if you like long walks, though not walkable in practice for anyone who has to carry a week’s worth of food for two people home in a rucksack – they still aren’t easy to get to if you either can’t drive, or are trying to cut down on car use.  Farrington’s, like Christine’s, takes nearly two hours and two buses in each direction to reach, with the difference that there is then a 25-minute walk from the bus stop to the shop.  When I asked Traveline.info for advice on how to get to Thorner’s by public transport, it said  

Unable to find a suitable journey with the details provided, please adjust your destination.

In fact, I did walk to Thorner’s and back in June this year.  As I had all day, and was buying only a few apples, it was possible, but as there isn’t a pavement along most of the A37 from Shepton to Pylle, it wasn’t a particularly safe or pleasant walk.

However, just lately things have changed.  A few months ago, a small village shop opened up in the Methodist Chapel in Oakhill, maybe half an hour’s walk from my house.  It took a while for word to get around – when I mentioned to one of my neighbours that I shopped there, he replied that it might be the sort of place a tourist would look into, but he had never been in there to see whether it was any use for normal grocery shopping. 

I decided to try alternating between shopping there one week and in Bradford the next.  In practice, I realised that if I was going to stock up on two weeks’ worth of my favourite brands of margarine, fruit juice and baked beans from Christine’s, they were going to take up so much space in my rucksack that I often wouldn’t be able to buy fruit and vegetables from Mr Bloomfield on the same trip, so would need to buy these the next day from Doc Foster’s. 

The difficulty here is that Doc Foster’s is a tiny operation, with only small amounts of anything on the premises at a given time, and that I like fruit a lot, so that if I buy a week’s worth of bananas, apples, oranges and plums, I can easily wipe out a day’s supply, leaving nothing for other customers.  I need to learn to restrain myself and remember that, with the shop practically on my doorstep, I don’t actually need to buy a week’s worth of anything in one go.

However, it doesn’t really have a huge range of fruit and vegetables either.  When I tried buying what was there and finding a use for it somehow, PDB11 and I had to conclude that celery isn’t really the ideal vegetable to go in a stir-fry, especially as a main ingredient.

But – Doc Foster’s isn’t the only shop to open lately.  TheLittle Farm Shed at 10 Market Place in Shepton Mallet, has an excellent choice of foods, especially fruit and vegetables, and, like Christine’s, Thorner’s and Doc Foster’s, it offers plenty of zero-waste goods, from foods to cleaning products, which can be decanted into a container.  It also conveniently stays open until 5.30, so that I can nip in there after work.

If it comes to avoiding waste, Denela’s Bakery in Shepton Mallet High Street is happy to slide a loaf of bread (sliced or unsliced according to preference) into a plastic bag if I bring one with me.  I try to bring a bag with me when buying a loaf at the farmers’ market in Bradford, too.  In both cases, if I don’t do this and they wrap the bread in one of their own bags, it’ll be paper, which can then be re-used to line a compost bin. 

Last week, however, I left it slightly too late to get to The Little Farm Shed, and so instead needed to pick up potatoes, carrots and onions from one of the various East European grocers in the High Street.  While in there, I thought I had noticed a translation error on one of the labels, and rather patronisingly explained to the shop assistant that no, this herb was parsley, but this root vegetable was parsnip.  She explained to me that in fact I was the one who had made a mistake; the root resembled a parsnip, but was in fact the root of the parsley. 

Parsnips and parsley, I have now discovered, are both members of the Apiaceae family, but separate genera.  According to Wikipedia, their other relatives include carrots, celery, and various herbs and spices such as anise, caraway, chervil, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel, and lovage, as well as poisons such as hemlock, fool’s parsley and water dropwort.  And if I hadn’t happened to go into a different grocer’s shop from usual, I would never have learned this.

So, do we even need big chain supermarkets?  Well – Tesco have quite a nice range of vegetarian sausages and burgers, and they stock my favourite brand of soya milk, and PDB11’s favourite brand of instant hot chocolate.  And while I should probably be buying sustainable bamboo toothbrushes from Christine’s, I go through them so fast that it’s easier to buy a multipack of plastic toothbrushes at Tesco.

But for now, we’re planning to give up supermarkets for Advent.  I can get used to buying a different brand of soya milk when shops have it in stock, or oat milk when they don’t.  And hot chocolate made up from either of these mixed with fair trade sugar and cocoa might turn out to be nice, even if it does take a bit longer than just adding hot water.

It’s got to be worth a try.