Carbon labelling

The Carbon Trust has been pilotting a scheme to introduce a carbon footprint label on certain products.  This will give consumers the ability to make an informed choice about how much carbon has been used in the growth, manufacture and shipping of the product.

The carbon footprint of food is impossible for the normal consumer to make an informed choice about.  A good example of the contradictions involved is a tomato.  They are grown in huge heated greenhouses in the UK.  It has been shown that a tomato shipped or even flown from Spain has a smaller carbon footprint than one grown here due to the enormous heating costs.

It is something I really struggle with, as I am just guessing when I’m at the supermarket.  And due to a lack of information I tend to give up and not think about it.

If they could make a universal scheme work (this is a big if, I can see all manor of complications in the implementation of this) then I would love to see something really simple like the traffic lights scheme for calories, fat etc.  A red, orange or green light would really influence my shopping habits and help us to really find out the worst carbon offenders in our shopping basket.

Oven baked tandoori salmon

Ingredients

• 2 salmon fillets
• ½ small pot of natural yoghurt
• Juice of half lemon
• 1 thumb ginger
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp chilli powder
• ½ tsp turmeric
• ½ tsp garam masala
• ½ tsp salt

Preparation

Grate the ginger and garlic on the fine side of the grater. Mix all the ingredients except the salmon together. Put the salmon in a plastic bag and mix in the yoghurt paste. Marinade for at least an hour. Cook in a pre-heated oven at 180’c for 20 mins.

Replace your fridge, save a power station (or six)

I’m not particularly into random factoids but I found this one pretty impressive (if its actually true of course):

“if we replaced all large domestic appliances with energy efficient ones we would provide savings of up to 3.6 TWh – the equivalent amount of electricity needed to power over 1 million UK homes for an entire year!”

This came from the time to change website: www.t2c.org.uk or http://tinyurl.com/chh9sf