Hello, I’m Fiona, a second year PhD student at the Nottingham University Business School
and this week I’m taking part in the Sustainability Action Week Challenge
to try and live as sustainably as possible. I’ve made pledges for the week. The first one is to
have two vegetarian only days and the other days I will have meat but sourced locally.
The second pledge is to have no food waste. The third is to try and reduce my car mileage. The
fourth is to try and completely avoid single-use plastic and where that’s not possible to minimise
my usage of it. So, I’ll take you on the journey of my Sustainability Action Week.
I wanted to shop locally to get my ingredients for the week so I went to
some local markets and shops instead of the big supermarkets like I usually would do.
I decided this week to try and get everything all from one place. I visited the farmer’s
market this morning. These are all for recipes throughout the week so I’ve created this meal plan
and these are some of the things that I wanted to get.
And then I got some jumbo oats, raspberry granola, dry roasted peanuts, banana chips
and some macaroni for a meal on Monday. Then, I also picked up two cereal rolls from the bakery
and finally I went to the butcher. So here I have a chicken breast fillet, four sausages
and a lamb shank. This is a little snapshot of everything that I bought. It was also the first
time that I’d been to the refill market and I had a really really good experience in there.
Today I’m making a mean-green macaroni pasta so there’ll be macaroni, broccoli, peas, spinach
with the cheese sauce. Another one of my pledges is also to use less plastic packaging, however
with this cheese, this is the only one that I can get that is just lactose free and it does come in
the plastic packaging. My goal is to minimise it as much as possible. So, I’m going to chop
all of this up and start cooking. The beginnings of a sauce and the pasta and broccoli cooking.
This did take quite a long time to make, the macaroni cheese, but I’m about to try it. It’s
really really nice. This recipe also made a lot more than I thought, I think there’ll
definitely be lunch tomorrow probably even dinner tonight as well so although it takes around
40 minutes to actually prepare, make the cheese sauce and then 25 minutes to cook in the oven,
tomorrow it’ll save me time. As long as you’re happy to use the leftovers the next day,
definitely a good recipe to give a go and part of meat-free Monday.
For a quick dinner, I’m going to use some veg I’ve got going spare to make some soup. We’ve got a
soup maker so 20 minutes you chop up any leftover veg (550 grams), add 650ml of water and a stock
cube and 20 minutes later you have some soup so I’ll show you how it works. The veg ready to go
in. That’s all my ingredients chopped nice and small and I’m just going to add the lid on now
and start. Here’s the finished soup after 21 minutes so I’m going to do a pot here to
take over to Nanna and then I’ve got some as well for a busy day at uni.
Today I’ve got a busy day on campus so I’ve got my reusable bamboo travel mug full of tea ready
to go for the day and also some homemade banana bread as a snack. Then, when I get back I’ll use
the rest of the macaroni and I’ve also got soup to deliver to Nanna later so today is quite a few
miles in the car. One of my goals was to reduce the number of miles I do in my car. Wednesday is
always my busiest day on campus and I do have to drive there at the moment because I’m not
living in Nottingham for now, I’m living at home. So, we’ll see how the weekly mileage total goes.
Today’s meal is lamb shank with some mint gravy, carrots, onions and potatoes.
And a homemade apple crumble flapjack for pudding.
So, I’m now on day five of my sustainability challenge and I’m just about to eat some
leftovers from the lamb that I had yesterday and also another goal I’ve got is to try and sort some
things out to take to a charity shop. I actually found one that will come and collect the items so
if you’re in a student house and you don’t have a car, this is a really good way of donating
some of your things potentially at the end of the semester or at the end of the year. You can find
these organisations just online and you fill out your basic contact details, your address,
and how many bags you’ve got for collection and when you’d be around for them to collect it. So,
I’m going to try that out and we’ll see how it goes but I thought it was a really good idea.
A
final activity for the week was just to plant out some herbs. I had a couple of pots going
spare so I thought I’d plant some mint and some chives to have handy in the kitchen for all the
food I’ve been cooking and want to continue doing so that’s something that I really found
enjoyable throughout the week and something that I can definitely continue.
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed doing the Sustainability Action Week Challenge and
there are some things that I will definitely carry on doing, for example having at least one
meat-free day per week because that’s really not a big ask at all and it gives me a chance to try
different recipes. Also, being more planned with my meals and thinking about where I am going to
buy certain ingredients like from the market, the butcher or refill stores which I would definitely
go to again – things like spices when I run out, they’re so much cheaper than in the shops so that
was a really interesting experience. I found the fruit and veg stall slightly more expensive so I’d
either perhaps buy less or pick certain things that I’d buy there that supermarkets usually
wrap in lots of single-use plastic packaging and in the supermarkets buy the loose items like
the carrots, bananas etc, so that I can still think about minimising my plastic waste. Then,
things like planting herbs, donating clothes, I’ve learnt some really interesting things
and I hope that from this video you also have and you also have a go
at some of these actions or others that you think of throughout sustainability week.