10 ways to drive as eco-nomically as possible

I try not to drive too much. When I can, I ride my bike. Often though, I have little choice but to hop in the automobile. I work miles from home in an area tricky to get to with PT. I haven’t been able to put the romance of road trips to bed - I don’t know many people who have. Inevitably, we do get caught out. We do hop in our cars. Ergo I’ve researched the best ways to drive as fuel efficiently as possible. It’s not ideal, I know, but if you’re gonna get in your car, you may as well know how to drive it to reduce its emissions as much as possible.

via jaymug

You can reduce your car’s green house gas emissions by boosting its fuel efficiency.

And you can boost the overall fuel efficiency of your car by as much as 30% by simple vehicle maintenance and attention to your style of driving:

1. Ride a bike or catch the train.
Obviously the less you use your car overall, the better. Do ride your bike or catch the train when you can. Definitely ride your bike for short trips: 

“A bicycle does get you there and more.... And there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive.  Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal.  And getting there is all the more fun.”  ~ Bill Emerson

2. Change up into top gear as soon as possible.
Waiting until you reach above 2,500 rpm before you change gears labours the engine. Accelerate smoothly and change up at around 2,000 rpm instead.

3. Ensure your tyres are properly inflated.
Underinflated tyres create more rolling resistance and so use more fuel.

4. Use the cruise control.

Cruise control can save fuel by helping your car maintain a steady speed. It only really works on long flat roads though – in hilly terrains the cruise control labours the engine by trying to maintain even speeds.

5. Drive steadily and smoothly.
“Jack-rabbit" starts and hard braking can increase fuel consumption by as much as 40%. Toxic emissions can be more than five times higher.

6. Drive at the speed limit.
The faster you go the more fuel you consume and the more emissions will chug out of your exhaust.

7. Minimise use of the air-conditioner.
Using your car air-con on a hot day can increase fuel consumption by 10%. If it’s cool enough, use the fan or, at low speeds, wind down your window. Winding down your window will only create too much wind resistance (and therefore consume more fuel) if you’re travelling at high speeds (above 65km/hr).

8. Know exactly where you’re going.
Driving aimlessly around a neighbourhood is wasting fuel. Use a map!

9. Don’t drive around with a full tank and unnecessary weight in the boot.
The heavier the load, the more fuel consumed.

10. Don’t be late.
Rushing means you’ll accelerate abruptly and break suddenly. Treat your car like a sanctuary. Tune into some good music or talk back. Relax. Rushing doesn’t get you there any quicker but it does increase your fuel consumption and emissions, not to mention your risk of crashing.

Any other tips?

pork and fennel sausages with braised cabbage, lemon & thyme

I've been posting all veg recipes of late so I thought I'd mix it up a little today. Afterall, I do eat and love meat, just not very much of it. I've written about how I eat meat sustainably before.

This recipe uses pork sausages. My obvious wish is that you source the best quality, highest welfare sausages you can. That's for animal welfare but also for your health and taste buds. The 'gourmet' ones you find at most supermarkets don't cut it:

• The pork comes from conventional pig 'farms' (where the piggies are kept indoors 24/7 in dirty caged pens).
• The pigs at these 'farms' (factories, really) are fed on grain. Bad for the pigs, bad for you. Silly use of resources.
• The sausages contain icky additives. 

It's not how sausages are meant to be.

Good sausages, the kind I'm hoping you'll source, are from small-scale family farms. They've been made with pork from pigs that have spent their lives outside, eating grass, digging up dirt with their piggy noses, being thoroughly pig-like. These pigs are slower to grow. The sausages made from their meat tastes like pork should taste. Like pork!

I find these type of sausages at farmers' markets. Online ethical meat suppliers and some butchers are also good options. Use Local Harvest to find a good market or butcher near you. Yes, they cost more than the sausages you buy from the supermarket. But you're eating less meat these days so you can afford it, right?

If you're thinking it'll be an expensive feed, I calculated this meal at around $5 a head for six people (or six feeds).

my simple life: my best 10 tips for eating well on a budget

Last week I shared my findings on how average Aussies spend their food budgets. It was fairly sorry, bury-your-head-in-your-hands-and-yell-why stuff.

5 bonus tips via thepurebar. Mine are further down...

What I find most frustrating is that our authorities – specifically our governments – haven’t done enough to curb the trend. Healthy choices are the hardest choices, for many. Town planning doesn't have to take into consideration access to healthy food outlets (and so food deserts abound), food marketers can make pretty much any health claims they want (hello 'vitamin' water), everything we've been told about healthy eating is... misguided....

Growing up, I was extremely lucky. My parents were raised in small villages in Greece where the only food was healthy food. They weren't into buying packet marinades and frozen meals. They, very thankfully, maintained their clean food philosophy when they came here to Australia. They grew stuff at home and we ate clean, simple yet nutritious meals. We certainly weren't a well-off family (one year, we couldn't afford heating), but the food was always healthy. Simple. But healthy (okay, apart from a very short fried spam affair).

My mum's clean food philosophy ensured that although she had very little in the way of money, she spent the money she did have on nutritious food. We rarely got to eat chips and biscuits because we couldn't afford that sort of thing. I don't know how to spread this sort of food philosophy on a mass scale. I don't know how to infiltrate society with it. I guess I'm trying to do my bit by sharing posts like this.

*rant alert*

It's true that it's not only up to us. Governments need to step up. When it comes to food and health, bring on the  nanny state, I say. Restrict how many junk food outlets there can be in a municipality. Restrict junk food advertising to kids. Tighten regulations around what sort of claims food marketers can make about their products. For god's sake do something, because heart disease and cancer and type 2 diabetes and obesity aren't gonna exit the building on their own.

Anyway, enough of that. Back to the budget. Let's roll up our sleeves and get practical:

I promised to share my personal food budget. Here it is, compared with the country’s average.  My best 10 tips for eating well on a budget are further down:

how to REALLY eat nuts

This isn't a post in which I'm going to tell you to activate your nuts. I mean, the better way to eat nuts is to activate them, but there's a step before that that many people skip.

via answerit

Remember when you were a kid and your parents had a lazy susan full of whole nuts on the coffee table? And a nut cracker from 1949? My parents did anyway. I have very fond memories of my mum cracking nuts in front of the telly all night. The sound of a cracking nut feels oddly comforting to me, for that reason.

Turns out, we should still be cracking nuts. I mean, instead of buying them ready-shelled in little plastic bags. This is the reason:

As soon as a nut is shelled, it starts turning rancid and continues to deteriorate even when it's packed in a vacuum sealed bag. All the while, it's losing nutrients and important enzymes and vitamins are being destroyed. On top of that, a rancid nut will irritate your stomach and gut lining.

my simple life: what type of food do we spend our money on? #1

For those who missed the My Simple Life intro, I’m making it my mission to prove that you can eat healthily and ethically on a budget. Granted, not any budget. I don’t suppose for a second that all individuals and families are in the position to do this. There are families out there, the most marginalised and right on the breadline, who are struggling to put any food on the table full stop and this I respect. But for most of us, healthy, ethical, sustainable eating is achievable and it doesn’t have to blow the budget out. In fact, my food budget is lower than the country’s average for my situation (partner, no children).

The premise of my claim is this – on average, food budgets are hijacked by junkie crap that isn’t good for us or the environment and the proportion spent on the good stuff is left minimal.

It’s a bit of robbing from Peter to pay Paul, except Peter doesn’t pay Paul; he pays multibillion dollar international junk food companies instead.

Last week, images from the book Hungry Planet by Menzel were released. I’m not sure why all the media hype now, the book was released back in 2006. But the timing has been great for me nonetheless, because it came about just as I was wrapping up this post. You see the book features images of what people around the world spend their food budget on in any given week. And the images are quite startling. And they prove my point above spectacularly. Here’s a few of them, but I do strongly recommend clicking here to view them all:

A week's food shop in Australia. It cost this family $325. Check out the quantity of meat! And soft drinks!

Bhutan. It cost this family $4.90 (people in Bhutan grow most of their veggies).

America. This family spent $334.

Egypt. Spend = $65.

Lookey, I may be coming off a little aggressive. But I want to make a point. And I’m fired up about it. Only 1 in 10 of us is getting enough fruit and vegetables into our gobs. Yet the average spend on fast food is $30 a week, more than double the average weekly spend on veggies ($14). We spend more money on alcohol than we do on meat, and if I break it down even further we spend double the dosh on processed meat like ham, bacon and sausages than we do on unprocessed beef.

Yet I hear people all the time tell me that they can’t afford to pay a higher price for ethically-raised meat.

And there is still a perception that healthy food costs more than junk.

From my research, there seems to be a disproportionate amount of money spent on crap. Not enough spent on the good stuff.

Before I go on, I’m not pointing the finger at anyone, on an individual level. Some people do. They say everyone has a choice about what they eat, and if they eat crap, well that’s their own fault. But the matter is much more complicated than this. There are many intricate and overlapping factors that determine what someone chooses to eat, not the least of which are the very real food deserts existing all over this country and other first-world nations. I found this article which breaks it all down in a simple way.