Out Come the Wolves

Disclaimer: Article written with Bristol residents in mind; doesn't mean these tips don't apply wherever you are though! Food waste accounts for 7 million tonnes   of all waste created in the UK annually . Unlike other forms of waste, food waste has the potential to be easily diverted from landfill,   avoiding continued overfilling of landfills, pollution of the environment, and emissions from the transportation, industry and uncontrolled decomposition of this waste, not to mention the wasted man hours, soil nutrients, water, and additional costs needed to create any and all food. Grow your own vegetables By growing your own vegetables you can be in control of everything that will go into them, and eventually your mouth. Asides from the taste and health benefits, you’ll be more wary of wasting the results of your hard work rather than easily accessible supermarket produce; you won’t have to purchase as much produce as well, and so will sa...

Obviously we do not want to believe that the apocalypse is upon us, but our current era is ticking a lot of boxes. A massive extinction event is underway globally; natural landscapes including rainforest are increasingly torn apart to make way for crop monocultures and anthropocentric land management; the climate is shifting into human-induced instability. For humans there are impending crises of overpopulation, fertile land availability, and water purity. Yet, we are trundling on.             Yes, certain concerns get thrust into the public eye, like the endangerment of charming mammals or marine plastic pollution, but the whole, the entirety, should be much more concerning than it is treated. I feel this is partly because the kind of apocalypse that our literature, art, film and religion prepares us for is dramatic, sudden, definite, universal, and possibly glamorous.      ...

It’s only been two years since I became a vegetarian, and for me it was very easy; although I ate meat, I never saw it as very important, and my upbringing didn’t hinge much cultural importance to it. As I began cooking more I began eating meat less, which was expensive and not always easily storable or usable, and fairly often bland. My partner has been a vegetarian most of her life so it made a lot of sense to just slip into it and stop eating meat in the winter of 2016.             The breaking point for me was a few lines and descriptions in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, which I was studying at the time as part of my Literature undergraduate degree. Through the titular character, Coetzee elaborates that meat producing systems are factories of death, emerging from the Chicago slaughtering pits of the early 20 th century that specialised in toning the efficiency of killing, where men spent their working hours clubbing...

While in my master’s year at the University of Sussex, I had the sudden benefit of a garden- we’d had one before, but then it was all concreted, paved patio, with a few fallow corners teeming with hardy bushes and weeds. I attempted creating a small bed for at least a flower of some sort but it was so shady that I was confined to growing inside (often unsuccessfully.)             The garden was similar to the previous one, but with a few meagre beds lining the walls. Though small and strewn with litter such as chicken bones and splintered fruit crates, and underlying plants such as a grape vine and daffodils that flourished suddenly in spring, this small space offered me an opportunity to grow things on my back doorstep, a chance I had not had yet.             In these small concreted beds I planted many vegetables and plants, with quite some small (but nonetheless warmin...