Living your best life
CAMBRIDGE motheroftwo Nicola Turner loves spreading the concept of mindful consumption.
While she has done this for years by talking to people, she has come to realise she can’t be everywhere so she has written Living Lightly: The Busy Person’s Guide to Mindful Consumption.
‘‘It’s not intended to be a blueprint but, rather, a dose of inspiration to help you navigate your own way.’’
For the past seven years, Turner has been on a journey to simplify the way she and her family live. In turn, she has shared her experiences and lessons learnt in workshops.
Turner is aware that while many people might want to do what is right for the planet, leading a busy lifestyle means people are only going to do it if it works for them.
‘‘Change is only going to happen if it’s not going to take too much time, cost too much money or turn me into a weirdo who no longer gets invited to cool parties.’’
In her book she shares ways to live more sustainably without compromising on your lifestyle.
The following is an edited extract from Living Lightly in which Turner shares her advice about food consumption.
FOOD plays a massive role in our lives. Obviously, there’s the whole needing food to live thing, but there’s also the social and cultural sides to it, the health, selfexpression, creativity, social connection — you get the picture. Food is a huge part of who we are, what we do and how we live.
The way we eat is a big deal when it comes to our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of the planet.
MY FOOD PHILOSOPHY
I want to feed my family good, nourishing food in the shortest amount of time possible, while also being mindful of the impact.
A few years ago, my New Year’s resolution was to go food shopping once every six weeks. My main motivation was to save time and reduce my packaging waste, but I also suspected that I would save money and we’d eat better. I diligently spreadsheeted the results (you’re welcome), and they were good. Like, really good.
In the first year of shopping this way, I saved more than $4000, reduced our packaging waste by 90% and we ate more real food. But the best bit was that I saved nearly two working weeks of time! Yep, two whole weeks just by going shopping less. Boom!
It has become my thing to prove that living more sustainably doesn’t have to take more time and money — but even I was pretty surprised at how massive this change was.
Two years on and I’m still shopping this way — why wouldn’t I be? Before you panic . . . no, I don’t spend all day in the kitchen, have an amazing garden, a house cow or feed my family only kale.
MAKING THE MOST OF THINGS
A gamechanger for me has been just making a simple shift in my mindset.
Instead of starting from the point of ‘‘What do I feel like?’’ I start from ‘‘What have I got?’’. It’s not about going without and eating random canned goods from your emergency kit — its about getting creative with what you have.
If I’m stuck, I’ll do a search on my phone for ‘‘What can I
make with [insert what ingredients I have]’’. The World Wide Web always provides.
If I run out of an ingredient, instead of my default being to go to the shop for more, my starting point is to figure out a way to substitute something else for it.
GETTING IT DONE
Food prep
We’ve been marketed this concept of convenience, that buying prepackaged goods will save us time — that a plastic bag of precut pumpkin will make life’s crazy juggle just that little bit easier. I’m the first to admit that, sometimes, in some ways, it will.
But sometimes, it won’t. We’ve let ourselves get a bit confused by all that convenience these days. We
can buy pretty much anything we want, at any time of the day.
Instead of making our lives more convenient, sometimes it means were spending more of our time shopping.
One day, I was in the middle of making a bacon and egg pie and realised I’d run out of those handy frozen pastry sheets. No worries I’ll just jump in the car and drive the four minutes each way to my local supermarket . . . It felt so easy.
But then, I took that micro pause.
I could make some pastry, but that would surely take ages
(and I don’t like baking). It would be way quicker to shoot to the supermarket.
Or would it? So I did what anyone else would do — I did both. Here’s what happened.
We had a unexpected winner!
The supermarket is only a fourminute drive from my place, and they have handy pastry in prerolled sheets. It feels so convenient!
But, by the time I get out of my trackies, load my kids into the car, drive, park, walk, negotiate with kids, find pastry, buy eight other things I didn’t realise I needed, check out, spend $160, find car, drive home, remove children from car, unpack, get back into trackies . . . You get the idea.
Making my own pastry had never entered my head (I hate baking, remember).
I saved a heap of time, saved money and created no extra packaging waste. I also knew and understood all of the ingredients in my pastry.
Here’s what I do to make food convenient without going to the shops.
Making from scratch
I do everything I can to make the time I spend in the kitchen as efficient as possible. Along with cooking meals, I do make a few things myself — either because it’s way cheaper or I haven’t found a good wastefree alternative. I normally allow myself 4560 minutes in the kitchen on a Sunday evening to make something — unless I can’t be bothered, and then I don’t.
Have a plan
I make a loose weekly meal plan. I say loose because, sometimes, I forget and, sometimes, I don’t follow it, because life happens and things change. When I do, I always appreciate that I don’t have to deal with the decision fatigue of deciding what to make every night. It also means that I have a plan to use all the fresh food that needs to be eaten that week.
I have a repertoire of dishes that I make regularly, and I’ll meal plan based on these and what I have. Yep, I meal plan based on what I already have, not the other way around. Eating seasonally helps when it comes to adding variety to what were eating.
Batch cooking
Whenever I’m cooking dinner, I make as much as I possibly can. Dinner is always lunch the next day, and any leftovers are afternoon tea or put in the freezer for another time.
I did go through a stage of spending a day or two of the school holidays prepping meals, which worked well, but I now prefer just rolling it into my regular evening cooking because it doesn’t feel like any more work.
Bigbatch baking
I also apply my batch cooking approach to baking. If I’m making a cake or muffins, I’ll cook at least double the recipe and throw a batch in the freezer. For cakes, I normally precut them so I can easily grab pieces from the freezer to put in lunchboxes.