It’s that time of year again when the frying pan, milk and box of eggs come out for their big evening of pancake-making and I still have no idea what to give up for Lent.
Chocolate, like when I was a teenager? Please no. Alcohol? Also please no. What would be a meaningful sacrifice in this time of environmental crisis?
One idea reluctantly crawls to mind – how about I give up buying fresh food that has flown half way round the world just to sit on my plate for a few minutes? The Times on Saturday reported that Britons chomped through 2,920 tonnes of fresh strawberries, reaspberries and blueberries each week in December, and that these berries had been flown from as far a-field as Peru, Chile, Morocco and South Africa. Aviation is believed to account for 4 per cent of global warming, and President Trump is pulling the US ever further away from its commitments to reducing their carbon emissions. So my Lenten inner pilgrimage could have a whiff of protest to it.
What would that mean for my weekly shop? I can live without grapes and avocados, but I would miss the delicious mangoes that are marked as coming from Peru. I’ve been buying them because I’ve wanted to introduce our young son to the sticky joy of mango-slurping – as well as the Sensible Lesson of delaying gratification (because obviously everything sold as “ripe and ready” takes another week to ripen). Mangoes also remind me of my sunny pre-university months in West Africa, when I used my fresh A-level French to chat and make friends across a cultural divide, realising you could do so without having got the hang of the past subjunctive.
Back to Lent 2026. What else would I have to renounce? A quick look at a supermarket website should help. Ah no. There’s a vagueness when it comes to showing an item’s provenance and carbon footprint. For example, the apples we usually buy apparently come from any one of seven countries, only one is the UK and four are not very near at all:
So that’s clear then.
And the frozen blueberries that hold the promise of anti-ageing through their magical anti-oxidants are:
Packed in: United Kingdom
Phew – that’s great! Though they may have been rocketed in from Mars.
Will I end up eating like a medieval peasant? Will I age 10 years in six weeks? Will I have to choose between endless celery and 1980s no-fly, high-carb biscuits, and manage to put on weight during the traditional season of fasting? Do check back over the next few weeks as I try to investigate where on earth my food comes from and try to make sure my shopping habits aren’t doing rather more harm than good.
Happy pancaking!
Top image: Cornelia Schneider-Frank from Pixabay
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