Category: Home Economics

The guts of economics will always be the household – this category looks at how you can reduce your exposure to costs and inflation by every day household management.

Turning Green Eatz’s Food Carbon Footprint into a calculator you can use

In the spirit of sharing useful Excel spreadsheets, I’ve adapted Green Eatz’s table of the amount of carbon emissions from the type of food consumed into what I hope is a useful calculator.

The calculator shows you the same table, but applies it to your household. All you have to do is enter the “Amount my household consumes” column and the calculator will tell you the total amount of CO2 emissions that result from your eating choices.

Household Co2 Emissions from FoodDownload

That gives you a sense of the relative weighting of each food type. For me, it has been really helpful in helping me visualise the amount of emissions that result from each type of food.

For instance, even though my household consumes only a few kilograms of lamb per year, those few kilograms amount to almost ten percent of total carbon emissions from food consumption attributable to the household.

From that data it’s pretty easy to see what can be improved upon – but the improvements you make are entirely up to you. I’ve just done this based on a bit of curiosity about what switching to an EAT Lancet or vegan diet might mean for my household’s overall carbon emissions.

A meal plan for EAT Lancet

The EAT Lancet report Commission recently released a report providing guidelines for how much meat to eat per day. The goal of this report is to reach a global consensus on what constitutes a sustainable diet. The results are quite punishing: according to the report, individuals should eat just 14g of beef, 14g of pork and 58g of chicken per average day. 
That’s not much. On a weekly basis, that works out to just under 100g of beef, 100g of pork and 406g of chicken per person per week. 

Is it possible to still be a meat eater with a majority of meat meals and achieve these targets? Perhaps. Below I have a go at preparing a meal plan to fit such guidelines. 

I’ve skipped breakfast on the assumption it can easily be done as muesli or cereal or pancakes, all of which are non-meat. Lunch is listed first, dinner after.

Saturday

Blueberry pancakes. (Make enough for two batches and save for tomorrow.)

1.2 kg roast chicken (to feed three people)Celery, carrot, onion, rosemary, lemon, salt and pepper, and potatoes for lots of handcut chips and peas to serve.Eat about 200g per person and keep half of the meat for leftovers during the week.

Boil the bones down for stock after the meal.

Put a whole pumpkin to roast in the oven at the same time you are roasting the chicken, in order to use for meals later in the week.

Sunday

Blueberry pancakes.

300g pork mince (for meatballs and wontons – for three people)

Make meatball recipe using egg, carrot, onion, breadcrumbs, spring onions, salt and pepper, cumin and coriander to make the meat go much further – this would create about 18 meatballs.

Using some of the broth from last night, make wonton noodle soup using noodles, chilli sauce, fish sauce, spring onion, ginger, mushroom, bok choi, and two meatballs as wontons (with wonton wrappers) per serve.

Monday

Package up about 200g of chicken per person for use in sandwiches and salads during the week, along with as many hand cut chips as you can take. Use about 50g of chicken per serve in your lunch, buy bread at the local baker.

Use the leftover roasted pumpkin to make Pasta Rotolo. Need 1 jar of passata, spinach, garlic cloves and feta or ricotta cheese, sage leaves, along with pasta sheets for the rotolo. This will go for three serves across two nights

Tuesday

Chicken salad/sandwich and chips as above.

Pasta with meatballs. Make a tagliatelle with tomato sauce – garlic cloves, oregano, red wine vinegar, two tins tomatoes and parmesan. Cook and add in two meatballs per serve. 

Wednesday

Chicken salad/sandwich and chips as above.

Pasta Rotolo as above.

Thursday

Chicken salad/sandwich and chips as above.

Use the leftover chicken broth to make any of a number of soups or dishes, such as leek and potato soup, or French onion soup.

Alternatively, make another round of wonton noodle soup and use up your remaining 6 meatballs as wontons for three serves.

Friday

By now you should have run out of leftovers. Buy lunch, non-meat based, up to $10. Or perhaps use some leftover tagliatelle. 

Steak night. Have 100g top quality steak per person. Add in lots of chips or mashed potato and spinach or greens to make it a rounded meal. 

There you have it. Sticking within EAT Lancet guidelines, it is still possible to have 9 out of 14 lunch and dinner meals as meat meals per week. 

Basically the above can be done with relative ease, but does require a bit of a switch from some meat to some carbs, especially potatoes. Effectively it requires the dilution of meat in the diet through creative use of meatballs and stock – what I call meat derivatives. Using these two features greatly extends the way in which a fairly small amount of meat can stretch across a week of meals. 

I am going to try this. But I’m not going to rush into it. Across the next few months, I’ll try variations of the above diet one week out of four to ease in to the new model. 

Is vegetarianism Pareto efficient?

This occurred to me the other day when I was chowing down on some sausage and black lentil soup.

Sausage and black lentil soup is a variation of the recipe for black lentil soup. In fact, there is only one difference, in that you add sausages to the soup.

The cost of black lentil soup, for two servings, is around $1.40. The cost of sausage and black lentil soup, for two serves, is around $4.90. The difference, of course, is due to the sausages, which add 250% to the cost of the soup.

The carbon emissions will differ depending on the type of meat in the sausage. It’s very likely, however, that the same sort of increase will be reflected in carbon emissions.

Not to mention you don’t have to raise an animal just for the sake of eating it.

Now I’m no vegetarian – not at the moment anyway. But this is driving the point home for me.

Vegetarians have been saying this for years, but I’m only just joining the dots. The question is, how to get this point across to the general public?

An Entrepreneur’s Diet

During the early days of a start up you want to make sure as much capital as possible is kept on the table. At the same time you want to make sure you have enough energy and nutrition to carry out a 14 hour work day.

My question is, what is the best way to do this? I’ve worked with entrepreneurs in the past who in the early days of their business subsisted off tins of beans. While I do think legumes hold the key, tinned beans alone won’t sustain you for long.

Is it possible to feed one person for a week on the equivalent budget of a tin of beans?


Black bean soup
4-5 healthy servings
Celery 90c
Carrots 50c
Onion 50c
1 cup Black lentils 80c
Water
Stock cubes 75c or real stock (free)
Salt and pepper

If you can make it go 5 meals you have a whopping recipe for 69c per serving.

Pumpkin lentil soup
4-5 servingsPumpkin $2
Onion 50c
Celery 90c
Carrot 50c
Yellow Lentils 80c
Stock cubes 75c or real stock (free)

Not a huge fan of pumpkin soup but I’ll eat it if I have to. Not going to lie, this type of diet requires some sacrifices. $1.09 per serving without bread.

I could go on forever, but these are two example recipes that cost less than a $1.20 can of beans.

So the key to a successful enterprise diet, it seems, is having a lot of pre-made stock & legumes up the wazoo.

Needless to say the entrepreneur’s diet is a legume-centric vegetarian diet. The same as baked beans.

If I assume 21 meals in the week, such a diet should get me through at about $19-20 per week and can mostly be made in my slow cooker.

The real challenge with the entrepreneur’s diet would be staying on the diet until the business makes a profit – but boy, would that give you motivation to make a profit.

Otaki Motel has consumed one colour ink cartridge in 12 months

I’m very pleased to report that we have not had to change colour cartridges in over a year. This is a result of some sound planning that I undertook regarding printer cartridge consumption in September last year.

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Why I’m not in favour of a ban on plastic bags

I generally write these blog articles and schedule them well in advance. Experience has taught me this is a necessary activity – I aim to publish one of these things per week and having a few articles already scheduled helps to avert deadline pressure, which I experienced in spades when I wrote my student humour column during my last year of university.
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One indirect way we can cut down on plastic bags

I was watching Seven Sharp the other night and Jeremy Wells and Hilary Barry were weighing up the relative inefficiency of reusable bags. This is well trodden ground in terms of environmental irony – the idea that one would have to use a reusable 170 times in order to make an actual reduction in one’s impact.

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Using social media to save on meat

I’m still tossing up the idea of going vegetarian – despite the health benefits and value benefits, and the fact that I’ve done it successfully for a year and a half before, logistically it would be quite difficult. Unfortunately I am part of a family that, while they tolerate my other eco-friendly activities, if I forced them to go even partially vegetarian they would openly mutiny.

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Make your groceries go 20% further using a home made stock recipe

Stock is one of the cornerstones of our civilisation, yet few households actually regularly make it part of their routine to create the stuff, preferring instead to harvest the supermarket shelves and pay up to $4 a litre for the privilege. Little attention has in fact been paid to the how much a regular stock habit can save you, as well as nourishing yourself and your family and making your grocery budget stretch further.

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