Tuesday 29 January 2008

Our crops replace the forest

On Monday 28th January I was scheduled to give a speech at Craven Speakers Club in Skipton. At Speakers clubs we practice giving speeches and are evaluated by other members of the club - and everyone learns and has fun from the performances. I had chosen to give one entitled "You can help save the rainforest".

I spent much of Monday preparing for this. I took for part of the theme the fact that according to a Friends of the Earth Report, in ten years time at current rates of forest destruction in Borneo there will be no orang-utans left in the wild.

I wanted to show some of the main reasons why the forest is disappearing and how it is linked to our lifestyle. I needed visual aids. First I found my eight year old mobile phone -coltan.

Coltan - rare metals from quarries in Zaire. Then I toddled down to the Coop.

Palm Oil: Brown bread rolls with vegetable oil (palm) and soya four.
Peanut butter - well that has palm oil from the outside of the nut. - It gives peanut butter its special taste..
If you were to throw a stick of celery in the air in the food section of a supermarket it would have a 10% chance of landing on something containing palm oil - usually labelled simply as vegetable oil.

Soya: White Fair trade white chocolate with soya emulsifier (soya lecithin - I had learned a new word).
Soy sauce
And the bread rolls above.
And really I should add ordinary British beef -- since our cattle are fed on soya.

Corned beef- from Brazil. Hmm interesting that one variety bothered to state that it was made from cattle not from newly cleared land.

Whilst there I met David and Hilary Briggs (Our minister and his wife).

Later that evening he skyped (phoned) me to suggest we have the first coffee morning at the Church rather than at a house to make it a bigger event and also to start of the "Coffee Morning Season in the Church"

I'll write about how the talk went shortly
Meanwhile I need to prepare display material to be used at the talk to be given by Sean McDonagh at Bradford on Tuesday 29th.

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