To be quite direct, I had a very negative reaction to the warnings about climate change. I’m sure a lot of you did too.

I went headlong into blaming myself for not changing sooner, for not making better choices, for being ignorant to the issue. I have an extreme personality and it came out in force. I cut out food options that I’d been buying for years if they had even the slightest bit of plastic in the packaging, I avoided shops that only sold plastic packaged items- making it very difficult to buy food. I was a mess. The only thing I found that helped was the decision to start making my own bread by hand.

It started as a way of reducing my plastic waste. Looking back I was buying bread at least once a week and that didn’t include buns, tortillas, and pastries. At minimum that was 52 plastic bread bags that had to be disposed of every year. If we look at a five year period, I, alone, would have contributed 260 plastic bags to my household plastic waste. Assuming that the other 8 households on my street ate a loaf of a bread a week, every week of the year for 5 years, that’s 2,080 plastic bags. Now consider that on a national scale. I find it a bit distressing to think about. I know that many of these plastic bags can be ‘recycled at large supermarkets’, but can we be honest about how many of us actually engage with this scheme?

Okay, that’s a bit of a negative take, and probably projection. I have a not insignificant pile of Teracycle and supermarket recyclable bags at home. I plan to take them to the relevant recycling facility, but life is busy and sometimes we can forget, or even get despondent about whether this type of recycling even makes an impact. I can assure you, it does. Almost all major UK supermarkets, from Waitrose to Aldi, have implemented ways for their customers to recycle their soft plastics and, not only is the desire there for customers to be able to recycle, but the UK government has started to step up and in April 2022 the Plastic Packaging Tax was introduced.

So, we’ve determined that I’ve definitely reduced the amount of soft plastics that I buy and dispose of, but is the alternative, of making bread products by hand, actually better for the environment? There are arguments for both sides. To sum up a few:

Many of these cons can be contested by seeking out more sustainable alternatives, like using refill shops, only baking sourdough to avoid the need for yeast, or making us of energy efficiently so as to not be wasteful.

Although driven by an anti-plastic mindset, I had no idea how much of a huge benefit the process of baking my own bread would have on my mental health. During a time of so much upheaval and uncertainty, I found peace in the manual effort required to create something out of a few ingredients. Working with dough, manually kneading and forming the food that would sustain my partner and I, it felt good, important even. It made me slow down, consider how and when I was going to be able to bake next to make sure we have what we needed. I am more in touch with my time and what I’m eating than ever before.

As I mentioned earlier, I have quite an extreme personality. What started with baking admittedly bad loaves of bread, has turned into a weekly commitment to bake rolls, tortillas, bagels, English muffins and even crumpets. To avoid waste, I freeze almost everything and, when I need something, a few minutes in the microwaves does the trick. It’s one of the most important changes I’ve made in this journey so far. It takes time and commitment, but that’s what we’ve all decide to commit to in the face of such a world-wide crisis.

I feel like I’ve started to move away from a life of blind, passive consumerism, to one of conscious engagement in even the smallest facets of everyday life. If you’ve never baked bread before, I’d suggest you give it a go. Use your hands, get stuck in.

Convenience isn’t an option anymore.