Our kids love peanut butter and ice-cream but I want to offer them healthy alternatives, and ones that aren’t wrapped in single-use plastic. What are the things you consume on a regular basis, and how can you unravel from the plastic packaging?

We got this robust second-hand heavy-duty juicer and we can now make whatever kind of nut butter mixes we want, and puree whatever surplus fruits we’ve frozen from our garden as ‘ice-cream’. Yumm!

Feel free to share and add your suggestions too.

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Hi! Welcome back, it’s Morag Gamble from Our Permaculture Life and the Permaculture Education Institute. And this series of lives is all about plastic free July and ways that we can simply within our home and our daily life. Actually think about ways that we can get rid of the single-use plastic but not just about the plastic, it’s about how those things then kind of ripple into other parts of our lives. Or how that influences the type of foods we eat or that we share with our family. Or the types of appliances that we use, and how we fix and make things. And so, it’s kind of like a portal to talk about a whole lot of different things, which are a lot of the values. Which are kind of embedded within the whole Permaculture way of thinking, the Permaculture way of life and Permaculture designing for our garden as well. 

So what I wanted to talk about today, was actually some of the things that we make at home. Things that the kids really like. So one of our most popular things is a cut, it’s some kind of nut butter to put on the beautiful bread that gets baked here within the eco village. And so, our kids really like peanut butter but I really don’t like buying the plastic peanut butter with the sugar and the oil, and all those sorts of things. I actually really like just plain straight peanut butter, that comes straight from peanuts, nothing else. So there, our local coop does do the peanut crushing on spot. But we also decided to invest in a champion juicer and not a brand new one, a second-hand one. So we looked on gumtree and then we actually even found someone here in our local neighborhood who was wanting to get rid of one. So this thing is so heavy it’s really substantial and you can make all sorts of things with this. So these have really powerful motors and can chomp through you know fantastic things and make paste. So anything to do with nut butters, these are great. So you just feed the nuts through the bottom and out they come out the other side. You just put them through, so you can make a mix. You could do your own almond macadamia, sunflower chia hemp seed peanuts, whatever you want to put in it. Whatever diversity or combination which I think is just brilliant! So it does that another thing. So that kind of deals with ours and then we can use our own jars and whatever nuts we can find the most localized sources and be in control of that. Which is another thing that I really like about this approach, is you can kind of determine what it is.

What are the ingredients you can make those ethical choices yourself, and find ways to do it cheaply as well. 

So ice cream is something that our kids like, and you know most kids do. But I really don’t like one, buying the plastic contained tubs of ice cream as well as the what’s in the ice cream inside as well. So we have some bananas growing, and whenever you get banana season there’s always a surplus. So we freeze them, and then simply by putting the bananas through this makes the most beautiful ice cream you can ever imagine. It’s not cream, it’s just fruit pulp. So if you’ve got some dried mango or whatever fruit it is you’ve got, you can pop it through at the same time. And it comes out beautiful, and so you can just put it straight into a bowl with a spoon. So there’s no waste at all. So you can pick up one of these ones second hand, and an old one is absolutely fine because they last forever. I think we got this for a hundred dollars, which is way cheaper than some of the rubbish plastic things that break within 12 months. So it’s actually that idea too, of picking appliances that you know going to last and that can be repaired. So this thing must be 20 years old at least and it’s still going strong. And I know that if something happens with it, I can take it up to our local fix-it cafe. And the people who are there will be absolutely fine, to be able to do some work on this. And so, there’s lots of things embedded within this whole conversation that I’m sharing with you around is sort of the plastic free July. And I really encourage you to think about what are some of the things that you just commonly use in and around your daily life that you could just tweak a little bit. And so many things could ripple out from that.

So join me again tomorrow for another live, either here in my deck or somewhere in the house or garden. Talking about a simple tip to try and get rid of some of those plastics, that kind of litter our lives and litter our world.