Meat Free Mondays: Join the herd

Come along to the Warehouse Café in Digbeth and enjoy their Meat Free Monday, where on a Monday you can buy one meal and get one free throughout November, just ring the cafe 0121 633 0261 to reserve your table*, and mention the Birmingham Friends of the Earth blog (reservation essential).

Meat Free Mondays is not about going vegetarian, it's about revolutionising meat and dairy farming and reducing our consumption. It’s about fixing the food chain, as it’s a far from perfect world out there. However, we do not want to attack the farmers, but help them to move to planet friendly farming.

Friends of the Earth have found that the meat and dairy industry produces more climate-changing emissions than all the planes, cars and lorries on the planet. Rainforests play a vital role in reducing the impact of our CO2 emissions but they are currently being destroyed in order to grow soy to feed UK livestock. Plus increasing demand for meat and dairy has led to unsustainable farming practices that threaten our planet.

So how can we help? By getting the government to enable our farmers to grow their own feed for their animals. There is 700 million EU subsidies going into intensive farming and this could be invested with our farmers to help them grow and feed their own animals. This would be better for the farmers and better for our food security.

Plus eating more vegetables is not only great for your health but also good for the planet too! UN’s top climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri states that “People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming. UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.” In the UK we eat 3 ½ times more meat the World Health Organisation recommends, putting us at risk of cancer, diabetes and obesity.

The point of having Meat Free Monday (or just a meat free day or meal) is it will take the pressure off the food chain and get people thinking about caring about what they eat and the impacts it has on the world around us. It is more realistic to get the whole world to alter their diet and reduce their consumption than get a few to convert to vegetarianism or veganism.

There is a lot more possibilities opened by having a meat free meal or day, for example a school changed to have one day a week meat free. Then for the other days of the weeks they were able to invest in organic meat or fish. Meat Free Monday is all about making smarter choices and it’s not about having a go at the UK farmers, which quite frankly have enough to worry about.

So by not eating meat for one day a week we are saving ourselves as well as the planet.

For November the Warehouse Café is offering the chance to ‘buy one get one free’ on all main meals bought on Mondays*.

* Offer equivalent to one free main meal to same or lower value of meal purchased. Maximum 4 vouchers used together. Limited spaces available, so booking essential and early booking recommended. Offer valid Monday until Monday 30 November.

Our Food Chain Parade

Last Saturday, members of our campaigns group were out in Birmingham City Centre on a Food Chain Parade to end our Food Chain fortnight of action.

As you can see from the picture below we were drawing people's attention to the issues surrounding factoring farming in this country leading to deforestation of some of the world's most valuable pristine habitat in South America. Arrows go from the animals to the bags of soy feed which they eat to the man with the chainsaw who cuts down the trees to grow the crops.


The parade went from in front of Tesco on New Street, up to Victoria Square, along Colmore Row, down Church Street, across to Ludgate Hill, up to St Pauls Square, along Brook Street, along Graham Street up Frederick St and along Warstone Lane where we finished at the 24 carrot farmers market in the Jewellery quarter.

Shaking our maracas we made our way along the route giving out badges and stickers to people along the way and singing our own version of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm".

It was a really fun event. Thanks to everyone who helped make the props and who joined in on the day. Let's hope that all the MPs get behind this now and the bill goes through parliament to make our food planet-friendly.

Click here to see how you can help online.

Bees - the new canaries

Over the years a few different animals and plants have been termed the new canaries in the coal mine for climate change and the ecological problems facing the world. Amphibians are at terrible risk of being wiped out, which could lead to huge increases in the numbers of insects and other problems. Coral-bleaching shows how much the oceans are warming and there is also evidence of how acidic they are becoming, with the real possibility that they could lose their ability to store carbon. Now though, it is the turn of the bees to become the symbol of environmental problems with a new film vanishing bees looking at the reasons for colony collapse disorder and warning of the consequences if nothing is done to save them.

On Wednesday a few of us from Birmingham Friends of the Earth went along to see the film at The Electric cinema and all of us certainly did come out thinking we wanted to do something - maybe put a hive on the roof of the Warehouse? Well, no that's probably not feasible, but definitely plant some bee-friendly stuff in the garden and maybe chuck a few seed bombs into the disused bulldozed sites of Digbeth.

While not as bleak as the Age of Stupid, the picture given in this film in the no-action-being-taken scenario, is also pretty worrying. The arguments for the importance of bees for all of us are pretty stark and cannot be ignored. The trouble is that neither this film nor any scientific study has provided conclusive proof of what is causing the bees to disappear. If you go expecting to get that, you'll be disappointed.

As a film, the vanishing of the bees has been described as "earnest", so I wasn't expecting it to be much more than informative, but there certainly were some interesting characters in the film and a few shocking facts - for example, the USA is now flying in bees from Australia to pollinate certain crops!!! It was also nice that there was a woman called Bee and a man called Dr Pollan in there who obviously belonged in their field.

The culprits are gradually revealed in the course of the documentary through interviews with bee-keepers, scientists and farmers. As an environmentalist they are pretty much what you'd expect; the use of certain pesticides, the use of intensive farming methods that have created huge monocultures rather than the biodiversity of mixed organic farming systems, loss of habitat and probably some of it is due to the industrialisation of bee-keeping itself. Many of these are also drivers of climate change and other problems associated with the ecology of our planet, so although the fate of bees is not necessarily directly linked to climate change, if we deal with one we will be helping to deal with the other, too.


I hadn't realised quite how much The Vanishing of the Bees would be about the USA, but that was primarily the focus, with only a minor mention of the UK. The fact is that we are the two countries mentioned who have not banned a certain Bayer pesticide with nicotinoids, which has been banned all over Europe where bee-keepers showed conclusive proof of what it was doing to bees (even Germany has banned it and Bayer is a German company!). I very much liked the French bee-keepers who took on the industrial giant and won, describing themselves as hippies who had been underestimated.

The American bee-keepers were interesting characters, but most of them work on such a massive industrial scale, taking their bees back and forth across the USA on lorries, that I kind of want that way of working to fail. There were a few small-scale bee-keepers and the ones who work locally with crops that flower at different times of the year seem to be doing much better.

Overall, it was certainly worth going to see, but the film was a bit over-long and could have been a bit bolder. For someone who didn't know about the topic at all, it would be very revealing, but for those with a reasonable amount of knowledge already, it did sometimes come over as a little patronising.

What is clear after seeing The Vanishing of the Bees, is that we must do something to change the destructive farming practices and have a new green revolution. This will help with food security both in terms of contributing fewer of the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change and in helping to protect bees who are vital for so much of the food we eat. This all ties in very well with our Fix the Food Chain campaign, so look here to see how you can help with that in Birmingham this weekend.

Joe Peacock

Launch pad next Thursday - 18th June

Concerned about the environment?
Can you make a difference in Birmingham?

If you've been reading our blog for a while and want to get involved with our campaigns, come to Launch pad, 18th June 7.30 pm.

At: The Warehouse, 54-57 Allison Street, Digbeth, Birmingham B5 5TH

Birmingham Friends of the Earth invite you to Launch pad, an evening to give you a flavour of the current campaigns we are running around Birmingham. You may just be starting getting interested in campaigning, or someone that wants to get updated our campaigns. By the end of the night we can guarantee you will have done something to make Birmingham a better place. The Campaigns we are covering are:

Get Serious
Campaign to put pressure on Birmingham council to make sure they are making serious steps to make Birmingham greener.


Vote with your feet on Dec 5th
Time is running out to keep us safe from climate change. At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen this December world leaders will decide how to tackle Climate Change. Working with other groups in Stop Climate Chaos, we want the this march to be the biggest march and send a message to the world leaders that the time is now to act.


20's plenty
We are calling for the default limit on all residential roads in Birmingham to be set at 20 mph to make them safer for cyclists, pedestrians all road users and residents. Following the success of this campaign in other cities our 20's plenty campaign is hitting the streets here to get the message out to public and community groups. Help us make this happen.


Fix the food chain
The food chain in the UK is a mess. All over Europe we feed our animals soy feed that comes from South America where the rainforest is being destroyed and people are being thrown off their land. We want to turn this around. Come and get involved in the campaign to make sure we have planet-friendly farming in the UK.

We hope to see some new faces there. Please get in touch if you have any questions.

Joe and Mary (Campaigns Coordinators)

City Farm Open Day

Yesterday a few volunteers from our group went along to do a stall at Balsall Heath City Farm for their open day. As a local to the area I knew of the farm's existence, but rather shamefully had never actually been to it to find out what goes on, so was looking forward to it on two fronts - as a chance to talk to people about our campaigns, but also to see what they do.
I wasn't disappointed on either front. We had a really nice time talking to kids about what we were doing while dressed as a chicken or cow and engaging with people who wouldn't normally know about Friends of the Earth. We got some postcards signed too, but didn't go for the hard sell as it was just great to find out about people's opinions and inform them about the broken food chain.
The whole place had a really nice vibe to it and the people who work there do a wonderful job at engaging kids with nature and animals. They were making things from waste, colouring pictures for competitions in which everyone was a winner and got a prize, recycling everything and selling home-made food. The city farm also works with offenders, as I understand, teaching them about farming and food production in planet-friendly ways and is a great intiative. Every part of Birmingham, especially inner-city areas, should have somewhere like this in my opinion.

Who killed the honey bee?

Following from my previous post on this blog Save the bees and article why bees matter, we hopefully will make progress in this country with government providing funding for research to find out what is killing the honey bee.

The BBC scheduled an excellent BBC documentary "Who killed the Honey Bee?" which covers how a combination of:

1. Monoculture farming,
2. Cocktail of insecticides, including the new seed treated insecticides,
3. Climate change,
4. 'Genetic modification' of crops

These are some of the factors that are thought to have weakened the honey bee to such a level that the viruses they carry naturally in their gut (normally with no ill effect) are now killing them on a frightening scale and could yet bring honey and food production (which requires pollination) to it's knees.

Save the bees!

After watching an item on Countryfile the other week on the plight of the bees did it drive home the importance of the bees. Not only do bees produce honey but they also are very important to our food supply. Did you know that 40% of our food supply relies on bees? All the orchards and fruit farms are reliant on bees pollinating their flowers. They also have an important environmental role, being responsible for pollinating wild plants which produce seeds and fruits on which birds and wild animals depend.

Einstein said that if the bee died out, that it would only be 4 years until human civilisation would end.

Now the bee population in America are reducing because they are being attacked by colony collapse disorder and this may emerge in the UK. New exotic threats such as the small hive beetle are expected in the UK anytime. In the UK the populations are reducing but nobody understands why? The UK doesn’t know enough about bee disease control and the medicines that are available are inadequate.

In the UK there is virtually no wild honey bees left due to the effects of the parasitic varoa mite and the viruses it carries, and for which to date, there is no cure.

What can you do about it?

* Sign the bee keepers associations petition at www.britishbee..org.uk.
* Make your garden bee friendly by planting flowers that they prefer.
* Make www.foxleas.com/bee_house.htm or buy a bee house
* Take up bee keeping, see www.britishbee.org.uk for advice

Mary