Book review

Published on Sunday 3 August 2008 19:55

CONFESSIONS OF AN ECO-SHOPPER

by Kate Lock, Hodder & Stoughton, 256pp, 12.99

Review by Katie Law

HOWEVER hard I've tried to boost my eco-credentials, collecting my own menstrual blood in a reusable silicone pot called a Mooncup isn't one of them. According to Kate Lock, this means I'll have contributed somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 chlorine-bleached, dioxin-infused tampons in my lifetime towards clogging up drains and littering our beaches. Lock, on the other hand, says she's become "a 100 per cent Moon Mama now". Not only does she swear by her Mooncups, she's even commissioned her friend Anastasia, who's handy with a sewing machine, to run her up a reusable washable pad made from a Liberty fabric, which, she says, looks as if it's been made from one of Anastasia's husband's ties.

This is just one among many eco-challenges the York-based writer, blogger and journalist undertook three years ago (with the support of her husband and their ten-year-old daughter) in order to write the book and to see whether leading a greener lifestyle might make a difference.

From the start she admits she's a born shopper who loves making regular trips to the supermarket. By the end, she's going to the supermarket every six to eight weeks, combining it with a recycling run. But that's only a tiny part of how she changes her life. She's engagingly honest about the failures: whether it's trying a week without eating meat – she can't; churning her own ice-cream – it stays unappetisingly crystallised; making strawberry jam – it explodes in the microwave; or trying to produce an edible meal using British pollack – she concludes mackerel's better.

She's amusing, too, about her attempts to clean green using only lemon, vinegar, soap flakes and bicarb around the house, especially when it comes to taking a toothbrush to the limescale in the loo. She uncovers alarming facts about what goes into many skin creams, sun creams, shampoos and antiperspirants and gives up her favourite Clarins products for a cream intended to moisturise cow udders called Udderly Smooth. She even brews up some balms of her own, including a raw sugar facial scrub, a beeswax night cream and a cornflower foot powder.

She conducts informal taste tests, with friends, on everything from Fairtrade and organic teas, coffees and wines to fruit, vegetables and bottled water against their regular equivalents, with inconclusive results. Sometimes they taste better, sometimes they don't. She persuades women from different backgrounds, including a teenage mother, to try out bamboo nappies over disposables – offering us more unsavoury statistics on landfill. She describes the joy of finding designer clothes in charity shops and dithers over whether she dare abandon packaging at the supermarket checkout, something I've done shamelessly for years.

But her ultimate happiness comes when she composts. "I honestly think it's the most practical, efficient and productive action I've taken out of all my eco-challenges because of the reduction it's made to what we throw away and because I get a great sense of pleasure from turning waste into this wonderful fertile stuff," she writes. And she's right. For all the occasionally barmy things she tries out, this is an absolutely brilliant book, whose message is completely clear. She's saying if she can do this, we can all do this and "this" isn't about building solar panels on our houses, it's about making lots of small changes in our lives which, added together, will end up making a very big change. Mostly, though, "this" is about consuming less of everything.

&#149 Books Editor David Robinson selects a book for review every Monday.