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Living Lightly column

Good morning

By Richard Paschke

Looks like a nice day today. Time to get up, have a shower, brush teeth and start the car so it warms up. Now gather a few things for the day in the office and into the warm car to drive the few kilometers to work. Plenty of time to pop in for a takeaway coffee and brekkie burger. Helps to pass the time driving to have some coffee and nibble on the burger.

Coffee in hand and the bag with the rest of the burger plus the work bag into the office and continue the breakfast while the computer starts up. For lunch it’s going to be a takeaway soup or a curry, and that cold coke is going to be great.

Thanks to Uber Eats and Foodora, dinner is sorted as well – life is great.

Does some of this sound familiar?

What happened to us? We used to enjoy a nice breakfast at home with the family, producing minimal waste, take some left overs or a sandwich for lunch and cook at home for the family or invite someone over. Sometimes on a special occasion we’d go out for dinner with friends. Food used to be a social event and we used to enjoy it freshly served from the kitchen.

Now we live a life holed up at home and there is a whole new industry delivering soggy pizzas and lukewarm curries and then when we are rushing from A to B because we are always so busy, we grab something on the way and shove it down while rushing to B from A via the arches of gold.

Time to wake up and be. To do just one thing at a time. Enjoy good fresh food. Enjoy the process of cooking for friends or the family.

Our lifestyle creates an incredible amount of rubbish and it is not sustainable. We are cutting down trees that are more than 100 years old, here in Victoria in the Thomson catchment, just to produce pulp for paper and cardboard. We import oil (and all it’s problems) to make the plastic that lines the takeaway cups and that make the lids and the straws. All that had a 10 minute lifecycle and we cannot afford this to go on.

Our beds are burning and we are sleeping soundly.