20 pledges for 2020: Could coronavirus lockdown cure us of our consuming blindness?

The question of whether we can eliminate recycling in a bid to be a zero waste household suddenly felt a whole lot less important as we watched 2/3rds of our household income disappear overnight last week.

As the creeping reality of life in terms of Covid-19 dawned on us and everyone else as they started stockpiling hand sanitizer in plastic bottles and toilet roll cut from prime forest we very nearly gave up on the whole thing after years of pursuing a zero waste life.

It seemed the only way to stay sane – to make life a little bit less complicated for a while as we and roughly a third of the species entered lockdown like something out of a really dreadful movie.

Except that after the initial panic, it occurred to us that a more sustainable life just got a whole lot easier. And I don’t mean that we’ve all stopped flying (or even driving) for now or that the pollution levels in China and Italy temporarily dropped through the floor. It’s all closer to home than that. Which is lucky seeing as that’s our world for a while.

Last week the cookery programme for self-isolators (and now everyone else) that Jamie Oliver and his team must have put together at breakneck speed showed us just how easy, fast and cheap it is to make your own pasta, especially if you didn’t get to the supermarket shelves before the rest of the planet.

Cooking from scratch has always been a big part of the fight against plastic in our house. Reducing food waste (as well as adopting a flexitarian diet) became a vital tool in cutting our carbon emissions.

The notion that we - as a nation of consumers - can have anything to eat, from anywhere in the world right now and for very little relative cost, has now been blown away along with the cash to spend a third of the average grocery budget on food we’ll never consume. We’re all tuning back into using what we have, from where we are, to the best of our ability.

And, crucially, we’ve got the time to work it all out (if you’re not, ahem, trying to hold down a full time job and an unplanned side hustle as a primary school teacher for which you are decidedly unqualified).

Nationwide, interest in growing our own veg has exploded in recent weeks. The seed distributors and online garden centres I rang round this week report they’ve been racing to take on staff while everyone else has been furloughing theirs off at a rate of knots.

It makes sense. Staring down the twin barrels of a slashed household income and yet a lot more time on our hands, my husband and I spent a decent chunk of last weekend making a propagator out of some very random bits and pieces we had at home. I’m hoping for our best tomato crop ever.

Doorstep veg box sales have, surprise surprise, skyrocketed. Businesses have been turning away new customers for deliveries of juice, milk and other glass-contained consumables because they can’t meet demand. The bread flour we buy in 25kg sacks not to stockpile, but to get us through a few months of loaves won’t be available for another month such is the new-found interest.

We have the typical quantity of food in our home. We certainly won’t be stripping the shelves of the local supermarket (or zero waste shop) anytime soon and there is no suggestion that food supply will dry out for us or anyone else, as long as we can continue to afford to pay for it – which of course is a huge unknown for millions of Brits right now.

But we’ve become immediately more aware of the quantity of food we’re getting through. Partly because we don’t want to leave lockdown a stone heavier than we went in (it’s a risk), we have changed our behaviour again. And we’d prided ourselves on being pretty on top of the leftovers cooking game to begin with. It’s remarkable what changes you can make when the stakes are high enough.

The really interesting thing is that some very clever consumer behaviour experts are starting to suggest that a decent chunk of UK households may never go back to our old ways.

We know the movement to less packaged, more seasonal, local food produced in more responsible ways was already coming down the tracks. But like other aspects of social change such as remote working, its rate of adoption has just gone through the roof. And because we could be experiencing this new normal, as well as dealing with the small matter of a global recession, for a very real amount of time, at least some of our new found habits are likely to stick.

You probably won’t be getting fresh mango in January for some time. If you do it will be eye-wateringly expensive, but after a while we won’t expect to see it and then we won’t look for it.

All of a sudden we’ve been forced to make a critical connection with our consuming, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as our food. That connection had been eroding away over the last 60 or so years, both actively and accidently, in the way our food demands have been met via increasingly global supply chains. Now it’s back with a vengeance and, if Jamie is anything to go by, making its presence felt.

The great hope is that such a bolt of widespread consuming awareness in this most brutal way could foster a powerful legacy.

Which is all great, and potentially very positive indeed for the future of our consuming and its effect on our wallets, waistlines and the planet as a whole. God knows we need some positives at the moment.

But doesn’t really explain why I (admittedly got close, but) never actually bought that bottle of hand sanitizer. It’s the same reason we started obsessively sowing seeds last week.

At a time when so much control has been either taken from us or fundamentally altered overnight - from how we earn our money, to the ways and places we can spend it, the people we see, the health we’re in, and the ability to support the people and communities we love – it felt a tiny bit like we were still in charge of our own lives, our own identities, our own decision-making, our own future.

We could all do with a sense of empowerment - right now and when we finally emerge blinking into the daylight to remember that our collective battle for survival is bigger than Covid-19.

So for now, and for then, all power to us.