One aspect of sustainability can be the choice to replace everyday items with others that are better for the planet and the people on it. However, these things are often difficult to find— especially in the same place. That’s why this week’s blog post is about a Dutch website called Leven Zonder Afval (Live Without Waste) which sells pretty much any zero-waste products you might be looking for. It also sends anything you order in plastic free packaging— everything I’ve ordered so far has arrived in a cardboard box stuffed with recycled newspaper. Finally, of course, it’s nice to support local(ish) businesses— it’s run by two women according to their “About Us” tab.

Of course, the quality of the products is also important. While I can’t vouch for everything on their website (although my it will be my life’s work), I can talk about the things I’ve ordered from them so far. So here goes:

1. Vegetable and Fruit Cotton Bags

These are really handy for the Haagse Markt, to avoid those plastic bags they offer you with everything. They’re also very handy for Lekker Nassuh, whether you’re getting the vegetables or the dried goods. Hot tip, though: cocoa powder is fine enough to get through the bags. A related point is that when you need to wash the bags, they will shrink a little bit. The label says they’re fine to be washed at 40C, but this doesn’t seem to be true. The shrinkage isn’t dramatic, but it is something to bear in mind.

2. Reusable Menstrual Pads

If you don’t want to, or can’t, switch to a menstrual cup, these are a fantastic way to reduce the amount of plastic you’re reducing with your period each month. I got both the regular and the night sizes, and they’re first of all the most comfortable pads I have ever experienced. There was no leakage even though my period is pretty heavy. I got the black ones, so obviously staining hasn’t been a problem, but there are pretty patterned options available. When you’re finished with a pad for the day, give it a quick rinse in the sink with cold water until the water runs clear, and then either put it in the washing machine, or hang it out to dry for a few days until you’re ready to do your laundry as usual. The pads are expensive— €17 for three regular sized ones— but once you have them, you won’t need to buy period products again for at least ten years, so it evens out fairly quickly. If you are interested in the cup or reusable tampons, the site also has those available.

3. Package free conditioner

It’s fairly easy to find shampoo bars at Lekker Nassuh, for example, but I hadn’t noticed a package free conditioner. Lush also sells them, but it can be nice to try out products from smaller companies. The conditioner comes in a beautifully designed cardboard box, but is surprisingly small for what you pay. It works well, but so do Lush’s package free conditioners which are a bit more affordable, so this is not something I would recommend unless you’re really passionate about supporting smaller businesses.

4. Toothpaste

The website has a wide variety of toothpastes, some solid (like the toothy tabs from Lush, but without plastic) and some in a paste. I got some of the latter. It came in a glass jar, and while it tastes and feels completely different to toothpaste (it doesn’t foam or anything) I really like it. My teeth feel really clean, and I think it sort of encourages me to brush more thoroughly because you can feel exactly where the toothpaste has touched and where it hasn’t in your mouth. 

Check out the website here, and let us know if you find any cool stuff!

If you enjoyed the vegan treats we sold at our bake sale last Thursday, or if you completely missed it but are curious about what kind of baked goods us vegans produce, then this is the blog post for you. We have four recipes: brownies, banana bread, carrot cake, and apple and berry pie. Below each recipe we link (if applicable) the original recipe that inspired our baking. 

Brownies

Ingredients:

1/2 cup non dairy butter

3/4 cup sugar

2 flax or chia eggs (1 tbsp seeds: 2 tbsp water per egg and let it sit for 5 minutes to gel)

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 cup cocoa powder

3/4 cup flour

1/4 cup soy or other plant milk

Instructions:

— Mix everything together in a bowl until there are no lumps. You might need a little extra soy milk to loosen the mixture— it should be the texture of regular cake batter.

— Put the brownies in a lined cupcake tray and stick them in an oven of 180C for 20-30 minutes.

Inspiration: https://minimalistbaker.com/simple-vegan-brownies/

Banana Bread

Ingredients:

3 large bananas (mashed)

1/3 cup of olive oil

1/4 cup soy or other plant milk

1 tsp lemon/lime juice or vinegar

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1.5 cups of flour 

2 tsp cinnamon

Optional: walnuts for sprinkling

Instructions:

— Mix together the wet ingredients, and then slowly fold in the dry ones. 

— Pour the mixture into a lined loaf tin (or any other sort of baking tin) and bake for between 55 and 75 minutes at around 180C. 

Inspiration: https://www.lazycatkitchen.com/vegan-banana-bread/

Carrot Cake:

Ingredients: 

5-6 small carrots, grated

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup flour

2 chia/flax eggs

1/4 cup soy or other plant milk

1 tsp baking powder

Instructions:

— Mix everything together and put in a lined cake tin.

— Bake in an oven at 180C for 40-50 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. 

Inspiration: Maria and I both bought carrots in one week. Bad mistake. But good cake!

Apple and Berry Pie

Ingredients:

— AH Filo Pastry

— 6-8 apples

— 1 box frozen berries from AH (about two cups fresh)

— 1/4 cup sugar

Instructions:

— Place the filo pastry in an overlapping formation in a pie dish that you’ve oiled. It should be more than one sheet thick everywhere and there should be enough to crumple artistically at the edges.

— Chop your apples into segments (about 8 per apple) and place them in a spiral on the pastry. Once they’re looking pretty, put the berries mostly in the centre of the pie and then sprinkle the rest over the apples. 

— Cover the fruit with the sugar, then place in an oven of around 180C for 40 minutes, or until the apples are soft.

Inspiration: Lekker Nassuh’s delicious apples from Elstar.

AM Lalor

Being sustainable can be complicated, especially given the rise in eco-chic products in recent years. Often, we are encouraged to buy products— particularly products like toiletries— because they are labelled as environmentally friendly, organic, or natural. These products are terribly appealing, especially if you like nice things but also want to care for the environment. There are, however, two problems with this sort of thing: firstly, that labels like ‘natural’ and ‘sustainable’ are vague enough not to really mean anything, and secondly, that overconsumption, even if one attempts to do it ethically, still has negative consequences on the planet. With this in mind, Act Aware has decided to begin slowly reviewing toiletry products, both on the basis of functionality, and in terms of how well they live up to their claims of being sustainable. This week, we are comparing two deodorants for you: Happy Moon and NUUD. 

Happy Moon (Lavender Deodorant)

We came across Happy Moon at Lekkernassuh. Happy Moon is a company that makes products that show love for the earth in the Netherlands. Their deodorants are for sale in small, recycled glass jars from Lekkernassuh. One thing that particularly impressed me was the short and very understandable list of ingredients in the product: baking soda, coconut oil and lavender extract are the ones I remember being there, and there was certainly nothing that struck me as being harmful. The product is also very pleasant to use: you add a pea sized amount to each armpit and rub in; it smells good but not strongly. And, most importantly, perhaps, it works really well all day. In terms of sustainability, this product also seems well thought out to me. Glass can be recycled indefinitely, unlike plastic. The ingredients are most likely harmless to nature (although it must be said that I’m no expert in this). And, most excitingly, it seems like it would be possible to make something like this yourself. Act Aware is hoping to run a workshop at AvB with Happy Moon sometime before Christmas— so if this sort of thing interests you, keep an eye out for it!

NUUD Deodorant

If you have a search history anything like mine, NUUD has probably popped up in your Facebook advertisements: that’s how I came upon it, anyway. Their marketing is sleek, professional, and accessible— think Innocent Smoothie vibes. The claims they make about the deodorant are pretty astounding, too. They say you only need to apply it once or twice a week, that the 15ml tube will last you six weeks (it should, it costs €12,95). It’s vegan, comes in a tube made of sugarcane rather than plastic, is carbon neutral, and has micro silver as its main ingredient. The website tells you that you can change the world with your armpits. Which perhaps says enough. Oftentimes this sort of hyperbolic advertisement strategy encourages suspicion in me. Changing your deodorant is not going to change the world; if you’re lucky, it might have a tiny positive effect. 

But it would be easy to forgive such exaggerations if the product itself was impressive: but alas. I’m not a particularly sweaty person, but the deodorant does not last more than two days on me, in contrast to NUUD’s claims. In short, then, it probably won’t last you more than three weeks (that’s how long it took me to get through it), which means you’d end up spending over €20 per month on deodorant. Frankly, I’d rather buy chocolate. 

AM Lalor

This week we not only have something resembling a recipe for you, but also a way of getting a little extra use out of your vegetable scraps. We’re going to show you a very simple method to make your own vegetable stock.

In the past, when I’d seen recipes for vegetable stock, I’d always thought it was a bit of a waste to use perfectly good vegetables that you could, you know, eat. Then a few months ago, I got a new cookbook called Thug Kitchen which presented a very aesthetically pleasing pot of vegetable scraps and suggested boiling them with water and some herbs to make vegetable stock. This idea is hardly novel, I know; but at that particular point in time, I was taken with the idea and decided to try it out. 

So, for a week and a half Maria and I collected vegetable scraps instead of throwing them away (there isn’t any composting facility available near where we live). We kept them in a ziplock bag in the freezer, but you could also simply keep them in the fridge, so long as you use them up pretty fast. Then, when we had enough scraps to fill two regular sized ziplock bags, we put them together into a large pot with two litres of water, a pinch of salt, some pepper, and random herbs we had lying around: things like dill, rosemary, basil and oregano. We let the pot boil on a low heat for about an hour and a half, and then used a sieve to separate the (now extremely sludgy) scraps from the stock. To our collective surprise the colour of the stock was a really rich dark brown, and it tasted delicious even by itself.

So what kind of scraps did we use? This will, of course, vary from week to week and household to household, but we used a lot of onion tops, tails and skins, garlic skins and heads, tomato vines, broccoli stems, pepper cores, potato skins and squeezed out lemons. The only vegetables that I’d recommend you keep in are the onions and garlic, because of the depth of flavour they bring. Something you should also bear in mind is that, unless you buy organic vegetables, you should make sure to clean your vegetables before using them in a stock like this. It might seem obvious, but I forgot to wash my carrots, for example, as I usually just peel them.

Making your own stock is cool in itself, but it also comes with several more important benefits. First of all, it allows you to make extra use of your vegetable scraps, which is especially positive if you don’t have access to composting facilities. It also cuts down on packaging— when you buy stock cubes, they are usually wrapped in foil individually as well as the overall cardboard packaging.

 

AM Lalor

Eating less meat, dairy, and animal products is now recognised as one of the most effective actions an individual can take if they want to reduce their impact on the planet. But for most of us, this is a pretty big dietary change. In this blog post, we’re going to discuss different replacements, substitutes and tips for transitioning towards a vegan diet. This does not, of course, mean that you need to become completely vegan immediately (although it’s admittedly how I did it six years ago), but these tips are applicable individually. Therefore, feel free to do just one at a time, or several for a week. Find out what’s practical for you long-term.

Replacing Meat

Before recent years, the question of replacing meat in vegetarian and vegan meals was a bit less easy to answer. In the last decade, the ‘mock meat’ on offer in supermarkets has drastically improved. Now, in almost every Albert Heijn (or other supermarket) there is a section dedicated to minced meat, burgers, chicken nuggets and sausages made from plants, or at least from vegetarian protein sources (some contain egg white, for example). So replacing the physical presence of meat in a dish is fairly easy, so long as you’re prepared for some differences in texture and taste while you’re still finding your preferred brands. However, there are some problems with replacing “real meat” with “mock meat” in terms of their environmental impact. Unlike keeping to a plant-focused diet, replacing meat with “mock meat” has debatable consequences for your carbon emissions; accordingly, we should keep our consumption of these products to a minimum if we are concentrating on the environmental implications of eating animals.

The next layer of meat replacements are foods such as tofu, tempeh and seitan. These are often used in the production of “mock meats”, but can also be eaten by themselves. Some, like tempeh, can be an acquired taste, but they are much cheaper than “mock meats” and have a lighter impact on the environment too. It’s also generally possible to get them with less packaging: seitan and tofu in particular are commonly sold in glass jars that you can reuse at home, and places like the Asian supermarket sell fresh tofu which you can get with your own jar, if you bring it with you. It takes some practice to learn which of these three to use in which situation, and how to flavour them, but here is a very brief summary.

Tofu: tofu is good just a dash of soy sauce in stir fries, or added at the end to soups with “Asian” flavours (don’t put it in tomato or potato and leek soup, please, God, no). It’s also delicious marinaded with soy sauce and spices and then baked in the oven for about an hour at 180C, or fried with some salt. These crispier versions are great in salads, rice dishes, or sandwiches.

Tempeh: unless you love the taste of tempeh, marinading it is an absolute must. It can then be fried, baked in the oven, or left as it is. It’s best to add it to dishes without a lot of liquid in them.

Seitan: seitan is the meat replacement most suited to European flavour profiles, and it also has a more meat-like  texture than tofu or tempeh. It’s great in pies, stews or in sandwiches, and usually comes in a jar with salted water, so it rarely needs to be marinaded. If you make your own, this is obviously a different story. 

Finally, we move onto the least “meat-like” product, which correspondingly has the lightest environmental impact and is the healthiest (in terms of low salt and lack of processing): beans and legumes. These are generally somewhat interchangeable in terms of their usage, but what works best in my experience is this: lentils in drier dishes, beans in more liquid dishes, and chickpeas in everything. 

Replacing Dairy

More than meat, replacing dairy is generally something people are sceptical of, especially when it comes to cheese. So, let’s start with the most difficult one.

Cheese: cheese is easiest to replace around pasta dishes. You can make a delicious creamy cheesy sauce with soaked cashews, nutritional yeast, and salt, or an even healthier mac and cheese with potatoes, carrots, and nutritional yeast. Recipes for these kind of sauces are readily available on the internet, so try a few and see what you like. Replacing parmesan can be done in two ways: sprinkling some nutritional yeast on top, if you like it simple, or creating a cashew parmesan from blended cashews, nutritional yeast, garlic and salt. Cheese in sandwiches is a bit more difficult, especially when it comes to cost and packaging. You can buy sliced vegan cheese in Ekoplaza, but it’s not the most flavourful, or the cheapest, and has similar amounts of packaging to regular cheese. (If anyone does know if a good vegan cheese source in The Hague, let us know! We’ll add it to this blog post). It’s also possible to make your own vegan cheese, but this tends to be pretty complicated if you want a cheese that’s sliceable. Cream cheese is possible by making a thicker version of one of your pasta sauces and adding agar agar flakes and herbs. 

Milk: most people are pretty familiar with plant based milks. If you don’t like one, try others, or give it a couple of tries. Your tastebuds might just need some time to get used to it. There is also cooking soya cream available in the bigger supermarkets.

Ice cream: In the bigger supermarkets, it’s perfectly possible to find vegan cornettos, magnum-copies, and Ben and Jerry’s. In the smaller ones, or at ice cream parlours, go for sorbets.

Butter: any dairy free margarine works here; I haven’t found one that tastes completely the same, but for baking and cooking it makes little difference. For bread, you may have to hunt around before you find something you’re happy with. 

Replacing Eggs

Eggs are maybe the most complicated animal product to replace. Each use of egg requires (usually) a different substitute, and none quite replicate the flavour unless you invest in some black salt (which contains sulphur). 

Baking cookies: chia seeds or ground linseed mixed with water work really well here, as well as applesauce.

Baking cakes: mix soy milk with vinegar until it separates a little, and add a little extra baking soda to your flour. 

Scrambled eggs: crumble tofu with nutritional yeast, turmeric and cumin, and fry in a pan for ten minutes.

Boiled/Fried eggs: These are pretty impossible to replace unless you spend a lot of time at it, so use context to judge what would work best. For example, if you’re making shakshouka, use fried disks of polenta to replace the eggs on top. 

What about nutrition?

People tend to worry most about iron and calcium when they reduce animal products in their diet; but these are actually pretty easy to keep topped up if you eat greens, nuts and seeds, and lots of veggies and legumes. B12 is the only nutrient that is pretty impossible to get from plant based food, as it lives in the soil which we all wash off our veggies before we eat them. However, if you buy plant-based milk or cereal, these tend to be fortified with B12 (among other vitamins); so if you eat these things daily, you’re probably fine. If not, buy a bottle of B12 pills and take one whenever you remember.

 

 AM Lalor

We’ve all heard it before, but a good breakfast will set you up for a good day. And if you have a 9am, you’ll need all the help you can get. 

Overnight oats are the perfect solution if you can’t see yourself getting up early enough to prepare a nourishing breakfast before class, and they’re also incredibly handy if you’re an early riser with more important things to do. By taking five minutes the night before to create this delicious pot of goodness, you’re setting yourself up right— also, because of its low environmental impact.

The three recipes below are, first of all, vegan. You can, of course, use dairy milk when making them, but given the impact of dairy production on the environment, a plant-based milk would be better. There are myriad plant milks now available readily in supermarkets in the Netherlands, all varyingly nutritious and costly. However, making your own oat milk at home is cheap, delicious, and sustainable. You can buy oats package free from the Organic Market next to Binnenhof on Wednesdays, or order them in paper bags from levenzonderafval.com. Blend one cup of oats with three cups of water, and strain through a cheesecloth, or a sieve. Finally, in terms of the environmental credit of these dishes, they are all created using fruit that’s either frozen or in season in autumn, both of which cut down on transportation. So, these dishes are good for both your conscience and your belly. And, when it gets colder, just stick your pot of oats in the microwave for 90 seconds and they’ll be toasty warm.

Recipe 1: Apple and Cinnamon

Ingredients:

1/2 cup oats

3/4 cup plant milk

1 apple

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp maple syrup/sugar/other sweetener (or not, if you prefer) 

1. Chop the apple and put it in a saucepan over a medium heat, with a drop or two of water at the bottom of the pan to prevent sticking. Be sure to stir it frequently, to help with the breakdown of the apple. Once it becomes soft and mashable, it’s ready — this should take 10-15 minutes. When you take it off the heat, add sweetener if you like, and half the teaspoon of cinnamon. Put this in a jar/bowl/tupperware. Alternatively: you can bake the apple in the oven, halved, with a sprinkle of sugar for 25 minutes, if you fancy something with a bit more texture.
2. If you’re feeling brave enough to multi-task, put the oats and plant milk in another jar/bowl/tupperware, and mix in the rest of the cinnamon, and more sweetener, if you like. Put this in the fridge— overnight is best, but at least leave the oats to soak up the milk for 2 or 3 hours. It’s best to keep this mixture separate from the apple until most of the milk has been soaked up by the oats, otherwise your apples will get milky, which is not especially appetising.
3. In the morning, or after the oats have been soaking for three hours, top them with the apple mixture and sprinkle a last pinch of cinnamon on top, for aesthetic purposes. You can mix the apple and the oats up, if you’re a wild animal, or enjoy their beautiful layering effect first, like a civilised person.

Recipe 2: Chocolate and Raspberry 

Ingredients:

1/2 cup oats

3/4 cup plant milk (hazelnut would be delicious here, but any will work)

2 tsp cocoa powder

1 tsp maple syrup/sugar/other sweetener (or not, if you prefer)

1/4 cup raspberries (frozen or fresh)

1. Put the oats, plant milk, cocoa powder, sweetener (if preferred), and raspberries (saving three for the topping) together in a jar/bowl/tupperware, and mix together until well combined (not that lumps of cocoa powder are unpleasant, but still). 
2. Put the mixture in the fridge overnight or for two to three hours.
3. In the morning, top with the leftover raspberries for aesthetic purposes, and enjoy!

Recipe 3: Blueberry and Nut or Seed Butter

Ingredients:

1/2 cup oats

3/4 cup plant milk

1 tbsp nut or seed butter (the picture above uses dark tahini)

1/4 cup blueberries (frozen or fresh)

1 tsp maple syrup/sugar/other sweetener (or not, if you prefer) 

1. Put the oats, plant milk, sweetener (if preferred), and blueberries (saving three for the topping) together in a jar/bowl/tupperware, and mix together.
2. Put the mixture in the fridge overnight or for two to three hours.
3. In the morning, top with the tablespoon of nut or seed butter and the leftover blueberries (for aesthetic purposes), and enjoy!

(Recipes approved by Ailish’s little sister).

AM Lalor

This year, Act Aware is back! For those of you who don’t remember us, we are the sustainability committee of LUC. Our goal is to help you (and ourselves) discover environmentally friendly ways of living in The Hague while being students at LUC. In this introductory blogpost, we’d like to tell you a little bit about who we are and what we intend to do this year as a committee.

At the moment, our committee has three board members: Anna Lluna Aguilar (Chair), Maria Clara Oliani (Treasurer) and Ailish Lalor (Internal Events Co-ordinator). Over the coming semester, we’re hoping to grow this board substantially with the addition of a Secretary, Garden Co-Ordinator, and External Events Co-ordinator. We’ll be advertising for people to fill these positions in the first weeks of this academic year.

This year, we’ll be offering multiple workshops and excursions, with themes such as sustainable fashion, waste-free menstruation, biking, rubbish separation— as well as encouraging you to participate in week-long challenges to show you directly how you can live more simply and ethically. In the first block, there’ll also be a raffle, through which you can win sustainable prizes to overhaul small areas of your daily life. 

This blog will have a central role to play in the changes we intend to make in LUC this year. We plan to post weekly, with tips, recipes, events and general updates to share what we know about sustainable living in The Hague. If you have anything you’d like to write about, in terms of environmentally friendly living, please let any of the board know, or contact us via email: actawarecommittee@gmail.com.