Less, Better, Local

I think most people would recognise this as Le Creuset. It is a casserole dish that we have had for a very long time. I can’t remember when we bought it, but it was almost certainly around 50 years ago when we were first setting up home. Why we bought Le Creuset, given how expensive it is, at a time when we had very little money, I have no idea. I was washing it up yesterday (not very well I realise looking at it now!) after Gordon had used it and wondered just how many times it had been used. Of course we have several other casserole dishes, but we seem to turn to this one over and over again. 


I thought of this when I finished a book yesterday - Patrick Grant’s Less. 

The cover message is - Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier. With a background in manufacturing of all kinds, but especially now in textiles, he charts a journey through the history of making and is in despair over a broken global system, where we now make so little in our own country and buy so much poorly made stuff from abroad. He has some frightening statistics about the extensive use of plastic, about the amount of waste from a throwaway society and lots more. It’s a grim story that we are probably all aware of, but here it is not only described but he has a very persuasive answer, an answer that he has already shown works. Of course one could say that he is not living in the real world, that he is too nostalgic for a past that did not really exist or that he is trying for some kind of world that is only a dream. 

However, I also yesterday watched him when he was at the Hay Festival earlier this year (through the Hay Anytime system) and he is very persuasive. 

So the link with my casserole? Patrick’s key words for a better way of doing things are ; Less, Better, Local. So we buy less, we buy better quality that lasts and we buy locally made wherever possible. I was thinking that many of us are trying to take this approach with food, so why not with clothing. And I thought that it also applied to Le Creuset. I am sure when we bought the dish we were not thinking of how we were investing in quality so it would last for a lifetime, but we certainly did when we bought another piece many years ago. Le Creuset is still made in the same place in France that it always was, the same foundry employs local people and the casseroles are still made to the same high standards, so much so that they give a lifetime guarantee. 

And by coincidence - it’s the final of the Sewing Bee tonight !!!