To wonder how people cope living in London?!

[WinterIsHereJon]

I'm visiting for the weekend. It's hot, sweaty, incredibly busy. We had the misfortune of travelling on the tube during rush hour earlier, people pushed and pushed onto an already full train, to the point where I became rather intimately acquainted with a chap behind me. Despite the complete lack of room people were still attempting to read newspapers! I think I'd snap if that was part of my daily routine, I don't know how people do it!

dizzy Everyone's different. I grew up in the country and got the feck out when I was 18 and vowed I would never raise children in the country. My Dsis lives in a hamlet in mid-Wales with her 3 kids and they seem blissfully happy.
I can totally understand why some people would hate living here. There are lots of places I would hate to live but I wouldn't come on here and be rude about those places.
London can be very cheap for teenagers - so many events are free and they travel for free which is pretty awesome.

The eggs were very thin and pale yoked

The colour of the yolks is due to food dye in chicken feed. If the chickens were being fed grain/corn/natural food, they won't have bright orange yolks. It is no reflection of their happiness!

The shell quality varies by the age of the chickens, and younger ones often produce thin shells when they first start laying

There are several schools around us who have chickens and a vegetable patch within the school, and grow their own food for their lunches

(London girl, but country bumpkin farmer's daughter roots...)

I think though if someone asked "how does anyone cope living in rural yourcounty?" Are you seriously saying you wouldn't comment? People who like living where you grew up might consider you rude for not liking it. That doesn't make your experiences any less valid. People don't make comments about random places they know nothing about, if someone slagged off Sydney or Rome I wouldn't have anything to say either way, but if I had lived in either of those places I most certainly would comment.
People on this thread are speaking from experience, not just randomly slagging off London because they feel like it.

Sparechange chickens that eat corn have orange yolks. Ours eat left overs, insects and home grown corn, we don't use commercial feeds but their yokes are orange and I've never had a thin shelled egg from any of them. Thin shells can be a calcium deficiency, especially if they are consistently thin regardless of age. The egg yolks were worryingly watery too. Logically chickens scratching around in soil that's been contaminated by hundreds of years of bellowing factory smoke and car fumes simply cannot be better.

Which is another given the levels of lead in london soils it is not recommended to eat vegetables grown there, especially for children!

given the levels of lead in london soils it is not recommended to eat vegetables grown there, especially for children!

WTF?

What absolute and total nonsense! I'd love to see your source for this!
Most residential areas of London are built on what was farmland until fairly recently - my house was built in the late 1800s on a field. There wasn't any contaminating industry, and nor does London soil have naturally higher levels of lead.
You clearly have a very sketchy knowledge of the history and geography of London if you think we are all living on the sites of former 'bellowing' factories. If you are actually interested, read up on the history of the tube. The lines were originally privately-funded, and those funding and planning the routes for the tube lines would secretly buy up the farmland in the areas around where their tube stations would go, so it would be worth lots as housing land once the tube was built. This was going on well into the 1900s

If you are really worried about contaminated soil, you should stop eating food grown in areas with a tannery history, which would be vast areas of the Cotswolds, Somerset and Northampton.

if you are really worried about contaminated soil you should stop eating conventionally produced meat and veg, which is full of nasty chemical (pesticides, fungicides, fertiliser, medicines residue)

I loved living in London.
If it wasn't so expensive I'd have happily stayed forever. And sometimes I think that the much bigger house wasn't worth moving away to be honest.

I'm not going into where I get my food but I will say that agricultural soil is tested and the food standards agency are very strict about the levels of soil contaminants in agricultural areas in Cotswolds, Somerset and Northampton so you are a lot safer to eat that produce than some organic wacko tomaccos from an inner London school playground.

Most of London was industrialised in the 1800's. After the 1800's high levels of toxins were belted out for over 150 years. In the USA they did research on lead contamination for city vegetable growing and found high levels of lead contamination even in the suburbs. lead is surprisingly prevalent and persistent in urban and suburban soil here

Do you remember the colour of Big Ben and The Natural History Museum in the 80's? The soil had the same coating, only unlike buildings it has been well mixed in and not cleaned. Remember the famous London smog of the 50's and 60's? That did not come from agriculture!
If you want sources, you can google up a bunch. Here's one.

Food can be grown in cities, but the soil needs to be tested and treated first and if needed a lot of uncontaminated soil needs to be bought in. I certainly didn't let my children eat from the London school garden or from my mum's vegetable patch because I know they were not treated properly.

My food comes from Lidl via Australia, France and Spain. Don't know how much lead there is in it but it has certainly clocked a few air miles

Dizzy
I don't even know where to begin the utter nonsense in that post. For starters, using a US study to talk about a very specific part of the UK. I'm still waiting for the source of your 'fact' that everyone should avoid eating food grown in London, especially children...

Secondly, you think the food standards agency routinely tests soil? Absolute horseshit...

Thirdly, DH works for a UK property company, which has to do soil contamination testing as part of the groundwork before they build houses, schools or hotels on the land, and clean it up when it is found.
They find plenty of heavily contaminated land all over the place. The worst case they had last year was in Morpeth

You are clearly just making up random weird things to try and prove a point, totally bizarre

The lead in the soil is not different in the USA, lead is lead. It doesn't change its consistancy and safety depending on the part of the world it is in. I used that article as an example that even suburban areas can be contaminated by the city.

Did you not look at the other article from the Jornal of Public Health Medicine? Here were the results High levels of lead were found in soil and produce. The worst case assessment showed that the estimated lead intake by a hypothetical consumer of allotment produce exceeded the provisionable tolerable weekly intake almost 10-fold and We advised the allotment holders not to cultivate the land
Lead is particularly dangerous to children because they absorb it more easily. That is a fact you can check out for yourself.

DH works for a UK property company, which has to do soil contamination testing as part of the groundwork before they build houses and They find plenty of heavily contaminated land all over the place

Which proves my point. Eating vegetables grown in a school playground in a city that has a really bad historical pollution track record is not a very good idea. How can you possibly think otherwise?

Soil is the most important resource a farmer has. Are you under the impression that anyone can just start producing for the food market without making sure the land is suitable first? Horseshit or otherwise, agricultural land must be tested before it can be used to produce food, school playgrounds do not. I know where I would rather take my chances.

I've worked in London for 22 years, I commute from just outside. The answer is... you get used to it, you don't think about it, it just becomes part of your routine. Central & Northern are merry hell in the rush hour but I often take the bus or walk somewhere instead. Take a fan, take a bottle of water...I love London so much, every week there's something new to experience and the pros far outweigh the cons for me. I think the only city in the world I've visited (so far) which seemed busier was Rome. London in summer is crazy but you just get used to it.

Dizzy are you talking about central London or parts of outer London here? (Barnet, Enfield, Haringey...)

Lots of parts of London weren't actually London-London in the 1800s.

You're talking about 216 years ago! 216 years of industrialisation will have polluted the soil!

Does this help?

Growing food in the city has risks. If you do eat city food go for things like beans and fruit rather than root vegetables and leafy greens, because leaves absorb a lot of the lead and hanging fruit is less likely to be contaminated. Also get it from sources where the levels have been checked and safety has been carried out like the The London Orchard Project. They have lots of information about the apparent "horseshit" I am talking about if you want to check it out.
London is not the countryside and growing your own veggies as a way of pretending you have the best of both worlds can actually be a big mistake, especially if you do not do your research and check your sources.

FWIW I'm not actually that bothered as I never grow my own and an unlikely to ever start. I don't disbelieve you, I was just curious as to which parts of London you were talking about as you mentioned Big Ben and the Natural History Museum when very few Londons live that central.

So dizzy, just to be absolutely clear, there are no actual recommendations to avoid eating food grown in London, especially for children? And you just made that bit up totally?

I'm also about this: "agricultural land must be tested before it can be used to produce food"
Tested by who? There is no mandatory testing required by law before food is grown and I can't really work out why you think there is. There is nothing stopping me picking the apples off my (London) tree and selling them anywhere in the country, same for my tomatoes.

Are you getting confused with soil nutrient analysis, which is where a farmer tests his own soil to work out what sort of fertilisers should be used?

If you think your food is only grown in government-certified soil, you are so very mistaken
Hence food can be grown in contaminated soil in rural Morpeth in Northumberland (I'm not sure you were clear from my other post where it was), and it only comes to light that the soil is contaminated when people want to build houses on it

You mean we shouldn't be eating the locally sourced vegetables sold at the farmers market

sparechange I don't know how it works in the UK as I have already said I am not there but before we could commercially produce legally labelled organic food we had to have the soil tested by an official body. Not by us. One of the tests they carried out was for heavy metals and the levels need to be under a specified amount.

There is nothing stopping you from selling your apples but I do think people should know where they were grown and you should have enough common sense to test your soil before giving them to other people or yourself.

I am very selective about the food I eat and the food my children eat. If others are less fussy then so be it. But eating food from London soil that has not been tested is not a very good idea, no official recommendations. If people want to run the risk then it's up to them. My mum loves her iinner city garden. She knows I will not touch her chard with a barge poll, wouldn't even give it to my rabbit. Each to their own. I wouldn't put my children at risk, others may feel less concerned.

dizzy
If you don't know how it works in the UK, wtf have you said things like "I will say that agricultural soil is tested and the food standards agency are very strict about the levels of soil contaminants in agricultural areas in Cotswolds, Somerset and Northampton" Those are places in the UK, btw

Ok, so here is how it works in the UK... Anyone can grow anything they want and sell it anywhere they want. They can't label it as organic without an official organic certification from either the Soil Association or Organic Farmers and Growers, which each have their own accreditation programmes.
(The Food Standards Agency has nothing at all to do with this.)

There is absolutely zero requirement to test soil before growing anything in it. The Food Standards agency has nothing to do with that either.
There is absolutely no requirement to test soil before selling that produce.

Other that some niche Biodynamic producers, you will not find any producers who routinely test their soil in order to give customers details of the soil contents.

Many, many farmers routinely test their soil to see the nutrient profile to see what sort of fertilizers need to be added, but this is totally separate.

You are talking absolute horseshit, as pointed out earlier. Please stop it.

Did you not look at the other article from the Jornal of Public Health Medicine?

I did. Did you? Because it doesn't actually support the assertions you're making.

Yes I did, I looked at the results and the concluding statement which advised allotment holders not to cultivate the land or eat anything grown on it as they could not be sure that preparation could safely remove the lead-contaminated soil.

In other words, test the soil, if it's not safe don't grow and eat food on it. Common sense says, as children are more susceptable to lead don't give it to them. Which is what I said.

There is a frightening lack of basic common sense here!

I'd better go and tell everyone at the allotments next to my house that they're all poisoning their children. And take my name off the waiting list.

Dizzy, you have lied and made up nonsense facts left right and centre
You are in absolutely no position to call anyone's common sense into question here...

Will you now confirm the following statements are totally untrue and made up on the spot by you for the purpose of this thread:
"I will say that agricultural soil is tested and the food standards agency are very strict about the levels of soil contaminants in agricultural areas in Cotswolds, Somerset and Northampton"
and
Are you under the impression that anyone can just start producing for the food market without making sure the land is suitable first? Horseshit or otherwise, agricultural land must be tested before it can be used to produce food
and
given the levels of lead in london soils it is not recommended to eat vegetables grown there, especially for children

Dizzy may well have a point, we don't know how many people in the UK die in year from the lead they may well absorb from their food. However, we do have a pretty good idea of how many people die from lead in bullets in the USA.

I think I'd rather live with the minor chance of lead poisoning from the tomatoes I grow on my balcony in London.

Well my family is up shits creek as we like I presume many other families across the UK still have the old lead pipework running from the road into house where we have modern copper piping