Following a helpful suggestion from Mr James Litston, I have this lunch-time pan-fried it with a little garlic until it softened (I cheated and sliced the tough stalky bits out).

Then I added two of my free range eggs from James Murdoch’s Duck Lane Farm, some salt and pepper, and cooked gently until firm.

The result was absolutely delicious but did look rather flat.

Which begs the question, when does a frittata become an omelette?

I’ve just received my next box from Farm Direct and it’s another corker. Some of the new products I’m trying:

-  Free range eggs from James Murdoch’s Duck Lane Farm in Cardington, Bedfordshire

-  An amazing walnut and apricot loaf from Matt Jones’ Flour Power City Bakery in Surrey Quays

-  Red, green and yellow peppers from Ted’s Veg Farm in Bennington, Lincolnshire. Hurrah for these being in season in the UK now. I had been buying them from Sainsbury’s I’m afraid

- Garlic, also from Ted’s Veg

-  Rainbow chard from Martin Mackey Ripple Farm Organics in Canterbury (I admit I have no idea what I’m going to do with this yet but in the photo it just looks so pretty)

I’ve already made a tasty breakfast of onion omelette on walnut bread. And lo, the hangover is gone!

Joining a ‘veg box’ scheme has been on my list of green things I really ought to do for a couple of years but when I checked it out it seemed extremely restrictive – having to commit to the same thing every week, prohibitively expensive, or limited in what they offer.

But at the Camden Green Fair a few weeks back I visited the Farm Direct stall and their set-up is completely different.

You don’t have to order the same thing each time, and you don’t even have to place an order each week – perfect for me as I’m away such a lot. Also, they sell so much more than fruit and veg – they have meat, fish, cheese, fruit juice, bread, flowers, jams and more, with different options each week depending what they’ve sourced.

The depot is close to me in Holloway so I can go and pick it up if I can’t be in for delivery on a Saturday or Sunday. And though delivery normally costs £3.95, you get it free on your first order, and if you have a neighbour who’s also interested, they’ll deliver to you both for free. Apparently there’s someone else in my block of flats who’s already using the service so Farm Direct’s going to put me in touch with them.

Farm Direct is also much clearer on exactly where all of their produce has been sourced from, right down to the name of the farmer, unlike veg box pioneers Able & Cole who aren’t able to give you specifics. I loved reading that my minced lamb came from Nicola Bulgin’s Beatbush Organic Farm in Methwold, Norfolk; my chicken from Gill Wing’s Organic Farm in Sussex; my natural yoghurt from Chris Timotheou’s Dairy in Chalfont St Peter; my splendid rye loaf made by Matt Jones’ Flour Power City Bakery in Surrey Quays, London; spinach from Martin Mackey Ripple Farm Organics in Canterbury, and so on.

I’ve already had one salad using my rocket, cucumber and carrots and it was deeee-licious. They even threw in a bunch of dahlias for free as I had a promo code from the Fair!

But however much I’ve been impressed by the service and the quality of the produce they offered, I simply couldn’t justify it if it costs a lot more than I budget for. But I’ve just priced up what I’d normally have spent at Sainsbury’s and it’s barely any different.

In fact, the lamb, chicken and rocket came in cheaper. The total cost for the basket at Sainsbury’s would have been £17.39 (see pricing to the right).

For infinitely better quality produce, all locally-sourced, I paid just £18.36 with Farm Direct (see pricing below). And I didn’t have to struggle home on the bus with all my shopping bags!

There are still a few staples which I’ll have to go to the supermarket for – Ryvita, Actimel, tinned stuff and so on. But I’m hoping I might be able to stock up on these once a month since they aren’t perishable. Farm Direct also seems very open to new suggestions so I might put in a request for cottage cheese in case that’s something they can work on…

Inkaterra has some of the most exciting, sustainable hotels in Peru. It all started in the 1970s with Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica right in the Amazon jungle. Next were La Casona in Cusco, part of the super-luxury Relais & Chateaux collection, and Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel right by Machu Picchu. Inkaterra has now launched another sister brand, ‘by Inkaterra’, which is slightly more affordable but retains the same eco credentials.

The hotel group has its very own research arm, the InkaTerra Association, and employs its own scientists – guests can help out too while staying there.

All the guides or ‘interpreters’ employed to give wildlife tours are local, and real experts. I know what a difference this can make – when I went backpacking in Peru we got totally ripped off. The guides who took us into the rainforest didn’t have a clue what they were looking at and I had to point out wildlife to my friend.

Across its various properties, Inkaterra has been responsible for the discovery of many new species of frogs and orchids and planted countless trees and restored other habitats. Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel holds the record for the highest number of native orchid species found in their natural environment in the world!

With all this talk of sustainability, Bumpkin seemed a particularly appropriate choice for the press lunch – all of their produce comes from right here in the UK (except its olive oil – which we really do struggle to produce in this climate, apparently), right down to seasonal cocktails. I enjoyed a lovely duck breast with spring onion and tarragon cake. This does go against my Meat Free Monday efforts, but I didn’t have meat at all over the weekend so I reckon Sir Paul would forgive me?

Inspired by the lovely, locally-sourced salads on the menu at Bumpkin I came home this evening and vowed to have one more go at growing something for myself on the balcony. I know what I got wrong last time – the soil level was too low, so the lettucey shoots had to struggle too high to reach the sunlight and went all limp and wobbly and died. So I’ve topped the soil right up, and also sown just a fine row of seeds, as opposed to chucking in the whole packet like I did last time (also wrong, it would appear).

If it doesn’t work this time, those bloody troughs are going in the bin.

In other balcony news, we most definitely have some birds visiting the feeder now as the sunflower hearts have almost all gone. Wildlife triumph!

Despite a thorough explanation from instructor Derek on how to hold my paddle and how to slow down and change direction, I was still concerned about losing control and smashing up my kayak on the rocks. But Derek assured me the kayaks were practically indestructible. “You might hit into each other, though – the kayaks have got magnets in them,” he warned us.

I’d have thought magnets would make the kayaks heavier and slower, but didn’t like to question it; Derek Hairon is a sea-kayaking expert and wrote the world’s first book on the subject. His company, Jersey Kayak Adventures, has been guiding trips around Jersey’s rugged coast and nearby islands since 2004.

As we navigated through narrow gaps between rocks, I bumped apologetically into my fellow kayakers a few times but nobody seemed to mind. It seemed the magnets in my kayak were particularly strong.

The sea-level in Jersey rises and falls by up to 12 metres each tide, meaning you see different things each time you go out. Travelling by sea-kayak also means accessing whole stretches of the coast you never could on foot. Derek pointed out various bird species, and told us about Jersey’s natural history and geology as we paddled.

It was only as we peeled off our wetsuits at the end that Derek finally admitted he’d been pulling my leg about the magnets. I sensed I hadn’t been the first to fall for it.

But while he might joke about kayak magnetism, one thing Jersey Kayak Adventures takes very seriously is its environmental impact. Kayakers get a discount if they use public transport, and are encouraged to pick up any litter they spot and to drink from refillable bicycle bottles rather than buying bottled water.

There are other companies on Jersey that have shown a similar commitment. Jersey was the first destination in the world to gain Green Globe accreditation, and many hotels and attractions are signed up to the Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS).

La Mare Wine Estate is the only Gold award holder on the island, with eco-measures such as using discarded cooking oil as bio-fuel for the mini-bus and giving visitors a 5% discount if they use public transport to reach the estate. Jersey is on the same latitude as the Champagne region of France, so it enjoys an excellent grape-growing climate. La Mare produces not just award-winning wines but also cider, apple brandy, its own range of chocolates and to-die-for preserves.

Animal magic

Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, founded by author and naturalist Gerald Durrell, holds a silver GTBS award. The Trust is involved in species conservation projects around the world, and “zoo” is something of a dirty word. Species at the centre include Andean bears, lemurs, tamarin monkeys and gorillas – you may remember TV footage from 1986 when a toddler fell into Durrell’s gorilla enclosure and the silverback sat next to the unconscious body to protect the boy from the other gorillas.

I went behind-the-scenes with a keeper to help prepare food for the family of seven orangutans. The wheelbarrow of shiny onions, leeks and cucumbers grown in Durrell’s own garden looked more like the Best In Show at a village fete than the scraps I’d imagined the animals might get. And it put me in the mind to try some local Jersey produce for myself…

Suma’s, the less formal sister restaurant to Longueville Manor hotel, is located on the waterfront in Gorey, overlooking the iconic Mont Orgueil Castle. I was spoilt for choice with brill, seabass, Royal Bay oysters, lobster and scallops caught off the very coast I’d explored by kayak the day before. Jersey asparagus and a bowl of the first Jersey Royals of the season were also mandatory.

In the last few years, the island’s cuisine has become an important selling point, and it is proud of its two Michelin stars and many AA rosettes. Marco Pierre White is to open a restaurant on St Helier’s waterfront next year, and the tourist board has recently tied up with Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen. Jamie’s trainee chefs flew to Jersey to learn about oyster farming and growing potatoes, and Jersey produce was then featured on the menu in the London restaurant.

The island’s culinary kudos, coupled with an expanding choice of adventure sports and events, is helping draw a new generation of holidaymakers. “Jersey is attracting a younger crowd now, and short breaks are growing fast,” says Premier Holidays marketing manager Emma Coteman.

This summer in particular, the ash cloud and British Airways crises have raised the profile of any destination easily reached by ferry instead of flying. “Once people experience Jersey and how much there is to see and do, they get drawn back again and again,” adds Emma.

I wonder if it might be something to do with those magnets?

In many ways, I think aquaculture sounds like a sensible idea.

• Natural fish stocks around the world are now dangerously low because of overfishing. By farming fish in giant tanks, we can reduce the pressure on natural stocks while ensuring man’s food supply.

• As the fish nutritionist in this story points out, farmed fish on a controlled diet are free of the mercury and other contaminants found in fish taken from the sea.

• The story also suggets fish-farmers can charge more for farmed fish as they are more standardised in size, and the fish can reach the plate much faster (catching them really is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel…).

• Researchers are also trying to make the practise sustainable, by using waste-water to feel algae, which feeds plankton, which in turn feeds the fish.

But I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about aquaculture – or at least, in the form in which it is described here.

• The description of how the fish eggs are extracted is pretty gross in itself: “Flounder specialist Troy Rezek demonstrated “strip-spawning” on an anesthetized female, harvesting her eggs by pressing them out in a fluid-looking stream.“

• The fish might be free of mercury, but you can bet they require a lot of antibiotics and other medication because they’re kept in such close proximity.

• The story also says that a local company is now “air-expressing” fillets from North Carolina to other major cities in the US. A model built on air-freighting can hardly be the way forward – we’d certainly need to investigate inland fish farms as opposed to flying it inland from the coast.

• The journalist says that, because commercial fishmeal is expensive, the research centre has been experimenting with substitute protein sources such as soybeans. Considering the massive Amazon deforestation that is already taking place to make way for soya plantations, developing yet another industry which depends upon it does not sound good.

That said, the fish do have to be fed on something, and soya would be preferable to smaller fish being taken from the ocean to feed them – a practise which Kristian Teleki of SeaWeb mentioned in his lecture in December.

I didn’t have a clue how big the global aquaculture industry is, but when I looked into it, I realised it’s huge:  WWF says almost half the seafood we eat have been artificially farmed, and that aquaculture is the fastest growing food industry in the world.

SeaWeb and WWF are extremely concerned about damaging aquaculture practises – but I see that both organisations are currently helping set up the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) – a new body expected to be in operation by 2011. Furthermore, new global standards for the farming of tilapia were released just a few weeks ago, with several other species guidelines to come, so I’m hopeful that aquaculture will develop in a responsible and sustainable way in the future.

For cereal and porridge, I’ve had to swap from soya milk to rice milk, which is much more drinkable. And I’ve had to allow myself one cup of tea with real milk per morning, as I couldn’t finish a mugful made with either soya or rice milk, and I don’t think anyone would begrudge me one cuppa a day.

Entirely by chance I happened to give up dairy at the same time as Natural Soya Week, and I came across a website with lots of useful info.

Unfortunately it’s also confused things for me rather, as I’ve been reading that not all soya products are created equal….unscrupulous soya companies use unsustainable practices, clearing the Amazon rainforest for their plantations almost as quickly as the cattle farmers are.

The European Natural Soya Association (ENSA) which is behind Soya Week has a charter which ensures its members do not buy soya grown on land that was previously rainforest, do not use GM ingredients, and use only natural manufacturing processes – that is, using the whole soya bean rather than ‘isolates’.

Alpro is the only ENSA member that sells products in the UK, so if I stick to that (expensive as it is), I should be assured that my blueberry yoghurt is ethically sound. I saw some infinitely cheaper Sainsbury’s no-frills soya milk for just 60p, but I doubt it meets the rigorous ENSA criteria if it can be produced that cheaply.

Once I’ve got through my box of rice milk, the next variety I’ve bought to test is….oat milk. How they manage to squeeze milk out of an oat – surely one of our driest foodstuffs – is beyond me. I’m rather hoping the milk will taste like flapjack.

So in terms of milk and yoghurt, I’m fairly happy, but the lack of cheese could prove my undoing.

I wondered if goat’s cheese (feta, mmmmm) would be an acceptable alternative, but from what I can gather, goats bred for milking tend to be kept in similar production-line conditions to dairy cows.

Even if you bought organic goat’s milk products, from goats who led the life of Riley, you can’t escape the fact that the goat spends most of its adult life pregnant, so the milk is still full of hormones, and there’s still the question of what they do with all the huge number of unwanted male goats that are born.

So I’m currently in search of some soya-based alternatives.

Soya cheese was a little beyond Sainsbury’s means, so I’m going to have to head down to Mother Earth. I’m not relishing the sound of products like ‘sheese’ though, I’ll be honest……

Hoping she’d made it up, I launched a full-scale Google investigation as soon as I got home. Alas, it does appear to be true – PETA has an entire campaign about it.

The problem seems to be this: because they are farmed so intensively, dairy cows get mastitis, a painful udder infection which creates loads of pus. Around a third of dairy cows will have the infection at any one time, so a lot of it ends up in the milk we drink.

There can legally be up to 400 million pus cells in every litre of milk in the UK. It also contains antibiotics and growth factors given to the cows, and since a dairy cow spends most of its life pregnant, it’s full of cow hormones.

I’ve always thought of milk as one of the most natural and healthy foodstuffs there is, and vital for strong bones and all that jazz. But the more I think about it, the stranger the idea of drinking milk sounds. As Heather McCartney (patron of the Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation) says:

“No other mammal drinks milk after weaning – and certainly not the milk of another species. Would you drink the milk of a cat, dog or elephant?”

It’s not just veggies and treehuggers who are anti-dairy. Some medical practitioners say it has health risks too.

The ethical implications are also massive. PETA’s Milk Sucks website says:

“Male calves, the “byproducts” of the dairy industry, endure 14 to 17 weeks of torment in veal crates so small that they can’t even turn around. Female calves often replace their old, worn-out mothers, or are slaughtered soon after birth for the rennet in their stomachs (an ingredient of most commercial cheeses). They are often kept in tiny crates or tethered in stalls for the first few months of their lives, only to grow up to become “milk machines” like their mothers.”

I’m still looking into it – there are bound to be some good counter-arguments – but in the meantime I’m going to have a go at cutting dairy out of my diet.

I do eat an awful lot of yogurt and cheese so it’s going to be tricky. I’ve already invested in some soya milk: the unsweetened version tastes like crap, to be honest, but the sweetened version is a bit more drinkable.

It ruins a cup of tea, mind. So let’s see how long I last…….

Something I’ve never considered, however, is their ethical/green credentials. Luckily, the latest issue of Ethical Consumer has done the research for me.

Interestingly, when the magazine looked at biscuits a decade ago, the issues were very different. The emphasis then was on the use of genetically-modified ingredients. A lot of food companies have since moved away from GM products, though it remains an concern.

A massive new issue to be addressed is the use of palm oil by food manufacturers. Indonesia has already given up six million hectares of land to palm oil, displacing local people, creating soil erosion, and destroying natural habitats – of the orangutan in particular.

(I don’t want to put you off your breakfast but see the Born To Be Wild site for more on the brutal killing of orangutans to make way for palm oil plantations.) Clearly that’s to be avoided, so I’m keen to steer clear of products which contain palm oil – or unsustainable palm oil such as that from Indonesia.

Now, rightly or wrongly, I perceive more ethically and environmentally-conscious products to be more expensive, and in the case of biscuits it seems to be broadly true.

Duchy’s Originals get quite a high ‘ethiscore’ (in 8th place out of 31) and they are bloody good biscuits. I’ve enjoyed many a Sicilian Lemon Shortbread – mainly when I’ve bought them for my Nan for Christmas. But at £2.39 per 100g for Chocolate and Vanilla Shortbread, it’s hard to justify them as an everyday biscuit.

The biscuits with the 2nd and 4th-highest ethiscores were also extremely expensive: Island Bakery’s Organic Chocolate Gingers at £3.08 per 100g and Against The Grain’s Chocolate Chip and Hazlenut biscuits at £3.05 per 100g.

The fact that I’ve never even heard of these brands says something about their availability in supermarkets.

What was a pleasant surprise was that the brand which had the highest and 3rd highest scores were not nearly as expensive as some less ethical brands. Dove’s Farm Hazlenut Cookies are quoted at just £1.53 per 100g, so half the price of Island Bakery’s comparable product.

I hunted high and low at the big Harringey Sainsbury’s but couldn’t find these mysterious Doves Farm biccies. Or Island Bakery or Against The Grain, for that matter. Doves Farm might be reasonably priced but where on earth can you lay your hands on them?

The Doves Farm website says Mother Earth in Islington is one of its stockists so I will make it my weekend’s mission to purchase some of their champion biscuits. In the name of ethical research, you understand….

I suppose I’d presumed that frog-eating nations (for it’s not just the French – America buys almost as many) had some kind of frog farms where frogs are bred for eating, but the Guardian says not. Commercial frog farming has been banned in France since 1980 and it imports nearly all its frogs legs (up to 4,000 tonnes) deep-frozen from Indonesia.

It seems absolute madness that frogs be transported from the wilds of Indonesia for human consumption. If you’re really desperate for frogs legs, you’d have thought they’d be pretty cheap to keep and breed right here in Europe.

Also this week, I noticed that the Zoological Society of London has successfully bred some frogs from Montserrat in the Caribbean. Leptodactylus fallax frogs have laid four batches of tadpoles this week. ZSL’s site says the frog is endangered because of a fungal infection, but the fact that this frog is also known as the “mountain chicken frog” gives you some idea of why else it might be under threat! They used to be found on seven Caribbean islands but are now on only Monsterrat and Dominica.

Fortunately my very favourite frogs – the bright green red-eyed treefrogs with sucker blobs on the ends of their fingers – don’t tend to have much meat on them, so are less appealing from a culinary point of view. However, numbers of all frogs are still massively declining.

There are more than 6,000 amphibians on the International Union of Conservation for Nature’s Red List, and there is particular concern for those living in rainforests. Factors causing the decline are thought to include climate change, habitat loss, acid rain, pesticides, and pathogens. Nearly a third of the world’s amphibian species are said to be endangered or extinct.

Frogs are a ‘canary in the coal mine’ because they have permeable skins and feel the effect of changes to their surrounding environment very quickly. They are therefore a very good indicator of the general environmental health of an area. So it’s doubly-scary that they’re dying out so quickly.