Cortijada Los Gazquez - Vida en 1000m. Parque Natural Sierra Maria Los Velez. Andalucia.

It would be pointless for me to add to all the things written about Jackson Pollock. I just love this film.

Great film it’s just that the music may be more relevant for celebrating Finland, not Spain.

Just above Velez Rubio on a side track to Velez Blanco is a covered well or Aljiba Cubierto. It’s another example of the Moorish inventiveness. You take your small supply of water from an underground aquifer or spring or snow melt and you store it underground in a large ‘aljiba’. The vaulted roof is to protect the fresh water from contamination and evaporation. And when your small, but steady supply of water accumulates into something worthwhile it can be brought to the surface, usually with a wooden water wheel, for the house and animals and small crops.

Consider this and wonder at the benefits of modern ‘bore holes’ and mechanised pumps irrigating winter lettuce crops for the supermarkets in Northern Europe. Modern wells which are becoming saline, exhausted from overuse.

It must be bliss. Being six on a warm December afternoon sitting on the ground in the sun, a warm breeze blowing through the trees. And best of all, you have a ‘Space Station’.

Are you a carnivore, pescetarian, flexitarian, vegetarian, vegan, vegansexual… or a “locavore”? That is, someone who chooses to only eat food that’s been produced locally.

The word was coined two years ago on a website by Jessica Prentice. She and three Californian friends decided to only eat food produced within 100 miles of San Francisco for a whole month – and challenged others to follow suit, which many gladly did – and continue to do so.

Indeed, eating locally produced food has become such a popular phenomenon that “locavore” was voted Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

So what exactly is the great appeal of food that was reared or grown nearby? First and foremost, it’s less damaging to the environment. The question is, though, how much less? Let’s take a look at the figures.

Every year humans are responsible for emitting a total of around 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Of that, the average western European is responsible for 12 tonnes each. Food accounts for 2 of the 12 tonnes (more than the same person’s emissions from flying, which add up to around 1.6 tonnes!).

Although eating locally produced food does reduce food miles (the distance the food has travelled to get to your mouth) and hence CO2 emissions – it’s actually the growing and processing of food that is particularly energy expensive (e.g. manufacturing fertilisers and heating greenhouses).

So if you really want to do your bit for the environment, then try to stick to locally grown food that’s not been processed or packaged either (importing Spanish tomatoes may require less energy than heating a greenhouse in the UK!). And by doing so, you will save around 0.7 tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.

And to make an even bigger difference to your carbon footprint, go vegan and reduce your carbon footprint by a further tonne of CO2 (the food the animals eat is energy-expensive to grow). But if you love meat and milk too much to give it up, then try to make sure it’s organic, as this will reduce your CO2 emissions by a similar amount. Does anyone know if there is a word for someone who only eats organic food – organivore, perhaps?

So, if you were vegan (or an organivore) and ate only locally produced, unpackaged, unprocessed food – you would reduce your yearly CO2 emissions from food by 1.7 tonnes, that’s a whopping 85% of the carbon food bill. And what would that make you I wonder – a veganlocavore? A saint more like.

I’m a vegetarian, and my boyfriend is a carnivore, but only eats animals that have been reared via a high standard of welfare, so perhaps that makes him a welfarivore.

Lucy Middleton, researcher

New Scientist.

Today, the first of December in Los Velez, they slaughter the fatted pig (and probably in the rest of Spain). The animal is wrestled to a table by the men of the house and the head female in the house dispatches the animal with a knife to the major artery in the throat. And the pig is dead in seconds.

Not a drop of blood is spilled and for the next hour the men wash and scrub the carcass and shave and scorch off the hair preparing for it to be butchered. The men carry the carcass indoors for the women to commence butchering and transforming it into a multitude of pig products.

Principally Jamon Iberico..

Morcilla (from the blood)..

Chorizo, with Pimiento and Paprika..

And Butifarra and Salchichon and a million other foods I don’t as yet know.

Now who would I offend by suggesting Spain isn’t a western developed country so the application of dreadful words like ‘Locavore’ to describe an environmental awareness programme is unnecessary here. However Spain is a western developed country whose economy is doing very well. And importantly they cherish their food culture making pilgrimages to the supermarket an anathema.

What is more all this food was produced by feeding the pig kitchen waste and turning it into more food without the need for transportation of live animals, or the use of energy supplies, as it is all preserved without the need for refrigeration.