Off The Shelf #12: Playing With Fire
When it comes to food, fire is fun. But when it comes to charcoal selection, don't play around
I’ll be first to admit it: a few years back, before I swallowed the pill and fell down the barbecue rabbit hole, I never paid much attention to charcoal. Barbecue planning would involve a haphazard dash down the sausage and burger aisle, before throwing into the trolley the first bag of cheap charcoal I came across. Sometimes, I’d swipe it from the petrol station forecourt before moving on to worrying about whether I had enough generic European lager in the fridge.
I’ve got another admission: until quite far into my adult life, I didn’t really think about what charcoal actually is. To my eternal shame, I didn’t realise that it’s made from wood. I never thought about it at all. While not an excuse, I wasn’t alone: a WWF survey showed at one point that more than a third of people were in this camp. Thankfully, whether you knew it before or not, we’re all now enlightened.
Basically, charcoal is made by burning wood at high temperatures, in a low oxygen environment, to remove moisture. There’s a nice guide to charcoal here, if you want to get a full rundown, or even make your own. I’ll stick to buying it, personally. Life’s too short.
Once you start to think about where charcoal comes from and how it’s made, it does start to raise some questions about its sustainability. Trees: good for the planet; burning trees: bad, right?
The UN Food and Agriculture estimates that production and use of wood fuel and charcoal contributes between 2 and 7 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. For reference, food waste, which is a massive problem, contributes about 6%. So charcoal clearly has some impact on the environment.
But the report by the FAO also highlights that these emissions are due largely to unsustainable forest management and inefficiency in production methods, and that there are significant opportunities to ‘green up’ the charcoal supply chain.
The ‘forestry management’ aspect is important here. If you think of trees as a kind of carbon sponge, sucking up carbon from the atmosphere, it stands to reason that when you burn it, you’re releasing that carbon back into the atmosphere. So on the face of it, this seems unsustainable. But if that wood is being regenerated, as part of a sustainable forestry management system, then that would make the end product carbon neutral as the ‘sponge’ is being rebuilt.
In sustainable forestry systems, this can be achieved through coppicing - which is a traditional method of woodland management where trees are cut to their stumps to encourage the growth of new branches. Coppicing ultimately promotes growth of more woodland, boosts biodiversity and provides sustainable wood which can be used to multiple things, including the production of charcoal.
In the UK, we’re lucky, because we have high standards of forestry management, in the context of the UK Forestry Standard. This essentially means that there are regulations in place in the UK to make sure that our forests are managed sustainably, and it therefore stands to reason that charcoal produced in the UK is going to be preferable to charcoal imported from places that don’t have strong regulatory frameworks.
To summarise, then, charcoal will be unsustainable if it comes from woodland that isn’t managed responsibly. But it can be sustainable if the wood is being replaced, and broadly speaking, that’s the system we have here in the UK. Easy conclusion if you’re based in Blighty: buy British.
And there are plenty of awesome local companies that you can support, all over the country, selling high-quality British charcoal. The Oxford Charcoal Company and Whittle and Flame are a couple of my favourites. This stuff is a bit more expensive than what you’ll pick up on the petrol station forecourt, but the transparency and traceability you get when buying from suppliers like these makes it worthwhile. Plus it burns for longer so you’ll need less. I like to get onto these companies’ websites, and read their stories: how they’re making their charcoal, where it comes from, what’s their ethos. A lot of them also have an active social media presence, and you can actually see the charcoal being produced.
In a perfect world, we’d just all buy local British charcoal and be done with it. But it’s never that simple, is it?
Here’s the catch: 97,000 tons of charcoal was imported in the UK last year, with South Africa, Namibia, Paraguay and Spain among the biggest exporters to the UK. The National Coppice Federation estimates that we currently produce about 5,500 tonnes each year. Put another way, the supply of British charcoal satisfies less than 6% of demand. And believe me: the brilliant companies I’ve mentioned so far can sell out occasionally. So if you’re planning a barbecue and want local, sustainable fuel, it’s best to plan ahead - especially during the summer months.
The supply and demand mismatch for UK charcoal means that ultimately, unless we move to a society which barbecues 94% less (a truly dystopian vision), then lots of charcoal is going to have to be imported. This opens us up to the risk that we’ll be unwittingly buying from countries which don’t have as strong a regulatory framework.
So as consumers, if we find ourselves faced with the prospect of having to buy imported charcoal, there are still things we can look out for to give peace of mind: the Forest Stewardship Council, an international organisation which covers more than 200 million hectares of forestry worldwide, provides certification that indicates products are adhering to high standards of forestry management. So I would look for the FSC tree sign as a minimum when buying imported charcoal, and try to see what other information you can get from the labels, such as country of origin.
And finally: FSC label or not, if it says instant light or words to that effect, stay away: this stuff will be laced with lighter fluid, and who wants that on their food? Use stuff with no unnatural chemicals, and light it with natural firelighters or some good old wooden kindling.
Writing this, with the sun beating through the windows, has made my hungry. So I’m off to smoke some chicken wings.
MORSELS
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