One Geek, One Earth

So, I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth. I’m not going to review it as such, because there are thousands of reviews, but I will give my quick impressions:

• He makes a compelling case with lot of interesting graphs and answers (in my mind) a lot of the questions that the “so-called skeptics” bring up all the time.
• Which makes the whole global warming thing very scary - I knew it was bad, but I don’t think I had a grasp on how bad it really is. The change is swift and dramatic over the past decade or so and
• I liked the point about how it’s a false assumption to say you have to choose between the economy and the environment - this is not a pie you have to divide up. Helping the environment can help the economy too.
• If Al Gore has been this passionate and this human during his Presidential race, we’d be looking at the end of the two term President Al Gore era. But the catch, of course, is that he’s probably done more to affect overall worldwide awareness than he could have done as President, where his attention would be required to be focused in so many different places and with a Congress working against him.

If you haven’t seen it, rent it and watch it. It’s an entertaining, interesting 90 minutes that’s not a waste of your time, and hopefully it’ll set some thought processes moving. More importantly, follow the advice of the movie. Little steps coming from everyone can make a big difference.

Tipnut.com is a neat little site for all sorts of tips - as it says, a “desperate attempt to archive all the household notes, scribbles and clippings of tips, crafts, recipes, DIY projects and neat-o hints I’ve collected over the years.”

They’ve put together a list of the 20 casual items that you can use twice before tossing - read it here.

My favorite? Used envelopes make excellent grocery list or to-do list fodder.

This challenge is very similar to the localvore challenge (eat local when you can, etc) but with some added caveats based on the algorithms/rules in Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food. I don’t have any preset goals with the In Defense of Food challenge – my overall health is probably the best it has ever been. My wife has decided to join me and she would like to see if this will help accelerate weight loss, but for me, I’m just curious how much convenience and money I’m forced to sacrifice to manage this, and at the end of it see if I feel different. It’s a fun experiment – a learning experience for me and for you, gentle reader. Now straight to his “algorithms” and how they incorporate into the challenge. For the sake of brevity, I’m not including all of them here, but this will get across the gist of it. It’s still a long post, so forgive me in advance.

• Don’t Eat Anything Your Great Grandmother Wouldn’t Recognize as Food

This one is easy – avoid products like Gogurt and Twinkies that aren’t really food, but are more like “foodish products”. I’ve already eliminated most of these things from my diet. This is not a large step.

• Avoid Food Products Containing Ingredients that are A) Unfamiliar B) Unpronounceable C) More than five in number or that include D) High-fructose corn syrup

Woo-boy. If you’ve ever looked at the ingredients list at almost any product in the supermarket, you will have noticed the vast majority violate this rule in one form or another. The high fructose corn syrup alone invalidates so many. It is in bread, for pete’s sake. It seems to be in everything. This will definitely be the hardest rule to follow 100% and I expect that I may end up violating this one every now and again (the 5 ingredients rule will be especially difficult).

• Avoid Food Products That Make Health Claims

If I can avoid packaged food in general, this will be an easy rule to follow – this rule exists to remind us of the “dubious benefits of nutritionism”.

• Shop the Peripheries of the Supermarket and Stay Out of the Middle

• Get Out of the Supermarket Whenever Possible

These two rules push you towards the healthier things in the supermarket located on the outside – fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat and so on. And preferably stay out of the supermarket altogether and get everything from local sources. I’m not sure that is completely feasible, but we’re going to do our best. We did just find out that there is a CSA option that would allow us to get grass fed beef and pork, which would be awesome and solve many of our problems, but I think there will always be staples that we will have to get at the supermarket.

• Eat Mostly Plants, Especially Leaves

• You Are What What You Eat Eats Too

This two will end up being easier if we’re following the rest of the rules, because it will be more inconvenient and more expensive to buy meat outside of the supermarket. And our current mobile market setup gets us a lot of plants, especially the green leafy ones that we might not have eaten a lot. Before this, I had never eaten a collard green or a turnip green. (Verdict: Not bad). I’m looking forward to getting some grass fed beef – if I have to lower my intake, probably better for me and makes each time a special occasion.

• If You Have the Space, Buy a Freezer

We do and already have. Now we just need to make sure we have the proper technique for freezing produce so we’ll have some available for the winter months.

• Eat Well Grown Food from Healthy Soils

Our mobile market is organic based, so this should follow naturally.

• Eat More Like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greek
• Regard Non Traditional Foods With Skepticism
• Don’t Look for the Magic Bullet in the Traditional Diet

These rules basically suggest that traditional cultural food patterns are successful for a reason – they work, and you diverge from them at your peril. The diets also work as a whole – you can’t just pull out one ingredient and say “That’s what makes this diet work.” I will be making an effort to learn traditional dishes as part as my cooking growth.

• Have a Glass of Wine with Dinner

This one is harder than you would think. Alcohol in moderation has solid benefits, but for whatever reason, I’ve never liked the taste of alcohol. I’ve tried wine a few times and never really been fond of it. So time to get back up on the horse and try again.

• Pay More, Eat Less

As he puts it, “choose quality over quantity, food experience over mere calories.” Eating less is better for you in lots of different ways, and the easiest way to do that is to eat better and savor what you do eat more. I’m hoping we can do this, although I’m worried about the impact on our budget.

• Eat Meals
• Do All Your Eating at a Table
• Don’t Get Your Fuel From the Same Place Your Car Does
• Try Not to Eat Alone

These 4 rules are all grouped together because they basically all say the same thing – the best way to eat is at a table, as a formal meal rather than a snack that you have with other people. Joy and I have not been great at this because of our odd schedules. We’re planning to make an attempt to get back into the habit of better dinner environments.

• Consult Your Gut
• Eat More Slowly

We oftentimes rush through our food too quickly, ruining the experience of the food and causing to not pay attention to how much or what type of food we’re eating. Food is meant to be enjoyed and savored and I think we’d all be better off if we spent a little more appreciating the food that we have and are eating.

• Cook And, If You Can, Plant a Garden

Cooking I have got covered. We’ve gone out to eat once in the past few months (and that was the result of a bad cooking experiment). The garden is a little harder, as I can’t really start one until we move to a new house, and that probably won’t be until next year. But I might make an effort to start a windowsill herb garden for the kitchen.

And that’s it. I’m going to be blogging every so often over the next few months to talk about my progress in moving away processed foods, as well as what my difficulties and obstacles were. I hope this long post hasn’t driven you away – stick around for a bit and see how I do.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
by Michael Pollan

This book is the follow up to Omnivore’s Dilemma, that answered the question “Where do the foods we eat today come from?” This book, however, answers the question, “What foods should I eat?” As Pollan says, it seems a little silly that we should have to present an argument of why food is good and what foods should be eaten, but as he points out a little later, this is the point that our Western society has gotten to.

In the first part of the book, “The Age of Nutritionism”, he explores how ever since William Prout identified the 3 principal elements of food (protein, fat, carbohydrates), science in the form of nutritionism, has been trying to break food down to core elements and then duplicate that food through science. Margarine is a good example and one he uses often. But as he also points out, it is a very young science and whole food is a very very complex set of intertwined resources that can be nearly impossible to duplicate. The flaw of nutritionism is that by its very nature (studying nutrients) it is forced to break a complex, intertwined system into its component parts and unfortunately for them, food is more than the sum of its nutrients. This leads to declarations of nutrient health (”fat is bad for you!”) that are established and then decades later found out to be wrong and potentially harmful for you (”oh, remember that trans fat we used to replace saturated fat? It actually causes heart attacks and that saturated stuff is ok. Sorry about that.”).

The second part, “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization”, talks about the Western Diet: “lots of processed foods and meats, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains” and how whenever it is introduced to a new society, the same diseases start cropping up almost immediately: cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and obesity - otherwise known as the Western diseases.

He also points out that the human being seems adapted to almost any diet - all plants, mostly animals, mostly fish, etc, etc. About the only diet we’re not adapted to is…wait for it…the Western diet. He goes on to talk about the history of refined food (a staple of the Western diet) and how it reduces complex food to simple food, and as nutritionists are finding out, simple food loses a lot of what we need to thrive and survive. That reduction to simplicity causes a change from quality to quantity in the food we eat, which is quite possibly one of the major elements in the Western diet that leads to its namesake diseases.

The third part, “Eat Food: Food Defined” gets back to the first sentence of the book (and one that is on the cover as well) - Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much. He clarifies that by food, he means real, whole food and not the foodish products that line the shelves of your local supermarket. He then lays out what he likes to call “food algorithms”. They’re not rules. He doesn’t want to tell you exactly what to eat. He just wants to give guidelines; patterns of behavior that if we keep them in mind, we can eat whatever diet we want and remain healthy (and do the environment a service as well). This, of course, excepts the Western diet, which is the diet we’re trying to escape in the first place.

Some of these algorithms include: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” “Avoid food products that make health claims,” “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle,” and “Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks”. There are more and I plan to go over them in more detail when I establish the guidelines for my In Defense of Food Challenge, which will start next week. But the gist of them is: Try and revert back to the kind of food/diets we know work for human beings and stay away from the processed foods of the Western diet whenever possible.

This, like, Omnivore’s Dilemma, is a complex, interesting book that this review has only really skimmed the surface on it. I highly recommend you pick up a copy from your local library, or if you’re in a hurry to read it, your local book exchange. And tune in Monday for the rules of the In Defense of Food Challenge (IDFC), which is going to be a lot of fun and a lot of challenge.

So, gas prices stink right now, at least relative to where they were. We’re paying $3.58 around here and it seems like only a few months ago that we were below $2.40. The idea has been floating around that the federal gas tax ought to be removed for the summer to help out the consumer, since gas prices have risen to such heights. John McCain jumped on board, saying it was a great idea. Hillary Clinton said we should do it and we should take money from Big Oil to pay for it. Obama said that we shouldn’t do it - we’re not going to be able to solve our energy problems until we understand the pricing behind them and that we’re going to have to make some sacrifices.

McCain is obviously on board with what is mainstream Republican philosophy - “economy first, environment second (or third, or fourth, or seventy-eighth)”. Hillary does what she does very well - say what she thinks people want to hear (and picking an easy target in Big Oil). Obama actually treated the American people as adults, making the assumption that we understand that there is a problem and there is not going to be an easy fix and short term relief will only end up causing pain in the future.

A politician that actually says what he thinks? And that cares about finding solutions to our environmental problems? Sign me up please. He’s got my vote in the May primary.

Over the weekend, Aurora attended a birthday party for one of her friends (the first of 3 parties over 3 consecutive Saturdays). What was neat was that it was located at a place called The Scrap Exchange in downtown Durham. Their goal is to promote environmental awareness through creative reuse of what would normally be considered junk. Their party room had big barrels full of various pieces of scrap - foam shapes, empty CD cases, loose pieces of wrapping paper, small corks, and a bunch of other things that I didn’t recognize from coming from something specific.

The kids were encouraged to wander aimlessly and just pick out scrap to use to make an art project in conjunction with scissors and tape (no glue, bad for the environment). The kids (and the adults) had a blast. Joy even found a scrap piece of gray tile that she may be able to use for a backdrop for photographing her jewelry and it only cost her a quarter.

This place is a great to emphasize the fact that a lot of things that we throw away could probably be reused in a creative way.

From an article on Planet Green, they talk about the reasons not to top off, including:

• Evaporation from spillage leads to bad ozone days
• You end up paying for gasoline that just automatically gets fed back into the pump (which is bad for the pump as well as your wallet)
• Gas tanks need wiggle room for expansion of the gas - if you overfill, you could mess up your fuel pump.

So break the habit and when the pump clicks, that’s your sign to hang ‘er up.

Joy and I signed up for the mobile farmer’s market available through Duke. You get to choose between 7 local farms, each of which offers a different selection of food (one farm offers fresh cut flowers instead of food). We signed up for Vollmer Farms, who is mostly organic, but not completely. John Vollmer was a former tobacco farmer who needed to find a way to convert the farm to a different product in order to survive. He’s been slowly changing most of his fields to organic production methods and I expect that in a few years, he’ll be completely 100% organic.

The way the process works is that we pay up front (in this case, $400 for 20 weeks) and every Tuesday, we get a box of produce that we pick up at the Duke Gardens, which makes it very convenient. The next Tuesday, we exchange the empty box for a new box and so on. Every Saturday, we get an e-mail telling us what will be in the upcoming box, which gives us a chance to meal plan and prep before our Sunday grocery run. In this last box, we got:

• 8 oz Baby Specialty Lettuce Mix ($4.50)
• 1 lb Strawberries ($5.00)
• 1 bunch Radishes ($1.50)
• 1.5 lbs Sunburst Tomatoes ($5.25)
• 2 lbs Turnip Greens ($5.00)

This allows us to eat more locally, which helps the environment and probably also our health. The hardest part is adjusting to thinking about

“what can I fix that will use what we’re getting?”
vs.
“what do I need to buy so I can fix what I want to eat?”

But it has opened up the chance to try some new things (I had never tried collard greens before last week). I definitely think it is a great thing. You may not have a mobile market near you, but check and see if you have a farmer’s market. It is definitely worth the effort.

…or offers you 20 ways that your home can save the earth, anyway. Sunday night they had an hour long show illustrating 20 ways to green your home. To be fair, it was about 50% product placement but a lot of the products were actually interesting, if somewhat expensive at times. The neat stuff:

(1) Plug into the hottest appliances

A dishwasher that automatically senses what dishes you have in the washer and uses just enough water and heat to clean. Also highlighted a monthly energy dashboard for your house that is accessible from the internet, so you can see what your energy usage patterns are, even while you’re not in the house. And the one I’d really like - a built in, hermetically sealed food composter.

(5) Recycle with style

A reminder of the reuse portion of the reduce, reuse, recycle portion. Reupholstering old pieces of furniture can be incredibly stylish and keeps furniture from hitting the landfill.

(6) Planet friendly floors

They mentioned cork floors, which appeal to me as I don’t walk well in bare feet on regular hardwood floors, but cork has give to it for a softer experience and cork is environmentally great because it is harvested from the tree every 9 years rather cutting the tree down. Marmoleum, which is a brand name linoleum was shown. Linoleum is made from all natural products and the design possibilities are much better than what you may remember from your childhood. And finally, they mentioned carpet tiles (available from lots of different eco-friendly materials) - since tiles are placed in a pattern, if something happens to one, you can just remove the tile to clean it, rather than having to remove the whole carpet, which is definitely more earth friendly.

(13) Go with the low flow

Besides the standard low flow showerheads and faucets, they showed off a toilet that has two separate buttons - 1 for #1, 1 for #2 - that way, the toilet uses only as much water as is needed.

(17) Be green when you clean

Lots of expensive washer and dryers that I can’t afford, but they did mention dryer balls that are supposed to help your wet clothes separate, allowing your dryer to be more efficient and use less heat. Should also allow you to stop using dryer sheets and fabric softener. For $20, that seems like it would pay for itself before long.

(20) Keep nature natural

Planters made of corn husks that are naturally biodegrable - you plant them with your plant, and they become part of the soil. Neat. They also had a stylish rug made from recycled plastic bottles and furniture made from “polywood“, a substance made from recycled milk jugs. Definitely neat stuff and something to consider when we move and need deck furniture.

If you can catch the show on repeat on HGTV, I think it is worth a look see - at 45 mins if you can Tivo it, I think it is worth the time.

Earth Day is almost upon us and so I’ve been thinking about what I can do for Earth Day and what might be good for someone else interested in saving the environment but without a lot of time or money to give right now. So without further delay:

1) Eat Locally (even if only a little)

You don’t even have to change your eating patterns much this time of year to try and eat locally. Most areas will have a farmer’s market, or if you’re rural, an actual farm, where you could buy some local vegetables. It might cost you 2 or 3 extra dollars a week, but you’ll get fresh food which tastes better and will reduce the amount of gas spent transporting food around.

2) Donate $5 to an interesting eco-charity.

The hardest part of donating to charities for me is finding one that catches my eye and does something specific and meaningful. A lot of charities are so broad, I feel like my money is going into a big sea where I’ll have no idea what it was used for. But for example, you could donate to RelightNY, which “[supplies] low-income housing units with energy-saving CFL bulbs, both helping families to save on utility costs and fighting global warming.” Started by a 16 year old, this is the kind of effort where you know where your money goes, and it could have a very real, practical effect on climate change. Find a charity that is useful and donate $5. A little money - real effect.

3) Work from home

Not viable for everyone, obviously, but those with flexible employers can save some gas by telecommuting and getting some work done from home. If you’ve never worked from home before, perhaps you’ll find it works out well, and you can shift to a day a week from home, giving you regular savings in gas bills (with gas prices skyrocketing, that’s nothing to sneeze at) and helping the environment out a little.

4) Drive a little slower

If you do have to drive in to work, why not try going a little slower? I’m not saying become one of those hypermiler folks who are drafting behind trucks and never going faster than 55. But if you’re anything like me, you’re living in suburbia and don’t have a lot of access to public transportation and it is near impossible time wise to bike or walk anywhere. So, you’re driving around a lot and probably driving 10 miles over the speed limit, which seems to be the norm. So, for Earth Day, commit to a week or so of driving a little slower - maybe 5 mph less than what you’d normally drive. I started doing that and found that my commute time didn’t really change, which seemed counterintuitive to me, but was proven true over and over again. If you’re driving on a highway, those 5 mph can make a substantial difference in your gas mileage.

5) Think in terms of capitalism

As mentioned above, charities are a good deal if you find the right one for you, but I also firmly believe a lot of good can be done by convincing companies that there is a huge market out there for changing the way they work to be more eco-friendly. If there is a profit to be had in it, they’ll make the change. In that line of thinking, my Earth Day contribution will be signing up for NC Green Power. Technically a non-profit, those of us in NC can donate in $4 blocks through our power bill. In their words:

The goal of NC GreenPower is to supplement the state’s existing power supply with more green energy – electricity generated from renewable resources like the sun, wind and organic matter. The program accepts financial contributions from North Carolina citizens and businesses to help offset the cost to produce green energy.

While my $4 “adds one block of 100 kilowatt-hours of green energy to North Carolina’s power supply”, that’s not a tremendous amount. The more important thing, in my opinion, is to make sure the power companies realize that there are lots of people out there who are willing to pay more if their power is green power. Maybe if enough people are on board, power companies will think twice about building another coal burning plant.