One Geek, One Earth

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part I: Corn

Pollan’s book, is at its core, about the disconnect that the modern human being experiences from the food they eat. Or more specifically, the disconnect about where that food comes from. The title of the book (as he explains in the introduction) comes from the idea that herbivores mostly have it easy. The koala bear, he says, knows that if the green thing they’re eating has the characteristics of eucalyptus, in the mouth it goes. But the omnivore has a much broader array of choices, which makes it harder for the omnivore to determine what is good to eat (is this poisonous? Did I feel good after eating this last time?). And in modern Western society, the industry that has sprung up around food has made it extremely hard to determine what foods, exactly, went into whatever you are eating out of that package.

The book is broken down into 3 sections, where he attempts to follow the 3 major food chains that make up our choices - industrial, organic, and alternative.

Part I: Corn

This is both an amazing and scary section all at once. He moves through the history of corn as a plant and follows it from the beginnings in a farm to a grain elevator, a feedlot, a processing plant. and eventually a meal. What is amazing is how corn has basically taken over agriculture as we know it and due to a variety of factors (government subsidies, processing, hybrid corn’s ability to create high yield) we have a huge corn surplus in America. And since the surplus has to go somewhere, it does - low quality “commodity corn” goes to feeding cattle (which normally are grass fed) and it goes to processing, where it gets turned into hundreds of different things that we ingest in pretty every food that comes from the supermarket that isn’t in the produce aisle.

High fructose corn syrup is in soda (the primary ingredient, in fact) and hundreds to thousands of other products (check out a huge list of brand name products with HFCS in it). Dextrose, lecithin, corn starch and dozens of other ingredients that are regularly listed on labels - in fact, he says the larger the ingredient list the more it will be made of corn byproducts. At the end of the chapter, after he and his family ate a meal from McDonald’s, he takes a duplicate meal to a lab with a mass spectrometer. It turns out that corn’s greatest strength - it’s ability to make C-4 carbon compounds - also allows it to be easily tracked via spectrometer. And as it turns out, the meal from McDonald’s is mostly corn.

• Soda (100%),
• Milk shake (78%),
• Salad dressing (65%),
• “Chicken” nuggets (56%)
• Cheeseburger (52%),
• French fries (23%).

As he puts it, we have become “corn’s koala” - the creature that subsists solely on corn in one form or another. It is a really fascinating chapter and it makes me really wonder how, when huge industries and everything we eat revolves around corn, how we can manage to try and escape from it.

Part II: Grass coming soon.

Air Powered Cars (via Yahoo)

The company that is producing cars running on compressed air is going to bring them to the U.S.. Of course, to give them a range useful enough to work in the U.S., they’re adding a small gasoline engine to heat the air and allow the car to go up to 95mph. It takes an hour to fill the compressed tank, but if you can do that in your home at night, it doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal.

Seems like green technologies are starting to gain some ground. I could see myself driving one of these cars, although I wish they would change the look a little…

Every Tuesday on the way to pick up my daughter from her mémère’s house, I pass by this odd shaped, basically round house that has an open house sign on it. I wasn’t even positive it was a house at first. Now that our house is on the market, I thought it might be a good opportunity to go take a look at the house and see what was up. Turns out that it is a house designed on green principles.

The Ark

A house that the creator refers to as The Ark because “you’ll never have to leave home again”. It has living quarters on the upper two floors and a separate private office on the bottom floor with its own entrance and driveway. The windows are facing the sun to create passive solar heating and they have active solar heating that heats hot water, which then runs between floors keeping the house warmer. The foundation is built for easy extensibility without spreading out and the builder buys lots where the view is fantastic and unlikely to change.

I don’t think I’d be able to live in this particular house - while I like a lot of the design of the house, the stairs tended to be at odd angles and with my various diseases, in the future I might have a lot of trouble climbing stairs. As it turns out, at $345K, the house is definitely out of our price range, but it was nice to look at and gives me some ideas for features that I might want to add or look for in a house.

For those interested, the house has its own website: http://www.1309martinlutherkingparkway.com/ 

Click the image for the larger version.

For the most part, I don’t mind if large companies have smaller brands that are organic (I’m not buying organic out of protest), but it does leave open the question of how organic these small companies actually are. I will say that Muir Glen’s canned tomatoes are fantastic and come highly recommended by Cook’s Illustrated.

I’m almost done with the “prepping the house for sale” portion of the program, which leads directly into the “keeping the house clean” portion, which is a pain but nowhere near as time intensive. So I’m about ready to have time again to think seriously about what the next step in my environmental growth should be.

I’ve done most (if not all) of the easy to do stuff that I can afford to do at this point in my life (i.e. low on disposable income). And moving eliminates some options, at least for a while. I can make sure that when I look for a new house, it is as environmentally friendly as possible (or has the potential to be environmentally friendly with some work), but having to keep this house exactly as it is until sold slows me down. And I’m not really interested (right now) in joining a cause or volunteering time to a group - my time is so limited these days, I need to leave it as open as possible. I would hate to volunteer for something and then having to drop out, disappointing everyone involved.

So, my next step needs to be something that involves making a relatively major change in my personal life habits. And I’m going to start with the one that interests me most right now: Food.

Here’s my plan:

1. Read and review The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Both of these books have been in the news a lot. The first book talks about where food comes from and the second talks about what food you should be eating.
2. Take the suggestions from In Defense of Food (they boil down to about 8 specific pieces of advice, which I’ll talk about in the review) and try to apply all of them to my life.
3. Write regular updates exploring how well I’m doing following the advice and how much it is affecting my health, my finances, and my environmental output.
4. ????
5. Profit!

This plan dovetails well with my intent to improve as a cook. I’m also trying to make my way through (when I have a spare moment) Essentials of Cooking by James Peterson, which is a book of cooking techniques that is designed to teach you basics of cooking and free you from needing recipes. Practicing this sort of cooking flexibility is likely to be necessary for this plan (I’m likely to end up getting a lot of random fruits and vegetables to cook) but it should also be fun. It also is a plan that should in theory make me healthier, which is bound to provide benefits in lots of subtle ways.

Expect my review of at least one of the books early next week, the other one shortly thereafter, and a detailed plan of what I’m going to have to do to make this work sometime shortly after that. I still plan to blog about other green topics as well, mind you. But this food plan will be the main focus of my eco-life for a while.

Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth’s Last Dinosaur

While you drift in sleep, turtles ride the curve of the deep, seeking their inspiration from the sky. From tranquil tropic bays or nightmare maelstroms hissing foam, they come unseen to share our air. Each sharp exhalation affirms, “Life yet endures.” Each inhaled gasp vows, “Life will continue.” With each breath they declare to the stars and wild silence. By night and by light, sea turtles glide always, their parallel universe strangely alien, yet intertwining with ours.

Those words are the second paragraph of the book and they illustrate so well the power of this book- it is, at times, as much as poetry as science, as much stories as it is facts.

This book is about the sea turtle and all its varieties. A warm blooded reptile, it is basically a living dinosaur.

The book itself is divided into three sections:

• Part I: Atlantic
• Part II: Between Oceans
• Part III: Pacific

In each section, he talks about the different types of sea turtles that make their way through that part of the world, from the Green Turtles to the Loggerheads to the massive Leatherbacks. What made this book so fascinating for me were two elements.

First, the sea turtle itself is just a fascinating creature - a warm blooded reptile, as the subtitle to the book says, the world’s last living dinosaur, weighing up to a ton. Imagine a turtle that weighs half as much as your car. An incredible navigator, a Leatherback sea turtle can unerringly cross the Atlantic Ocean, returning to the exact place it was born 30 years ago to lay its eggs. I get lost pulling out of my own driveway. But as the book points out, they’re in serious danger of extinction due to numerous reasons - fishing nets, people eating turtle eggs, light pollution causing the mother turtles to avoid the beaches they need (and hatchling to get confused as to where they are going). And you can tell that Dr. Safina really cares about the turtles.

Which makes the second compelling factor in the book all that more amazing: he tells the stories of all the people involved in or related to the life of a sea turtle, including the shrimpers whose nets end up catching turtles; the scientists diving to the incredible depths of the ocean with the turtles; the poachers who gather eggs in Mexico because the eggs are a delicacy (and rumored to be an aphrodisiac!); the harpooners hunting swordfish in Nova Scotia who pass by the Leatherback turtles swimming in the cold Canadian waters. He tells all of their stories (and more) and he does so without prejudice or bias - he just tells the story. Even if you don’t agree with some of the people that he interacts with, you at least come to an understanding of WHY they do what they do. And that understanding of all the factors allows him to paint the true and complete story of the sea turtles.

It also doesn’t hurt that he knows the science and can give it to the reader in an easily understandable form and intersperse the science with almost poetic descriptions of scenery and people. For example, talking about New Guinea:

Some of the local people here have already felt insulted that the world would look here and see the needs of turtles more than of the people themselves. Fewer than half have been to school; they want education for their children. They want access to markets. They want what other people have. They live in a beautiful place with more leisure and more priceless waterfront than they could ever use. But there have always been unquenched desires in paradise. The human heart will cast itself out of Eden every time, because it has needs that heaven never addresses.

I highly recommend this book. It is a compelling read about an important environmental topic. Run, don’t walk, to your local library and check out a copy.