One Geek, One Earth

Fuqua has hired a new company called Meriwether Godsey to be the food service provider for our in-house dining center. From the HR e-mail:

Meriwether currently serves 40 locations and their “foodie-ness” is shown by their signature recipes, use of their restaurants as labs, their chef management and their balanced menus.

Their cuisine emphasizes local, natural and organic foods while supporting the goals of responsible and conscious consumerism.They stress recycling,composting, use of biodiesel when possible and they are constantly striving for waste reduction. Their goal is to use sensible, eco-friendly strategies that balance environmental responsibility with each client’s needs and preferences.

Meriwether Godsey is committed to offering a balance of fresh, popular, nutritious, variety-filled cuisine, served with “restaurant-style” flair. Their menus, created “from scratch,” are based on input solicited from clients on an ongoing basis.

This is good stuff because it shows that Fuqua is working hard to try and make sure that all elements of the school fit the conservationist/environmental attitude that we hope/want our students have. And in the rare times I don’t bring my own lunch, I’ll have solid choices to choose from. Excellent.

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part III: Forest

The final portion of Omnivore’s Dilemma has Pollan going out and hunting a wild pig and gathering wild mushrooms to be able to create a complete meal that he gathered completely on his own. He diverges some at the beginning, as he goes into the idea of vegetarianism for a bit. He quotes famous animal rights activist Peter Singer, who said “No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared cause suffering.” So he takes up vegetarianism for a while but comes to the conclusion that eating meat is ok, as long as the animal involved was either wild or humanely raised.

And so he goes out into the wilds of California and hunts a wild pig, with the help of an experienced hunter. He feels the thrill of the hunt, which is something he really wasn’t expecting to experience. He later feels guilty about the killing (and about feeling so excited during the kill) but eventually comes to terms with it.

He then has an entire section devoted to gathering wild mushrooms with hobbyist gatherers who all have their own personal secret locations to gather and rarely share them with the outside world.

He then makes his meal and serves it to everyone that helped him do the foraging and gathering and proclaims it as the perfect meal for him, in that while it might not have been the “perfect” meal as a cook would envision it, it had a unique greatness to him personally since he was so in touch with all the elements involved.  He does conclude that this meal, like the McDonald’s meal at the end of Part I, was just not sustainable in modern times. Just like you should only be having fast food on rare occasions, so the meal completely gathered by its cook is going to be a very rare event.  I found this section of the book to be the least interesting, mostly because it was the most personal - it was Pollan getting deeply in touch with basic hunting/gathering instincts and I just didn’t find it as interesting as the first two sections.

On a meta note, I messed up reviewing this book in 3 sections. It’s a complex,interesting book with a lot of themes that weave back and forth throughout. I thought by dividing it, I could do it better justice, but instead, I still couldn’t do it justice and I stretched this out to a painful ordeal both for you and for me. I’m 10th on the library waitlist for his next book, In Defense of Food, which I need to read so I can do this food challenge I have planned. But, I think I will work on making a shorter, more compressed review of that, and in the meantime, work on getting back to some interesting posts about the world of green. Between the prepping of the house for sale and getting my wife’s jewelry website running, blogging has seemed more like work that is getting in the way of other things that needed to be done, and I don’t want it to be that way. So back to shorter, more fun posts in the near future.

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part II: Grass

Part II actually takes Pollan down two separate paths for two different meals. First is discovering what Big Organic is all about, and then second is a trip to a small scale completely sustainable farm (whose owner refers to himself as a “grass farmer”).

Pollan thinks about shopping in places like Whole Foods is the equivalent of “supermarket pastoral” - a quality story attached to each piece of meat and vegetable to allow us to create a picture in our mind of how that free-range chicken lived a wonderful life before being brought to our plate. But in reality, the way Big Organic works is not tremendously different from regular industrial farms. The major difference is that they don’t use pesticides. But chickens, for example, are kept in the exact same condition as industrial farms, except that the farmers can’t use antibiotics, making the whole system even less stable. “Free range” means they have a door open to a small yard that the chickens never go out into (and the owners, afraid of chickens getting sick, pray that they never use).

Pollan goes on to explore the history of the organic movement, straight from its roots in hippiedom. Now organic foods gotten at the supermarket are mostly produced by two extremely large companies (Cascadian Farm and Earthbound Farms) or are subbrands of the industrial food system.  Pollan asks the question, “Is Organic better?” and concludes you have to ask the question, “Better for what?” If you’re asking about our health, the answer is “probably, but not necessarily”. The lack of pesticides can’t be a bad thing, but there have been no real tests to prove that the small doses of pesticides that we intake with non-organics is affecting us in any way. If you’re asking about the environment, the lack of pesticides is a good thing…but there’s a large carbon footprint involved with all the fuel used to transport this organic food across the globe. In short, the industrial organic movement, by its very nature, is a contradiction in terms.

Pollan then goes to Polyface Farms, in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Polyface is run by Joel Salatin. Salatin is a fanatic. Not that is a bad thing in this case. But he lives and breathes the idea of a sustainable farm. He considers himself a grass farmer, by which he means that his primary goal is to make sure the grass at his farm is growing well - everything else flows from that. His cows are moved from pasture to pasture daily, getting only one chance to eat a particular set of grass a day. His chickens follow the cows two days later, eating grass destroying grubs and fertilizing the grass with their manure. The farm is also completely transparent - you can come by and watch your chickens being slaughtered - that allows you to know how your chickens were raised. He also only sells locally. Like I said, he lives it and breathes the environment where a lot of people just talk it.

This part of the book was the most fascinating to me, by far. I can’t do the section on Polyface Farms justice, honestly. It made me want to drive to Virginia to pick up some chicken and beef from the farm. It’s a complex, interesting farm and I highly recommend picking up the book, if for no other reason to read this section.

Next: Part III - The Forest

As a former Duke student and Cameron crazy and now current Duke employee, I only have one word for this: awesome.

One of the things I’m learning as I start to immerse myself in the green news world is that there are a lot of things that would seem to have an obvious green benefit, but when you look closer, it isn’t such an obvious decision. I had been reading about bamboo and how it was a trendy option for flooring and furniture because it grows so quickly, making it an excellent renewable resource. But then I did some reading at Gristmill and Treehugger and it turns out the choice isn’t that easy. Oftentimes the people harvesting the bamboo are tearing down natural forests to plant bamboo and are using pesticides as part of the growing process. So what seemed like an obviously green choice suddenly requires a lot more thought.

In my case, Joy and I have been deciding what to do about our drinking water situation. Joy drinks a lot of bottled water and I’m planning to move away from drinking a lot of Kool-aid (I really don’t need all that sugar). It seemed like the easy decision would be to get a Brita pitcher. But the decision was complicated by the fact that we’re in a drought. Does the environmental savings from not buying all these bottles of water (that are now being recycled) outweigh the fact that we’ll be using more local water, which is in short supply these days? What I originally thought was going to be an easy decision turned out to be a little more complex. We thought about it for a little bit and decided that the amount of water saved from drinking bottled water was not a particularly high percentage of our water usage, so it was best to go with the Brita pitcher and stop buying the bottled water.

So no easy choices. I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised by that.

Part of changing my habits is also working on changing the family’s habits. My wife is, thankfully, cheerfully on board and willing to help in whatever fashion she can. My five year old daughter (actually, she doesn’t turn 5 until Groundhog Day, but I feel ok fudging the numbers here), on the other hand is a bit of a harder sell. Not because she’s not willing, mind you. Mostly because it can be hard to explain to her why we should do certain things.

For example, she understands pretty well why we need to conserve water - if we use too much, then we’ll run out. But then she wants to apply that logic across the board.

“So, Daddy, if we waste electricity, then we’ll run out of power and I won’t be able to play my computer, right?”

Then I explain that electricity, for the most part, comes from coal burning plants which put pollution in the air, which makes it hard for us to breathe. And she generally gets that. And she understands that throwing stuff away means it gets put in a big pile which keeps growing bigger (“Do the garbage men take the garbage to the big pile? Woowwww. . .”). But even when she understands, she’s 5. And that means she easily forgets because she’s so busy. So she’ll be in the shower and spending forever getting her hair wet. Or she’ll leave her room light on along with her music when she rushes to the living room to do something else. And that’s ok - I don’t expect her to be a tiny little environmentalist, especially when I’m at the beginning of the learning process myself. But I do hope she’s learning a little bit with me that will stick with her as she grows up.

So, what’s this blog about?

Imagine, if you will, a typical 30 something geek. Works at a techie job (web designer). Does pen paper gaming every weekend. Plays video games, especially RPGs with a good story. Reads science-fiction and fantasy novels. Takes part in a fake sports league - not just fantasy sports, mind you, but a whole league based on sports teams that don’t actually exist. Add in a fantastic wife and a 5 year old daughter. And there I am. Not really any different from most geeks out there. Living a fairly carefree life, not really thinking much about anything other than just making it to the next day.

Then a few months ago, I was reading financial blogs in order to get my financial house in shape. I wasn’t in a lot of debt, but it felt like I had been in debt forever. The Simple Dollar had just finished reviewing Your Money or Your Life and I decided to rent a copy from the library (go, cheap books, go). As I worked my way through it, one theme kept popping back up over and over where I couldn’t avoid it.

Get yourself out of debt and create passive income so you won’t have to work anymore and you can pursue your dream, your cause.

Dream? Cause? I realized that I didn’t have a dream. If I were to win the lottery and not have to work another moment in my life, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. This left me really unsettled. How could I not have a dream? At first, I tried to convince myself that it was okay, nothing wrong with just living the way I was living. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that while I loved my family dearly (and still do), I needed something to help give my life as an individual person meaning. So why not give myself a cause and work on devoting myself to it? And so here we are.

So why environmentalism?

I could’ve just pulled it out of a hat, in some respects. It wasn’t the specific cause as much as it was the devotion to something real that mattered to me. That said, there were quite a few reasons why I picked environmentalism over my other options.

1. It was already on my radar. Going green had been one of those causes I had always been peripherally aware of and thought, “I really do something for that cause” and then I would promptly forget about it and go on with my life.
2. Fits in with my job. I work at the Fuqua School of Business, which is Duke University’s business graduate school. The school is going through a lot of changes, one of which is trying to become better at creating “leaders of consequence” - business leaders who care about the big global issues, of which environmentalism and corporate sustainability is a big one. So educating myself about environmentalism at the same time my business does works out well.
3. Trendy. Kind of a silly point, I know. Noone likes a bandwagon hopper. But the advantage of becoming eco-friendly as the issue starts to reach critical mass is that it will be easier for me to find information about eco-friendy things I can do and eco-friendly products to replace what I’m using now.
4. Frugal. My other major life task at the moment is to become frugal and perhaps learn how to live a simpler life. Unlike some causes, environmentalism generally fits hand in hand with frugality; saving energy saves money, saving gas saves money, etc.
5. Cooking. One of my new hobbies is learning how to cook. I think I would like to learn how to garden and grow some of my own food.
6. Self contained. Perhaps most importantly for me at this point in my life, learning how to be eco-friendly can be relatively self contained. If I don’t want to go out to rallies and fund raisers and I don’t want to try and convince everyone I know to convert to the cause, I don’t have to. This isn’t to say that I won’t ever reach that point. But right now, I can go on an internal journey of change and work on learning on how to convert myself before I convert others.

What’s Probably Not Going to Ever Happen

I’m not terribly likely to become a hippie and move into the upper mountains where the air is thin, growing the hemp for my own clothes and sitting on the front porch meditating about bigger issues. I’m a geek, hence the title of the blog. I love my computer games. I love a well constructed movie of any genre. Heck, I even like the occasional bit of reality TV (Amazing Race, I’m looking at you). I don’t have any urge to give up these pursuits and I don’t think it is necessary. So while the majority of posts will obviously be about becoming eco-friendly, they will be from the geek’s perspective. And I might slip a post in here and there about poker or this fantastic new game I just played. It’s a long journey to where I want to go, after all. And hopefully, Faithful Reader, you’ll enjoy reading about my journey as much as I’m expecting to enjoy living it.