One Geek, One Earth

So, per one of my commenters (thanks, Drake!), I took a look at Wired’s article detailing out 10 ideas that are heresies in the current environmental movement that we should all be taking a look anyway. So, always the slave to the Man telling me what to do (even when he’s telling me what to do about what not to do), I read the article. My brief thoughts on each of the 10:

1. Live in Cities: Urban Living Is Kinder to the Planet Than the Suburban Lifestyle

This actually doesn’t surprise me at all - the suburban lifestyle requires a lot of automobile driving, a lot of factors to bring in food in. It is just less efficient. But don’t confuse “rural” with suburban. I think rural life is probably even better, but it just isn’t efficient enough for the size of our population.

2. A/C Is OK: Air-Conditioning Actually Emits Less C0₂ Than Heating

Ummm, ok? I’m not sure what the point of this was. We should all move to Arizona? It may take more energy to run the heat, but water usage in the hot areas has its own environmental concern.

3. Organics Are Not the Answer: Surprise! Conventional Agriculture Can Be Easier on the Planet

2 valid points here: Eating less meat is more environmentally friendly and eating local is better than eating Big Organics. But using these two points to extrapolate to the Abandon Organics In Favor of Conventional Agriculture seems silly.

4. Farm the Forests: Old-Growth Forests Can Actually Contribute to Global Warming

I’ve got no problem with this one - manage the forests as appropriate. You don’t have to deforest them, just prune them. And those forests which are monuments of nature, like the Sequoias? Leave those be.

5. China Is the Solution: The People’s Republic Leads the Way in Alternative-Energy Hardware

Another one that is not particularly shocking. China has the most people in the world and so they have, for a variety of reasons, some of the biggest reasons to be creating green energy solutions. The question is: Will China export all these solutions only and turn China into freeways and cars? If so, the advantage of all this green technology coming out of China would be nullified by the CO2 from a billion people hitting the highway.

6. Accept Genetic Engineering: Superefficient Frankencrops Could Put a Real Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The Law of Unintended Consequences bother me here. We don’t really understand food - how it affects us and deciding that we can make super crops to solve our problems seems like it might end up backfiring on us in the future.

7. Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work: Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory

This one is just plain silly. I don’t know whether carbon credits are a fantastic idea or not, but I do know that it is way too early in the process to have any idea whether the system is working. Yeah, a bunch of celebrities abuse the idea to make themselves feel better, but it doesn’t mean it can’t work. We have a professor who is joint at Fuqua and the Nicholas School of the Environment and his focus is going to be on emerging carbon markets. We’re just getting started, folks.

8. Embrace Nuclear Power: Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy

I’ve got no real problems with nuclear power. I don’t want to abandon pouring lots of new resources into solar, wind, geothermal, and other extremely clean power sources, but it doesn’t hurt to look at nuclear power to replace some coal fired power plants. Nuclear’s biggest concern is potential terrorist attacks - nuclear plants have a much bigger target on them. Also, random thought: why don’t we just launch spent nuclear waste and material into the sun every so often? Seriously, what are the factors that keep that from happening?

9. Used Cars — Not Hybrids:Don’t Buy That New Prius! Test-Drive a Used Car Instead

One of the comments on this article pointed to a Sierra Club article that exposed a lot of the flaws in the information that the Wired article uses to make this comparison. And yes, a used car will oftentimes get almost as good mileage as a Hybrid…but it is also putting out a lot more pollution. A Hybrid gives you the benefit of using less gas and of putting out less emissions both.

10. Prepare for the Worst: Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

This has some points - using technology to help us adapt to the changes that are surely coming is a good idea. It needs to be in conjunction with doing what we can to slow things down as well though. We can’t just expect technology to be our Deus Ex Machina. Well, maybe Wired does, after all, that is their purview.

Summary:

All in all, most of these short little pieces were lazy writing with very few solid points. Mostly, overall, the articles fail to take the complexity of the issues in hand. “Pastured cows take more to produce the same amount of meat and produce more methane, therefore corn fed cows are the correct solution!” I just felt that it was overall way too focused on climate change, which is obviously the elephant in the room - that doesn’t mean that we should be ignoring all other environmental issues on the way to correcting our poor carbon emitting habits.

What do you folks think? Is climate change big enough to push other issues aside?

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.

So far, so good. We’ve not had any real issues sticking to the plan. And after a week, we’ve pretty much given up on shopping at Whole Foods. They are well out of our way, their store is insanely crowded and narrow and about the only thing that we get there that we can’t easily get anywhere is the grass fed beef (and Gorilla Munch cereal). The local farms don’t offer the beef yet and we’ve not quite made the transition to going completely seasonal. It’s going to take us some time to get adjusted meal plan wise. So we’ve moved to Harris Teeter, where they are offering milk and eggs from local farms, which is about all we need for food that we don’t get from the farmer’s market and our CSA.

Joy and I have also been working on making sure we both get at least 8 hours sleep a night, and so this week, I think I’ve felt the best that I have in a while. Which is awesome. We’re traveling to my mom’s house this weekend, so we’ll be off the plan slightly for the weekend - that doesn’t mean we’re going to go crazy on fast food, but I doubt my mom has a huge investment in non-processed foods, so we’ll adapt and come back to the plan after Memorial Day.

Enjoy the long weekend, all.

When we went to Whole Foods to shop, my daughter surprised me by saying she wanted the Gorilla Munch cereal on the lower shelf. She normally only eats Princess themed cereal. Turns out Joy’s dad eats the cereal because it is gluten free and Aurora had tried some at his place and loved it. Made by EnviroKidz, the cereal:

• is certified organic
• comes in a box that is made from 100% recycled paperboard
• Has fun gorilla facts and games on the back of the box
• donates 1% of all sales to endangered species, habitat conservation, and environmental education for kids

So Aurora gets a cereal that she likes and is good for her and we get to subtly do something for the environment. Excellent. Check out their website at www.envirokidz.com.

As we started the challenge, Joy and I decided that for the first month, we were going to go off budget - just buy what we needed/wanted to buy (without going crazy) and use that month as baseline for what our budget would ideally be assuming that money was not a limiting factor.

We shifted to Whole Foods - I’m not sure we’ll stick with that because they’re crazy expensive, but we’re going to give it a shot. We also went to the Durham Farmer’s market - they’re now open on Wednesday afternoons in addition to Saturday mornings, and that works out really well. We got fresh chicken and pork, all raised with care and love locally and some fresh vegetables - they had pak choi, which I wasn’t expecting. Fantastic selection. Check out the following link to see where the farmer’s market near you is:

http://www.localharvest.org/

But after all was said and done, our weekly food budget was increased by 150%. “Pay more, eat less.”

I’ve found that my biggest problem is condiments and cooking supplies - the Worcester sauce we had on hand was full of all sorts of processed ingredients and we haven’t found a salad dressing we’re completely happy with yet. Part of that may be a continuing adjustment to foods that are less sweet in general due to the lack of high fructose corn syrup.

It is probably too early to say how effective this has been, but I have notice my energy level in the evenings has been better. Something to keep an eye on for sure.

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.

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.

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