The Story of Stuff

Annie Leonard on Colbert Report. Is there anyone this side of Bill Moyers who has more interesting, out-of-the-box guests, or who gives more exposure to this kind of thinking, than Stephen Colbert?

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Annie Leonard
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

On the same subject, go back to the beginning of the show and watch the piece about Pringles. Classic stuff-ism!

And of course don't forget Annie's web-film, the Story of Stuff. It's permanently linked over there on the left. Annie is an American hero!

Drastic times call for hopeful measures

Thomas Friedman in the Times brings up a similar point to the one in the Alternet article I linked to the other day: that the current economic crisis shows that the economic-growth model of the last 50 years has run its course. Money quote:

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

The piece points out that economic growth based on the exploitation of our natural resources isn't really wealth at all, but an elaborate Ponzi scheme, the consequences of which we pass on to our children.

“Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we’re living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets,” argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”

The solution is sustainability, on the macro level:

For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

This of course is what this blog and other sustainability and frugality blogs have been advocating all along: living within our means, taking out only as much as we need, not wasting, recycling and reusing as much as possible. Unfortunately, the mechanisms of society as a whole are built to use exploitative and non-sustainable means and technologies. Changing that will be our biggest challenge.

Reconstructing Mishloah Manot

This posting on the Jew and the Carrot (the link is broken, but maybe they'll fix it later) led me to thinking about sustainable, eco-friendly, thrifty mishloah manot. For those who don’t know, mishloah manot is the custom of sending gifts of food to others on Purim – it is actually one of the four mitzvot that everyone is supposed to observe on Purim. As with every mitzvah, it’s possible to do it in a very over-the-top and expensive way; in a stam, fulfilling-the-ritual-obligation-but-not-very-attentive way; or in a way that fulfills the mitzvah in new and thoughtful ways – as an expression of our values and commitments.

Just jotting down some notes on issues that could be addressed in this manner, I note healthful, local, fair trade, low carbon and low packaging. Traditionally one is to give mishloah manot from at least two different food groups, which means giving the recipient the opportunity to make two different brakhot. So in a reconstructed practice, we could say that one should include in one’s package at least two different issues – two different ways to make a difference.

It’s still too early in the year to share locally grown produce, at least where I live. But dried fruit and nuts make a nice addition to any mishloah manot package, and they can be purchased in bulk from your local healthfood store. Supporting local, independently owned businesses is important too!

Also, make sure to include some fair trade chocolate. I’ve come to the realization (again) that much of what we get cheaply is gotten on the backs of someone else’s poorly paid labor. Plus, much fair trade is produced in ways that are more environmentally sustainable as well.

Making hamentaschen or other treats at home allows us to have control over the ingredients and therefore the healthfulness of the end product. Whole-grain hamentaschen, anyone?

Maybe making a donation to an organization working on climate change, and including cards in your basket saying, “In lieu of sweet treats, a donation has been made to such-and-such organization in your honor” would be educative as well as effective. I suppose one could buy carbon offsets as well, although I’m not convinced of their efficacy. How about postcards made out to your friends’ legislators, asking them to support clean energy?!

Buy baskets or coffee cups from the second-hand store for your packaging. Use newspaper instead of tissue paper for lining. Make ribbons from worn-out clothes or linens. Draw cards. Make stickers.

With a little thought and resourcefulness, our mishloah manot packages can represent what we care about, to those we care about. And of course, they’re fun and delicious, too!

Happy Purim!

The 11 best foods don't include corn

There's a new health blog on NYTimes.com, and the article today was "11 best foods you aren't eating." Swiss chard, sardines, pumpkin seeds. Nothing too surprising but it'll definitely make you happy there's a farmer's market/CSA near you.

Also, last night on BookTV I saw an interview with the fellow who directed "King Corn," a documentary recounting the adventures of two young men who rent an acre of farmland in Iowa, grow corn on it, and then follow that corn through its various processing possibilities, whether than be HFCS or fattening up feedlot cattle or whatever. It was like Michael Pollan on the screen, and in fact one of the experts extensively interviewed was...Michael Pollan. The film was on Independent Lens earlier in the year, I missed it but it is available through netflix, so now it's in my queue. Of course, I suppose you could buy it as well, I'm sure that would make the director happy! The website is attractive and has lots of good links, so go take a look.

And speaking of which, here's an interview with Pollan on Yale Environment360. Money quote:

The writer Wendell Berry was right a long time ago when he said the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It’s really about how we live. The thought that we can swap out the fuel we’re putting in our cars to ethanol, and swap out the electricity to nuclear and everything else can stay the same, I think, is really a pipe dream. We’re going to have to change, and the beginning of knowing how to change is learning how to provide for yourself a little bit more.

If Pollan added a touch more values language to his writing, he could become this generation's Wendell Berry.

Thinking it through

One of the benefits of doing this blog is that it makes me more conscious of the choices I make. Having to tell on myself means that I have to be more aware of when I'm too willing to let myself off the hook on that tenuous nexus between simple, sustainable, frugal, and green. So here are a couple of events from the last week that bore further reflection:

1 - Saturday morning (determined to take a week off from shul after the recent holiday) I was looking for something to do with the family so we decided to go fruit picking. I've already written about my inability to find berries at the farmers' markets so I thought I'd go direct to the source. We went to a place south of town and they weren't picking berries, they were picking cherries, and sour ones, that you put into pies. We thought, okay, and picked almost 10 pounds of them. $1.75/pund, much less than they would be at the store.

While we were there we were talking to a woman who was telling us what to do with them. She said, put them through a cherry pitter, freeze them with a little sugar and thaw them in time to wow your guests for Thanksgiving. We said, sounds good.

Now all we needed was a cherry pitter. In the best of all worlds we would have found one used or at a yard sale, but of course, as usual, the time you want to buy something is the time when you need it, and we called around a few of the second-hand stores and they didn't have what we needed. Williams-Sonoma only had a 1-at-a-time pitter, and that wouldn't work, so we ended up ordering one on-line. It cost $17. This now doubles the cost of the adventure, as well as the cost of the cherries.

While waiting for it to arrive, the cherries are starting to soften. We figure since we're going to cook them anyway it doesn't matter if they're soft, but we have them in the fridge in the hopes of preventing all-out rotting. Hopefully the pitter will arrive so that the adventure is just more expensive, rather than a complete flushing of the money. And we also have to convince ourselves that we're going to use our solid-gold cherry pitter more than this once, and that it's not going to end up at our yard sale, benefitting someone more forward thinking than we.

2 - I was in the store over the weekend and decided I would like some fish to have in the freezer. We haven't been having much fish lately and Pollan's book talked a lot about omega-3s. I made the mistake, once again, of not thinking it out ahead of time. I have been buying wild caught salmon lately - it's more expensive but I like it a lot better than the steroid-pumped, colorized pieces of protein that pass for salmon from the farm. But then, sometimes one gets tire of salmon altogether, so I thought I'd buy a white fish. So there I am at the counter, looking at the fish and comparing prices and whether they're wild- and farm-raised, and I ended up guessing, and buying wild-caught orange roughy. Why, you ask? Because it was on sale!

Problem 1 is that it's from New Zealand, so the food mile footprint is miles wide - 6000 miles, to be precise. Of course, one is not going to get "local fish" in the middle of Kansas, but still. To tell the truth, I was dazzled by the word "wild caught." As a rule, wild is better than farmed, because of all the damage fish farms can do to their environment - antibiotics especially. But on the other hand, wild can just as easily mean that they just throw the nets down there and pick up anything that moves...

...which appears to be the case with orange roughy. As soon as I got home, I did what I should have done before I left, and looked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch site. This is a wonderful resource which tells you a lot about what kind of seafood to buy, and why. There's also a wallet-sized print-out that you can bring to the store with you.

So I put "orange roughy" in the search engine and the answer is ... avoid! Darn! They are trawled ("wild caught" in this case is kind of a slogan; they're all wild caught), and also they take 20 years to reach sexual maturation so if you snag one there may not be another one for a long time. "Years of heavy fishing have decimated orange roughy populations."

I feel like I just got three lemons on a slot machine, but the truth is, if I had thought about it before I went I could have done the necessary research and bought the right kind. Let that be a lesson to me!

We solve a tricky problem

When we lived in Illinois we had curbside recycling of basically everything - glass, all kinds of plastic (except 3 & 5), mixed paper. When we moved to Wichita we were surprised at how backward the city is in this regard (now there's a sentence I could write 100 times). The garbage collection is franchised, which means that rather than having one company pick up for the whole neighborhood, each individual pays an individual company to come and pick up their trash. Supposedly we're the biggest city in the country that does it this way, and it has a bad effect on the streets, because if you've got 3 garbage trucks using a city street obviously there's going to be more need for street repair. (Which they don't really do, because it would actually involve taxes!)

But that's not what I'm talking about - what I'm talking about is recycling. There's one of these companies that offers curbside recycling, and they pick up aluminum, newspapers and white paper, and corrugated boxes. No glass, no mixed paper, no mixed plastic. It only costs an additional $3 per month so we did it, but it killed us to be throwing all this other stuff away.

We found a place that would take that glass, a privately owned scrapyard near downtown. We did that for a few months. (BTW, I spoke to the owner of another privately owned scrapyard of my acquaintance, and he said that glass recycling was complete nonsense, the reason they don't collect it is that there's no market for it because it's cheaper just to make it from scratch. Most companies that collect it, he said, do it for the customer service rather than for the reuse, and it mostly ends up in the dump anyway, where, in his opinion, it belongs. I have not researched his assertions further, but I do consider him a fairly authoritative source.)

Then recently I discovered that there is a not-for-profit recycling place in town, and they take everything - laundry detergent plastic bottles, strawberry containers, glass and mixed paper, the works! It reminds me of when we used to bring everything to a weekly recycling center in Philadelphia when we were in seminary there. I must say, I was excited to find it! This will become a monthly excursion on a Saturday morning for my family, as it teaches important values, particularly bal tashhit (not wasting).

While I'm on the subject, another place where Wichita seems to be behind is in the food revolution that has been unfolding for the past few years - CSAs especially. There does not appear to be a CSA in Wichita. There are a couple of farmers' markets, but I've been kind of disappointed. I should say parenthetically that I've been averse to going to the main one on Saturdays, and the selection may be better there, but the one on Wednesday, which is the better of the mid-week ones, has one (count 'em) veg farmer and no fruit available. No berries!

I'm not sure what to do. I don't really want to rely on Dillons for this kind of thing, because that's the corporate food structure and they bring it in from who knows where and that's why tomatoes end up with botulism or whatever they get. And the health food stores are too expensive. This is a typical values conflict because I may end up having to compromise my Shabbat observance for the sake of the sustainability and healthfulness of the farmers market. How this little drama will come out remains to be seen.

But let me say that the stuff the veg farmer has at the Wednesday market is primo! Today I came back with 2 small heads of broccoli ($3) (first of the season!) which I threw into fried rice to use up some leftover rice. Onion, garlic, mushrooms, FM broccoli, some tofu, rice with a little soy - yum!

And we have found a wonderful place to find sustainably raised chicken, truly free range eggs, and raw butter, milk and cheese. We don't eat much meat, but when we do, boy, this is the place. I never had anything like that available to me anywhere else. It's the best food revolution thing going on here.

Can green food shopping save money?

Story on NPR tonight on rising food prices and the impact they will have on people's shopping habits (leaving aside the food riots taking place in many other countries as the price of food skyrockets). One of the women is shopping for a cake at Whole Foods when she looks around and realizes that things are expensive there! Wow!

By way of contrast, see this post from Locavore Nation maintaining that eating locally is a money-saving strategy - contrary to what her friends may think!

I haven't really felt that big a hit in my shopping bills as a result of food prices going up, and although it may just not have caught up with me yet, I think that the combination of frugal and green shopping strategies that we use - what I buy and the way I buy - protect us somewhat from this phenomenon. For example, if what's driving this is the price of corn, then the thing to do would be to avoid items that rely heavily on corn, like all the products that have HFCS in them - processed foods, mostly - or corn-fed meat. As a good Pollan-ite, I don't buy much of these things anyway. If it's the price of gas that's responsible, then it's worth staying away from items that have to be brought in from far away. Another vote for the farmers' market!

It's an irony that the very policies (keeping corn and fuel cheap) that drove food prices down all these years may now be responsible for the lion's share of the upsurge in prices, and the strategies that were seen as spendthrift or elitist may be the way to keep one's food bill lower. Life is interesting, eh?

We see instead that eating low on the food chain, buying local, and staying away from processed foods are not simply green choices, not simply healthy choices, but they turn out to be money savers as well.

Is good food frugal?

From the NY Times, an article about whether the high cost of fossil fuels, and the impact it has on food prices, will make organic and local more cost-competitive.

Every since I discovered Tightwad Gazette in the '90s, I've been aware of a certain tension between frugality and sustainability. What I mean is, if Wal-Mart is where the cheapest food is, wouldn't an interest in frugality cause one to shop there no matter what it's impact on the enviroment (or on labor relations, or on local businesses)? Likewise, if white pasta and store-brand cheese is cheaper, shouldn't we be eating more of that, despite its (respectively) negative nutrititional value and the cheapening of taste and the impact on artisanal cheese? Isn't making the more expensive choice anti-frugal? To an extent, that's the argument that DW makes with me.

But as Michael Pollan makes abundantly clear, part of the reason that such choices are cheaper (along with factory farmed meat, milk and eggs) is because in many ways the costs are undercounted ("externalized" in the parlance) or subsidized by us, the taxpayer. If a hog factory farmer gets a break from pollution laws in order to keep the price of bacon cheap, I pay for that financially and otherwise even though I have no use for the product.

The way I have approached this is via a Jewish values approach: I am convinced that part of the reason the kosher laws were invented was to provide a more humane existence for the animals, and if that is not the case then we have to call the kashrut of the "product" into question, whether the meat has (Orthodox) kosher certification or not. Likewise, Arthur Waskow and others have promulgated the idea of eco-kashrut, the taking into account of health and environmental costs into deciding what is permissible to eat (or use - styrofoam, for instance, would fall under this rubric). I've been moving steadily in the direction of these approaches over the last several years.

There are only two ways more "boutique" food choices are going to become more cost competitive: first, if the elaborate system of incentives and subsidies that keep industrial food production cheaper is overthrown - and looking at the continuing control Big Ag has had on the Farm Bill shows that that's not going to happen too soon - or second, if enough people pay the premium that will allow the price of the better choice to come down enough that there's no longer such a premium. But now I guess there is a third option - if the price of fuel causes the industrial agricultural product to be not quite so much cheaper after all.

Look, the basis of the frugality/sustainability nexus is fairly easy to articulate: buy seasonal, buy local, buy products with as little packaging as possible. Whether we pursue organic or not, by taking these few simple steps, we will opt out of the "Frankenfood" mentality, to great benefit to our health and the health of the planet, and to our wallets.