Article by Paul Krugman in today's Times about how declining standards of food regulation in the US has led to repeated outbreaks of diseased foods - most recently tomatoes - but more, had made it hard to sell our produce overseas to peoples who are not as blase about the purity of their food as Americans seem to be.
I agree with Krugman's analysis as far as it goes - having cronies in positions of oversight is obviously a Bad Thing, and starving the FDA of resources and personnel at a time of rapidly expanding technological change in the food industry is going to cause problems in the supply chain.
But the deeper problem is reflected in the very idea of thinking of food in terms of a "supply chain." The reason inspections are so important is because of the sheer scale of the American corporate food system - massive feedlots and slaughter houses, bioengineering, use of pesticides and monocultures, etc. etc. etc. If we looked at this dysfunctional system at all deeply we would realize that it's poisonous (sometimes quite literally) to its core and we'd be out on the streets like the South Koreans. That's why the corporate powers-that-be and their political handmaidens make sure that inspections are curtailed - it's like the mob being in charge of the homocide department, hiring the (few) detectives (from within) and deciding what and how they could investigate.
In a context like this increased inspections or regulation will only affect those who are least likely to be causing the problem. In Sandor Katz's book, Joel Salatin points out that a small scale producer like him cannot slaughter his animals on site because of the incredible amount of regulations that exist, designed to deal with industrial slaughterhouses. So instead he has to put them on a truck to that very industrial slaughterhouse, and that he cannot then sell the product back on his farm. The rules weren't meant for him, but they affect him, and all of us.
In a situation of rule by corporations, for corporations, increased regulation and inspection would, I fear, only be bandaids for the whole system of corporate agriculture which is the underlying issue.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
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.
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.
Frugality website written up in Eagle
Article in the Eagle on a frugality website in the area, livingonadime.com. One could spend all one's time linking to all the articles about frugality that are appearing in newspapers these days - we must be in a recession! She feeds her family of 5 on $350 a month, which is nearly half what we spend.
I took a look at the site and it's pretty good: it's got a clear, attractive design, and they have a couple of out-of-the-ordinary features, like a Q&A section ("help! my husband's behind in the mortgage!") and they also have the recipes easily bookmarked. There's also have a debt calculator utility that I had previously seen on dollar stretcher. According to its thumbnail calculations, if I pay down my credit cards at the current rate I have 31 months until I pay off that debt, and I will be then have paid an additional $3000 in interest. Oy!
Of course, circumstances could cause this to move radically, in either direction - I could have to put something substantial on the card, or I could get a high holiday pulpit or some other windfall and be able to pay a chunk of it down, like I did with the tax breaks.
I took a look at the site and it's pretty good: it's got a clear, attractive design, and they have a couple of out-of-the-ordinary features, like a Q&A section ("help! my husband's behind in the mortgage!") and they also have the recipes easily bookmarked. There's also have a debt calculator utility that I had previously seen on dollar stretcher. According to its thumbnail calculations, if I pay down my credit cards at the current rate I have 31 months until I pay off that debt, and I will be then have paid an additional $3000 in interest. Oy!
Of course, circumstances could cause this to move radically, in either direction - I could have to put something substantial on the card, or I could get a high holiday pulpit or some other windfall and be able to pay a chunk of it down, like I did with the tax breaks.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
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?
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.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Kids and commercialism
Excellent post from Nature Moms blog regarding "Helping your kids see past commercialism." I would also recommend Center for a New American Dream, which has a lot of material on this - simplifying the holidays, doing things during the summer, etc. An excellent organization.
We've mostly been working on the "power of example" model - we're very anti-corporate, the kids have very limited access to TV (we mostly watch videos) and if they're watching sports with me or something we turn off the TV during commercials. (Sports commercials are the worse - beer and cars, both sold with copious amounts of sex - but fortunately they're not really interested in it.)
There's a book now, Parenting, Inc., which talks about the sheer amount of STUFF there is for new parents to buy, $700 stoller and all that. I sometimes think we're living in an alternate reality, and maybe we are (thank goodness we don't live in New York!) but then I happened to be at a middle school for an event recently and I overheard a kid making a snarky remark about another kid buying clothes at a thrift shop. I know that's something my kids are going to face, even though we buy most of their clothes at Target.
I would also recommend showing the older kids (who can understand it) The Story of Stuff, a 20-minute video which talks clearly and pursuasively about the environmental and human impact of our (Americans') unending appetite for STUFF. That's a lesson we'd all support, I think, and it's not just dad pleading poverty this time.
We've mostly been working on the "power of example" model - we're very anti-corporate, the kids have very limited access to TV (we mostly watch videos) and if they're watching sports with me or something we turn off the TV during commercials. (Sports commercials are the worse - beer and cars, both sold with copious amounts of sex - but fortunately they're not really interested in it.)
There's a book now, Parenting, Inc., which talks about the sheer amount of STUFF there is for new parents to buy, $700 stoller and all that. I sometimes think we're living in an alternate reality, and maybe we are (thank goodness we don't live in New York!) but then I happened to be at a middle school for an event recently and I overheard a kid making a snarky remark about another kid buying clothes at a thrift shop. I know that's something my kids are going to face, even though we buy most of their clothes at Target.
I would also recommend showing the older kids (who can understand it) The Story of Stuff, a 20-minute video which talks clearly and pursuasively about the environmental and human impact of our (Americans') unending appetite for STUFF. That's a lesson we'd all support, I think, and it's not just dad pleading poverty this time.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
MP x 2 - Menu Plan and Michael Pollan
Didn't go to the farmers market last week, so that final tally from last week's shopping was: $138.
Meal plan for this week:
Brooklyn Pad Thai
Some sort of fried rice
Spanish Potato Pepper Frittata - from the Veg Times cookbook, to use up some of the potatoes that are in their drawer sprouting even as we speak.
DW and D1 are going away overnight on Thursday, so that means it's not worth cooking anything substantial, so I'll probably have one of my rare meat meals that night and give the little ones pasta.
Total from last night's food shopping: $106. Leaving room, as usual, for the tofu and milk run later in the week.
I've been reading Michael Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food. It's very good, as one would expect from this excellent writer, writing about a very important topic. He says at one point that Americans spend a lesser percentage of their gross income on food than any other developed country, and that when you look at the cost of industrialized cheap food - in terms of biodiversity, soil health, welfare of food animals, but primarily in terms of increased health risks like obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease, all outcomes of the Western (read: American diet) - "you may want to find other areas to economize."
I've noticed as I've written this blog and followed other people writing on similar topics that, while I am obviously very conscious of trying to beat our family's food budget into some kind of shape, there are choices that we make that are not the most frugal choices. I buy high-end cold cereal, for instance. (Whole grains, no HFCS.) I shop at the farmer's market (most weeks, in season). There are some things I buy organic - milk and potatoes, for instance. We buy much of our (limited) meat from a local farmer who grazes them on grass. I make these choices because I think they are better, either for our health or, because of the way they're produced or transported, for the health of the planet. The price might be higher but the quality is far superior, and I fell like I'm having my spending supporting my values.
To some extent I'm trying to suppress my food spending in other areas so that I can support making the non-frugal choice in these. But the reason I write about simplicity and not simply frugality is that there are sometimes other values that have to be compared with, and may take precedence over, simply suppressing the food bill. And the advice in Pollan's book is certainly a good place to start.
Meal plan for this week:
Brooklyn Pad Thai
Some sort of fried rice
Spanish Potato Pepper Frittata - from the Veg Times cookbook, to use up some of the potatoes that are in their drawer sprouting even as we speak.
DW and D1 are going away overnight on Thursday, so that means it's not worth cooking anything substantial, so I'll probably have one of my rare meat meals that night and give the little ones pasta.
Total from last night's food shopping: $106. Leaving room, as usual, for the tofu and milk run later in the week.
I've been reading Michael Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food. It's very good, as one would expect from this excellent writer, writing about a very important topic. He says at one point that Americans spend a lesser percentage of their gross income on food than any other developed country, and that when you look at the cost of industrialized cheap food - in terms of biodiversity, soil health, welfare of food animals, but primarily in terms of increased health risks like obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease, all outcomes of the Western (read: American diet) - "you may want to find other areas to economize."
I've noticed as I've written this blog and followed other people writing on similar topics that, while I am obviously very conscious of trying to beat our family's food budget into some kind of shape, there are choices that we make that are not the most frugal choices. I buy high-end cold cereal, for instance. (Whole grains, no HFCS.) I shop at the farmer's market (most weeks, in season). There are some things I buy organic - milk and potatoes, for instance. We buy much of our (limited) meat from a local farmer who grazes them on grass. I make these choices because I think they are better, either for our health or, because of the way they're produced or transported, for the health of the planet. The price might be higher but the quality is far superior, and I fell like I'm having my spending supporting my values.
To some extent I'm trying to suppress my food spending in other areas so that I can support making the non-frugal choice in these. But the reason I write about simplicity and not simply frugality is that there are sometimes other values that have to be compared with, and may take precedence over, simply suppressing the food bill. And the advice in Pollan's book is certainly a good place to start.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Bad advice
Funny post from I paid for this twice already - a how-not-to-be-frugal posts as opposed to the frugality basics posts I mentioned the other day. Ben Stein actually wrote a whole book like this, which I kept for a while in the bathroom for quick review. Of course, one of his was "don't buy a house" and we know how that turned out for me....
Speaking of which, we're trying to do a "deed in lieu of foreclosure" with Sovereign, but I can't get anybody in the loan mitigation department to return my telephone calls. I just got another utility bill from the house - how is an empty house using $63 in water, I ask you? - and there's just no telling how long it will take them to get around to sheriff's selling it. The lawyer I've been consulting with (dollar signs roll...) said that we should keep the insurance up just in case the place burns down the day after we let it lapse, which will be a big bill in July if it goes that far, but that we could let the utilities lapse. So that's what we're going to do.
And another consequence of my continued and elongated default is that I keep getting notices from Bank of America (my major credit card creditor) lowering my credit limit. Every time I pay off another $1000 they lower the credit limit to the next thousand. So I'm at something like $7400 now and they lowered the limit to $8000 "due to a major derogatory item on your credit report," according to the letter. No kidding. But I can keep using my card, they assure me, as long as I don't spend more than $600.
This is actually sort of okay, because I don't want to have a whole lot of available credit anyway at this stage, but the issue for me is that, while I acknowledge that I'm going to spend the next few years discovering how people with bad credit live, I can't start rebuilding my credit until this thing with the house is resolved, and it just won't resolve.
Speaking of which, we're trying to do a "deed in lieu of foreclosure" with Sovereign, but I can't get anybody in the loan mitigation department to return my telephone calls. I just got another utility bill from the house - how is an empty house using $63 in water, I ask you? - and there's just no telling how long it will take them to get around to sheriff's selling it. The lawyer I've been consulting with (dollar signs roll...) said that we should keep the insurance up just in case the place burns down the day after we let it lapse, which will be a big bill in July if it goes that far, but that we could let the utilities lapse. So that's what we're going to do.
And another consequence of my continued and elongated default is that I keep getting notices from Bank of America (my major credit card creditor) lowering my credit limit. Every time I pay off another $1000 they lower the credit limit to the next thousand. So I'm at something like $7400 now and they lowered the limit to $8000 "due to a major derogatory item on your credit report," according to the letter. No kidding. But I can keep using my card, they assure me, as long as I don't spend more than $600.
This is actually sort of okay, because I don't want to have a whole lot of available credit anyway at this stage, but the issue for me is that, while I acknowledge that I'm going to spend the next few years discovering how people with bad credit live, I can't start rebuilding my credit until this thing with the house is resolved, and it just won't resolve.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
