Category Archives: knowledge

Resources for Going Green

It’s amazing to me how much my attitude has changed in just the last few weeks about what it means to live my best life––my definition has expanded to include eating organic foods and wanting to “go green” in other areas of my life.

But I have so much still to learn!  I feel like every new thing I learn opens up six more questions.  For instance, I just recently learned that cotton is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to chemical pesticides and fertalizers––because it’s not a food crop, people dump all kinds of crap on it.

I know I can’t make all these changes at once, but sometimes it’s tough to know where to start.  That’s why I was excited to find Co-op America and their National Green Pages. There is so much information on this web site, I barely know where to begin––and I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface––but the National Green Pages are “the nation’s only directory of screened and approved green businesses.”  Looking for an organic cotton t-shirt?  Now you know where to look.

Also?  I’m now dying to go to Co-op America’s Green Festival in Chicago at the end of April.   Anybody up for a road trip?

A Little Goes a Long Way

The Mission Organic 2010 website has one goal: get everyone in the country to commit to increasing their organic consumption to just ten percent of their diet––that means one item out of ten in your grocery cart will be organic, or one meal out of ten will be.

But how much good could that little change do? According to the statistics on the site, it would eliminate more than 2 million pounds of antibiotics, save 2 billion barrels of imported oil annually and restore more than 6 billion pounds of carbon to our soil––proof that small choices can have a big impact.

Corn in your Car

NPR did an interesting piece on ethanol this afternoon on “All Things Considered.”  They mentioned the fact that increasing demand for ethanol is driving up prices for corn, and the farmer they interviewed was concerned that the rising price of corn would impact his animal feed (pig and chicken) customers.

Here’s what I’m thinking: if the price of corn continues to rise because of the demand for ethanol, maybe it will encourage the pig and chicken (and cow) producers to seek out more economical ways of feeding their stocks, namely GRASS; a return to a more natural food chain.

Unfortunately, ethanol probably uses just as much petroleum to produce it as the industrial feed lots use to feed the chickens and pork and beef.  It will probably have just as much negative impact on the atmosphere as burning petroleum products.  Or, the government, in its infinite wisdom, will step in and subsidize the corn so that the pig and chicken and cow farmers can continue producing industrial meat even cheaper than they already are.

Still, a girl can dream.

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I inquired with a small organic farm in Boulder about the CSA program they’re starting this year.  I’d love to be able to support them, especially because they already have a good reputation at the local farmer’s market in Boulder.  I’m supposed to get more info in a week or two.

Why NOT to Eat a Twinkie: Reason No. 32

From Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger (via body+soul magazine):

Ethylene oxide [part of Polysorbate 60, a Twinkie ingredient] is an excellent but entirely unlikely food chemical, seeing as it is highly explosive (it was used in tunnel-busting shells during the Vietnam War), a known human carcinogen, and a respiratory, skin, and eye irritant.

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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’m apalled and astounded at how little I know about the food that’s been going into my body for the last 25 years.  Do you know what goes into a chicken McNugget? A plethora of ingredients, most of which are NOT chicken.

And do you know that they spray butane (or a form of butane, anyway) on the nuggets and/or box for freshness?  As little as a gram of this stuff can kill you, but they spray it on the faux chicken bits so they don’t go off.

I think E. coli is the least of our worries when eating at fast food restaurants.

Li-bary

The Husband and I made a trip to the library yesterday afternoon. Because of our aforementioned financial status, we’ve stopped buying books and magazines. In all honesty, I almost never buy new books any more anyway. My author friends would tell me that used bookstores steal revenue from authors, but at the same time, I don’t have the funds to commit $25 every time a new book I want to read comes out, so I compromise.

Interestingly, the library is even a better deal than used bookstores; you get to read new books much sooner after they come out than if you had to wait for them to show up at the used bookstore, and you get to read them for FREE!

Now, books are my crack, and not actually owning the book with which I’ve just fallen in love is something of an adjustment for me, but it’s not as bad as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, after picking up the next installment in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequence, I moseyed over to the periodicals section and sat down with the latest Martha Stewart Living magazine. I like Martha. She’s a little odd, and more than a little OCD, I think, but I love the photography and design of her magazines, and I aspire to be crafty and a homemaking diva, so I like to look at her magazines. I almost never pay the cover price for them, though.

As I was flipping through the beautifully designed pages of cookie recipes and Valentine’s Day ideas, it occurred to me that she has an equally beautifully designed website, and nearly all of the information in the magazine is available for free on said website — or will be, as soon as next months’ magazine hits newsstands. So, I took out the little notebook I carry in my purse and made a note of all the articles that were interesting to me, that I might want to look up later.

Voila! Instant savings. Instead of buying the magazine, I now have a reminder to myself of the knowledge I might want to retain from it, and a way of obtaining said knowledge for free.

You always learn something at the library.

Eat Food

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Sounds pretty easy, right? Wrong.

I’m still trying to digest all the information presented in Michael Pollan’s fascinating article Unhappy Meals from Sunday’s NY Times Magazine. The article is hard to summarize, because there’s so much pertinent information contained therein, but Pollan’s main recommendation is to stop fixating on nutrients and focus our diets more on whole foods.

But that’s a lot easier said than done, at least for me.

Some people are super conscious of their appearance, always influenced by the latest fashion magazines and celebrities; I’m hyper-conscious of food, influenced by lifestyle magazines and celebrity chefs. I’m always thinking about food, reading about it, worrying about it, or eating it.

When I started this obsession, it was to facilitate a much-needed weight loss. I still struggle with those 10-15 pounds that I never seem to be able to get rid of, but I am much healthier than I was at the start of my journey, and a lot of that is because of my dedication to the cult of food.

What to do, then, when Mr. Pollan tells me to stop worrying about getting enough protein with my carbs? To stop multiplying calories by grams of fiber? To toss my multi-vitamins?

Frankly, I would love to give up all these silly food affectations and obsessions that I’ve acquired over the years and return to a simpler lifestyle eating more healthful, whole foods. I tell myself this, and yet, I keep coming up against mental blocks when trying to implement it.  (Am I really supposed to go back to full-fat butter instead of margerine???  It contradicts everything I’ve ever known!)  Old habits die hard.
I’m not at a point in my life where I can go through my kitchen and throw away anything with more than five ingredients, but even thinking about some of Pollan’s assertions has me changing the way I’m thinking about food.

It may be a long row to hoe, getting to a place where I am truly living his mantra to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” but I think it’s an important step in my life. Maybe I’m past the point when I need to analyze every single calorie that goes into my mouth. Maybe I’m coming to a place where the whole should be more important than the sum of its parts; rather than allowing it to be my whole life, maybe it’s time to let food in general become just another part of the whole.

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My dear friend Cate is sending me Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which we both plan to read, so expect more musings to come.