Local food reconsidered
September 2, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Opinions & Thoughts , 5 comments
As a self-professed more-than-occasional geek, I am susceptible to splitting-hair optimizing theories about just everything. Here is my confession: though I am enthusiastic about both organic and local food, I have never been able to convince myself, let alone anyone else that organic and local food are ABSOLUTELY the way to go.
It’s been observed that organic standards are under the threat of dilution to pave way for corporate profits. Horizon organic milk, for instance, has been criticized by many as barely hanging on to the text of the organic label by the skin of its teeth and wholly lacking the spirit of the organic concept.
We’ve all seen organic labeled frozen vegetables imported from countries with dubious food health standards.
What about local food? Is the concept bullet proof?
A couple of years ago, I happened upon an interview of Peter Singer, a professional ethicist (who knew there was such as profession?) who was best known for his 1975 book “Animal Liberation” – a canonical text of the animal rights movement.
In his book The Way We Eat, aside from discussing ethical issues with animal husbandry, he provided a curious example against the local food movement. Singer argued that the “socially responsible folks in San Francisco would do better to buy their rice from Bangladesh than from local growers in California.”
(image courtesy of www.greenpeace.org)
Why? California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizers that involve intensive energy use. Rice grown in Bangladesh takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and does not require any artificial irrigation. It also doesn’t require as much synthetic fertilizers since the river washes down nutrients. The energy used for the Bangladesh rice to get to our table is quite efficient compared to the artificial irrigation and local trucking. Shipping, it seems, is ten times more energy efficient than trucking.
Interesting food for thought.
Then another article this year pointed out that local fruits and veggies might have more food-miles than produce at the supermarket. Wandering about San Francisco’s famous Ferry Plaza farmers’ market, the author observed that most farmers there drove their “Ford, Isuzu or Chevrolet trucks, packing anywhere between 200 and 2,000 pounds of goods”. They trucked their produce an average of 117 miles.
In comparison, the produce from a conventional distributor who buys from California, Arizona, Washington, Texas and Mexico averages 942 miles.
But they mostly use semi-trailer trucks that can pack 40,000 pounds of food. After a bunch of detailed carbon calculations later, the author concluded that the wholesaler won for the most part as far as CO2 emission was concerned.
The author of the article proceeded to provide a few other examples of local food losing out when it came to overall energy usage. “Raising lambs on New Zealand’s grassy slopes required four times less energy than U.K. lamb, which relied more heavily on fertilizer”.
More good food for thought.
I got a splitting headache when imaging tremendously controversial and detailed carbon calculation for each food. To be complete, shouldn’t we also throw in factors such as local fair land use, environmental standards, impact on endangered species, and fair labor regulations into the gigantic ethical food formula?
I gave up on splitting the hair of ethical food.
A friend came to visit with her young children this weekend. She and her husband have been expats in Malaysia for the past three years. Like on most Sundays, we went to our local farmers’ market.
My daughters’ went straight to berries and peaches. My friends’ 5 year old boy suspiciously eyed the strawberries my girls were devouring. He stuck out his tongue, “bleh.” After some inaudible exchange among the kids, apparently he was convinced to try one. A couple of seconds later, he asked in his perfectly polite English accent, “Can I have another one?”
Before long, two baskets of strawberries were gone. The only trace left was the stains on their shirts. I asked my friend what changed her son’s mind about these berries.
She laughed, “believe it or not, in our local market, we get strawberries from Watsonville.”
“Watsonville? You mean the town 30 miles south of here? All the way to Malaysia?” I was amazed.
“Yep. But the strawberries we get are always so horrible. Rubbery and bleh, like he said,” my friend pointed to her son.
“I am sure the ones we get are picked not quite ripe and sprayed with bloody anti-rot juice,” she semi-joked.
“Wow!” I was still thinking about how these strawberries got shipped all the way to Malaysia.
“Obviously he loves real strawberries,” my friend quipped as she watched her son’s stained mouth and fingers.
It was then I threw the big hair ball of food calculation out of the window. Though legitimate issues have been raised about local food, as of now, it is still a far better option for many foods in many parts of the world.
The satisfied look on the face of my friends’ son also told me that what got lost in all the calculation was the enjoyment of “real” food. Can you put an index on that?
Unless a clean, complete and convincing theory is formed, I am sticking with eating and enjoying local food.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Cleansing by camping
August 25, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 6 comments
We spent five days happily scrambling up rocks, walking on pine-needle-padded-and-scented trails, wading in crystal clear streams and generally wallowing in dirt.
Poets, writers and naturalists have so eloquently crafted passages and passages of tribute to this breath-taking valley. I would only trample and stumble on their words if I were to put forth my feeble attempt at describing Yosemite and the Sierra-Nevada mountain range.
Nonetheless, every visitor to the national park probably has his or her unique and personal experience while traveling through the valley.
John Muir’s description of the valley as a “tonic of wilderness” came to my mind as we clambered up a long stretch of Stately Pleasure Dome (can it be more appropriately named?) on a perfect evening.
We sat down on the luminous granite, uniquely Yosemite and watched Tenaya Lake stretching and glistening in the early evening sun. It may sound utterly corny to people, but I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I was being cleansed inside out. There were no noises in my head competing with each other to be heard. There were no petty thoughts that ran in and out from the sidelines.
Just the quietness and the smallness I was feeling.
I don’t meditate. But if I ever do, that will be the state I want to achieve.
Even my six year old and three year old, who were normally incapable of remaining silent for more than 30 seconds, were mesmerized by what was in front of them. Richard Louv wrote a whole book to encourage parents and children to play in natural surroundings. In Last Child in the Woods, he listed many practical reasons for staying outdoors.
But right there and then, all the reasons simply slipped away. Looking at my kids, I knew they got it. They were feeling it in their hearts.
Later, on the way home, my three-year old said, “I wish we could be camping all the time and forever.”
“Awesome idea if mom and dad didn’t have to work to eat and live,” I laughed.
When we got home, she dashed straight to her room. A few minutes later, she charged out jingling her piggy bank, “Mom, I think we have enough money!”
Taking a proud breath, she continued, “can we go camping now?”
Children, it seems, do not need to be persuaded to play in the woods.
This weekend as I tried to catch up with my regular blog reads, I saw that Greenbean, Burbs, and Ruchi were exercising their green muscles to fight against the evisceration of the Endangered Species Act.
Fresh from my overdose of nature (actually there is no such thing), I participated immediately with a sense of admiration for these green heroes but also a dose of sadness.
Why do we do these things to ourselves? It’s no different from chipping away at our beautiful home, one brick at a time, for a temporary nickel here and there. Depleted of any poetry in us, are we that different from a pack of hyenas?
I will leave with a passage John Muir wrote in 1877:
“When a man plants a tree he plants himself. Every root is an anchor, over which he rests with grateful interest, and becomes sufficiently calm to feel the joy of living.”
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Back to school camping trip
August 18, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 5 comments
Can you go anywhere without seeing “back to school sales” signs this week? Indeed school is starting for my kids next week. Before that happens, we are escaping to our back-to-school family camping trip for a few days.
Yosemite, here we come!
While Yosemite valley is breathtakingly beautiful, my personal favorite is Tuolomne Meadows in the Yosemite National Park where the sky is open, the domes are spectacular and the tourists are pleasantly fewer.
This is what we will see:
(courtesy of www.wikimedia.org)
and this:
(courtesy of www.yosemitehikes.com)
Be back in a week!
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Bragging time
August 11, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 4 comments
If you are a seasoned gardener, you will laugh at my misplaced exuberance. But hey, this is my first year and a few months ago, I could not tell the difference between a squash leaf and a melon leaf. More laughing at my expense, yeah, yeah.
But we are seeing the fruit of our labor. The corn is not quite there yet, but in a few weeks, these fragile and thin-looking ears of corn will be consumed with great enthusiasm. We are a little crazy about corn around here.
These are our baby melons. They may look like mature watermelons and cantaloupes. But remember that camera adds 10 pounds? They are only a little bigger than a decent sized egg. But aren’t they cute?
Here are our consistently flowering and fruiting strawberries. Every week, the six plants provide us a pint of strawberries. For the first year, I suppose it’s not too shabby. You natural green thumbs, humor me, for once?
Our carrots have come and gone. They were sort of deformed, stretching and bulging in all sorts odd directions. I happily ate them in a big bowl of salad nonetheless.
Tomatoes are late this year, though they are forming little green orbs. We did leave the plants alone for a whole month, leaving them to the sole care of a hastily rigged and barely working automatic sprinkler system. It was a miracle that most of them even survived.
Zucchinis and squashes are flowering; those will be on the bragging list for next week.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Once a geek always a geek
August 7, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Opinions & Thoughts , 5 comments
Yesterday I had some time to read an incredible article by Nathan S. Lowis, a chemistry professor at the California Institute of Technology. Though the paper is one year old, it includes so much astounding information that makes my head spin. I love numbers because they speak facts to me.
I’d like to share some of his thoughts in the conclusion section first:
-
In the United States, we spend more money buying gas at the pump in ONE hour than we spend funding basic solar research in our country over an ENTIRE year.
In that ONE hour, more energy from the sun hits the earth than all of the energy consumed on our planet in an ENTIRE year.
We don’t yet know how to capture the solar energy cost-effectively.
We spend $200 Billion annually to fund the Iraqi war (I added this from NYT), $28 Billion on health, and $0.028 Billion on basic solar research.
I translate it to myself: We can avert the climate crisis IF (big if here) we have the will power and the vision further than what’s on TV tonight.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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It worked! sort of
August 5, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Opinions & Thoughts , 1 comment so far
Vacuum cleaners are not that complex technically. However it is still frustrating to trouble shoot and to fix if you are like me, a hopelessly non-handy person. But after lamenting about the lost art of fix-it, I had to try and try to fix (or break) our vacuum cleaner.
But sometimes, with enough perseverance even I can fix a simple household appliance. Well, sort of.
After two hours of laying out all the unrecognizable parts, reading the trouble shooting section of the manual, pulling my hair out and cursing up a storm, I managed to make the vacuum run.
I can’t say it is fixed because I still have two small plastic pieces that don’t fit anywhere. The power cord no longer retracts. Yeah, I fixed something while breaking others. Don’t know how long it will last, but the vacuum cleaner is doing its job so far.
Considering other options - tossing it into the garbage or paying half of the price of the vacuum for repair, I am happy with the outcome. Honestly, I even felt an inflated sense of accomplishment. “It’s not like it’s a car or anything, or even a bike,” you say. I know, but someone has to pat me on the back.
But if it breaks again, I am taking it to a repair shop. While playing around me, my kids asked, “what are you saying?” as I muttered too many curse words. THAT is worth avoiding.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Sustain a sustainble life
August 4, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 4 comments
What does it mean to live a sustainable life?
Arduous clearly stole my would-be-brilliant thoughts last week. Fortunately I tucked away the rest of my random opinions that could only be surfaced and comprehended by a jetlagged mind at 3am. So here is my spin.
Coming back from our recent trip to China, I was disheartened. It may be hard to tell from my previous entries. But I would be blind if I could not see the consequences of 1.6 billion people trying to live like us. With India thrown in, that is 2.7 billion people potentially increasing their resource consumption by magnitudes. Frankly we don’t have any right or ability to stop them.
There are about 250 million registered cars in the U.S. Imagine 1 billion more cars on the road in the near future.
We consume 28 billion pounds of beef annually in the U.S. Imagine 140 billion more pounds of beef that may be produced in the horrendous factory farms every year.
On and on, you wonder why I was disturbed. I asked myself at 3am one jetlagged morning: “honestly do you really think it matters whether you bring your own bags to the stores?” I could not produce a satisfying answer.
Then a couple of days later, Crunchy Chicken asked an interesting question – would you behave differently if energy and water were free in terms of financial and environmental cost? Most people mentioned that they’d probably keep their houses a little warmer in the winter and a little cooler in the summer.
Then it clicked for me. Even if energy and water were free and even if all 2.7 billion people were striving to emulate our lifestyle, it would not change most of the things I do now.
I’d still enthusiastically
I’d still use green cleaning products, buy organic produce and meats, eat less junk food, apply non-petroleum based lotions, because I do all these things out of health concern not obligation.
I’d still recycle and compost, I’d still bring my own bags and cups to the stores, I’d still use homemade napkins, I’d still not buy crap from Target, I’d still repair our household tools and gadgets as much as possible, because I do all these things out of habit not obligation.
Sure I could use a longer shower or turn up the heat a couple of degrees in the winter. But these are hardly sacrifices.
I can’t seem to cut traveling out of my life, though I try to do it with as little impact as possible, I let my children get plastic (gasp!) lego pieces, mostly from second hand, I enjoy occasional restaurant outing, and we patronize the ones that use local and organic ingredients.
This is how I plan to sustain a sustainable life - living it with joy and leaving room for eco-sins now and then.
Thank goodness I am just into stock car racing, bi-annual home remodeling, or weekly shopping. Otherwise I might have to suffer some serious sacrificing for the common good.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Copyright 2007 Organicpicks
Failing my RelativeOffset program
July 30, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Rants & the Ridiculous , 12 comments
Lately positive vibes are bouncing around the green blosphere as many are forming APLS, yahoo groups, and book clubs. There are also a few that vent their frustrations, about the incredibly incompetent Bubbles and about the down trodden folks who have lost any interest in caring for themselves and their dwelling.
I feel the positive vibe, I do. But I also have some BIG griping to do. So here it goes.
We all know carbon offset - a financial instrument representing a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. It “alleviates” some guilt for people like me who occasionally use up a bunch of energy jetting across the Pacific Ocean.
As a spoof, CheatNeutral was born – it is all about offsetting infidelity. The founders of the website believe that carbon offset is as much of a joke as cheating offset. One of the convoluted examples they give is:
“Steve and Lisa met while on holiday in Spain, and quickly fell head over heels for each other. That Christmas, at his office party, Steve got drunk and unavoidably repeatedly cheated on Lisa with Cheri, a co-worker. He paid Cheatneutral just £2.50 and we invested his money in Alex, a single man with no prospect of finding a partner. In return for the payments, Alex agreed to remain single.
Thanks to Cheatneutral, Steve was able to come clean about his cheating to Lisa, and when he presented her with the Cheatneutral certificate they realised they wanted to get married. Their wedding is taking place in the summer. Steve continues to regularly cheat on Lisa and Cheatneutral continues to fund projects like Alex with his offset payments.”
Secretively I too have a program running at the back of my mind - RelativeOffset. Not that I am a green super hero, but compared to my brother-in-law’s (BIL) family, I am a green saint. Often times I feel that we have to cut back more to offset the waste my BIL’s family generates.
We have been overwhelmed with the stuff that they are tossing out – two-year new convection oven, very gently used kids’ furniture, three-year old golf clubs (I don’t even play the game), and many other random things.
“We don’t need to take all their junk, you know,” my husband reminds me.
“But if we didn’t, all of it would go into the landfill,” I am frustrated. I post the items on Craigslist and Freecycle so someone can use them.
But lately I can’t keep up anymore. Even if we don’t breathe, don’t drink, and don’t eat, we can’t offset their escalated spend. A year ago, they remodeled their home for the 3rd time in ten years. A couple of months ago, they proudly acquired a 47-foot motor boat and flaunted that high gas prices were of no concern to them. This week I have been informed during a “catch up” call that it is their intention that a personal plane will be their next “big ticket” item.
Worst of all, I have to listen to all the bragging. Even their preteen kids are starting to associate everything with a $ value. So knowing it is totally lame, I phone screen the calls. The one-sided avoidance can’t last forever though.
I quit my own imaginary RelativeOffset program, since it has zero chance of working
Whew, it feels great to rant.
But seriously, how do you deal with family members that have starkly opposite values?
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Lost art of fix-it
July 29, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 9 comments
This weekend my vacuum cleaner stopped working. It was humming beautifully before our vacation. Surely someone must have broken into our house to vacuum our floor when we were away. In any case, since I did part with a handsome amount of fund for an engineering degree, albeit from long time ago, I decided to open the chassis and fix it myself.
A couple of frustrating hours later, the chassis was jammed back on with some loose nuts and bolts scattered on floor. It was still not working!
Leafing through the yellow pages for repair shops, I managed to find a few within 25 miles from our house. Unfortunately most of them are not open on weekends. It’d probably cost as much as half the vacuum cleaner.
Is repair work a lost art?
During our trip to China, we found a few out in the rural areas. Want to fix the right heel of your otherwise wearable shoes? Here is the man for you:
Are your pots and pans all dented or rusted? These nice looking men can turn them into shining new cooking vessels again:
Dulled knives or scissors? This clever man powers his sharpener with a bike:
Unfortunately in the wealthier Chinese cities, repair shops are disappearing as well.
It’s the economics - with virgin material being undervalued (thus seemingly cheap), the labor cost of repairing an item is often close to or more than its replacement cost. Throw in the inconvenience of not having the item while it is being repaired and the almost instant availability of a replacement item, the choice of junking old and buying new seems perfectly rational, at least to most people.
I am not sure if the art of fix-it will make its massive comeback next year, though I suspect in time the cost of virgin material and cost of labor will shift the balance once again. The economics will tilt back to the side of repairing.
For me though, repairing an item as much as possible rather than chucking it has its elegance. Tossing out a vacuum cleaner without at least trying to figure out the problem is simply crass. Go ahead and laugh. But there is a universal beauty in maximizing the efficiency and usage of resources.
The elegance of maximizing resource efficiency is manifested in living creatures and man-made designs. Even in building computer chips, unnecessarily utilizing silicon space and power is considered to be sloppy and poor engineering.
So yes, to me, fixing things is not about the economics; it’s about aesthetics. You can call me a kook, but I am sticking to it.
This weekend, you will find me sitting on our driveway, with the vacuum cleaner manual and parts all spread out. I may tear my hair out again, but at least I feel elegant, maybe not Birkin bag sort of elegant.
***************************************************************
Also want to also pass on some good fix-it information from a bay area simple living group. Thanks Kathryn Benedicto.
- www.RepairClinic.com is a website that gives useful tips for fixing stuff yourself, plus resources for finding repair shops in your neighborhood
- www.recyclethis.co.uk is one of my favorite sites (though more for repurposing than repairing). Can’t figure out what to do with old socks? Let me count the ways.
Locally:
- Menlo Vacuum and Fix-It, 1179 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, (650-322-9333) - repair all sorts of small appliances and electronics, also recycles batteries
- West Bay TV, 3219 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, (650-368-3384) - repair TVs, stereos, cameras
- Rancho Grande Appliances, 2890 Bryant, San Francisco, (415-641-51390 - repair washers, dryers, refrigerators, stoves
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Luxury or Frugality
July 28, 2008
Posted by CindyC in : Opinions & Thoughts , 10 comments
During a weekend get together, some friends and I got into an interesting discussion. It started out simple enough with us talking about summer movies. Amazingly, I had actually seen a few before they came out on DVD. In any case, we were talking about Sex and the City (SATC) when one friend said, “You must be totally excited about these rent-a-designer-handbag websites.” It took me a second to realize she was referring to “Louise”, the wanna be fashionista in the movie, and her economical entry into high fashion that involved renting Louis Vitton handbags online.
Huh? I admit, once upon a time, I had the same obsession as those glamorous ladies in SATC (except I wasn’t so glamorous). But that was long ago, before a mortgage, family and a clearer shopping conscience. So I was a bit confused by her comment.
“Well, doesn’t it warm your heart that fashionistas are embracing the idea of community and recycling?” I must have had a doubtful scowl on my face since my friend defensively responded, “Does it really matter that these people are renting and reusing bags to satisfy their own vanity as long as they are reusing and not buying another handbag? How is that any different or worse than buying at consignment stores? Aren’t you a pragmatist?”
I suppose she has a point. I often tell my friends that the motivation doesn’t concern me too much as long as people are cleaning up their act. I also believe that you don’t have to make significant changes in your lifestyle to start making a difference, as long as you make changes and stick to them. But does renting (rather than buying) expensive handbags actually counts as a change? After all, does anyone (other than Carrie Bradshaw and company) really need a Hermes Birkin bag, especially considering the cost can probably feed some impoverish village for a year?
Maybe I’ve become less pragmatic and more skeptical but I don’t buy this idea as a change for the better.
CindyC at Organicpicks
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Copyright 2007 Organicpicks
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