With the committment I've made to try and live and eat more sustainably, sometimes I am overwhelmed by the amount of information I find. The more I learn, I'm like my 5 year old watching a scary movie with her hands clapped over her eyes -- but her fingers are parted just a little bit to peek.
I feel like Jerry Maguire, when he began his mission statement. There is no turning back, despite the fact that it means his career will be in ruins.
There is no turning back for me, even though I wish so badly that I could hit the rewind button in my brain and go back to a moment when I didn't care a whole lot about what I ate. Ask my husband -- he'll tell you that he's impressed with my dedication, very pleased with the wonderful dinners I've been cooking night after night; but in many ways I do feel like my nice, easy domestic role has been ruined.
Sometimes I wish I hadn't read the November issue of Natural Health magazine, regarding Sustainable Meat Eating. Or the October issue of National Geographic about the international economics and sustainability of fishing and fish-consumption.
Via simple Google searches, that anyone can do if they have the curiosity and the desire to learn, I understand the influence of marketing on the healthier eating movement, and that terms like cage-free, natural, and organic are not necessarily self-explanatory, and that words like fully-pastured, local, and small are far more important.
I also heard the term beak-trimming.
Friends with good intentions are encouraging me to watch Food, Inc or read The Omnivore's Dilemma.
But I'm afraid my brain will explode.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Wrappin' It Up
Every Christmas Eve, my husband and I stay long after the kids go to bed, so that we can assemble toys and wrap presents. We usually have some drinks and dessert, and either we listen to Christmas music or we find "A Christmas Story" marathon and have that on in the background. At some point we split up to wrap each other's gifts, and then we finish the night with a cuddle on the couch, eyeing the mountain of presents under the tree.
That is all about to change.
With my quest to live less wastefully, I have decided not to wrap presents this year. Would you believe that 4 million tons of logs are used to create wrapping paper? Only a fastidious minority of gift recipients will open the packages delicately without tearing it, with the intention of reusing it for another gift; paper gift bags and tissue are only marginally more likely to be saved and used another time. This year, Santa will be giving us our gifts in cloth sacks. And isn't that the image that many of us have of Santa, a sack thrown over his shoulder as he heads down the chimney, sacks of toys piled up in his reindeer-drawn sleigh?
The kids were very excited to learn that Santa has gone green, and it coincides with the idea that the paper that they use for their millions of drawings indeed comes from trees, and those trees must be conserved. My husband, while supportive of my new endeavor, is a bit disappointed. But I promise him that late-night Christmas Eve still belongs to the two of us alone.
Remembering that UrbanEcoMama is trying to do all this on a budget, here is how it breaks down: I've spent $50 on 5 large cloth sacks that I intend to use for many years. How many years will it take me to have saved that much by not buying holiday wrapping paper? Answer unknown. I also do still have about half a dozen partially used rolls of wrapping paper that have accumulated over the years, and I will continue to use those sparingly. And what about gifts I give outside of my family? I didn't purchase a variety of sizes for those presents to my father-in-law, the girls' teachers, or my friends. But if I were to give them gifts in a pretty cloth sack, how do I delicately ask for the bag back?
That is all about to change.
With my quest to live less wastefully, I have decided not to wrap presents this year. Would you believe that 4 million tons of logs are used to create wrapping paper? Only a fastidious minority of gift recipients will open the packages delicately without tearing it, with the intention of reusing it for another gift; paper gift bags and tissue are only marginally more likely to be saved and used another time. This year, Santa will be giving us our gifts in cloth sacks. And isn't that the image that many of us have of Santa, a sack thrown over his shoulder as he heads down the chimney, sacks of toys piled up in his reindeer-drawn sleigh?
The kids were very excited to learn that Santa has gone green, and it coincides with the idea that the paper that they use for their millions of drawings indeed comes from trees, and those trees must be conserved. My husband, while supportive of my new endeavor, is a bit disappointed. But I promise him that late-night Christmas Eve still belongs to the two of us alone.
Remembering that UrbanEcoMama is trying to do all this on a budget, here is how it breaks down: I've spent $50 on 5 large cloth sacks that I intend to use for many years. How many years will it take me to have saved that much by not buying holiday wrapping paper? Answer unknown. I also do still have about half a dozen partially used rolls of wrapping paper that have accumulated over the years, and I will continue to use those sparingly. And what about gifts I give outside of my family? I didn't purchase a variety of sizes for those presents to my father-in-law, the girls' teachers, or my friends. But if I were to give them gifts in a pretty cloth sack, how do I delicately ask for the bag back?
Friday, December 10, 2010
My Love Affair with Coffee...
...must not be mutually exclusive with my committment to care for the earth. And this is a challenge. I am the mother of 3 children, ages ranging from almost 9 to almost 2. I work as a doula, so at times I am up all night long and for 24+ hour stretches. I need coffee to drink like I need air to breathe.
At one of my favorite hospitals, there is a Keurig Coffee Maker. I am tethered to that thing the way laboring women are tethered to medical equipment (and to read my thoughts about this, please visit my other blog!). I usually try to bring my stainless steel coffee mug with me when I work to avoid using a paper cup, but the single use coffee container/filter thing from Keurig or any other similar coffeemaker has resulted in 1.6 billion single-use coffee cup/filters used in 2009. The coffee is decent and brewed in seconds, but the plastic gadgets go into a landfill for decades, if not a centuries. How green is Green Mountain, who bought Keurig?
My other pleasure, when running about my life with my youngest, is to grab a quick coffee on our way to wherever we're going. A cup of coffee amid a sea of toddler mayhem is the only escape I need. But by forgetting to carry my reusable travel mug with me -- just this year alone -- means I contribute to a projected 23 billion paper coffee cups used. For a whole host of reasons, these paper coffee cups are not recycleable. Post-consumer materials in coffee cups usually only accounts for 10% of the material in each cup. The other 90% is newly acquired, because the cup would be too flimsy without new material.
If you prick my veins, my blood runneth black with dark roast. Since longer stretches of sleep are not in my near future, UrbanEcoMama needs to stash the travel mug in the diaper/doula bag. And the Keurig coffee maker at Mt. Auburn Hospital? I'll take suggestions, because even the sludge they sell in the hospital cafeteria is not available at 3AM.
At one of my favorite hospitals, there is a Keurig Coffee Maker. I am tethered to that thing the way laboring women are tethered to medical equipment (and to read my thoughts about this, please visit my other blog!). I usually try to bring my stainless steel coffee mug with me when I work to avoid using a paper cup, but the single use coffee container/filter thing from Keurig or any other similar coffeemaker has resulted in 1.6 billion single-use coffee cup/filters used in 2009. The coffee is decent and brewed in seconds, but the plastic gadgets go into a landfill for decades, if not a centuries. How green is Green Mountain, who bought Keurig?
My other pleasure, when running about my life with my youngest, is to grab a quick coffee on our way to wherever we're going. A cup of coffee amid a sea of toddler mayhem is the only escape I need. But by forgetting to carry my reusable travel mug with me -- just this year alone -- means I contribute to a projected 23 billion paper coffee cups used. For a whole host of reasons, these paper coffee cups are not recycleable. Post-consumer materials in coffee cups usually only accounts for 10% of the material in each cup. The other 90% is newly acquired, because the cup would be too flimsy without new material.
If you prick my veins, my blood runneth black with dark roast. Since longer stretches of sleep are not in my near future, UrbanEcoMama needs to stash the travel mug in the diaper/doula bag. And the Keurig coffee maker at Mt. Auburn Hospital? I'll take suggestions, because even the sludge they sell in the hospital cafeteria is not available at 3AM.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Who cares why the chicken crossed the road??
It's more important that I know where that road is and what the chicken ate before crossing it.
About a year ago, Jamie Oliver convinced me to stop giving my children chicken nuggets. Initially, because it's just so damn convenient, I resisted it: "But I only buy the white breast meat kind!" But I gave it up, much to my middle daughter's chagrin, and have been making chicken nuggets on my own, with even the breading being my own concoction of old bread, crackers, cornmeal, arrowroot and various spices. (Middle daughter refuses to eat them, but that is for another post.)
So...
...encouraged by my numerous friends who belong to CSA's, but discouraged by the cost,
...inspired by my friend Laura who is running a beef and egg CSA on her family farm ,
...and bolstered by the November article in Natural Health Magazine on sustainable meat-eating,
I decided to buy Nature's Promise chicken breasts at Stop and Shop last week. Organic and free-range, I was willing to go over my stringent weekly grocery budget for the purchase, although there was no indication of where the chicken was raised, slaughtered and trucked in from, and I don't recall from the packaging what it ate before it gave up its life for my saute pan. So not a perfect purchase, but I figured better than what I'd been purchasing before, and less expensive than going to Whole Foods, where the chicken's entire curriculum vitae is listed on its price tag.
Ready to cook! I open the ziplock bag the chicken is packaged in - handy, since I probably won't make the entire package, and the plastic seems durable enough to go in the freezer. (I hate zip lock bags, by the way, and use them sparingly, washing them and rewashing them for repeated uses.) And what is inside? A total over-packaging, plastic nightmare! Six of those organic chicken breasts are individually wrapped in plastic. And the plastic is not reusable on two counts: 1) vacuum sealed, so it has formed to the meat and must be cut open, and 2) because it is used for meat (bacteria and such).
So -- healthy, homemade, minimally processed chicken dinner for the kids, but wasteful packaging with meat of unknown origins. If there were a game score between UrbanEcoMama and Earth, I'd say it's a tie.
Not good enough. UrbanEcoMama wants a win-win.
About a year ago, Jamie Oliver convinced me to stop giving my children chicken nuggets. Initially, because it's just so damn convenient, I resisted it: "But I only buy the white breast meat kind!" But I gave it up, much to my middle daughter's chagrin, and have been making chicken nuggets on my own, with even the breading being my own concoction of old bread, crackers, cornmeal, arrowroot and various spices. (Middle daughter refuses to eat them, but that is for another post.)
So...
...encouraged by my numerous friends who belong to CSA's, but discouraged by the cost,
...inspired by my friend Laura who is running a beef and egg CSA on her family farm ,
...and bolstered by the November article in Natural Health Magazine on sustainable meat-eating,
I decided to buy Nature's Promise chicken breasts at Stop and Shop last week. Organic and free-range, I was willing to go over my stringent weekly grocery budget for the purchase, although there was no indication of where the chicken was raised, slaughtered and trucked in from, and I don't recall from the packaging what it ate before it gave up its life for my saute pan. So not a perfect purchase, but I figured better than what I'd been purchasing before, and less expensive than going to Whole Foods, where the chicken's entire curriculum vitae is listed on its price tag.
Ready to cook! I open the ziplock bag the chicken is packaged in - handy, since I probably won't make the entire package, and the plastic seems durable enough to go in the freezer. (I hate zip lock bags, by the way, and use them sparingly, washing them and rewashing them for repeated uses.) And what is inside? A total over-packaging, plastic nightmare! Six of those organic chicken breasts are individually wrapped in plastic. And the plastic is not reusable on two counts: 1) vacuum sealed, so it has formed to the meat and must be cut open, and 2) because it is used for meat (bacteria and such).
So -- healthy, homemade, minimally processed chicken dinner for the kids, but wasteful packaging with meat of unknown origins. If there were a game score between UrbanEcoMama and Earth, I'd say it's a tie.
Not good enough. UrbanEcoMama wants a win-win.
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