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Environmental

Sustainable fish

April 22, 2010 by amanda Leave a Comment

Tonight we had baked wrapped tilapia, quinoa, and sweet potatoes.  It was awesome. As I ate, I kept thinking about how I wish the public had more information on which fish are the safest and most sustainable to eat.

As many of you know, I am a bit of a freak when it comes to toxins. Toxins are highly present in a lot of fish, because fish tend to have longer food chains. Long food chains mean that there are a lot of extra opportunities for the toxins to accumulate.  When a big fish eats a smaller fish, it gets the lifetime accumulated toxin load from that fish and every fish (or other item) that the smaller fish ate.

Basically, that means that if you eat fish (or anything that had a mother), you want to eat lower on the food chain. Toxins are also lipophilic (attracted to fat), so fatty fish store more. This is why shrimp are less toxic than seals  😉 It is also why the native cultures who eat a lot of blubbery and fatty seafood that is also high on the food chain end up with the highest toxin body burdens in the world.

(As a side note, here is a nasty story about trash recently found in a whale’s gut. It was a fairly low volume of trash compared to food, but still gross. It contained sweatpants, a golf ball, over 20 plastic bags, surgical gloves, and more goodies….)

Anyways, so tilapia is one of the few kinds of fish that is considered to be “kid safe“.  That means that it is both low in toxins and sustainable. Tilapia eat mostly algae and aquatic plants, so they don’t have many opportunities to absorb toxins. The “kid safe” designation is really only true for tilapia from the US or other countries in the Americas. It is NOT true for Chinese tilapia (which is what most of the frozen stuff is.) Chinese fish farms have pollution and other environmental problems.

We have obviously gone back and forth on whether or not we’ve eaten fish. If you aren’t abstaining for moral or philosophical reasons, then fish can be a great way to get essential fatty acids. It is especially important for women who are pregnant, may become pregnant, or breastfeeding to be aware of what they’re eating, because our children are the highest on the food chain as they are nourished from our body. See this article on mothering.com, SafeMilk.org, or the amazing book, Having Faith for more info on toxins in pregnancy and breastfeeding. 🙂 Happy eating!

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Filed Under: Environmental

Consumerism and the green movement

July 30, 2008 by amanda 3 Comments

I just read this article by Michael Pollan. He makes some really good points.

It sounds like he’s on board with the Food, Not Lawns movement

We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. You know, eight percent of the American landmass we’ve kind of locked up and thrown away the key. That’s a wonderful achievement and has given us things like the wilderness park.

This is one of our great contributions to world culture, this idea of wilderness. On the other hand, it’s had nothing to say of any value for the ninety-two percent of the landscape that we cannot help but change because this is where we live. This is where we grow our food, this is where we work. Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development– parking lot, lawn.

This is a topic that I’ve been thinking about, especially after reading Urban Homestead. They talk a lot about the wastefulness of having a lawn, and I’ve been slowly trying to de-grass my yard. We are expanding our mulched beds, and putting in vegetables, fruits, and herbs that look beautiful, but also don’t waste water. It is ridiculous to pollute our water supply with all of the chemicals that we put in to our lawn, when it gives us nothing in return except for a manicured slab of grass. I am fortunate to live in an area where I am not required to have grass, but my husband is afraid that we will be the weirdos on the block if we completely eliminate it. He helped me to yank out some of our useless water hogs this weekend though, so I think he’s coming on board. For now, my goal is to reduce the amount of water that we waste and to make sure that I do the best that I can to avoid further polluting the water that does go to my lawn.

Back to the article… Michael Pollan also challenges readers to

…find one thing in your life that doesn’t involve spending money that you could do, one change that would make a contribution both to the fact of global warming and your sense of helplessness about global warming.

I think of this when I’m at the grocery store and I see the “green” grocery bags for sale. I know so many people who have tons of canvas or mesh bags at their house, but they feel the need to buy the bags to be more green. Its silly. Our consumerism is tainting our attempts to undo the problem… a problem that it has caused in the first place!

I think this is such a great challenge. Its one that I’ve struggled with… I’ve had to push myself to think in a new way. There are so many things that we can do that will help immensely and don’t require for us to spend a single cent. I use a clothes line outside, but I wanted to dry some clothes inside. I immediately wanted to run (or walk) to the store and buy a fancy, retractable clothesline. I thought about it for a second, and I realized that I had places in my house where I could hang or drape the sheets, and I didn’t need to buy anything. Why did I feel the need to go get the proper gadget to hang clothes?! Billions of people have hung clothes without indoor retractable clotheslines!

I did the same thing with my worm bin. I was researching online to find some kind of super worm chalet. It took me several days to convince myself that all that I needed was the rubbermaid that held my homebirth supplies, with a few holes drilled in the side. It took me only a few minutes, and it reused an item that I wasn’t using. When I went to the Boulder county worm composting workshop, I smiled when I saw that they were using the same thing for their official worm bin. You don’t need fancy stuff to make it work.

I’m not saying that there aren’t times when the special equipment is worth it. For example, I use my grain mill daily, and I absolutely adore it. I traded in my hand powered model for the electric one, because it grinds a much finer flour so I don’t need to supplement with white flour. I still try to make good choices, by buying Colorado grown organic wheat berries in bulk, and by batch processing the wheat. I’m still happy to use the electric version though 😉

If you’ve recently started doing anything to be more green that doesn’t include buying something new, then I’d love to hear about it. I’m always excited to try new things! I am going to try to make a solar oven out of stuff that I have in my garage. We’ll see how that goes. Hopefully I’ll soon be making my zucchini bread in the back yard 😉

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Filed Under: Environmental, Voluntary Simplicity

Mourning Wild Oats

February 23, 2007 by amanda Leave a Comment

I went out and did my grocery shopping today. I was bummed as I went around Wild Oats and realized that soon it would be swallowed up by Whole Foods. I realize that Boulder is home to Wild Oats, and that is probably why I like it so much. They do a wonderful job of buying local (and marking it so you can tell what you are buying!) while still keeping prices reasonable. Their sales are so much better than WF and their bulk section rocks. I have heard that this is not the case on the east coast, but here in Colorado, I think Wild Oats is way better.

To be fair, Vitamin Cottage beats them both up and down the block when it comes to prices (and they only stock organic!), but VC is a lot smaller and doesn’t offer the deli and butchering services that Wild Oats and Whole Foods offer, so it is harder for them to be competitive if you are an omnivore.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan talks about how Whole Foods uses a big distribution chain for their produce which means that only a very small percentage is still from local farms. They fly produce around just like Safeway, and they are more than willing to sacrifice the local ideals in order to better industrialize their chain. That’s fine if they want to do it, but I’d rather have Wild Oats as a competitive option.

Then again, in some ways Whole Foods has it right. Their organic milk doesn’t come from Aurora, unlike Wild Oats. They also do a better job of luring in yuppies, which I suppose is a good thing. Whole Foods offers more “regular” products like Quaker Oats. I don’t know…

See, this is why I like being able to get the good things frome each store. Now that option is being taken from me :P  I realize this is all a part of capitalism, but it bums me out.  I like having choices.  I’m pouting.

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Filed Under: Environmental, The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan

New books and my chance to hear Michael Pollan speak

February 9, 2007 by amanda Leave a Comment

I have all of these entries in the works, but I’ve been bogged down and haven’t had them time to actually write them out.

Last night I had the opportunity to go hear Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Delimma) speak. It was really great, and it was perfect timing since I’ve been blogging about him for the past month or so. I was sitting at my computer, minding my own business, when a new article popped up in Vienna saying that Mr. Pollan would be speaking at Colorado College. I called up my friend, begged her to join me, and made plans to go to Colorado Springs. It was such a nice night out! I’m such a nerd 😛

This week I have a new hunk of books that I’m working on.

I am about 2/3 of the way through with this one now. It is giving me all sorts of great quotes like

…the dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment.

Dude. Their dictionary is apparently not like my dictionary.

My upcoming reads this week:

I started this one last week, but I put it on the back burner to finish How to Read a Book


This one was recommended on the Vegan Freak podcast. I’m really looking forward to it.

This one was recommended by Sara. I’m hoping to write about it once I’m digging in 🙂

Well, it looks like its going to be a pretty green week of reading 😉 I am guessing that means I’ll be reading on an entirely different subject in the next week or two. I can’t stay focused for too long.

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Filed Under: Book Talk, Environmental, The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan

Organic dairy ratings (and a quick update on me)

January 27, 2007 by amanda 2 Comments

We have family in from out of town right now, so I haven’t been updating, but I didn’t want you to think I had fallen off of the face of the earth! I finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma last week and I am so glad that I read it. If you haven’t gotten it yet, I really encourage you to do so! I went to the library today to pick up some books that were on hold for me, including Appetite for Change: How The Counterculture Took on the Food Industry and God and Country: How Evangelicals Have Become America’s New Mainstream. I plan on blogging about one or both of them in the next week 🙂 I’m just not sure which one will be a better fit for my blog yet 😉
I also wanted to share a link that I found this week for dairy industry rankings. This is a study of all the big organic dairy producers, and I think it is something that everyone who buys milk should read. Check it out here:

http://cornucopia.org/dairysurvey/index.html

I was inspired to find the above page after my dh brought home some Safeway Organic “O” Milk. I was less than impressed. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I purchased milk, and I told him that he was encouraging factory farming. He pulled it out of the fridge and showed me the drawing of the cows in the pasture on the front of the carton, which made me seriously roll my eyes. I then decided to prove myself right (very different from proving him wrong, lol.)

Sure enough, I was totally right 😛 He then agreed and sent on this article about Aurora Dairy, which supplies not only Safeway’s “O” brand but also Wild Oats, Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, and a few other of the big names. Please be conscientious about what you buy. It is not fair to choose to be ignorant and thus support factory farms that abuse animals. If you feel you don’t have the time to research it, let me know, and I’ll even research it for you! I want there to be no excuses! I understand that in some areas there are no better options. In that case, if you must drink milk, then I agree that the organic factory farm is better than the non-organic one. I just want to get the word out there that not all farms are created equal though. Just because there is a picture of happy cows on the cover does not mean there are happy cows making your milk.
I hope everyone is having a great weekend 🙂 Thanks for the PMs, emails, and comments over the past week. You guys are the best!

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Filed Under: Environmental, Vegetarian

The animals on the “beyond organic” farm

January 20, 2007 by amanda Leave a Comment

I split this into two entries. I hope that it won’t discourage people from reading the other one 🙂

In Chapter Eleven, Pollan discusses the way that the animals work together at Polyface farm. He starts by talking about the chickens, who are moved in a way that is similar to the cows. There is portable fencing that is used to move them so that they evenly fertilize and clean the land.

Left to their own devices, a confined flock of chickens will eventually destroy any patch of land, by pecking the grass down to its roots and poisoning the soil with their extremely “hot,” or nitrogenous, manure. This why the typical free-range chicken yard quickly winds up bereft of plant life and hard as a brick. Moving the birds daily keeps both the land and the birds healthy; the broilers escape their pathogens and the varied diet of greens supplies most of their vitamins and minerals… Meanwhile, their manure fertilizes the grass, supplying all the nitrogen it needs. The chief reason Polyface Farm is completely self-sufficient in nitrogen is that a chicken, defecating copiously, pays a visit to virtually every square foot of it at several points during the season.

Doesn’t that make so much more sense? Just compare that to the “free-range” organic house that was discussed a few chapters ago. Which chicken do you think has a better life?

“In nature you’ll always find birds following herbivores,” Joel explained… “The egret perched on the rhino’s nose, the pheasants and turkeys trailing after the bison–that’s a symbiotic relationship we’re trying to imitate.” In each case the birds dine on the insects that would otherwise bother the herbivore; they also pick insect larvae and parasites out of the animal’s droppings, breaking the cycle of infestation and disease. “To mimic this symbiosis on a domestic scale, we follow the cattle in their rotation… I call these gals our sanitation crew.”

Just like the life cycle for grass that I just spoke about in my last entry, there is something similar for the chickens.

It seems that chicken eschew fresh manure, so he waits three or four days before bringing them in–but not a day longer. That’s because the fly larvae in the manure are on a four-day cycle, he explained. “Three days is ideal. That gives the grubs a chance to fatten up nicely, the way the hens like them, but not quite long enough to hatch into flies.” The result is prodigious amounts of protein for the hens, the insect supplying as much as a third of their total diet–and making their eggs unusually rich and tasty. By means of this simple little management trick, Joel is able to use his cattle’s waste to “grow” large quantities of high-protein chicken feed for free; he says this trims his cost of producing eggs by twenty-five cents a dozen… The cows further oblige the chickens by shearing the grass; chickens can’t navigate in grass more than about six inches tall.

I love this. This is the kind of farm I tell myself I am supporting when I buy organic. The truth is, as I said before, that it is not necessarily what is meant by “organic”. Sure, some organic farms are like this, but the biggest producer of organic eggs is owned by the same company that made “Rosie” the chicken in my entry yesterday.

Joel also uses ingenious ways to make fertilizer and other inputs for the farm, rather than buying them or using fossil fuels. Pollan goes on to discuss how Joel adds layers of woodchips and corn to the manure that the cows are on in their barn. This slowly rises up and then keeps them warm as it decomposes during the winter. When the cows head out to pasture in the spring, Joel brings in the pigs who use their amazing sense of smell to get the fermented corn out. This is a delicious treat to them, and as they dig through for the corn, they mix it up and make an amazing fertilizer.

“This is the sort of farm machinery I like: never needs its oil changed, appreciates over time, and when you’re done with it you eat it.”

You can’t argue with that (assuming you aren’t Jewish or vegetarian… or both, in my case, lol).

I couldn’t look at their spiraled tails, which cruised about the earthy mass like conning towers on submarines, without thinking about the fate of pigtails in industrial hog production. Farmers “dock,” or snip off, the tails at birth, a practice that makes a certain twisted sense if you follow the logic of industrial efficiency on a hog farm. Piglets in these CAFOs are weaned from their mothers ten days after birth (compared with thirteen weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their drug-fortified feed than on sow’s milk. But this premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a need they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. “Learned helplessness” is the psychological term and it’s not uncommon in CAFOs, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank. It’s not surprising that an animal as intelligent as a pig would get depressed under these circumstances, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Since treating sick pigs is not economically efficient, these underperforming production units are typically clubbed to death on the spot.

Tail docking is the USDA’s recommended solution to the porcine “vice” of tail chewing. Using a pair of pliers and no anesthetic, most–but not quite all–of the tail is snipped off. Why leave the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail biting so much as to render it even more sensitive. Now a bite to the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will struggle to resist it. Horrible as it is to contemplate, it’s not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency.

Doesn’t that make you sick? Even if you eat pork (which I really don’t think is a good idea), that should make you think twice about random bacon or pork chops. That is just sick.

To close up the chapter:

At Polyface no one ever told me not to touch the animals, or asked me to put on a biohazard suit before going into the brooder house. The reason I had to wear one at Petaluma Poultry is because that system–a monoculture of chickens raised in close confinement–is inherently precarious, and the organic rules’ prohibition on antibiotics puts it at a serious disadvantage. Maintaining a single-species animal farm on an industrial scale isn’t easy without pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Indeed, that’s why the chemicals were invented in the first place, to keep shaky monocultures from collapsing. Sometimes the large-scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.

By the same token, a reliance on agrochemicals destroys the information feedback loop on which an attentive farmer depends to improve his farming. “Meds just mask genetic weaknesses,” Joel explained one afternoon when we were moving the cattle. “My goal is always to improve the herd, adapt it to the local conditions by careful culling. To do this I need to know: Who has a propensity for pinkeye? For worms? You simply have no clue if you’re giving meds all the time.”

On that note, I’ll say goodbye until my next entry 🙂 Thanks to everyone who has been reading and commenting! Its been great to hear from some new voices!

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Filed Under: Environmental, The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan, Vegetarian

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