Living the American Green

Tomorrow, April 14, is “Big Picture” day at Starbucks.  Now, don’t get all excited- they’re not giving away free giant photographs of coffee beans and barista tools- I know, it’s very disappointing.  But, according to the coffee cult’’s website, if you bring a reusable mug into any Starbucks tomorrow, they’ll fill it with coffee for free.  Why?  They want to encourage customers to think of the big picture by considering the life span of each thing they throw away.  Starbucks’ goal? To encourage more people to begin using reusable coffee cups daily, resulting in more trees and less disposable cups in landfills.  They’ve got an online pledge you can take, and the numbers fuel the site’s calculator which shows  “how many trees” people are predicted to save by using their own cups.

Dutiful readers, well aware of my usual attacks when it comes to company “greening” efforts, may be suprised at my reaction to this campaign.   I actually like this one!   It’s rare for a company to discuss customer’s habits, and motivate for positive change.  And this free coffee bit, followed by Starbucks’ unending promise of 10 cents off any drink when using a reusable cup, are pretty convincing perks.  Bribery works, and I’m interested to see just how many people Starbucks can get to take one step forward in reducing their daily waste.

Starbucks, no doubt, benefits widely from this plan: they get a lot of positive PR, a flood of customers tomorrow,  and reduced costs from not providing cups, sleeves, and lids to a large percentage of customers.  Still, though, I think the net positive outweighs the gain by Starbucks big wigs.  So dig out that coffee mug and get to drinking the pep juice- your environment needs you!

Fresh from the Huffington Post oven…

Top 10 Recent Developments on Factory Farming and Vegetarianism

PhD applications are running my life these past few months, and another two to go – but a quick stop by LtAG to share two recent New York Times articles that corroborate my earlier musings on the importance of ramping up our venison consumption on the East Coast, especially when we can eat it instead of factory-produced meat with its astronomical carbon footprint and barbaric animal treatment standards. 

Christopher Walken is watching you not hunt for your own food.

One article is called “The Urban Deerslayer”, and deals with a Virginia man’s new entrepreneurial classes called Deer Hunting for Locavores – in which he teaches urban and suburban people committed to eating more responsibly how to hunt for their own food. The classes have been a huge success, as they play into the contemporary trend of being as close as possible to the food cycle that sustains us, while also having the feel-good element of helping to reduce some of the environmental pressure the deer are placing on Eastern forest ecosystems – not to mention combatting the unnerving trend that only about 22% of hunting today is for food.

The other article is an even better idea, in my opinion, than training trendy urbanites to be even more environmentally sensitive than they already are. This concerns a bill that was introduced last winter in Connecticut to allow hunters to cull additional deer if they donate the meat to food pantries struggling to meet their needs. As legislators put it, this proposal addressed three problems at once (and reminded us again that taking responsibility for our ecosystems is emphatically not some hippie cause that doesn’t help people): it combats the deer overpopulation and defoliation due to the destruction of their natural predators, it redresses the dire straits that many food charities are facing as their demand increases and their supply dwindles during the recession, and it helps to reduce the risks of Lyme Disease in the region. 

And it’s not just Connecticut. Ohio has a similar program to enroll hunters – who are often pejoratively treated as backwards or insensitive by urban folks – in the effort to help the poor outlast the economic downturn and help the land recover from its many mismanagements. And my prediction? We’re going to see more and more of these kinds of solutions on the ground, because communities need them, and everyone wins. Forget the dicks-in-hands dithering of Dems and Repubs on Capitol Hill – here we’re bringing together hunters and environmentalists, rugged individuals and community service charities….this is bipartisanship in practice. 

Very briefly up for air, we are at LtAG. Three bits of ominous news for you today from the (slightly unintentional) food front.

1. Winning the Why Am I Not Surprised Award, undercover animal rights activists landed jobs at an Iowa chicken factory and released footage of male chicks being dumped, alive, into an industrial grinder. After all, who needs 200 million roosters running around? Look, if we could breed only female birds we would, but we can’t, so we’ll just keep grinding up these male birds. Crystalline logic. P.S. our eggs are 100% local!

2. A Florida man was horrified when he took a big gulp from a can of Pepsi and discovered that all kinds of foul-tasting gunk was inside. He tried to empty the can and shook it until something that looked like “pink linguini” came out, then called the FDA. The FDA’s analysis? Somehow there had been a disemboweled frog inside the closed can of Pepsi. Mmmmmm. The Choice of a New Generation.

3. And far and away my favorite story, likewise not that surprising – just when we thought health care protests couldn’t get uglier, a rally supporting Obama’s healthcare reform turned into a rumble when it encountered our dear friends on the deather fringe, some words were exchanged, some fisticuffs were exchanged, and a dude’s finger got bitten off by what we can only assume was someone who took the notion of “rabid extremism” a little literally. Yeah, uh, I hear that under Obamacare the government is going to make decisions on what fingers you get to keep. No to Body Part Rationing! Free Grandma! On the plus side, he certainly showed the government that no east-coast liberal is going to tell him to stop eating meat! We The People will eat whatever and whoever we damn well please because this is America, not the Third Reich!

First of all, full disclaimer that “locowashing” is an awful portmanteau – almost (but not quite) as bad as “he-cession.”

This cracks me up though, it really does. Thanks to the apparent trendiness of bioregional eating, the ad wizards hailing from the four corners of corporate fantasyland have decided that it would be a tremendous idea to “go local” themselves. Unfortunately – there doesn’t appear to be a crystal-clear understanding of what exactly “local” entails…

A few examples, ranging from the mildly bile-inducing to the full-on, gut-bustingly, milk-snortingly hilarious:

The one that started the attention was most likely the Frito-Lay corporation, whose marketing campaign in early 2009 gently nudged attention from the quality of the product itself to the “local people and communities” who grow their potatoes. The logic is sound, I guess, in an infuriating know-it-all 6th-grader kind of way: “Potatoes have to be grown by somebody, don’t they? And those people are growing them somewhere, aren’t they? So the potatoes are local to the place where they’re grown. Right?” My favorite feature of this ad campaign? It would have to be the “Chip Tracker” gadget that let’s you pop in a zip code and learn exactly which ”local community” has painstakingly and lovingly grown your potato chips, hopefully taking long, picturesque siestas and relaxing with big pitchers of iced tea and 2.5 children per farmhouse.  (For the record: mass produced chips are not small-batch delicacies. It’s a neat gimmick to give you the location of where potatoes are sourced, but dollars to donuts the Chip Tracker kicks out the closest farm to your zip code without telling you anything about how millions of bags of chips are actually shipped and stored around the country.)

But it’s not just Frito-Lay. Far from it. 

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Oh children. We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants around here with business, campaigning, and general tomfoolery, which I hope explains why we haven’t posted anything in a week and probably will be a bit thin on the ground for a while longer. But in a spirit of reconciling our sorry selves with you, dear reader, here are a couple news articles that one could read in any variety of ways – anything from elation to jelly-booted terror.

Fast-Food School Vicinity Ban: Prudent or Tantalizing?

So New York City councilmember Eric Gioia is trying to get a bill passed in the city that would prohibit the opening of new fast food establishments within 0.1 miles of a school. Now, granted that’s only two blocks in New York speak, which is no great preventative measure if you ask me, but there’s a bigger question at hand. I support in theory any acknowledgment by the city that fast food is a factor of childhood unhealthiness and unknown chemical imbalances later in life, and I respect the effort. But kids that want something are remarkably committed to getting it. Cigarettes, booze, energy drinks, you name it – prohibiting it may have the reverse effect of making it even more desirable than it already is. I used to babysit a kid who was incredibly lazy EXCEPT when going dramatically out of his way to acquire something his parents wouldn’t let him have. If enough noise is made out of this bill if it gets passed (and rest assured, the non-issue-obsessed e-media being what it is, noise will be made), expect to see a sharp increase in the amount of fast food consumed by rebellious high-schoolers at lunch.

So what can be done? Either try to keep kids indoors for lunch (which, I know from experience, will produce an epic shit-monsoon that no school wants to deal with), or go ahead and pass the ban and make fast food less convenient and hope to Moses, Mary, and Mohammed that they just don’t find out about it. So, I guess: shhhhhhhhh. Wait. I screwed it up already. Sigh.

This is why you're fat (double cheeseburgers with chicken nuggets for buns).

Monsanto and Your Future, or, “Really, FDA?”

Sing, Muse, of Michael Taylor! Of the Monsanto exec who at any given moment is either employed by the US government in a capacity of regulating the dangerous practices of the agribusiness industry, or (if it’s tuesday, thursday, or sunday), is in the agribusiness industry writing deregulatory proposals to be approved by the FDA. One of the architects of Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (the same one that some studies and European governments have suggested contribute to health irregularities and weirdly early puberty in milk-guzzling kids), he was also one of the FDA authorities who approved that very wonder cocktail under Clinton. 

And now! After another corporate foray, Taylor is back in the FD, back in the FD, back in the FDA. Appointed by Obama’s administration. Cool.

Now, all the environmentalist listserves that grace my email have gone into varying shades of apoplexy over this, demanding immediate censure of anything with two thumbs and a government paycheck. IF there is a silver lining or an alternative spin to this, it is that despite the long history of cronyism and impending mollycoddling of Monsanto and the other three Horseman of the Apocalypse, Taylor has in fact been pretty tough on food sanitation issues and will probably do more to crack down on such dangerous embarrassments as the peanut-contamination fracas earlier this year. I guess he’s of the “tough love” school of regulating his buddies, like the coach that wants you to succeed but isn’t afraid to make you run a few extra laps (for the record, that may be the first sports analogy I’ve ever successfully used). But if regulation of dirty agrifactories is achieved mainly by redirecting funds and manpower from the watchdogging of the special-interests science that leads to things like rBGH, as is, well, likely – then we’re no less screwed than we already were.  And I’d really like to be less screwed than we already are.

Michael Taylor. With a mustache.

Cats and kittens, we’ve got a real treat tonight. I sat down yesterday with Jared Koch, nutritionist and author of a dense gem of a book, Clean Plates NYC.

“Jared’s nutritional advice in Clean Plates has the power to transform your individual health and our collective well-being." --Deepak Chopra, M.D.

I first met Jared at New York’s monthly schmooze-fest for all breeds of vocational environmentalists, “Green Drinks,” where he was giving a brief presentation on his project. And quite a project it is: teaming up with a professional food-critic, Alex van Buren, Jared conducted a phenomenal amount of research deep into the food sourcing, cooking methods, and final products of over 300 restaurants in Manhattan – eating at over 125 of them. All with the objective of compiling a list of New York restaurants, accommodating omnivores and vegans alike, that stand out at the helm of a subcultural shift towards food that is as healthy as it is delicious, as ethically sound as it is aesthetically rich. 

After a brief rundown of the criteria by which foods and restaurants were evaluated, the meat and potatoes (so to speak) of Clean Plates NYC begins with ethos, laying out Jared’s five precepts for finding a unique manner of eating that is suited to the individual rather than to the hippest new diet.

He parses the complex relationship between genetic history, cultural background, day-to-day lifestyle, sex, and age in determining what diet may suit us best as “bio-individuals” – and it turns out that the “ideal diet” is just as in flux as we are. Nonetheless, the other precepts make it clear that the nutritional situation of virtually all of us suffers from excessive processing of foods away from their state as they come from the earth, from a gross imbalance of the plant-animal ratio in our diet, from the presence of hormones, antibiotics, and heavy metallic sterilizers in our food, and from addictions to mood-and-energy-altering substances like sugar, caffeine, and alcohol. 

And then come the reviews. And O, the reviews. The rest of the book is composed of nuanced, in-depth, high-quality reviews of the 75 top choices from Jared’s and Alex’s research. Now, I visited two of these places prior to interviewing Jared, and already I’ve had the most interesting tea I’ve ever tasted, one of the best salads I’ve ever had, the third most delicious sandwich I’ve ever had (1st place goes to the Italian ex-pats at Panino Sportivo Roma on 121st and Amsterdam, and 2nd to the sandwich ninjas at our dear City Sub on Bergen near 5th Ave in Brooklyn), and one of the best (organic!) cocktails I’ve ever had (called, no less, the “Slap & Tickle”). These restaurants are the real deal: hedonistic, atmospheric, and power-packed with nutrition. And because the book is pocket-sized, you can stick it in your pants and go on the healthiest damn glutton-crawl this side of the Sardinian countryside. Clearly, the authors are onto something here – something way, way overdue…

So I knew straight away I needed to talk to this guy. Get him to weigh in on all these tricky issues we keep carouselling around at LtAG – local vs. organic? just how much difference can we actually make on the environment with our food consumption choices? how do we get schools involved in re-rooting our agricultural system in real foods that don’t need to be shipped halfway around the world? on a scale of 1 to 100, just how elitist is arugula (okay, I didn’t ask that one)? But the rest – and much more – are answered below the fold.

So here are the steps to take. 1) Click “More” to read this exclusive interview with Mr. Jared Koch; 2) Reflect. Salivate; 3) Buy the book – you won’t regret it if you’re ever planning on being in this beautiful, busy, and surprisingly healthful city of mine.

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pure genius.

make sure you watch until time 4:33 for the full impact.

An Ethanol Molecule. You know... Science Stuff!

The other week, I posted a few things about Ethanol: how the lobby was holding up the Waxman Bill, etc.  As per my usual, it was one part educated conjecture, one part politics, one part research a six parts B.S. (essentially, the patented  LtAG 9 part system!)

After Mark made the fair point that numbers might be a good thing, I tried… but lets be honest — I don’t know much about “science”.  On the other hand, I know people who know things.  Some of them even know a lot of things.

One of those people, a Mr. James C, was kind enough to tell me a little ’bout Ethanol, and about why we shouldn’t let that ship sail off to the proverbial land of the elves just yet.  (Yeah, that was a LoTR reference.  So what?)

James works for a company makes enzymes for the corn ethanol industry, so he has a dog in this fight.  However, he also has “knowledge” of “science” stuff, so we have to suspect that he knows what he be talking bout.  The following is all his words, and let me tell you: they make sense.

“I have come to believe that while corn is not the ideal crop, it is the currently the only means to reduce emissions in cars on the road today. Even when we look slightly into the future, technology is still lacking. While electric cars will become more of a reality in the future, the battery technology is not here yet and they will likely be expensive when it is. Also, we have to think about where the electricity is coming from (ie, coal is worse that solar but solar costs a lot).  Funding into fuel cells has been cut by the DOE as it’s not really a feasible technology.  Algal biodiesel likely will never happen (it’d be great if it does but there are too many hurdles such as how to collect it). (Editors Note: Crap!  We were really jazzed about that!)   Finally, we can make more efficient cars, but they will still need liquid fuel likely in conjunction with electricity (hybrid electric).   (more…)

While I am still recovering from the grief of my vanished dissertation of a post, here are two slightly less interesting but still ponderable cow-related stories of late. 

Happy Cows: Not Just a Depressing Corporate Slogan

Researchers in Newcastle (a moment of silence for their football squad) came up with something interesting recently: out of 516 dairy farmers in England, almost half gave their cows names and, on average, reported an annual yield of milk over 500 pints greater per cow. Now, chances are there’s more correlation than causation going on here – farmers who choose to name their cows are probably also more likely attentive to their cows individual needs and conditions, making the cows on average healthier. Nevertheless, it does provide an interesting rejoinder to the all-too-modern agricultural perspective that would define livestock as machines that simply need to be calibrated correctly and allowed to produce and produce and produce. Agribusinesses that do not acknowledge the elements of uniqueness belonging to what are, without legitimate counter-argument, individual organisms, will remain successful through cut corners, antibiotic warfare, and sheer bulk of production – but at significant cost to quality both culinary and moral. I hope we can see that the relationships between farmer and livestock is not the sole purview of sentimentalists, but a basic fact of the craft of farming that has largely fallen by the wayside of American production methods.

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