Improve NJ Transit, Practically for Free

I sent a letter to NJ Governor Phil Murphy. Go here if you want to send one too.

Chocolate, Coffee, and Sustainability

Chocolate and coffee are harmful to humans and to the environment in several ways.

Industrial-scale farmers clear forests to plant the trees and shrubs that are the source of coffee and cacao beans. The resulting habitat loss contributes to species extinction, and the loss of trees means more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Roasting the beans, manufacturing chocolate bars, and shipping the end products also releases a lot of CO2.

There's a good run-down of the evils of chocolate here, and of coffee, here.

According to Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions per kilogram of chocolate and coffee are comparable to those of cheese and shrimp: not as bad as beef and lamb, but many times higher than the carbon footprints of lentils and soy beans.

Go here for a larger version of the chart.

So if you're paying attention to the ecological impacts of your diet, coffee and chocolate are up there, pound for pound. 

As you can see from the chart above, net emissions of tree nuts are about three-tenths of a kilogram of CO2 per kilo of nuts, because the trees themselves take up CO2 as they grow. (On the other hand, they need a lot of water, and farmers in drought-prone places like California probably shouldn't be growing them.) Apples net 0.4 kg of CO2 per kilo, peas 0.9, tomatoes 1.4, and cane sugar 3 kg of CO2 per kilogram consumed. 

But there's a big difference in the quantities consumed. On average, Americans consume nearly 10 pounds of coffee per year and more than 11 pounds of chocolate. 

That compares to a total of well over 200 pounds per person of meat: in 2020, we averaged almost 100 pounds of chicken, almost 60 pounds of beef, and just over 50 pounds of pork. On top of that, we ate around 16 pounds of fish.

If you're wondering, we ate, on average, 145 pounds of vegetables in 2020. And we consume, on average, just over 150 pounds of sugar every year. 

So the carbon footprint of our sugar turns out to be higher, in the aggregate, than the impact of our coffee and chocolate, which in turn is far lower than the total average carbon footprint of the meat we collectively eat.

In terms of individual choices, it's is environmentally sound to limit consumption of coffee and chocolate, and certainly to seek out shade-grown and fair trade varieties. 

But you'll have a bigger impact if you trade in your gas guzzler for an electric car, put solar panels on the roof of your house, fly as little as possible, and vote for lawmakers who will fund public transportation and renewable energy.

Yet Another Reason to Lay off Shopping

Americans have been shopping to an unprecendented extent, and that's backing up ports and supply chains over and above anything else going on. 

But hang on, which Americans? The wealthiest 20 percent, of course. People whose income barely covered the basics before the Covid disruptions are also the hardest hit by losing income as a result of illness, job loss, and let's face it, deaths in their families.

A ship bigger than the Empire State Building docked in New York City a few months ago. 

For my part, I've been buying more books than usual, and they're arriving more slowly than they used to. I can live with that. 

I made the commitment in September of 2019 to stop buying new clothing, and with exceptions like socks, shoes and underwear, I've been doing a fairly decent job of sticking with it. I really should start counting non-thrifted purchases to keep myself honest. I buy most of my clothing from thrift stores, including the online giant ThredUP.

Recently, I mail-ordered a few items, and they took weeks longer to arrive than I expected based on pre-Covid norms. 

But the Atlantic points out that all these back-ups are also putting pressure on the hardest-hit Americans, maybe a quarter or half of us scraping by on not much more than minimum wage, lacking in health insurance, often food insecure.

It's those families, and their kids, that are missing out on school lunches and having trouble getting their hands on needed medications. 

And whose stuff gets shipped faster depends on who can pay more for shipping. It becomes a self-fulfilling loop. Amanda Mull writes:

Over time, it's [shopping has] become an expression of personal identity, a form of entertainment, and a way in which some believe they can effectively participate in politics—people rush to buy from or boycott companies on the basis of their public stances on social issues, and brands have begun to run extensive get-out-the-vote campaigns among their customers.

Reading that article this morning made me think about how many things I buy, and how many of them I don't, in fact, need. Need in the sense of basics: food, shelter, enough clothing to keep warm and comfortable (but not necessarily look extra sharp at work).

Meanwhile, we are learning that recycling isn't the solution. Water bottles can be pretty readily recycled, but there are dozens of different kinds of plastic, and 90 percent of it ends up in the trash. Plastic can't actually be recycled; it can only be "downcycled" into increasingly less reusable materials.

Fast fashion -- cheap clothing that's only worn a few times, is "destroying the planet," according to the not very environmentally forward-thinking New York Times. 

Amanda Mull's article in the Atlantic made me stop and think again, and re-commit myself to buying less stuff. Just ... everywhere. All the time. Probably even books.

How about you?

Circular Economies

To slow the release of carbon into the atmosphere, we can turn to renewable energy and biodegradable packaging, but to stop it, we need to return to a circular economy, with localized nodes all over the world.

Our current global and local economies depend on "natural resources" and "human resources" with the assumption that these are limitless, that the earth possesses or will continue to generate enough raw materials for the endless production and transport of new goods. In fact, many of our global industries depend not just on stable markets, but continuously growing ones, for financial stability. We have now reached the point where this will no longer allow for environmental sustainability.

In order to reach a point of truly circular economy, we need to reuse, recycle, compost, or burn (as fuel) everything we produce. And we're doing a terrible job at that.

While glass and metals can readily be recycled and similar products created, with less energy output than refining new materials, recycling plastic is much more difficult. Plastic, once produced, can't be melted down and re-used in the same form.

Water bottles (#1 plastic), for instance, can be made into fleece sweaters, but not into new plastic water bottles. There's a problem, though: every time you launder that fleece, you release microplastics into your town sewer system, and they end up in the ocean where they're killing wildlife.

Here's a table from Oxford University that summarizes how plastics are generally recycled by communities:

Go here for the full-size image

It turns out, though, that the situation isn't quite as dire, in theory: Plastics labeled  #2, #3, #4, and #5 can be turned into plastic wood. The town of Long Branch started a program last year to recycle plastic bags and wrappers (#4). They promised a park bench after 500 pounds of packaging was collected, and this January, the first bench was installed near Lake Takanassee.

Meanwhile, the town of Middletown, NJ recently opened a styrofoam recycling center, open to residents of the entire county. It only collects styrofoam used in packaging and shipping, not food-grade products, so you still need to get a reusable mug for your Dunkin Donuts coffee, and avoid take-out that's packaged in styrofoam.

There's a breakdown, however, been theory and practice. Between 1950 and 2015, the amount of plastic products produced annually rose almost 200-fold, from 2 million metric tons per year to 381 million metric tons, and only 9 percent of that was recycled.

We need to do better, and when it comes to plastics we need to address this in several different ways.

Governments need to enact carbon taxes to encourage corporate and individual consumers to use less carbon, by making it more expensive.

Producers of plastic products need to do a better job of making containers out of more easily recyclable products when possible, researching and developing biodegradable containers, and avoiding excess packaging.

Consumers need to send a message through individual purchases and buying habits that we don't want plastic. We need to:

• stop buying bottled water and other products packaged in single-use plastics
• refuse excess packaging, for instance when we buy loose produce
• advocate with local and state governments to enact plastic bag bans, and meanwhile make the choice to use reusable bags for our shopping
• boycott Dunkin Donuts and other corporations that still use styrofoam instead of paper hot drink cups, and tell them why

... and more. Those are starting points, not end points. We need to move to an economy where everything we produce can be repurposed in some way. It's going to take imagination and persistence. If we don't do it voluntarily, the effects of climate crisis will force the issue.

Green Holiday Gift Guide

The holidays are hard on the environment. In the US, people generate 25 percent more trash between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day -- including uneaten food, giftwrap, packaging, decorations, and last year's phones and computers. Then there are the unwanted gifts that people don't know what to do with, many of which also end up in the trash.

It's time to rethink gift-giving. Regifting can be a positive thing. An older family member who was downsizing gave me a lovely wooden salad bowl one year. It became a treasure. If you're just passing on something that the recipient won't want and can't use, it's not going to be appreciated, but regifting can be done thoughtfully and tactfully.

It's time to rethink giftwrap. My family has a long history of wrapping gifts in paper tied with ribbon, no tape used, that can then easily be saved for another year. We also cut taped paper and re-use that. One year, my mother sewed a bunch of cloth gift bags. I usually use gift bags with tissue paper -- with a little care, endlessly reusable.

But with those caveats, we want to give gifts to our loved ones. So, a few thoughts.

Don't go overboard. I'll admit, I like to have a little gift for my son for every day of Hanukah. One day it might be the skateboard or commuter bag he's had his eye on. Another day it might be a shirt or a hoodie I think he'll like. Other days, it will be a snack or treat of some sort. But I try to keep most of it low-key, and a combination of food he'll enjoy, clothes he can wear, and stuff he's been wanting. 

I know some folks appreciate it more than others, but I often make a charitable donation in lieu of a physical gift. Planned Parenthood, Heifer International, and the Sierra Club are some of the organizations I've supported in this way, but that's something that has to be personalized to both giver and recipient.

Another alternative is to give green products, and this is also a way to communicate with friends and family members about why you're doing this. You might give shade grown coffee, responsibly sourced tea, or ethically grown chocolate, with an explanation of what fair trade and environmentally responsible farming practices mean. 

If you're going to buy someone clothing, save up for a quality piece that will last, both in terms of construction and fashion, and look for a company with policies friendly to both labor and environment. 

Beware of green-washing. Overconsumption is a major driver of climate crisis, and even "green" products have production and transportation related emissions.

And don't forget folks who can't afford to give their families gifts. Consider making a donation to an organization that helps poor people at the holidays. And then vote in politicians who will raise the minimum wage and enact single-payer health insurance and make other inroads into the American scourge of poverty.

Just keep thinking. The holidays are stressful for all kinds of reasons. But try to keep environmental issues in sight as well. Other ideas? Please post in the comments, and I'll update.

Six Weeks without Single-Use Plastic?

Lent isn’t my holiday, but I hope those of you who observe it won’t mind if I borrow it to re-commit myself to a couple of environment-friendly habits that have been hard for me to get behind.

It’s true, global warming isn’t going to go away because of the individual actions of a few tree-huggers. (I will admit to being a tree-hugger.) We need corporate and government action. 

But we also need personal change. We need to find ways to say “no” to the endless cycles of consumption encouraged by capitalism and the marketing that supports it.

Lent begins tomorrow, March 6, and runs through April 18. Six weeks is a good time span to establish new habits. My goals: Buy nothing new, and give up single use plastics.

I don’t anticipate not buying new things is going to be difficult, not for six weeks. Once Lent is over, I’ll see how much longer I can keep it up.

Giving up single-use plastics is going to be a much bigger challenge. I’ve developed the habit of carrying a mug with me. I start my day with coffee and when that’s gone I switch over to water. So I don’t use water bottles or coffee cups.

But I’ve come to rely on take-out meals to get me through busy weeks, and it’s going to be hard to go six weeks without a take-out meal. It’s going to be hard to remember next time I’m at a reception not to grab a plastic plate and fork to have some cut up fruit or vegetables and hummus.

I might make it through six weeks without any single-use plastic items, but I’m certainly not going to be able to make it through six weeks without any plastic at all, because of the ubiquity of plastic packaging that comes with groceries. Most of those containers are bigger than single servings, so it’s not technically single-use, but it’s close.

I just went to the grocery store. I bought a couple of bars of soap in cardboard boxes, but inside the boxes — plastic wrap. Yogurt, in a plastic container, dishwasher detergent pods in a plastic bag. Garlic and onions, each in a plastic mesh bag. Almonds and walnuts, each in a plastic bag. Biodegradable plastic garbage bags — in a plastic bag. Calcium tablets in a little plastic jar, and two toothbrushes, both made of plastic and packaged in more plastic.

So at the same time that I’m trying to quit single-use plastic, I’m also going to try to limit the plastic packaging that comes with my food.

Wish me luck. It’s going to be hard.

What Will You Do? A Birthday Request

I’m turning 55 this month. Facebook has been encouraging me to set up a donation link and ask all my friends to contribute to my favorite cause. Instead, I’m asking my friends to do something about the environment.

Climate change has become a huge problem, and we are all going to be affected in our lifetimes. You don’t need me to tell you all the ways we’re doomed.

I’m not going to tell you what to do — we need action in so many different spheres and at so many different levels. If you’re going to keep up a commitment, it has to be to something that you feel is meaningful and that you are comfortable doing. 

We need government action, we need corporate action, and we need individual action. We need carbon taxes, we need businesses to adopt environmentally responsible processes, we need better public transit, we need better pedestrian and bike routes, and we need to stop consuming and wasting so much stuff at the individual level.

Maybe you’d be comfortable making a weekly phone call to an elected official — local, state, or federal — urging them to take positive action on some issue concerning the environment. Maybe you hold stocks, and you can try to persuade the corporations you invest in to take more environmentally responsible actions. Or you are vested in a retirement account and you can persuade its managers to disinvest from fossil fuels.

Maybe you want to try giving up fast fashion, spending more money on fewer items of clothing that will last longer. 

Maybe you want to try eating lower on the food chain, or cutting back on beef and dairy, which are worse for the environment than vegetable sources of protein but also worse than chicken and eggs.

Maybe you think it would be an interesting challenge to give up single-use plastics, whether water bottles, take-out containers, or soap and shampoo bottles. Maybe you can persuade your favorite take-out place to switch to paper containers. Maybe you’ll get a reusable coffee cup and get your coffee shop to put your morning brew in it instead of into paper or styrofoam.

Maybe you want to turn down the heat and put on a sweater, or in the summer turn up the heat and put on a fan. Maybe you can buy your electricity from a company that uses renewable sources, or even put solar panels on your roof.

Maybe you’re willing to give up your lawn, and the chemical fertilizers and pest control chemicals you’re using to maintain it, and instead create a yard full of native flowers and shrubs that will attract bees and butterflies and birds, and native trees that will do those things plus sequester carbon and provide summer-time shade that will reduce your need for air conditioning.

Maybe you believe environmental justice should be our biggest priority, and you want to volunteer for a few hours a month with an organization that helps both people and the environment.

Maybe you’re contemplating a move, and you want to choose a new home based in part on environmental criteria: well insulated? In a multi-unit building, so it can share heating and cooling via walls adjacent to other units? Close to public transit so you can take a bus or train to work or to school? Close enough to work so that you can walk or ride a bike?

My own commitments for the year are to recommit to a number of environmentally responsible habits, including use of public transit, avoiding take-out, and keeping my shopping for anything other than necessities to a bare minimum, and to get back to blogging about environmental issues. My goal will be to post weekly. Once a month, I’ll tell you what I am doing myself to help the environment. In other posts, I’ll provide more information about the things I’ve mentioned above, along with links to sources, as well as other ideas about things we can do to make the world a better place, big as well as small.

Do I have 55 friends who are with me? Please post in the comments section, or if you’d rather be anonymous, message me. Thank you.

Teaching After Trump: What Is A Book?

When I teach courses on medieval literature and the environment, I know that there are issues that are going to intersect with contemporary politics that I have to navigate with caution. But yesterday, when it dawned on me in the middle of a class meeting that "What Is A Book?" is political, I was pretty well blind-sided.

The course looks at the transitions from manuscript to print and from print to digital, and tries to throw codicology, history of the book, and digital humanities in the air together to see what kinds of configurations stuff drops into. I've taught the course only once before, four years ago, so I'm still in a very fluid period of making stuff up as I go along.

Yesterday we were looking at the Appendix to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. My students all know that technology is terrible because it makes us distracted, but Davidson engages with the prophets of doom and makes a good case that there are also things to value, and rather than rejecting it, we should engage with technology and figure out what it can do.

The Appendix turns out to be a good introduction to the book, and the course, because it lists "Twenty-First Century Literacies" like attention, collaboration, global consciousness, and ethics. It raises good topics for discussion and gets the students and me pretty quickly beyond the problems of how social media and mobile devices are distracting us into other issues involving the ethics and affordances of technology.

The night before class, I'd spent half an hour or so on Twitter following the new president's gag order on US scientific agencies and national parks, the scrubbing of anything that could be interpreted as related to climate science from government websites, the silencing of agencies like the USDA and the CDC. (Salmonella, anyone? Zika?)

Davidson lists sustainability and preservation near the end of the appendix. She uses "sustainability" to refer to environmental issues like the amounts of electricity needed to power computers and servers, but digital humanists use the same word to refer to the creation of digital texts and databases in forms that will outlast current hardware and software configurations and still be readable, decades or hopefully even centuries into the future.

The related issue of "preservation" has to do with keeping copies of things -- archiving materials created digitally, as well as figuring out how to keep copies of things that began their life as material objects. If something originally in book form is preserved in pdf, is that the same as the original? What if there are different copies owned by two different people who made notes in the margins? How important are those notes?

Cotton Vitellius A. xv. is the manuscript that contains the unique copy of Beowulf. It was put together, probably in the seventeenth century, out of two different collections written several hundred years before, but a couple hundred years apart from each other. It contains the Nowell Codex, a late tenth- or early eleventh-century copy manuscript of two poems, including Beowulf, and three prose texts. Is that a book? Or is a medieval collection of materials different than what we think of today as "a book"? Are photographs of the Beowulf manuscript the same as the actual manuscript? What if we could print a 3-dimensional copy, retaining the texture of every page?

People who deal with other media ask related questions. Is a CD version of a song the same as its 45 rpm vinyl original? Is a DVD copy of "Singin' in the Rain" the same as a print of the film on several reels of 35mm film?

Preservation also deals with avoiding loss of data, which was a big problem in the early days of computing but is less acute now, when storage is cheap and it's easy to store redundantly. The issue of data that lasts forever, like social media posts that haunt people hunting for a job, looms larger.

So there I was in class, talking about the relatively long life of manuscripts in comparison to things like punch cards and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and suddenly I apprehended the enormity of the new administration's deliberate suppression and even destruction of information.

I don't know if this material is being mirrored or archived in some other country that's now freeer than the United States or if, horrifyingly, decades of data that the new regime considers to be "alternative facts" or even "a hoax" will simply be destroyed. I don't know what the consequences might be of stopping research in the sciences and humanities dead, and how quickly it might recover if (when?) we get ourselves back on a course of sanity, four years or more from now.

But there I was talking about issues that, six months ago, seemed to have nothing to do with politics in the United States. Yet even though they have nothing to do with hot-button issues like climate science or women's health care, issues of data preservation and sustainability are completely politicized.

It caught me completely by surprise. I hadn't prepared to teach a class that was politically charged, and I found myself floundering. I said that whatever anyone's politics, our classroom had to remain a space for civil discourse. I said that I grade on how persuasively students organize and present their research, not on what their opinions are, and I hoped that students would feel free to disagree, even with me.

I need to do better, though. I need to make it clear that scrubbing websites is comparable to burning books and neither has a place in democracy.

I'm thankful for tenure. I'm thankful that I teach in a university, and a state, that isn't moving to silence its faculty. And I'm deeply sobered and dismayed by the implications. Teaching with integrity used to mean not smoking or sleeping with the students. It's become far more difficult to navigate the environment of alternative realities, suppression of scientific fact, and abrogation of human rights.

I now feel a grave responsibility to step up and state clearly that these things are not right. But I have to do so in a way that maintains respect for students with different views and allows for an open classroom atmosphere, that keeps the classroom a place of inquiry and the development of critical thinking, not a lecture on the ills of the people currently in power.

Teaching just got a whole lot harder.

Green Your Life

Our president-elect believes that climate change is a hoax. He has appointed, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a person with degrees in philosophy and political theory who doesn't believe scientific concensus about climate change. He has announced he is going to eliminate funding to the NASA division that studies earth science and gathers basic data on climate, year to year, decade to decade.

He is planning on reopening coal mining and expanding oil drilling and fracking. Climate groups like Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Greenpeace will be fighting the new administration's proposals, and one way to fight back is to use your holiday gift-giving budget to make donations in the names of friends and family members. Lists of effective groups are here and here and here.

Meanwhile, you can make changes in your own life to reduce your carbon footprint, and encourage friends and family members to make similar changes. Many people making relatively small changes in housing, mobility and food consumption can have more impact than one person making drastic changes. 

1. Reduce your consumption of beef and dairy.

You don't need to go vegan to have an impact. Americans eat almost 215 pounds of meat per year, on average. That's 9.4 ounces per day: two and a half quarter pounders, four 6" turkey sandwiches from Subway, or nine slices of bacon. Cutting your meat consumption in half would have a significant environmental impact. Since lamb, beef, and cheese have the highest emissions of carbon dioxide and methane per pound, switching from steak to chicken wings has almost as much of an effect as going all the way to tofu-burgers.

Treehugger

Bonus: eating less meat is healthier.

2. Drive less.

Half of the trips people make in their cars are three miles or less; a quarter are less than a mile long. You can choose to make some of these trips by bike or on foot. 

If your community doesn't have safe walking or cycling routes, call up your local elected officials and join with other interested citizens. Transportation Alternatives lobbies for safer streets in New York City, and many other communities have similar groups.

Bonus: getting more exercise is healthier.

3. Downsize your house or apartment.

The smaller your living quarters, the less you need to spend on heat and and light. If you're considering a move, think about downsizing rather than upsizing. Meanwhile, switch from incandescent to LED lightbulbs and turn off anything that's not in use. In the winter, put on a sweater and turn the heat down a couple of degrees; in the summer, close the blinds on the sunny side of the house and sip ice water.

Bonus: You'll save money.

4. Don't buy so much stuff.

The businesses that send us all those catalogues and pop-up internet advertising are banking on making you want seasonally colored towels and placemat, clothing in new colors and designs, and yet another gadget for your kitchen. Just say no. 

But how to get off the buying cycle? Every time a catalogue comes in the house, call up the company and tell them to take you off their mailing list. Only buy things that you love, and that you think will last indefinitely. Make a plan that every time you buy something, you have to get rid of something. Want a new pair of shoes? Which pair are you going to get rid of? Contemplating a fancy new garlic peeler or lemon zester? What kitchen gadget will you take to the thrift shop to make room? 

Bonus: You won't need such a big house.

==================

None of this has to be all-or-nothing. You might consider vegetarian breakfast on weekdays, and save the bacon for a Sunday brunch treat. If cooking is Your Thing, don't sweat the gadgets, but get your books from the library and forego another pair of yoga pants. Commit to one small change at a time. If you hate it, try something else. But do something.

My Grandmother's Cookbooks

For years, I've been saying that someone could do an interesting study of cultural history looking just at the cookbooks from my grandmother's kitchen. For now, I give you two recipes for creamed spinach:

1. From The Joy of Cooking, 1943 edition, by Irma S. Rombauer:

CREAMED SPINACH
4 servings

If this unfortunate vegetable--so often thrust upon resisting children and grownups--were given a fair chance by the following rule it might retire permanently from the comic papers and the vaudeville stage.
Pick over and cut the roots and tough stems from:
1/2 peck (2 pounds) spinach (when cooked 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups)
Wash it in several waters until it is free from sand and soil. If the spinach is old cook it for 20 minutes in:
1 quart boiling salted water (1 1/2 teaspoons salt to the quart)
If the spinach is new lift it from the water with the hands and place it moist, but without additional water, in a saucepan, cover it and cook it for 6 minutes, or until it is tender. Drain it well. Chill it. Chop the spinach, old or young, until it is as fine as puree, using a board and a knife, or a chopping bowl and a knife, or put it through a coarse strainer or ricer.* Melt in a skillet:
2 tablespoons butter
Add and cook for 1 minute (or if preferred until brown):
1 tablespoon or more very finely chopped onion (optional)
Stir in until blended:
2 1/2 tablespoons flour
Stir in slowly:
1 cup hot cream, top milk, stock or diluted evaporated milk
When the sauce is smooth and boiling add the spinach. Stir and cook it for 3 minutes or until it is thoroughly blended. If the spinach seems too thick it may be thinned with additional cream or milk. Season it well with:
Salt
Paprika
Nutmeg (very good but optional)
Serve it garnished with slices of:
1 hard-cooked egg
The French recipes call for 1 teaspoon of powdered sugar and the grated rind of 1/2 a lemon. These ingredients and the onion are optional. The flour is sometimes browned before it is added to the butter. Evaporated milk is good in spinach. Stock, cream or milk may be used in combination.
Remember that young uncooked spinach makes a good salad; that cooked buttered spinach and grapefruit salad are an ideal reducer's luncheon; and that cooked spinach greens are superb with Hollandaise sauce (page 381), with crisp bacon, minced, or with Sauteed Mushrooms.

*An ideal strainer may be purchased for about a dollar which makes this process painless. It is called a food mill. I am devoted to mine and shall reward it some day with an old age pension.

2. From Microwave Cookbook, JCPenney, 1984:

CREAMED SPINACH

2 10-ounce packages frozen chopped spinach, thawed and well drained
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons finely chopped green onion
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
1 cup whipping cream
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

1. Combine spinach, butter, and onion in a 1 1/2-quart glass casserole. Cover and microwave at Time Cook 1 (power level 7) for 6 1/2 minutes, or until spinach is very hot, stirring twice.
2. Stir flour into spinach, blending until smooth. Stir in remaining ingredients. Microwave, uncovered, at Time Cook 2 (power level 10) for 5 to 6 minutes, or until mixture boils and thickens, stirring twice. Let stand, covered, 5 minutes before serving.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Raise your hand if you've ever bought anything by the peck, if you know what top milk is, if you own a food mill, or if you noticed that JCPenney uses the Oxford Comma, but Rombauer does not.

Six Pack Rings

I sent an email message to Margaret Chin and Brad Lander today. They are the sponsors of the bill passed in May and scheduled to go into effect in October that requires grocery stores in New York City to charge customers five cents per plastic bag used.

I'm hoping they'll consider taking on the issue of those vile pieces of plastic that connect cans of beer and soda.

Readers, do you have any suggestions about how to deal with these? Can soda cans be packaged in cardboard like beer bottles? Do you know an inventor who can come up with a better way?

Or is the best solution to quit drinking soda, and switch to water?

=======================

Thank you for sponsoring legislation to charge a fee for plastic bags in NYC,  and getting it passed.

I'm writing to you today to ask if you'd consider taking on six pack rings, those plastic yokes that hold soda and beer cans together and then go into the landfill.

Many people cut them into little pieces before putting them in the garbage to avoid the problem of birds choking to death in them.

But the little pieces end up in the ocean, where fish and turtles and other marine animals mistake them for food and eat them. They also contribute to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other marine trash vortexes.

Thank you for considering this.

========================

Update: I got a reply from Vincent Fang, Council Member Chin's director of budget and legislation, saying he's going to look into it.

Update 2: I got a reply from someone in Brad Lander's office saying she's interested in the issue. And then I saw an article about a small brewery that has developed edible six-pack rings. If New York lawmakers can find a way to encourage soda and beer companies who do business in the city to adopt these rings, it could have much wider impact eventually.

How Not to Turn On the Air Conditioner

In the past ten days in my neighborhood, we've gone from a night-time low of 44 degrees, when I got my winter coat back out to walk the dog for the last time at night, to yesterdays high of 89. I work at home in the summers, and I'm sitting very comfortably at my desk with no air conditioning.

Comfortably, I said. How is this possible?

It takes a little bit more time and organization than flipping a switch so a beast in the wall can roar into operation. But not much. And it's a lot quieter.

It's also only feasible as long as nights remain cool: it's been going down into the 60's every night, and will continue to do so for most of the summer. There's always that one week in August when it doesn't go below 80 at night, and that's a different story. But for now...

Keeping my apartment comfortable during the day starts with making sure to let it cool down at night.  As soon as temperatures drop in the evening, I open all the windows to let the cool air in. The next step is to keep the place as cool as possible during the day, I cover windows when the sun is shining directly on them to keep the sun from warming the air inside. The light-blocking shade in the bedroom is most effective, but even the sheer curtain in the kitchen makes a difference.

As soon as temperatures warm up, I switch to iced coffee. I also drink cool water throughout the day to make sure I stay hydrated. Running a fan on a low setting to keep the air moving also helps. I also dress for the weather. In the winter, I keep warm with wool socks, long underwear, turtlenecks and sweaters. In the summer, those give way to tank tops and sandals.

I limit cooking during the day. I made coffee this morning, but sometimes I'll do that that the night before and then refrigerate it to drink iced. For lunch, I had a sandwich and a salad. Bonus: eating cold food cools my body. I save the bigger cooking for the evening when the air is already starting to cool again.

And last but not least, when I go outdoors, I walk on the shady side of the street when possible.

A Backwards Solution to Junk Mail

I just got an email message from the Story of Stuff project, where they're doing lots of good things to lessen the amount of waste that we produce. This one was about junk mail, and how not to get so much of it.

Story of Stuff sent me an email link to Catalog Choice, an organization that lets people choose what junk mail not to get. Catalogs, credit card offers, reverse mortgages, phone and data plans, all the other unopened junk that comes in the mail, and maybe you tear it in half before you throw it in the recycle bin in the hopes that someone else won't use it to open an account in your name.

And it struck me that while this is probably a useful individual solution, and might be less time-consuming than calling all the mailers individually and telling them to get you off their lists, it's completely backwards, like so much that we do regarding the environment.

If we were serious about stopping the plague of junk mail and its carbon footprint, from production to transportation and delivery to transportation back out of each individual household to dump or recycling facility, we would cut junk mail off at the source.

What if ... we made it illegal to send junk mail? What if you could only get that LLBean catalogue if you told LLBean that you wanted it, and not because some other company sold them your name along with various associated personal information?

As with so many environmental issues, we need to re-think junk mail. We need to approach it not as an individual scourge but as a systemic, structural problem.

I don't know how to change that. But I'm going to start with email messages to Story of Stuff and Catalog Choice, suggesting that they push the junk mailers to rethink unsolicited mail.

Back on the Soap Box

I don't know when the world decided it needed liquid soap instead of soap in bars. I think it had something to do with the emergence of germ-o-phobia and the addition of anti-bacterial chemicals to everything a couple of decades ago. And I totally get that bars of soap in places like public bathrooms can totally be germ magnets.

But for home use? Most soap sold in bars is still packaged in paper.

Liquid soap, however, is packaged in plastic. And it's ... kind of the same thing as bar soap, except with a lot of water added. So you get a double-whammy of extra petroleum: the single-use plastic package that goes in the landfill when the soap is all gone*, and the extra water weight that makes up extra shipping volume and weight.

Bar soap works great for handwashing. It works great as a body wash in the shower. Certain bar soaps (I like Dr. Bronner's) work well on dishes. And you can even get bar shampoo from a couple of manufacturers.

Just like body wash, there are lots of varieties: glycerin soap that won't clog your pores, deodorant soap, soap with lots of moisturizer to keep your skin from drying out. Some of the bar shampoos work better with dry hair, some better with oily scalp.

So, do me a favor? Think about switching from the plastic bottle full of soap to a nice solid bar the next time you run out.
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* IF the soap is all gone. The design of a lot of the packaging makes it very difficult to use up all of the contents, so if you don't think to cut apart the bottle,  you end up throwing a quarter of the contents away.

Vegan (Gluten-Free) Pantry

If you're trying to prepare vegan meals at home, it helps a lot to have a well-stocked pantry, supplemented with shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables once or twice a week, so you're not inventing the wheel every time you need to get supper together. Here's what I usually have on hand.

Non-perishables:

• dried lentils, split peas, navy beans, chick peas
• pasta, rice, quinoa, popping corn
• canned tomatoes, black beans, kidney beans, chick peas, baked beans
• baking: unrefined sugar, gluten-free baking mix, baking powder, baking soda, corn starch, cocoa powder, dark chocolate chips, chick pea flour, pectin, baking chocolate
• jam
• rice cakes, corn cakes, corn chips, potato chips, GF bread
• cereal
• nuts and nut butters
• sunflower oil, olive oil
• coconut milk
• vegetable bouillon
• coffee and tea

I keep canned beans on hand as well as dry ones for the days when I don't have the time or energy to cook dry beans from scratch, but since the cans are all lined with plastic, I avoid them with possible. I don't use bouillon very often, but it's handy to have on hand. I use a lot of red split lentils because they cook fastest. To cut down on cooking time for the dry legumes, I bring them to a rolling boil in the evening and let them sit overnight. The Mate and I usually make enough jam in the summer and fall to last all year -- strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, blackberry, apricot, peach, plum. Last year after Sukkot I made jam out of the etrog, with a couple of oranges mixed in to sweeten it a bit. I used to think it was some kind of arcane process requiring lots of specialized tools ... but it turns out it's pretty easy.

I switched to unrefined sugar after I learned that the white stuff is filtered through charcoal, sometimes made from bones.

Herbs and spices: 

• herbes de province, Italian seasoning, basil, oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary
• cumin, coriander, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon
• curry powder, chili powder
• peppercorns in a grinder, unrefined salt

I buy spices as whole seeds and grind them as I use them; they last a lot longer that way. For small quantities I use a mortar and pestle; if I need more, I grind them in the coffee grinder (and then wash thoroughly).  

Freezer:

• vegetables and fruit
• prepared soups
• sorbet
• compost
• freezer jam
• applesauce

Sometimes I buy frozen vegetables and fruit at the supermarket. But I also freeze a lot of my own. When fruit is in season, I buy extra for freezing: it works best to freeze them on a cookie sheet and then put them in bags or containers so they don't clump together.  Apple sauce is super easy to make: cube the apples, boil in a large pot with a couple of tablespoons of water until they're completely soft, run through a food mill, spoon into clean jars, and freeze.  When bananas go brown, I skin them and freeze them in chunks for smoothies, banana pancakes, and banana bread. 

Same with vegetables: I buy lots of kale, spinach, swiss chard, beet greens, and leeks in season, cook them, and then freeze in bags, flattened for easier thawing. (It's worth every penny to pay extra for the heavy-duty brand-name ones, because they last for many, many uses.) I make soup or baked beans in big batches and then freeze extra servings in pint mason jars. 

When freezing soup or jam or applesauce, use wide-mouth jars. Anything that gets narrower at the top will crack when the contents freeze. Leave a half inch or so of extra space at the top to accommodate expansion, and rest the lids on top of the jars when you put them in the freezer. Screw them on after the contents have frozen.

Refrigerator:

• margarine, milk substitute, vegan mayonnaise
• condiments of various sorts, including red and green chili pastes, tamari, pickled ginger, ketchup and mustard
• maple syrup
• tahini, for mashed potatoes and creamy soups
• non-dairy cheese, yogurt; hummus
• potatoes, carrots, onions, celery
• greens
• leftover soup, cooked vegetables

Greens have to be cooked pretty quickly after shopping, whether they come from the farmer's market or the supermarket. If I'm not going to use them right away, they go in the freezer. Root vegetables and celery keep for quite a while, so you can stock up at a farmer's market every couple of weeks.

Countertop:

• fresh fruit
• tomatoes
• fresh ginger, garlic, hot peppers

I buy oranges, lemons, and bananas, but otherwise stick mostly to whatever is local and in season or I've managed to freeze when it was. Apples last for a long time if they're stored correctly, so in New York I can get local apples late into the fall/winter. Right now I still have some blackberries in the freezer, left over from last fall, foraged in the fields outside of town.

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It helps to join a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm: you pay a few hundred dollars up front, and then you get a share of whatever vegetables and fruit the farm can produce all summer long and into the fall. Another alternative in New York City is Urban Organics, and some other cities have similar schemes where you get a weekly delivery, and fresh vegetables and fruit appear in your home every week. The variety is usually better than what's available at my neighborhood urban supermarket or farmer's market. With parents and grandparents who lived through the Great Depression and the hungry post-war years in 1940s Germany, I have a deep aversion to throwing food away -- so I cook. 

The Mate and I do a lot of cooking on weekends -- steaming, baking, and roasting vegetables, baking quick breads, cooking up big batches of soup and stew. Some goes in the fridge, some in the freezer, and then on a weeknight when one of us is teaching late and the other is riding herd on the pre-teen while trying to finish grading essays or prepare for a class, we reheat some leftovers and bang, there's a healthy dinner on the table.

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We buy fair trade when we can -- chocolate, coffee, tea, bananas. Hershey has committed to making sure all of its suppliers avoid child or slave labor ... by 2020. Yes, you read that right: the people who brought you the Pennsylvania theme park buy chocolate from suppliers that use slaves and children, and sometimes enslaved children, to pick the cocoa beans.

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But here's the thing: unless you can buy yourself a farm, or you can devote a significant amount of time to your food, you're not going to be able to eat locally grown organic food cooked at home from scratch all the time. So do what you can and keep moving -- and instead of indulging in guilt, use that energy to advocate for better resources. Or go for a nice long walk while you remind yourself of all the things that you're already doing to curtail climate change.

Want to Go Vegan? How To Stick With It

This is the last in a series of three posts answering questions from a friend; the previous posts were on cooking vegan and eating vegan meals in restaurants.

This is the toughest one: what arguments do you tell yourself to stay with it? The decision to forego animal products is a personal one and, at the moment, a fairly counter-cultural one, and thus is bound to engender some flak or just bafflement from friends and family. And occasionally strangers.

There are a lot of reasons why someone would choose to go vegan, including concerns for animal rights, individual health, the health of the planet.

Various population-wide studies going back years have demonstrated that vegan diets are healthier than diets that include animals, as long as some attention is given to protein and vitamin B12, and as long as people eat a variety of foods regularly, including fruits and vegetables, nuts and legumes, and whole grains.

Climate science is also clear that vegan diets have less planetary impact than diets containing meat. It takes about ten pounds of feed to produce a pound of meat, meat requires more water to raise than most vegan foods; all that feed needs to be transported from the field to the animal; and animals release a lot of methane as they chew their cuds.

Factory farming is horrifying in terms of animal welfare as well as pollution and the use of antibiotics and pesticides.

Some people argue that the problems with meat consumption can be solved by relying on local, sustainably raised meat sources. The problem with this is the size of the human population: to feed all the people sustainably raised meat in the quantities Americans eat would be impossible. There's just not enough land to graze all those animals.

Others advocate eating fish instead of meat because the sea appears to be an endless resource, covering nearly three-quarters of the earth's surface. But fishing, too, has been mechanized and industrialized. Many species are declining and ocean environments are threatened by pollution and bottom trawling. Eating only line-caught fish helps, but there's still the problem of eating high on the food chain. Fish farms are also an environmental disaster.

Finally, though, if you slip occasionally and eat animal products, don't beat yourself up. Re-commit yourself based on whatever the reasons you had for going vegan in the first place, and keep moving.

Want to Go Vegan? Eating In Restaurants

A friend asked for advice on going vegan. So this is the first of a series of posts in an attempt to answer some of her questions.

Eating vegan in restaurants can be a challenge. When I can choose the restaurant, I'm good to go; Indian restaurants almost always have good vegan options, and Chinese and Japanese restaurants also usually do.

At diners and diner-like restaurants, I usually do pretty well off the list of side orders, combining a couple of vegetables with some baked beans and a salad, for instance.

But sometimes you get stuck with a plate of wilted lettuce and tasteless tomatoes with salt and pepper out of little paper packets. Maybe some bread or home fries, if you're lucky. Then what?

If you know it's coming, you can plan ahead. I often carry a bag of almonds or cashews, as they make great vegan snacks and are also good to supplement an inadequate meal. If it comes as a surprise, I drink a lot of water and then go in search of more food. Even vending machines and gas stations will almost always have something vegan -- potato chips, pretzels, peanuts.

It gets easier. Around home, I've learned which restaurants have at least one item on the menu that I'm happy to eat, as well as a few with enough great options I actually re-read the menu each time I eat there.

If fast food is the only option, Wendy's salad bar can work; Taco Bell will sell you a tacos or a burritos with just beans and vegetables, and if you add enough of their tiny packets of sauce, they're not bad.

And I try not to be too hard on myself. The tofu and the chicken wings get deep-fried in the same oil, and the Vietnamese soup might contain fish sauce or chicken broth, but I try not to make myself crazy, particularly when traveling.

Hiking in the Dolomites and staying in mountain huts a couple of summers ago, I was getting really low on protein; day after day, I was eating polenta or potatoes and not much else, after I ran out of nuts and dried fruit. I was going to have to quit hiking or eat meat. so I chose the meat. I had to retreat to a corner of the bunk room and choke it down without anyone watching, and it still grosses me out to think about it, but boy was I strong the next day.

I try to learn from mistakes: When I went to the Lake District for a hostel-to-hostel hike a few weeks ago, I brought along a huge bag of TVP: dried soy chunks to reconstitute with water. Much lighter than nuts, so pound for pound, it goes much farther, and thus lasts much longer.

But also, I try not to beat myself up over the lapses. I'm never going to be perfect, so I just do my best and keep on moving.

Drifting toward Vegan

It took me a long time, many years, to become fully vegan, and I still cheat for good butter. And I eat honey and I wear leather shoes.

I started on the journey after reading Diet For A Small Planet -- my mother had a copy kicking around -- and was completely appalled that they were razing forests in Argentina to grow beef for McDonald's hamburgers.

I quit eating meat, though I still ate cheese and eggs. Once every few months I'd got out for a hamburger with everything, and for a while I continued eating fish at family gatherings. It was probably years before I gave that up. And I only stopped eating eggs because I figured out they were giving me a rash, and cheese because it didn't agree with me either.

Unfortunately, "sustainably" grown beef actually isn't, despite industry claims to the contrary: it still requires large quantities of water as well as grazing acreage that can feed only a fraction of the planetary population. Grazing cows still fart methane. It's more humane for the cows, and if the cows aren't fed hormones and antibiotics, it is healthier -- but it's not sustainable for everyone to continue eating current first-world quantities of meat.

And the amount of meat we eat today is historically unprecedented: here's a graph from the World Cancer Research Fund, which wants you to cut back on eating meat because it's statistically linked with more cases of cancer. Correlation isn't causation, of course, but the data keep piling up

Chicken and eggs, by the way, require a lot less in the way of resources than red meat. Fish is pretty problematic given the violence to ocean environments of industrial-scale fishing operations.

Changing to a more sustainable diet doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. When I was a kid growing up in northern New Hampshire, billboards everywhere proclaimed, "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day." These days, many families aim for Meatless Mondays or Vegan Wednesdays (or "Vednesdays," if you like your alliteration). Some families go vegetarian during the week but not on weekends. We cook vegetarian and vegan meals at home, but one member of the family chooses to eat meat at restaurants.

You can make a great vegan sauce for spaghetti or lasange by replacing the meat with chick peas, navy beans, tempeh, or bits of fried tofu. If you add a little parmesan for flavor, that's still healthier for you AND the planet than feeding half a pound of ground beef to everyone at the table.

If you want to drift toward vegetarian or even vegan, it doesn't have to mean a commitment to self-deprived asceticism. You can start by adding one recipe to your repertoire. A couple of weeks later, try out another. Make sure you find foods you LIKE. Instead of thinking in terms of cutting out meat, think in terms of adding vegetarian or vegan meals, or parts of meals, to the rotation, and spacing out meat-heavy meals. Maybe you'll continue to change over time; maybe you'll find a point where you're comfortable.

But the data are clear: reducing meat consumption, and in particular beef and dairy products, is the most efficient way to reduce your own carbon and water footprint. Eliminating beef from your diet would have more impact than giving up your car.

Less Plastic With My Groceries

I talk a lot about the importance of buying local food. I also complain a lot about how everything is packaged in plastic. The other day, my colleague challenged academics to make changes in our own lives, to lead on the issue of climate change. So I made a commitment to myself to shop more at the farmer's market: local food, no packaging. Here's the haul from today's shopping trip:

From the supermarket. Not local. Olive oil from Spain, gluten-free pasta from Italy, coconut oil from the Phillipines, chocolate from Spain, curry powder packed in France, capers from Morocco. Beans and hummus say they're prepared in the UK. Hummus doesn't say where the ingredients came from; beans admit to "EU and non-EU" ingredients.

The chocolate is not Fair Trade, ohmygod. I always talk about the importance of Fair Trade chocolate, coffee, and the like. Since we moved (temporarily) to the UK, I've been buying a lot of Lindt because, well, it's made in Switzerland, and it's really, really good. I'm going to have to re-think that.

Local foods purchased at the supermarket: yogurt, eggs, honey. But there's a farm shop a few blocks farther on; I should go there for eggs and honey instead of going to the mega corporation.

From the farmer's market: swiss chard, potatoes, beets with greens, broccoli greens, apples, and a cauliflower. The cauliflower and part of the broccoli greens are already in a soup.

All in all, better than last week's shopping trip, after which I threw away a ton of plastic packaging. But I can still do better.

Going Green As Moving Target

Two years ago, I embarked on the project I called "Ten of Tens" -- ten days on each of ten different habits to make changes in the direction of environmental sustainability. My projects included packing lunches to avoid take-out (and all the plastic involved) at work; eating more local food; using less water for dishwashing and in the shower; learning about the environmental impact of the foods I eat; switching to fair-trade coffee, tea, and chocolate; not buying things packaged in plastic; and buying less stuff.

It was a partial success. I didn't eliminate take-out, which is terrible for the planet and the body, but I cut back. I continued doing most of my shopping at the supermarket, but I made an effort to get out to the farmers' markets more. I've been almost take-out free this year, but then again I'm on sabbatical, and my desk is five feet from my kitchen. Buying local is easier here in the UK, where everything in the supermarket is marked with point of origin, but I STILL don't get to the farmer's market enough. And I don't know, but I think it's gotten even harder to avoid bringing home plastic packaging. At Sainsbury's, even the recycled toiled paper is wrapped in plastic.

But I keep trying. When I'm finished with the sabbatical I'm planning on buying some stainless-steel food containers for packing lunches -- I've been using mason jars, and they're heavy, and they break.

As of right now, today, I'm going to try to stop first at the farmer's market every time I go shopping.

Another of the issues I wrestle with is how much clothing I own. The 333 Project has been on my radar for a while, and it's a great idea: limit yourself to 33 items of clothing, including accessories, shoes, outerwear) for three months.

But exercise clothes are excluded from the accounting, as are pajamas, undergarments, and "in-home lounge wear." I do a lot of different kinds of physical activities, and I own almost as many items of clothing for exercise as I do for the rest of life.  I've been trying to avoid having a separate wardrobe for all the different activities. And you get 33 items of clothing for each season -- so in a three-season climate, that's 99 articles of clothing.

I've been trying to overlap as much as possible, for instance buying hiking clothes that look neat enough to wear in town. I dress a lot more casually when I'm writing at home than when I'm teaching, but it doesn't seem fair to allow an entire additional wardrobe of casual clothing, so I'm trying to bring my casual and work clothes closer together. There's a decluttering recommendation that you only buy an item if you're getting rid of another item; I've been trying to go two-for-one, though not always successfully.

Moving toward sustainability isn't a one-shot deal. It requires continuous adjustments and renegotiations. I'm trying to do better each year; it's hard, and I fail a lot, but I know I'm doing better than if I didn't try in the first place.