We Need To Find A Way To Ban Plane Advertising

Advertising planes fly over the beach seven days a week in my neighborhood. I am three-quarters of a mile away from the beach. I have been spending a lot of time outdoors resting, when not treed indoors by global boiling or poor air quality.

Even at my distance from the beach, I usually see two or three advertising planes a day, even on weekdays, and more on weekends.

The most common small plane, according to the Intertubes, is the Cessna 172, which seems to require around 8 gallons of gas an hour.

My Honda Fit gets 33 mpg driving around on suburban streets, 40+ on highways. Let’s call it an average of 35 mpg. 

Let’s say they’re out there flying for six hours a day: that’s 48 gallons per flight. If that’s a good guess, then one of those planes burns as much gas in under a week as my car does in a year.

One part of me reacts to this by thinking there’s no point in worrying about my own carbon footprint when this is going on. 

Another part of me wants to figure out what businesses are flying the planes (the signs face the beach, not my backyard) and write to them all to tell them how I feel about this.

Another part wants to write to Governor Murray and Vin Gopal and suggest that they make this kind of advertising illegal.

And then there’s the part of me that’s feels like all of this is too much, because Long COVID. 

But I will, I hope, revise this post into a letter to write to some of my elected officials, and I hope you’ll feel free steal whatever is useful and do the same.

If you do, please let me know. Thank you!

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.

Fighting for Minimalism

I've lived in apartments in New York City for the past 25 years, and that means keeping possessions to a relative minimum unless I want to pay for storage for stuff that I then won't be able to use ... because, well, it's across town in storage.

Today, I ran across the Haters Guide to the Williams Sonoma Catalogue, which includes this gem:

The Williams-Sonoma catalog will not rest until you need a separate pot for every single goddamn thing you make.

For a while, I owned a crock pot that I'd found in my building's recycling area, with a note promising, "it works!" Since I'm either home all day or out for fifteen hours, I never left the thing unattended, and eventually I came to the conclusion that I could cook more efficiently in -- gasp -- a normal pot on the stove.

By that time I'd moved, twice, paying movers to schlep that crock pot down five flights, up four, back down the same four, and up three. In the last move, I finally after nearly 25 years in New York City moved to an elevator building, but still.

In the end, the crock pot ended up at the Salvation Army. Maybe now some other poor soul is using it based on the promise of better meals than you can make with a normal pot on a normal stove.

But the thing about Black Friday and Cyber Monday and our consumer-driven society in general is that, with the exception of kids moving out on their own, people pretty much already own all the pots they need. And so Williams Sonoma, and for that matter Walmart, need to persuade you that you need MORE pots in your kitchen.

If they can find a way to sell you DISPOSABLE kitchenware, for instance single-use roasting pans or pie pans, then they've hit the jackpot.

It takes WORK to avoid advertising. I regularly make phone calls to get people to stop sending catalogues, but one on-line purchase can mean another whole pile of them. I've installed ad-blocker on my PC, but I still see advertising on my iPad. And internet advertising is a special horror:it takes extra discipline not to click through to the next web site, and the next.

Everyone wants me, or rather my limited amount of disposable income. Another pot, a better cleaning product, another sweater, a new pair of socks, a better health plan. I'm constantly fighting the capitalist barrage of advertising trying to persuade me that I need another item.

And budget considerations aside, it's an environmental issue. How do you fight the good fight?

False in Advertising

Mayor Bloomberg wants to stop people from buying huge sodas because he's worried about the amount of sugar people consume in their drinks, and its contribution to obesity, diabetes, and related diseases.

I think he has a point, but I think there's a larger problem with grossly misleading food advertising that encourages people to think that total junk is healthy food.

Case in point: check out this advertisement for General Mills kids' cereals:

It will be a little hard to read at that size, but the ad makes the claim that whole grains are the first ingredient in all General Mills kids' cereals.

They're not technically lying: here's the ingredient list for Lucky Charms, just one example of their cereals:

Whole Grain Oats, Marshmallows (Sugar, Modified Corn Starch, Corn Syrup, Dextrose, Gelatin, Calcium Carbonate, Yellows 5 & 6, Red 40, Blue 1, Artificial Flavor), Sugar, Oat Flour, Corn Syrup, Corn Starch, Salt, Trisodium Phosphate, Color Added, Natural And Artificial Flavor, Vitamin E (Mixed Tocopherols) Added to Preserve Freshness.Vitamins And Minerals: Calcium Carbonate, Zinc And Iron (Mineral Nutrients), Vitamin C (Sodium Ascorbate), A B Vitamin (Niacinamide), Artificial Flavor, Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine Hydrochloride), Vitamin B2,(Riboflavin), Vitamin B1 (Thiamin Mononitrate), Vitamin A(Palmitate), A B Vitamin (Folic Acid), Vitamin B12, Vitamin D3.

The first ingredient is, indeed, whole grain oats.  But different sugars are listed five times in all: two listings each of sugar and corn syrup, plus dextrose, another kind of sugar, through the (legal) trick of listing the marshmallows as a separate ingredient.

The nutrition "facts" section of the label reveals that a 3/4-cup serving of the cereal contains 2 grams of dietary fiber, and 10 grams of sugars.  Three-quarters of a cup of plain oatmeal? 7.7 grams of dietary fiber. That means the serving of Lucky Charms contains less than a quarter of a cup of whole grain oats, and all the other ingredients add up to more than half a cup.  

Meanwhile, 10 grams of sugar adds up to two and a half teaspoons.  What the heck is taking up the rest of the volume in that three-quarters of a cup?  Looks like it's mostly corn starch (also listed twice) and oat flour (not identified as whole grain, therefore almost certainly refined).

Back to that advertisement, which I found in a parenting magazine while waiting at the doctor's office a couple of months ago.  It's designed to make parents think these cereals are healthy, kind of like an apple.

And what context do parents have to challenge those claims? Nutrition information that gets into the media usually involves sound-bites about isolated pieces of information: low fat versus high fat foods, sugary drinks versus artificial sweeteners, eggs and chocolate are healthy this week but excess sodium is still bad; but how much sodium is excessive?  Confusing, contradictory, and ultimately unhelpful.

What's missing is education about diet in general.  Pyramids and plates and various other gimmicky graphics try to do something, but what the nation needs is to educate a generation in school over the long term, year after year after year, not just in a single day or week or even year, about the general parameters of a healthy diet.

What's missing is also meaningful regulation about the kinds of claims advertisers can make about food.  General Mills isn't alone here; I've seen billboards for Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's with the word "healthy" on them.

Oh, and Yellow 5 & 6, and Red 40? Banned in Europe for their effects on kids' behavior, made out of petroleum. Yes, if Lucky Charms are in your home, you're eating the same stuff you put in your car at the gas station.