voting with your stomach

   You'd think this might have occurred to me before. I know about how "voting with your money" is a good way of sending your ethical concerns to a company, but for some myopic reason it only just occurred to me that it is also a way of voicing environmental concerns.

   Perhaps the issue is that we are often told about the environmental sins of obvious polluters like oil conglomerates or companies that dump toxic wastes into water systems, whereas I feel the "footprint" of food companies is rarely addressed.

   But so — with trepidation given the implications — I would like to start digging into the environmental records of food companies. We know a number of them are stepping into the wide world of GMOs, which itself has arguably serious ramifications in terms of monoculture (think potato famine or Dutch elm disease) and loss of crop diversity (e-high-five to Svalbard!), but what about the direct damage food  companies are doing, say, in terms of deforestation, or waste, or water pollution, or energy usage?

   Here's a good place to start (sorry about the scale!):

...seeing how few companies actually control our food system means two main things to this discussion: holy crap! and also, in fact there are only basically a dozen companies to have a proper look at. yay.

   This feels like a very complex and multi-faceted topic, and the atmospheric pressure change is making my head explode. However, I'll try to do a few posts on these guys, and hopefully by the end there will still be good food to eat. maybe even some meat.

barely a post

SO... a friend posted this video on FB a while back and I reposted immediately, prompting some interesting discussion about finite resources and pessimism etc. For my part, I felt strongly that this video said in 30mins what I have been trying on this blog to say for almost 3 years. so ... enjoy!

of course I'm a hypocrite!

hello 561ba890-682d-11e1-9664-000f20980440 (if that even is your real name)...!

Today I am replying to a thoughtful commentator (commenter?). My character has been called into question, and that's fair. In a round about way I have been called a hypocrite, and I don't actually deny it. I drive a car, I wash my clothes in a machine, I own a house which requires heat and light, I have a baby for whom we buy (P.C. Green, but still) disposable diapers, I'm not a raw-food vegan, I drink coffee and tea, I own all kinds of factory-made resource-based instruments... etc. etc. etc. So yes, I'm a hypocrite, but I think that's part and parcel of being a human being. We are flawed and we are broken and we can't do anything right. We screw up. But we try, and we learn, and in fact I have found that the more mistakes we make the faster we learn. So I'm fast-tracking it, apparently.

In what is part-digression and part-related-illustration, one of the things that drives me the craziest about politicians these days is their unwillingness to accept failure, or to be seen as having ever made a mistake. It is completely insane and inhuman to think that anyone, particularly anyone tasked with leading and running a country, is infallible. The bigger the responsibility, the bigger the job, and presumably the bigger the mistakes that are made along the way which, when addressed and dealt with openly, can lead to greater wisdom in both decision-making and policy-enacting. People! Soilent Green is made of PEOPLE! wake up. Government is made of people just like you and me whose capacity for perfection in anything is NIL. Anyone who pretends otherwise thinks you're an idiot.

But back to the question at hand: am I, Ben Bowen, environmental blogger, a hypocrite? But of course! It's one of the reasons I drink. ha ha. I think, unless I live squatting in a grass hut on Crown Land and only eat bugs and berries, that I will always be so. It is one of the unfortunate consequences of living in 21st-century North America. But that doesn't mean I don't want to try to defend my position. Not being capable of a complete quaquaversal should not mean that I decide to throw in the towel, buy a Hummer and an AC unit for every room, and water my lawn 24/7 all summer. I still think striving to make small differences in my lifestyle is worthwhile.

I thought it might be useful or me to detail some of those differences in one post, given that a good many of them are spread out all over the blog:

• we put our laundry on the line outside from late March to early October
• Among many dietary choices I've made, I don't eat red meat, since ruminants (primarily cows in N.America, but sheep on the opposite side of the world) produce methane, which harms the atmosphere
• I try, when I drive, not to exceed about 110km/hr since anything over that (or, in fact, under about 80k) burns more gas in my car, and I walk to the grocery store as often as I can, though carrying home a full load of groceries hurts my back, so I mostly do drive.
• I don't shower as often as a normal person should. On average every 5 or 6 days, and then as quickly as possible. I hope this saves water.
• I drink tap water, not bottled.
• we have window AC units we put in maybe 5 or 6 nights a summer when it's either that or sleep in your own juices. Otherwise, just fans.
• I turn lights off whenever I can, and try to be conscientious about electricity use.
• I agonize at the grocery store over my food purchases, trying to weigh cost against local food against free-range against organic. It's a horror show. ugh. I always leave feeling like a failure.

...do I want to live in the Stone Age again? Well, if we could still have medicines and civil society, yes. I'd be happy to find my own food through foraging and hunting, and I could make do without running water or electric amenities. I often dream heartachingly about picking up and moving to a remote plot of land somewhere on the east coast just so I didn't feel so conflicted and co-opted.

So I guess my bottom line is, I feel I'm doing my almost-best in what is an interminable uphill battle. I want to do the right thing. I want to build a better, more sustainable, more beautiful, more natural world for my children and my descendants, but I'm not getting it right very much. I know that. It sucks. It makes me sad. But my children give me the motivation to keep on keepin' on, so I do, even though I'm aware that just by living in North America I'm part of the problem. There are so many forces working against me that I bend and break under them all the time.

I ate bacon for lunch

So I have finally made what I hope is another sustainable decision about my diet: I am cutting my dairy consumption by at least half — less cheese by far, soy milk in my coffee, very little yoghourt or sour or cream or what-have-you — but I have also decided to start eating pig products again.

I get asked often enough whether I'm a veg, and my response is always that I'm n "environmental vegetarian," by which I mean I'm trying to do my best by the environment by the food choices I make. So beef has been an obvious choice to leave out because of the effect of methane, a powerful "greenhouse gas," on the atmosphere and the fact that cows, which ruminate, produce a lot of it. But I miss meat. So last week I did a little digging around about exactly which animals were ruminants, hoping to discover that maybe there were some animals I hadn't thought of that I could sink my teeth into. Well, in fact, in large part the answer was no, BUT, it turns out according to a report by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board of Kenilworth, Warwickshire, pigs are better than cows emissions-wise because they don't ruminate (to oversimplify, chew their cud).

So my thought is this: if I cut my dairy by more than half but eat a little pork or bacon now and then, I am in fact decreasing the emissions for which I'm responsible. Granted, cutting the dairy and not eating the pork would be better again, but I'm not ready for that yet. I love cheese. I had even begun having a new recipe for savoury oatmeal for my breakfast most mornings... as a digression, here is the recipe:

1 cup vegetable stock

1/2 cup rolled oats

...stir oats into stock in a microwave-safe bowl. cook 3 minutes.

grate in 1/2 a cup of cheese (I used cheddar but anything will do) and stir until melted.

best served with Louisiana hot sauce.

...so giving up this amazing creation is no fun, but if I console myself with a little pig now and then — we ate 7 strips between 3 of us this morning — I won't just break and slide back into heavier-emissions consumption. It's not perfect, but it's something I think I can probably manage long-term, which veganism really wasn't.

An open letter to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver

So yesterday the Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver published an open letter to the Canadian public about the environmental "radicals" whose "goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth." Referring to Enbridge's new Northern Gateway Pipeline, he decries the attempts to stop the export of tar sands oil to Asia, which is the Harper Government™'s new plan after the Keystone XL Pipeline to the US was effectively scrapped by President Obama.

Much though this insidious attack offended me personally — I'm sure Oliver would lump we in with the crazies — it didn't surprise me. Oliver's attitude is in fact typical of business and government, whose interests are always in short-term profit over the long-term welfare of the public. What they fail to understand — or perhaps, more rightly, acknowledge — is that the destruction of the environment will actually lead to more lost jobs and disastrous economic decline, and that the environmental agenda is not in fact about the environment but about humanity. Environmentalists want to save the world because they — we — want to save the human species. This planet, as I said in the previous post, is the only like it within the nearest 200 million light years; we don't get another one. It is finite.

David Suzuki had a clever response, I thought, calling the environmental paradigm "a pretty conservative approach" that seeks to "'live within our means,' 'save some for tomorrow,' [and] think about the 'legacy we leave for our children.'" He pointed out that the government's policies actually deplete and destroy the very resources it seeks to profit from, ensuring, in the long-term, economic depression (not big 'D,' though that could easily follow).

Here's another writer saying the same thing as me: 350.org

food waste, caloric density, cooking...

Time for an update. It has now been over a year since I stopped eating red meat. It still sucks, but I still feel committed to the decision. My daughter will often say to me, "so Daddy, just stop being a vegetarian! If you want to eat meat, then eat it!" This is in fact helpful, because I have to restate my case to her: I don't eat meat because I love her and I want her and her children to have a beautiful planet to live on. We don't get another one. In fact, author Bill Bryson says (in his excellent book A Short History of Nearly Everything), the average distance between stars is about 200 million light years, meaning that's the closest we are to another Earth-like planet at the right proximity to its sun to support life. "Two hundred light years is so far beyond us as to be, well, beyond us." (p28) ...All to say, it's worth trying to preserve this tiny finite planet for future humans; our great migration to Earth Mark 2 is a few years off.

1) There was a program on the CBC a couple weeks ago — I think in conjunction with their annual Sounds off the Season food drive — about how much food gets wasted in North America. It's obscene. Now, I'm a pretty frugal guy as it is, and growing up my mom always tried to waste as little food as possible, so I have always tended to eat things others might not, and save things others might throw out, but after hearing the article I have been being even more intentional. This is problematic on the rare occasions there's beef being eaten in our house, but otherwise one of the main things I've been trying to do is eat smaller portions. I find that if I dole out a smaller plate of food for myself, I not only eat less but also waste less. Not only that, it also means I can finish whatever my daughter doesn't, also leading to less waste.

2) I've also been thinking about, for lack of less jargony term, "caloric density." For a variety of reasons, including the ailing economy, personal finances, climate change, Third World hunger, and recent CBC articles about the prolongation of human life (one report said the potential was almost infinite life! How on earth do they expect humanity to have enough food if everyone lives into their hundreds and hundreds?), I've begun thinking about food sources, and just how calorie-rich nuts and seeds are. One cup of sunflower seeds, for instance, has like 1200 calories! So 2 cups would be enough to sustain someone my size for a day. Environmentally, this would mean such a tiny little footprint, both in terms of production and in terms of waste. Not that we could ever move as a species towards such a diet, but is it worth thinking about how to apply this in some (more balanced) manner? Maybe cutting my meals in half and eating more nuts & seeds?

3) A couple nights ago I tried to make potato chips by baking rather than deep-frying them. They were in the oven at like 425ºF for over 45 minutes and only got about halfway done. I started wondering how much energy it must take to make many of the foods we eat regularly, which once again brought up the idea that easily the most "environmentally-friendly" way to eat is raw food, not cooked. I have not yet converted, no. Not sure I could bring myself to do it. Being a vegetarian or even a vegan seems like a cakewalk by comparison.

fire (now with references)

So I suck at being good to the planet. I'm trying to make the right decisions, but even when I oh-so-virtuously manage to deny myself all kinds of things I feel are harmful, I still manage to mess it up.

I have just come back from camping with my family. It was mostly restful, except for the somewhat leaky tent one night and the steadily deflated blow-up mattress the next, but on the third day (of five), while I was sitting beside the fire pit nursing damp wood to life, I had a glimmer of memory about campfires being terrible for the environment. As I recall now, the information was given in reference to the Third World and their meagre choices for heat - wood, dung, garbage in some cases - but it made me realize that I was polluting the air too! Now you may be saying, Oh come on Bowen, surely a few campfires cannot do that much damage to the atmosphere! ...and in one sense you're right, but the Tragedy of the Commons (is that Thoreau or Malthus or someone else? - edit: it's someone named Garrett Hardin, and it was coined in 1968 in the linked article) dictates that if you and I think that way, basically so does everyone else, and suddenly we're all having just a few campfires by the thousands and the tens of thousands... you can see where this leads. So... what to do?

There are a few different factors to consider:

1. apparently trees only remove CO₂ from the atmosphere for a certain length of time. By some estimates, after about 100 years of life, trees begin to decay and return their CO₂ to the air. So... by burning wood over a century old, does this create more CO₂, or an equal amount? Edit: "Carbon sequestration," as it's called, does only last in trees for between 80 - 100 years, after which time it is offset by decay in the tree, which releases CO₂. see here...
2. we could consider using those indoor creosote-removing recycled-coffee-bean ready-made logs outside while camping. But are they meant for outdoors? Are they safe for cooking with? And, most pertinently, do they produce noxious and environmentally-damaging gases? Edit: depends who you talk to. This company says their logs are "greener," while this report (p2 under "Toxic Pollutants") says some of them release PCBs and other toxic gases.
3. if no campfire, then all cooking must be done otherwise: is propane a better alternative?

...This also leads me to the dreadful conclusion that perhaps cooked food is worse for the environment than raw food. I am already a super-reluctant vegetarian; do I have to consider not eating anything cooked now too? Good God.

My second major revelation was to do with some of the snacky-type "vacation foods" we brought along, ostensibly for our daughter, but y'know. Oreos, for instance. Turns out Oreos are made with (cow-fat derived) shortening rather than butter (splitting hairs though? more on this...). Ack! And both a vegan friend of mine and our (very not-vegan) neighbour recently mentioned, separately in the same week, that they don't eat Jell-O because of its gelatine, which of course is from cow hooves.

And suddenly I felt foolish and simple-minded in my conviction not to eat "beef." It seems fairly clear that all the "fruit of the bovine" may be just as bad as beef itself (quick! creative writers! new Creation myth where the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is actually a cow! go! oh and also, now the serpent is actually Adam's little girl saying, "but daddy you love beef! you should stop being a vegetarian. I want you to be happy!" Please also read Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage for reference). Given that I don't eat beef anymore because of methane (a greenhouse gas which I have cited numerous times as being 90x more toxic to the atmosphere - technically the troposphere, Jack and Annie and their Magic Treehouse recently pointed out to me), isn't buying dairy products just supporting the same industry and therefore the production of the same toxic gases? Argh!

so... do goats burp or fart?

cow farts

Sometime in the spring we had a moment of weakness and went to a pizza chain (a sit-down one. with a bar) for dinner. When the waitress took our order, I asked whether a particular sauce was meat-based and my daughter (almost 5 now) exclaimed, "Daddy doesn't eat beef because of cow farts!"

She's not wrong. It's why. It's also why I tend not to eat even the "happiest" lamb or mutton (actually that's because of sheep burps). Last time I had red meat, then, was Easter dinner. We bought a leg of lamb, organic and locally sourced, from our local butcher. It was melty. And I tried not to feel guilty.

So generally I avoid beef no matter what. In their book The Way We Eat, Peter Singer and Jim Mason do an excellent job of pitting the various ethical factors in our dietary decisions against one another. In terms of beef, they convincingly argue that pasture-fed organic "free range" cows are actually more damaging to the environment than factory-farmed ones fed corn and other grain because eating grass makes the happy cows fart more. This produces more methane, which is a greenhouse gas 90x more potent than CO2, and accounts for the fact that by some estimates, our North American meat industry alone is responsible for around 40% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. Ugh. Which means that even if I get happy beef that has been shot in the back of the head while watching the perfect sun set with its adoring bovine family, it's still going to be responsible for record-breaking temperatures, droughts, water shortages, etc. for something like the next 800 generations of my offspring (apparently greenhouse gases stick around for about 20,000 years).

But ho, what news? Apparently, we're working on the scientific equivalent of bovine bean-o. See here in the March 2011 edition of Business Green!

So maybe, just maybe, one day I'll be able to eat a non-lentil, non-tofu, non-mushroom burger again. A boy can dream.

http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2038244/diets-stop-cows-methane-emissions

tiny little OCD decisions

I may have written about this before, I can't remember.

We don't buy bottled water in our house - we (perhaps naively, but I'll save that for a future conspiracies blog) just trust what comes out of the tap. But we like it cold. Today, when I was filling up the jug to put in the fridge, I wondered, does it take more energy to let the water cool before I fill the jug, or just take the first water that comes out and let it cool in the fridge? It occurs to me now, it uses less water to do the latter, which then seems like an obvious choice. But having read The Way We Eat, I find myself weighing various environmental consequences against others: which is worse, wasting a couple litres of water or using extra electricity by putting lukewarm water in the fridge?

I have no idea what the answer is, but I'm plagued by such decisions. Here are choice others:

• driving at what speed does it become equally bad, because of drag, to have the windows down as to run the AC?
• is it worse to water your own vegetables (thereby using water) or to buy non-local non-organic veggies from somewhere with high rainfall (thereby using petrochemicals)?
• does it take more gas to turn the car off frequently and then turn it on (like at a long light) or just to keep it running?
• is it worse to drive to the bookstore (using x amount of gas) and buy a new book or to order it secondhand online (using y amount of gas - likely more than x)?
• do the eggs I buy from a local farmer actually use more resources - in terms of food, water, gas, etc. - than the ones I buy from the grocery store (because the latter are mass produced and more carefully controlled)?

...as a musician and academic, I'm also always thinking cost because money's always a little tight, so then factor that in too. Sometimes, I have to admit, cost wins over environment. It can be expensive trying to do right by the Earth, and much as I want to think long-term, there are times when I can't afford to. Those are times when I feel incredibly guilty, times for which I imagine myself apologizing to my daughter and her children in 25 or 40 years.

bye baby bunting

Daddy's going hunting.

Well, at least, that's the plan at some point in the future. My brother-in-law (also Ben) and I were talking last night about meat (and my vegetarianity) and we totally see eye-to-eye, but he still eats meat and I don't. And I explained, rather obviously to him probably, that I didn't mind so much about the animal lives lost to produce meat, but that I did mind a) about their treatment and health and b) about the environment.

I have eaten chicken a couple times since the fall, and turkey twice, and it was because they were local, "organic" (greenwashed and impotent though that word has become, I do still believe that choosing it is a loud way to vote with my money), and free range. In at least of two of those cases, we in fact know the producer personally.

I still miss meat. Beef most of all. But that's the one thing I can't find a way to justify; even when beef is well-treated and grass-fed and all of that other good stuff, it still produces methane, and lots of it.

Now I know that this is not a particularly balanced approach - my wife called it "boycotting" meat, which I think is an apt label. I'm not eating meat, basically, because too many other people are. I could be more balanced about it, and frankly anyone who knows me knows that I will likely be a meat eater again one day (by virtue of my fickleness), but I think I do better, in some ways, as a fervent fundamentalist than a laid-back liberal. It's easier.

I started re-listening to the CBC's excellent series Have Your Meat and Eat It Too enjoying the re-affirmations of the conclusions I've drawn, and feeling good again about being a vegetarian. In the third episode, though, are some of the most compelling interviews, with people like Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan

...and the gist of what they say is twofold:

1. in nature, ecosystems are dependent on animals: without animals, farms need chemical fertilizers to enrich the soil
2. governments support the current meat production system by subsidizing corn and soy, which are fed to animals.

In other words, it may be possible to eat meat - and maybe actually help small ecosystems thrive - if we look to smaller producers who have created closed systems within which animals play a crucial role.

Back to hunting, then: my thinking is that those are animals which have led as natural a life as they can have had (making "free range" and "organic" look pretty ridiculous), and that becoming part of the food chain again - in a direct way - I am probably doing much less damage, both to ecosystems and to the global environment, than buying produced meat, regardless of the source. In fact, if it was part of a cull, I might even be contributing to an ecosystem by keeping it in balance.

[addendum: apparently they've discovered that curry spices reduce methane in ruminants! so curried beef is better for the environment...?

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/curry-spices-for-cows-and-sheep-could-cut-methane-emissions-2029761.html]

CBC is a Superhero

So, yesterday evening I had a quick conversation about this blog and these ideas with a good family friend, and she mentioned not really always being able to follow what I'm on about. Which I think is fair: I'll be the first to admit I occasionally do lose sight of the forest through the trees; I sometimes have a hard time communicating what I want, and sort of leave out the important details.

But, once again, thank goodness, CBC has rescued me from myself. I was driving over to the LCBO this evening and had on the radio, and it being after 9 Paul Kennedy's Ideas was on and guess what?

They are currently running a 3-part series called Have Your Meat and Eat It Too, all about factory farming and the food system!

So for those of you who have been tempted to read the book I've been plugging but cannot quite bring yourselves to buy a copy/ sign one out of the library / root around at Value Village / ask to borrow mine, you can get the meat and potatoes (!) of what I've been saying in only 3 short hours of listening! Carpet sweep your house, put your laundry on the line, make some non-bolognaise spaghetti sauce, and tune in to this program. It's kind of like a greatest hits of The Way We Eat. It's excellent.

break-meat-fast

woohoo! veganism experiment 2010 is over! woke up salivating. bacon and eggs! milk in my coffee! meat and milk coma!

so... I made organic fair-trade coffee and had *real milk* in it. Scarfed down some of the formerly banned "salt & pepper" (and milk) peanuts while cooking the half-pack of extra-thick bacon that had been languishing in the freezer for a month, used the fat to cook 3 large farm-fresh local organic eggs, fried up an organic tomato, and then served it with salsa, a sprig of fresh basil, and some unbelievable Scottish T&T Shropshire blue cheese.

Funny thing, though (besides the actual haze I'm struggling through right now... coma coming on good and strong), I felt quite weird about the eating all that animal product again. It actually occurred to me that I could probably go vegan permanently, should I wish. I lasted a month, and though I didn't try very hard to get into the cooking, I'm sure it would get easier and more tasty.

So I think I'm gonna go middle-of-the-road; nothing like being lukewarm and sitting on the fence: I'll be a vegetarian. I loooove cheese too much and have an excellent source for local organic "ethical" eggs, and our grocer sells lots of organic milk products, many of them local since we have no less than three big dairy producers within less than 50km. It's not the perfect solution, but I think it's one I can sustain, which I really don't think is true of being vegan, particularly in a house with two other non-vegans.

the skinny on this vegan thing

So look, I haven't really explained my vegan madness here, at least not on the blog. So I thought maybe it was time.

The authors of this book I've cited (The Way We Eat... - which, btw, I picked up haphazardly for $4 @ Value Village) point out a number of what for me were very salient points:

• organic beef, which treats the animals better than factory farming, means they get to eat grass and hay and roam large swaths of pasture. However, cows that eat grass and hay actually produce more methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2 (http://www.epa.gov/methane/), and in giving them room for pasture, they use way more land than factory-farmed animals
• eating local (particularly local and out of season) can actually cause more damage and use more energy than getting stuff from overseas. Example 1: Californian rice - in fact, it takes much more energy and much more water to produce rice in North America than it does to grow it in, say, Bangladesh, and ship it over by sea. Example 2: greenhouse-grown local tomatoes use tons of energy to heat the greenhouses, and tons of water to irrigate.
  
• farm animals produce lots of waste. The more of us there are eating meat and cheese and eggs, the more waste gets produced, and that waste ends up running off into groundwater, into lakes and streams, into rivers and oceans. It can also contaminate those self-same animal products.
  
• cows consume 5 times more than people, so if we stopped eating beef and used that land to grow crops for human consumption, we'd actually have a lot more food! (see "where's the grain?" in this Cornell study from 1997)

...so essentially, if we stopped eating animal products altogether, we'd put a lot less strain both on the food system and on the planet. It really is difficult though! I now weigh 213.6, which means I've lost 2.4lbs in two and a half weeks. Great diet plan, I guess, though this was not a goal of mine. I don't really like tofu, though meatless burgers are okay, and I've made some headway on nice vegan main dishes with things like potatoes, green beans, pasta, and rice. It's going okay. I can imagine just keeping on going; it certainly does get easier, but it's still a bit of a struggle.

Preview: Global TV tonight began a new series based on the now famous 100-mile diet. It actually looks even more difficult than going vegan. My wife wondered aloud whether this was my new quest... so this evening I spent some time Googling local sources of flour (or maybe bread? pasta...?), dairy (can't wait!), and coffee (no dice. argh), and I'll have a look around for locally-sourced beer (luckily we live right near one of the world's great wine regions) and yeast, and we actually already have connections to local produce, local honey, local chicken, and local eggs. So maybe come August 15th...? I'll keep you posted.

milk is in everything...!

argh. So far the two things I've found hardest about this experiment have been 1) giving up things I like and 2) realizing just how prevalent milk and eggs are in what we eat!

For instance, my mother-in-law, knowing I was vegan for the moment, bought some awesome hot sauce for me with which to ease my pain (or substitute one kind for another, really). I had it on a bunch of things over one meal and then checked the ingredients... milk products! In hot sauce, I ask you? So I've been reading much more carefully, and have found the ingredient "lactose (from milk" in things like PC Black Bean & Salsa whole grain chips, their Flaxseed tortilla chips, their tomato basil rice cakes... all things I thought would for sure be safe. Then, and this one stung, I have been eating more nuts as part of my diet of late, and I bought some "kettle-cooked" salt and pepper peanuts from Sobeys, unquestioningly inhaling handful after handful. Well... of course, three days in, I checked the ingredient list only to find milk ingredients listed! frack.

As a side note, I have discovered that it would actually be very easy to become a plump vegan. the nuts alone could do it. A cup of sunflower seeds, for instance, has 1000 calories in it! wow. so like, 2 cups would be most people's daily caloric intake. Kinda makes me think maybe instead of rice, which only has about 200 calories per cup, we should be sending over bags and bags of sunflower seeds to people in need. SO much more bang for the buck!

not my cup of tea (too!)...

so... day 6. I've already eaten more wraps with salsa and tofu than I care to count, and I've watched my family eat things I already miss: mayo, chicken, cheese, milk in my tea (that one was a bit of a blindside)... and I've mistakenly eaten a bunch of non-vegan things: a handful of chips with cheese in them (chips, I thought - potatoes! vegan!), little bits of crumbled cheese from mac & cheese I made for my daughter...

Anyway so being a vegan is not very much fun. At least, not for me. I cannot imagine anyone really enjoying this who really, y'know, likes food. Granted, I haven't started getting into vegan cooking much so to boot I'm essentially also on a rawfood diet, but still.

I just wonder what kind of person is more satisfied with being an ethical eater than with eating stuff that tastes good. But maybe it gets easier...?

Good thing beer's still vegan.

end day 2, day 3, and a list

...so last night's supper was more wraps, but this time with fresh tomatoes, fresh mushrooms, salsa again, kidney beans, and tofu. I also had some organic blue corn chips and not-organic white corn chips, and some peanuts. whee.

I've started a list of what things I can eat as a vegan:

• nuts
• veggies
• potatoes, rice, bread
• fruit
• beer & wine
• soy stuff: soy milk, tofu, fake cheese, tofurkey...
  

...? anything else you can think of?

...have so far eaten lots of nuts, lots of peanut butter, wraps with tofu and veggies and mustard, rice boiled with vegetable stock, corn-on-the-cob... and I think I've actually gained weight. For the record, I'm at 216 right now. curious what I'll be in a month's time. Predictions? Up? Down?

an experiment in veganism

So I'm reading this book right now - I'm about 50 pages from the end - called The Way We Eat, about the ethics of food and the choices we make about what we put in our mouths. It's been very compelling and very complicating, blurring lots of lines for me between the right and the wrong of organics, local food, seasonal food, meat-eating, GM foods, the environment, etc.

Essentially, though, what the book seems to be leading up to is the conclusion that the most ethical choice we can make - in terms of the treatment of animals, the treatment of people, and the welfare of the planet - is to be vegan.

So I've resolved to try to be vegan for a month, to try it and see what it's like. I'll report in as often as possible, mainly with the rundown of what I've eaten and my victories and defeats in this quest.

I'm on day two right now.

Yesterday after breakfast (eggs, bacon, coffee with milk, berries) I thought I'd try to make a go of it. We were at the cottage and drove back from Muskoka, making a stop at the infamous Weber's burger joint on highway 11. I dutifully ordered the garden burger (mushy beany blech), but then Jen got a hotdog that was waaaaay too big for one person, and Abby wanted a hamburger that she didn't finish. Ethically, I thought it would be worse to waste that food than to eat it, so I finished them off rather than throwing them away.

For supper I had three wraps with beans and salsa, a couple pieces of bread and PB, some hickory-smoked almonds, some apple juice, and cherries for dessert.

Today for breakfast I had more bread and PB and coffee with vanilla soymilk, and then for lunch we were out (Williams Coffee Pub at the harbour) so I ordered a grilled veggie panini with no cheese. They're pre-made, I was told, but the veggie wraps were good. Does it have cheese in it, I wondered? My server asked if I was vegan, so I explained I was trying it out for a month. A sympathetic vegetarian, she said she couldn't imagine trying to go vegan, and that the only other "sauce" I could have for my veggie wrap, besides the cream cheese they normally put in it, was mustard. Okay, I said, I could deal with that. When it finally came, however, it did have the cream cheese! I asked Jen what to do, and she pointed out, again, that it was probably more ethical to eat it than to send it back to be thrown out so they could make me a new one. So day two, halfway through, I've had to compromise twice already. I also had beer with lunch, and a coffee with soy milk, which they did manage to get right.

I'm hungry.

"I'm Thinking Future Friendly"

I'm blogging again at 10 to 1 in the morning because I just saw a commercial for a total crock. Well okay it was not marketed as such, but here it is: http://www.futurefriendlybrands.ca/en

...it was for a bunch of products that are marketing themselves as being "future friendly" - i.e. environmentally responsible or whatever.

I don't know the answers to these questions yet, but the first things that came to mind were:

• if Downy is making its fabric softener more concentrated (to reduce the plastic used), doesn't that make it harder on the water supply? Doesn't that make it more toxic? Same with Tide high efficiency ("HE") liquid... WTF?
• how do they make Coldwater detergent? What have they put into it to make it work? Why won't they assure us that it's not toxic and that it's biodegradable and made of natural ingredients?
• aren't stronger Bounty sheets going to take longer to decompose, either in a landfill or in a municipal compost heap?
• what the hell do they have to do to already toxic batteries to make them last longer? What on earth can they be putting in to make batteries give even more power? why shouldn't this terrify us?
• what is Cascade made of, if not organic biodegradable stuff?

...recently capitalism, which when done properly can totally spur technology and markets and medicine (etc. etc.) through competition, has been showing its dark underbelly: products released too soon (e.g. Tylenol, Honda), in the name of the quickest profit and the most competetive advantage hurt people and hurt the planet. This website and this line of products is SO lame.

Our Bodies Our Selves

[readers, this is a post started two months ago that I may never complete but that starts a bunch of interesting thoughts. And what is this blog, if not a catalyst for reflection? So I present to you, for the first time though likely not the last, an incomplete blog entry on motives and agendas:]

29.10.09

the so-called "environmental debate" has some pretty fanatical devotees on both sides. I was recently directed to http://www.noteviljustwrong.com, which [...incomplete]

...critical thinking is key, then. We must always always ask, who stands to gain from this point of view? Of what benefit is it to the involved party to espouse such a radical stance?

...noteviljustwrong has an entire movie that I have yet to watch, but their opening page asserts that "the World Health Organization lifted its ban on DDT in 2006, but Al Gore and his allies will not accept that verdict any more than they will accept the science that discounts theories about global warming. They are determined to blame humans for everything." So I looked it up. And indeed, here is the WHO press release:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/index.html

...which is amazing. That said, the Neo-cons seem to put no faith in the relative authority of the UN or the Nobel Prize (to say nothing of their utter disdain for government), so it's funny to say in one breath that government can't be trusted and then turn around and use governmental edicts as evidence for your argument. Can't have it both ways, I don't think.

But this leads me to question, or at least admit, my own motives: why am I so interested in trying to preserve the environment?

1) First and foremost, I am concerned for the future of my own family, of my child (or possibly children, at some point). I want the beautiful world around me to exist and not be deteriorating and falling apart for my daughter when she grows up, and for her own family.

2) As well, ages ago I concluded that suffering is a result of the actions of humankind, so that my actions (yes, good or bad) can have an effect on *your* life, and on the lives of countless people I will never even meet (see http://btbowen.blogspot.com/2007/10/restating-case.html). So for example, cancers and other environmentally-caused sickness are to some degree the result of the poisons we as a species are spewing into our biosphere. God isn't to blame for suffering; *we* are, and so I want to try to diminish my responsibility, such as I can, for the suffering of others. In a similar way, if I buy new clothes from a company that uses sweatshops (e.g. watch the documentary "China Blue"), I'm contributing to the suffering of unknown numbers of people who live in deplorable conditions. So I try always to buy my clothes second-hand: it's not a perfect solution, but it's a good step, I think, and it's within my financial means.

3) In a backwards kind of way, I suppose my motivation could be financial, maybe. I find that being "environmentally conscious" does help save money, and that's useful for our family at this juncture. As well, I occasionally think about going into journalism, so doing all this writing is both good practice and also potentially good for my portfolio. That said, I don't make money from the blog and it does take hours and hours of work.

* * * * *

[flash forward]

4) 09.12.09 - it's two months later and I'm still mulling over this motivation problem. Why are climate deniers really so very interested in "disproving" climate change? Do they think we'll be blown back to the dark ages? Do they resent not feeling like they really have any choices left, or do they feel like they're being told what to do? I, for my part, have begun to conclude that maybe my own interest in the environmental causes stems from the fact that I feel like a bit of a black sheep: I don't totally feel like I fit in, even now, in society as it has been erected, and so maybe my underlying motivation for championing environmental causes is that I think maybe I'd feel more comfortable - like I'd finally found "home" - in those self-same dark ages. Do I eschew technology? I do not. Do I constantly wish that i were doing something other than watching TV or checking my email, and that the people around me didn't buy into a culture I find so repulsive? yes. Our western culture makes me uneasy at best and terrified and nauseated at worst.

...so it seems to me that maybe the battle over the validity of the environmental argument is a battle of identity: namely, that each of us self-identifies either as being successful by society's standards, and therefore welcomed, or a loser, and therefore shunned. What's at stake when we dig down under the threat to our lifestyles that the environmental movement could be, is in fact the very sense of who we are, which has taken us our lifetime to construct.

* * * * *

So what does noteviljustwrong stand to gain? Well, for one thing, they have a big retail section (http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/shop). But - and I think this is the real underlying motivation - noteviljustwrong really represents a particular way of life and standard of living, and a resistance to being forced to change. And that's fair enough, really. But I think the thing they're missing is that no one (and here I'm talking about North Americans, and still only generally) really *wants* to make massive changes to the way they live. Environmentalists, though, I think understand that either we can change now of our own free will, or we can be forced to change when the conditions on the planet make the status quo impossible.

Noteviljustwrong's opening pseudo-manifesto includes the phrase "They are determined to blame humans for everything." Putting aside a discussion of whether or not humans are in fact to blame for everything, this assertion is defensive. It suggests that they feel they are not beng treated fairly, and that their [...and here the entry stopped back in October, when I saved it to my desktop and vowed to come back to it].

the climate change hoax

You may have seen this story somewhere in the last couple days: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/11/26/climate-change-hack.html. Essentially, some very prominent "climate change scientists" from the UK's Climatic Research Unit had their emails hacked and posted online, and those emails seem to suggest that these scientists have been fudging the numbers on climate change to make the situation seem more dire than it may in fact be.

In response, climate change deniers and agnostics are having a triumphant HA moment, and it's not the first time. In December 2007, a number of UN climate change scientists were revealed to have been fudging some of those self-same numbers too.

Bastards!

Eventually, I'll get 'round to posting my article on motivations - who stands to gain from the two sides of this showdown? - but for now, I'd like to make a point:

Nothing - nothing! - changes the fact that a finite planet cannot hold infinite resources. It's against the laws both of logic and of physics, and it's not possible. So... we're still going to run out of oil, whether we've peaked already or we won't do so for another century; it's impossible for there to be an endless supply. Potable water is still under imminent threat: the way we're poisoning our water, we don't have an infinite supply! As the head of the Council for Canadians Maude Barlowe asserts, "the wars of the future... will be fought over water."

We humans are not being kind to the planet, and the validity of climate change science will not change that fact. Just look at the rates of extinction of species, the state of the Great Barrier Reef, the pollutions of the oceans, etc. etc. etc., and you'll have a hard time denying it.

The human species has overreached our carrying capacity, and we can't just keep continuing to grow and grow. It's insane to think that exponential growth using up a finite resource can go on forever - that doesn't make any sense (see Easter Island - our canary in the coalmine). If nothing else, realize that all species go extinct, and that our time will come too.