Awake

Eco Claims

I wanted to flag this interesting article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal today.  The article discusses how easy it currently is for consumer products of all kinds to receive some sort of "eco-friendly" label.  It is also not always clear what exactly the various labels mean, or what standards a product has to meet to be deemed to be a good, environmental alternative.  A lot of companies rightly view "green living" as the latest major trend they need to follow in the endless race for what they call "wallet-share".  While this can be a good thing, if it means that they're creating less toxic / environmentally damaging products, we all need to remember to view the plethora of new "eco" products with a little skepticism.  Besides, would I really doing the world such a favor, for example, by getting rid of all my lightly-worn cotton towels so I can buy new ones made of hemp or bamboo?  In many instances I feel as though living simply is preferable to re-filling our homes with lots of new items that bear little green stickers.

Hey, That's Cheating!

I just remembered that I have a funny story to tell you.  Before going to the farmer's market yesterday morning, I stopped into Whole Foods at Union Square to pick up a few groceries.  I was standing in the express line, which was nevertheless moving very slowly, and had plenty of time to eavesdrop on a group of women standing in line next to me and chatting with each other.  A young man got in line behind them holding a basket filled with leafy greens and a baguette, and one of the women said, "What a pretty basket of food!" and he said, "Funny you should say so..." and explained that he was actually buying the food as a prop for a new cooking show.  I missed the name of it outside of the word "Daisy;" could it be this one?  Anyway, he explained that they were going to be shooting part of an episode in the farmer's market, so he was buying food to go in Daisy's basket.  Am I the only one who finds it very amusing that this guy went to Whole Foods to buy food for the basket that Daisy will be holding while she traipses around the farmer's market across the street?  It must be because it's still March and there's not much green, so they'd rather show her with a vibrant green bunch of parsley from California than a basket of potatoes and cabbages.  Seems a bit beside the point though!  He could have at least bought the bread at the farmer's market... but what do I know about the mysteries of TV?

ComPOST

When I was growing up in the suburbs of New York, my mother kept a small compost pile at a shady edge of our back yard, behind a cracked stone bench that we’d inherited with the house.  No one ever sat on this bench, because it was in a dark corner of the yard and faced the underside of a rather large outdoor deck that juts off of the back of my parent’s house.  But it wasn’t bothering anybody either and so we never moved it, and it provided a nice barrier between this compost pile and the rest of the yard.  The pile included some fallen leaves and cut grass from the garden, as well as a variety of vegetable scraps and fruit peels from our kitchen.  It was by no means a sophisticated system: it was only visited by the indigenous earthworm population of our back yard, we only turned it once in a while, and it took several seasons before nice rich soil began to appear at the bottom.  In my mind it was a nice thing to do if you had a garden, but hardly something to consider if you didn’t.

However, over the past year or so I’ve seen several articles about indoor composting systems, worms included, that city-dwellers can keep in their kitchens.  This one appeared in the Times not long ago.  While for all these years I’d been thinking that because food decomposes easily it isn’t really “bad” garbage, I read and I learned what may already be known to many: the sad truth is that when food is sent to landfill to decompose, it produces methane, one of the greenhouse gases that contributes to global warming.  When food is composted properly, however, methane is not released into the atmosphere and it produces great new humus (no, not the chickpea kind) to boot.  This can be added to soil to enrich its nutritional content.