Guest Post on Just Move Monday for the Zaftig Chicks

Over the past two months I've been doing probably a million, bajillion things, but one of the less-stressful ones has been to read some of the blogs on the fat-o-sphere feed.

That's how i came to know of Bianca & Sylvia, the Zaftig Chicks.

As a way to fight the stress of the past two months, i've been hot-yoga-ing a lot, and when the girls asked if anyone wanted to guest-contribute a blog post, it seemed like a nice opportunity to write about my practice. You can check it out here.

Meanwhile, although I haven't been posting anything here, I HAVE been tweeting, and those tweets relate to green things, including the chickens (now there are 15!). The garden has been producing the first tomatoes of the season, and my belly is READY to give them a home... I'll definitely share more as Dallas' harvests come in.

I've been doing a little "activist" stuff, too. My friend Molly and I went to check out the new TN headquarters of Repower America and then I went with a couple strangers to visit the offices of the two TN senators to tell them that I support the ACES act.

ALSO - I give a hearty thumbs-up to the Murfreesboro toothpaste I got from The Green Wagon, as well as the castile soap shampoo (i can't remember the name of it) that you can buy by the ounce (!). They'll be opening their East Nashville location oh-so-very soon, so you'll have 100% more opportunities to buy green!

Meanwhile, think good thoughts for me as I embark upon a quest for better living through altering my chemical composition with the help of the Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex :(

Happy Earth Day!

To celebrate, i give you a picture of my very modest veggies...
they're all coming up! whoohoo!

Top left: spinach
bottom left: romaine
middle: green-leaf lettuce
top right: tomatoes
bottom right: bell peppers

giving gardening another go...

Last year I tried to grow some tomatoes.
Target had some little grow-pots in their dollar-bin and I thought wouldn't it be sweet to have my own tomatoes...

well, sadly, instead of April showers bringing me tomatoes, they just washed away the little sprouts and all the soil. It was pretty sad.

This year, I am determined to NOT let my little sprouts die in a torrential rain storm.

And I DO have sprouts!
They're tiny, but they're there!

This picture was taken a week ago - right now the middle container is chock-full of sprouts and the tomatoes (in the left container) have just begun to sprout.

I am very excited about the prospect of salads every day!

egg on my face...

Well, first of all, if you knew all the details, you would forgive me for being such a slacker about posting. Trust me, you would not want to read any blogging I might have done over the past three weeks!

BUT...

I'm feeling a bit perkier now, and I have something to share with you all - which is also the cause of a bit of embarrassment on my part (because I haven't updated like I should).

I've been named a Runner Up for Greenest Greek by my sorority's magazine, Anchora!!!
Check me out... along with all the other Green DGs!!! Part of what makes me green is this blog, and since I haven't been updating like I normally would... well, you can see how it's kind of embarrassing.

Anyway, I promise that I haven't left green-dom behind, just put it on pause for a while.
My latest project is figuring out where to recycle in Murfreesboro.

Also, I just finished reading Skinny Bitch (they have a website, too), and I'm not quite transformed into a vegan yet, but I have definitely stopped eating all artificial sweeteners (the phrase that made me buy the book even though I'm on a Skinny Wallet diet right now? "When methyl alcohol, a component of aspartame, enters your body, it turns into formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is toxic and carcinogenic (cancer-causing). Laboratory scientists use formaldehyde as a disinfectant or preservative. They don't fucking drink it."). That's my first step. Next step is cutting out dairy (chapter 5).

Anyway, it's "fall hell" right now at my job, so this is all I can manage... but yay for being a Green Greek and yay for trying to be a skinny bitch!

Bovine Ambition

I want to be exactly like Alexe P. van Beuren.

Check out her latest column in the Oxford Eagle:

Bovine Ambition

Outside my study window lives the only sign of my agricultural ambitions: a fifteen by twenty plot of raised beds, including a pre-existing boxwood, and forty-one heirloom tomato plants.

Thirty-nine, come to think of it. The blight got two that I ripped out yesterday.

I am twenty-five years old and there are days when I want nothing more than to rise at dawn, don overalls, and pad forth from my sleeping family to go deal with chickens, fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and yes, a cow. A milk cow, to be exact.

Somehow, the whole town knows of my ambitions. Yesterday at the farmers' market, the husband of an acquaintance asked me how my pursuit of cow-dom was going... (Click to read more)

This chick is soooooooo awesome. If she weren't already married I'd be hightailing it down to Mississippi with a ring in one hand and a cow in the other.

The City Chicken

So.

My little tomato plants are doing okay. I haven't killed them yet, which is a sign that they're very robust, perhaps even Super Tomatoes. Hopefully not Killer Tomatoes, just plants that can survive my flakiness.

As the condo is still on the market, my daydreams of being greener by growing my own veggies and hanging clothes on a line instead of using the dryer are still just daydreams. Still and all, the way I'm living now seems itself an interesting experiment in being green. Living so minimally - no cable, minimum wardrobe/makeup/accessories, being strapped for cash - is really not that bad. Not to say that I don't sort of lust over the thought of watching the History Channel now and then... or actually putting on eyeliner... or being able to participate in NPR's summer e-pledge day (I've been wanting to do the $5/month thing since Jeff did it last year but I keep thinking "it's dumb to do that when you're eating off-brand mac'n'cheese...").

Anyway, my daydreaming of tomatoes has been amdended, now, to include chickens. Chickens and tomatoes. I think I could subsist off of tomatoes, fresh monzarella and eggs for the rest of my life. Why? Because I was thinking about having one chicken. I mean, you can keep chickens as domestic pets as far as I know.

What happened is that I was reading on Slate.com and found my way to this site, called The City Chicken, about keeping your own chickens in urban areas. While i don't think it's feasible to have a chicken right now (or maybe ever, if I'm going to be renting somewhere), I was thinking that it might be possible to have one down at mom and dad's when they move here. That would also mean I could just make them raise the chicken! Brilliant!

Tayst goes green!

If you haven't seen the tidbit in the Scene, Tayst restaurant, a little place across from the Gardens at Hillsboro Village on 21st Ave, has gone green!

Thanks, Whole Foods!

Whole Foods finally got some biodegradable meal boxes that actually fit a whole meal. They're made of bullrushes.

Yay!
The plastic ones that I had to use when I forgot my rubbermaid one always irritated me.

I am really looking forward to this weekend - hopefully Monday I will actually have caught up with everything and can focus on having a regular schedule, complete with actual posts rather than silly posts. I am pretty proud of myself for providing a picture for this one, despite its simplicity :)

Vegetarianism, Veganism, and the "All-American" Hamburger, part 2

So, I told you all about how the chicken made me queasy the other night. Yeah, it might have been that fast-food fried chicken isn't exactly at the top of the healthy-eating list. Also, like LisaT suggested, had I taken the time to actually sit down and thoughtfully eat, perhaps I would have either a) gotten queasy earlier or b) STOPPED EATING THE DAMNED THING. But I think that really, in that moment, it was because i couldn't stop imagining the live chicken. Not that I have some emotional connection to chickens. Mostly, I hate them, thanks to an evil rooster my cousins had when we were kids that would fly maniacally at you whenever you went to collect the eggs from the coop. But still, something about that live chicken image in my head...

Now, like Mr. Franklin explained, since I am a rational creature, I can surely come up with a way to convince myself that eating meat is ethically okay in regards to my relation to the animal (animals eat other animals; people have been doing it forever; our bodies need the protein; the animal was killed humanely; this is my chance to take revenge on the poultry population; etc etc etc).

But what about the staggering economic & health impact of eating animal products?

Here's where, for me, it gets pretty clear.
- It takes 990 gallons of water to get you one gallon of milk (Thanks, AnimalBlawg! Click here for a citation... fact is on page 167)
- Livestock is responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (Thanks, NoImpactMan)
- Hog Farms don't have to treat the hog waste; plus, they're helping to grow antibiotic-resistant bacteria (check out this article from Rolling Stone)

There are lots of ways to rationalize these problems - sure, water is a renewable resource; sure, humans are causing a lot of greenhouse gas emissions just by breathing...

But the more that I read, the more I want to just opt out. Thinking about the vastness of these problems and how they affect just me, just this one body, really freaks me out.

So maybe going vegetarian and/or vegan is something that I should do out of respect for myself; putting aside my respect for the environment, or animals, or my fellow man, shouldn't I try to take care of my own body first? If I am going to start eating thoughtfully (O, were there more than 24 hours in a day - an additional 4 hours for yoga and thoughtful eating would be a true blessing), why don't I use that brain-power to hunt down green foods? Eating those free sandwiches from the BEC was definitely not a thoughtful act - it was "easy" and "free". We come back to the idea of scope versus scale here - sure it was, on the "scale" scale, easy and free, but on the "scope" scale, I actually paid for that food with my own body. I sold out. I spent myself instead of money... and we are spending our planet, instead of our time and money, on all of that meat.

I am feeling quite trapped by this problem, because I have always had a hard enough time respecting my own body without bringing green into it. The last time I did hot yoga was two weeks ago (Hey, I rationalize, sleep is more important and I don't have the money to go). Last night I ate three packaged, mass-produced, white bread dinner rolls (they were free). This morning I ate a Little Debbie snack (no excuse there other than i could find 75 cents in the floorboard of my car).

This is all, for me, like a drug addiction! But unlike heroin, the price of this addiction is "cheaper" than the alternative. Additionally, there seems to be little societal support for someone who wants to break the oil/sugar/processed-food/animal-products/waste/mass-production addiction. My job, the media, my financial life, and people around me all make it difficult to do what, if I weren't so implicated in this bizzare system, I would choose to do.

So, economics play a HUGE part in this for me. All of the immediate things, like the balance in my bank account and the time i have in a day, completely occlude the big picture cost of what I'm doing to myself by persisting in these very un-green habits.

Well, I certainly didn't intend this post to be quite such a whine-fest as it turned out to be, but I do want to ask for help in this sense - do you all have any ideas how to quantify your choices? It is easy for me to quantify the price of a lunch (free sandwich from BEC = $5 at least still in the bank). It has not been so easy for me to quantify the cost of that sandwich (that roast beef and the styrofoam packaging - how much is that costing my body and my world?).

That's why I'm super excited about a new curriculum at my parents' Alma Mater, Warren Wilson College, which I'll talk about in my next post. Maybe it will help us quantify scope in a way that our over-stressed brains can actually understand.

Vegetarianism, Veganism, and the "All-American" Hamburger, part 1

What drove the composition of this post (an expansion of a comment on a post over at AnimalBlawg, a blog written by some acquaintances from undergrad) was something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. However, in the writing of it, I really found it's too big to tackle in one post, so look out for part 2 next.

About a year ago, I found a soup that I really like - Mexican–Style Chicken Tortilla soup. But I really hate the chicken in it. It is tasteless and rubbery and totally ruins the rest of the soup! So I’ve almost stopped buying it in preference for vegetable soup. It really depresses me that i don’t get to enjoy the ricey-corny-black beany goodness that that tortilla soup could be because of the nasty chicken. I figured it was just because it was cheap soup (hence, cheap chicken in it)

A few Thursdays back, I went to Hillwood High School out in Belle Meade to give a "Getting In" strategy session to a bunch of juniors and seniors (over 60 people were there! it was awesome!), and the PTA served Mrs. Winners chicken for dinner. Being that I am cheap, when they offered me a couple of pieces after the session, I promptly said thank you and then thanked the universe for the free meal. I started eating on the drive home, and at first it was very tasty. But as I ate, I got increasingly queasy. I figured it was because I was driving, but the whole thing really hit me as I pulled into the parking lot at home and finished off the last piece. I was really disgusted by the *thought* of what I was eating.

Now, I can't imagine that I'm anywhere near going vegan. Is this really me? I'm thinking... am i really turning into a leftist whacko that starts asking restaurants if they're cooking with animal oils?

Well, it is possible that I am. I mean, when they started serving Crispanis at Panera, I asked them to show me the ingredients label on the tomato sauce to see if it contained sugar of HFCS.

But I still am resistant to the idea of putting that label on myself. My vegetarian leanings mostly manifest in my day-to-day small choices as opposed to an overall lifestyle choice - I still do heartily attack a bison burger at Ted’s Montana Grill on occasion - but on a daily basis, I daydream of eating black beans and rice or a spinach and mushroom salad. I often wonder if it’s actually the burger I’m enjoying, as opposed to the idea of a burger (so ingrained in my middle-class, white-bread mindset!).

AnimalBlawg explained that the source of this may be umami

"Umami is the fifth taste, often called “savory.” We have “umami” taste receptors on our tongues that detect glutamates, found in protein-rich foods. And in uncreative diets, meat is the staple protein-rich food."

I will definitely be exploring non-meat ways to fulfill this 5th taste... although I see it playing out more as a way to avoid eating chicken as opposed to a way to avoid animal products entirely. Mostly, this is because I am lazy. And when someone puts free food, or easy food, in front of me, somehow I forget my desire to eat organic and vegetarian.

This Thanksgiving, we did cook a turkey, and it was my job to take care of the leftovers - pull all the meat off the bones. Now, I did enjoy the turkey/cranberry/whitebread sandwiches that were the reason we cooked the turkey - but after pulling all that meat off the bird, I wasn't interested in eating it anymore.

A more recent post at Animal Blawg introduced me to the fact that Ben Franklin dabbled in veganism - go read it! It really describes perfectly the situations I find myself in. Yes, i find that not eating animal products is cheaper. However, sometimes I am so drawn in by the smell and memory of the taste of food that I dig in without thinking. Ahhh, rationalism.

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do."

Yes, Ben. This is exactly the problem.
Up next - sure, I feel like chicken is gross, but how about the economic impact of being an omnivore?