a 'green' St. Patrick's day

So, the new job is going quite well... but that means my green blogging - pobrecita! - is suffering.

Do as I say, not as I do - don't let your Green Life suffer because your financial, housing and professional life is in turmoil!

Be really Green this St. Patrick's Day - check out this awesome Slate article about the relatively green-ness of green beer.

Then, go even greener by buying some local suds from Yazoo Brewery.

And if you're going out, Dan McGuinness is the mainstream choice (I went last year and it was pretty fun but also super crowded), but you should also check out the Family Wash over in East Nashville, where they've got locally made beer brats and vegetarian shepherd's pie!

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?