How Much Is Enough?

Note: This post was actually written about a week ago, but life got in the way, the weather's since been up and down, and we're at the beginning of another heat wave. The musings, however, still hold.

Late August morning in McKinney; First clouds in weeks!

The Beloved Spouse and I were enjoying the cool, breezy morning--after weeks of blistering temperatures with only one, short, previous break. This is beginning to look like a harbinger of Fall, but we're not celebrating extended good fortune quite yet. Still, even a short-lived respite is welcome, and recognizing good fortune often results in good conversation.

As often happens among the philosophically inclined, we were discussing the conditions that have created the current socio-political situation: climate change, energy consumption, consumption in general, the kind of materialism that convinces people that they need more and more stuff (instead of the kind of materialism that focuses on what exists rather than what people imagine might be out there), greed, The Future. In other words, Life, the Universe, and Everything. As we often do.

After we had mused about what we could do to ameliorate things (acquire an electric car, increase our solar production/battery capabilities), I wondered out loud about how much of what we already do makes even a dent in the overall condition of the planet: cut unnecessary consumption of consumer goods rather drastically, eliminate food waste, conserve power, reduce reliance on natural gas, minimize water use, eliminate single-use plastics, rely as much as possible on locally sourced food (sustainably grown and humanely raised),  minimize car use--all of which we're already pretty good at.

But to what end? If as few people actually make these efforts as seems to be the case, are we really accomplishing anything? 

We also live in an area of the country that's experiencing monstrous growth with the accompanying environmental degradation, increased pollution, massive addition of concrete and other problematic infrastructure materials, and demand for (and ultimate shortage of) water resources. The influx of population is bringing with it not only more people, more jobs, increasing property values, and a larger tax base (which are all considered Good Things in Texas), but is also exacerbating all of the problems conscientious people are trying to deal with.

A few signs of hope occasionally appear, like the increasing presence of local farms practicing regenerative agriculture (even as land gets snatched up by developers), urban farmlets cropping (sorry) up in South Dallas's food desert, cooperative enterprises that involve farmers, artisans, restaurateurs, food purveyors, and other socially and environmentally responsible entrepreneurs. But can they keep up with the "progress as growth" ethos built into the kind of consumer capitalism that dominates the current economy?

Another hopeful sign is the increasing number of "slow" movements sneaking into the existing economic forecast. Backlashes against destructive consumerism, especially in food and fashion, are appearing in the news, online, and in shelter magazines. The permaculture movement, most visibly evident in Australia, but catching on in Great Britain, the US, and Canada fairly conspicuously, is becoming a "thing." I've become an avid reader of Tom Hodgkinson's The Idler, which advocates slowing down and smelling flowers, but also a slower, more engaged, less frenetic economy. I only subscribed after it became available digitally because of my problematic relationship with print publications. (Digital subscriptions are also less expensive.) It is, however, highly entertaining, and often quite instructive.

Oddly enough, given my technologically skeptical bent, social media platforms like Pinterest and YouTube are helpful in promulgating practices that lead to slowing down and less active forms of consumption. For example, TBS and I have become followers of a few travel vlogs that allow us to enjoy activities out of our financial reach (such as sailing, or wandering around Scotland, or boating on the British canal system, or living in a Japanese satoyama and restoring a rice farm) vicariously. Every day we can learn something about the latest astrophysics news, watch Italian nonnas make pasta, or clever chefs show us how to make dishes from recipes published in the New York Times food section. Pinterest allows me to collect and curate inspiring photos and articles like those I used to cut out of the shelter magazines I subscribed to and save in notebooks. Now I can do much more with the interesting ideas I come across. At least until the EMP comes and fries the Cloud.

And so, while we still have pipe dreams about buying an electric truck and pulling an electric caravan, it's more likely that we'll keep plugging away at doing what we can to lower our planetary impact. I may not be able to maintain a completely waste-free household (the kind of effort that frequently appears in the newspaper and magazine articles I consume), over the last decade we have managed to reduce our trash output to a single green bin per month (stuff headed for the tip), and our recycle bin goes out every month or so. New clothing purchases are primarily confined to tennis shoes (TBS's avocation requires properly supportive foot ware) and underwear, neither of which are suitably acquired at charity shops.  I'm also hoping to solve some of our energy-consumption challenges by creating insulated portieres to help us isolate single rooms when we need an air conditioner to escape the heat, or a heated room to withstand the cold. We're currently recycling old woven serapes, but they're not as efficient as they could be. Over the years, however, I've collected large bins of fabrics--from worn clothing, bed linens, remnants from old projects, and thrift-store finds, all of which will allow me to make use of my antique-looking sewing machine or (if I'm feeling especially frugal) my grandmother's treadle machine, on which I learned to sew in the first place.

In fact, ruminating on the conditions in which my grandmother grew up (isolated Nevada ranch with no running water, indoor plumbing, nor electricity), and remembering the little two-room cottage with a single water spigot in the kitchen and outdoor toilet where my family spent a year in Japan, provides a reality check when I feel a bit picked on by the cosmos.

All of this navel gazing has come about in part because of the 100-degree (F) exterior heat that's characterized the last two months, and that seeps into a wood-frame house with brick cladding and little insulation (and not much we can really do about it). Upgrading heating and cooling sources, and otherwise improving a century-old house built to withstand nineteenth-century temperatures, requires more money (and in some cases, physical effort) than we can expend. So we make do, as inventively as we can, because we chose this house, and love it enough to keep living in it. 

We are deeply aware that there are unimaginable numbers of people in this world, and even in this very state, who are far worse off than we are. And if our meager efforts to make a difference aren't any where near enough, at least they're not nothing.

And maybe, at least for now, that has to be enough.

The Education of Desire: We are what we do, we are what we eat

Perhaps I'm a bit late in jumping on this particular bandwagon, because when I started searching for more information on a couple of closely related problems (obesity and food waste) I found more than I can handle in one post.  Other folks have also been thinking about the irony of this country's enormous waistlines and the equally enormous amounts of food waste making its way to the landfill.  We also hear talk of food deserts that help account for obesity among the poor, but I only recently began to wonder if anyone had been connecting the dots. Clearly they have.

This week's news media also reported on topics that are at least tangentially related to the waste/obesity problem: Herman Pontzer's articles in the New York Times,  pointed out that (as the Daily Poop version of the story put it) "It's the Sugar, Stupid," and that all the exercise in the world isn't going to make us as healthy as our distant ancestors if we're consuming crap. And in this week's New Scientist, the cover story ("Eat Your Way to Dementia") is about the relationship between type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. 

The last two months of house-renovation have increased my awareness of food waste because the combination of beastly weather, minimal air conditioning, and odd sleeping accommodations has put the kibosh on cooking (I've been way too hot and tired)--with the result that I spent this morning cleaning out my fridge, ridding myself of spoilt food, shriveled limes and carrots, and a couple of mystery life forms.  Mind you, the compost and the Bokashi bins can handle almost all of this, so that I don't really have to throw much away.  But that's not the point. 

This stuff was bought at a premium, represents many folks' labor and time (from farm to market), and bloody well should have been eaten.  Not only eaten, but cooked well and healthfully.  What the news articles have done is to fortify my resolve to accomplish several items in a new program of food-consciousness. 

First, it's really a good idea to plan one's meals and not rely (except on rare occasions) on serendipity.  My daughter bragged in a text message last night that she had planned a week's meals for two and spent $57 on them at Whole Foods. She's also tracking how they use leftovers--which isn't a bad idea either.  Simplifying food preparation in hot weather so that ingredients can be used more than once saves time, energy, and effort, and it helps prevent waste. So I'm going to set aside an hour or so one day a week (probably Wednesday morning) to plan the week's meals in time to shop on the way home from school on Thursday, when I have an early morning class. 

In addition, since before too long I'm going to be pinching food pennies again (i.e. when I retire, which could be as early as a year from now), I'm going to need to be considerably more mindful of how much I spend. I won't scrimp on quality, but if I end up paying $5 a pound for really good tomatoes, I certainly need to make sure that we actually eat them before they go off. 

My biggest challenge will be to address the issues that Herman Pontzer raises about what we've evolved to eat.  This is actually something I've been aware of for rather a long time, having conducted research on breastfeeding and maternal nutrition in hunter-gatherer cultures as a grad student.  I'm also really puzzled by what seems to be an increasing intolerance to the kinds of grains that our Neolithic ancestors domesticated for us.  Purely gathering cultures didn't eat these grains, which came along after people settled down and began to raise animals and crops.  Still, I do wonder if modern modifications to wheat varieties and increased refinement (the quest for gummy white bread) might be at least partly responsible.  I've already started using farro in pilaf and risotto-like concoctions; now I'm thinking of grinding some and trying it in bread. 

Another article, on the effect of modern European diets on Native Americans, makes a similar point,   as does a report on the Westernization of Asian diets. Both of these populations suffer mightily from diabetes in increasing numbers, and at least part of the culprit is radical dietary change over a relatively small amount of time in evolutionary terms.

It just seems like plain common sense to eat whole foods, high in fiber, low in--but not absent--fats, and free of transmogrified sugars and other chemicalized foodstuffs that have been developed to entice us to eat "food" that's not good for us. (See the 60 Minutes programs on "Tweaking Tastes and Creating Cravings" and the toxicity of sugar for examples of how we're being seduced into desiring what's bad for us.)

The simplest path to health seems also to be the cheapest: eat simply, grow herbs to enhance flavors and provide micronutrients, stay away from heavily processed stuff that comes in fancy packaging, and cook from scratch as much as possible.  New information about fermented foods seems to back up the practices of many simpler cultures (sauerkraut, kimchee, miso, cheese), so taking your dairy foods in the form of a good yoghurt doesn't sound all that bad.  Thanks to Mark Bittman, I've recently reduced the amount of cow's milk I drink and have since suffered far less from heartburn.  I haven't completely sworn off the stuff, because I love it (1%) in coffee, and am not fond of completely eliminating things that still offer some nutritional benefits.

While it's clear that eating more like an Archevore or following some version of a paleo-diet might well improve overall health, that's fodder (sorry) for another post. After all, if everyone suddenly abandoned wheat, corn, dairy foods, and minimized fruit consumption because of its sugar content, the American economy would collapse.  But we certainly do need to pay a lot more attention to what we eat and what we throw away, and make decisions that lead producers away from creating more and more junk.  Spending a bit of time reading Dana Gunders's position paper for the National Resources Defense Council, "Wasted: How America Is Losing up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill", or Jonathan Bloom's book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food (the link is to his blog, Wasted Food) can go a long way toward raising our collective awareness of the ironies and inconsistencies in American food-life; obesity, hunger, plenty, over-indulgence, and waste are all tightly woven into a culture riddled with greed, inattentiveness, consumerism, and advertising designed to make us keep doing what we're doing. But we ought not to be doing it, else we will become it.

I vote we stop. Soon.

Image credit: Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Crows seemed appropriate for this post, not least because the crows can be seen as harbingers of his death.  I showed this in my Art History 2 class a couple of weeks ago, along with Akira Kurasawa's short film, Crows, via Biblioklept (from Akira Kurosawa's Dreams); the painting is from Wikimedia Commons.

Waste Not

One of the unintended--but not at all unwelcome--aspects of a recessional economy is that folks seem to be waking up to one of the major consequences bequeathed us by our acquisitiveness: waste. Or should I say Waste, with a capital. As a consumption-based society, we constantly produce more trash than anybody. Anywhere. Any time in memory.

A few weeks ago, I showed my Visual Anthropology class a pair of films John Marshall made many ears ago among the !Kung Bushmen in southern Africa. Many students noticed the sharp contrast between the early film, The Hunters (1957) and N!ai, Story of a !Kung Woman (1980) in terms of the domestic environments the two films depicted. In The Hunters, and in the bits of N!ai filmed early in her life, the people had few material belongings--but they also had no trash. After N!ai's people were moved to a reservation and exposed to Western overseers and tourists, they began to accumulate more and more stuff, and their surroundings became littered with cast-off bits of paper, plastic, and other trash. Deprived of their traditional hunting and gathering economy (in which acquired goods were precious and not easily discarded), they had little to do but quarrel and earn money from tourists to pay for material signs of their "importance" in the group.

I've frequently ranted about how much stuff we buy, and how unnecessary most of it is, but being reminded of the the relationship between making something and using it provided a fresh lesson in the politics of waste. The "advanced" or "civilized" West (as opposed to the "uncivilized" or "primitive" natives of various regions) measures its wealth in concepts like Gross Domestic Product, "The total market value of all final goods and services produced in a country in a given year, equal to total consumer, investment and government spending, plus the value of exports, minus the value of imports" (Investorwords.com. Wikipedia's map of the world's relative GDP's is instructive). Thus, worth as a civilization is grounded in a notion of how much loot we produce and consume.

Perhaps what we need now is a Gross Garbage Index to help us understand how much of what we "consume" is only bought--not used, but simply discarded. Even those of us who recycle most of what we can't physically consume (food packaging, for example) are adding to the pile. Because of the economic down-turn, more people around here seem to be growing more conscious of what they buy, and perhaps that will help people understand how much they throw away, such as wasted food. On the online forum I frequent, a recent thread (short-lived as it was) explored what posters let go to waste in their refrigerators. Some were already extremely conscious of their own habits, but others admitted to carrying on random biological experiments out of neglect or forgetfulness. I have been guilty of growing my own varieties of alien critters on occasion, but have begun a deliberate campaign to avoid them. The best solution, of course, is simply to eat one's leftovers promptly, but doing so does require a modicum of attention.

And I think that's the root: we simply do not attend to our habits. They are, after all, habits, often ingrained and out of mind. But solving the problem of waste requires that we do pay attention, and that we modify our habits accordingly.

People who live in slightly less profligate communities, such as the Brits, seem to have twigged to this already (they do live on a fairly small island, with few landfill possibilities). The other day I was rereading the March edition of my favorite shelter magazine, the British edition of Country Living (with its environmentally sensitive editorial bent), and noticed a small article in the "Ecoguide" section on "The food we throw away." One bit of advice stands out: "Cook once, eat twice." Freeze leftovers instead of letting them rot, or at least compost the inedible side-effects of cooking. Doing so, the article claims, will make a difference: "If we stopped wasting food that could have been eaten, it would be the equivalent of taking one in five cars off the road." And then it sends us to a really cool website to tell us how to do it: Love Food Hate Waste. The section on food waste points out the following:

Around a third of all the food we buy ends up being thrown in the bin and most of this could have been eaten. Reducing food waste is a major issue and not just about good food going to waste; wasting food costs the average family £420 a year [about US $630] and has serious environmental implications, too.

Of course, this seems intuitively obvious to many of us, but again, we're simply not in the habit of thinking about such things. At least we haven't been until now.

Another obvious way of reducing waste is to buy fewer things--rather a hard sell during the holidays. But the Washington Post ran a column by Judith Levine on Sunday called "Don't Buy It," which describes the situation better than I ever could. And she should know, having spent an entire year without buying anything but necessities. The idea's a variation on themes we've heard before (some of which I've tried, like living on a welfare mother's budget for a month), where writers conduct experiments to help them answer questions:

The Year Without Shopping occurred to me, like so many rash ideas, at Christmastime. Although I'm a secular Jew, I'd scattered $1,001 on gifts and other holiday odds and ends. As my credit line grew smaller and my shopping bags heavier, I envisioned their contents, along with those of a whole nation, dismissed, disliked and discarded -- and moldering in landfills forever. Then as now, more than two-thirds of the gross domestic product came from consumer spending. There was, and still is, essentially one measure of economic health: growth. But all that growth is outgrowing our finite planet. Ask any economist left or right about this, and he'll write off resource depletion as an "externality," something to worry about later.

I decided to investigate the connection between the personal activity of shopping and the global problem of overconsumption. And I figured that the best way to understand the draw of the marketplace would be to quit it altogether, then see how that felt -- like contemplating a failed marriage from the distance of post-divorce single life. I knew that my no-shopping budget would be on Mother Earth's side. Which side would the macroeconomy eventually be on? Today it's clearer than ever that we'll have to worry about that sooner rather than later.

Her book, Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, is now at the top of my list (one more thing to buy--but as anyone who's visited my house knows, I still own nearly every book I've ever bought), and her talk about it at Cody's Books in San Francisco is available in full from FORA.tv.

And so, even after all this rumination, I'm still sanguine about the future. The new Cabinet is shaping up to be something I can live with, smart people seem to be populating the airwaves more and more, and people like Levine seem to be asking the right questions. Maybe I won't see utopia in my lifetime, but perhaps dystopia can be kept at bay. If we can decrease the number of landfills significantly, I'll take that as a sign that we've begun to come to our senses.

Image source: Landfill Compactor in Australia (We Are Not Alone!), by Ropable via Wikimedia Commons.