Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

Foiled

I spent a good bit of the weekend preparing to have worms.  Two weekends ago, I finished my homework (reading Worms Eat my Garbage), and this past weekend was action time.  Finding newspaper without colored ink proved to be the biggest challenge.  I thought black ink would predominate in newspapers, because colored ink is more expensive, and newspapers are struggling financially, right?  Think again!  I hunted through a lot of newspaper to get 4-5 pounds of black and white pages.  After wasting some time, and diminishing the life of my scissors, by cutting the paper into strips, I brilliantly discovered that newspaper easily tears into nice, uniform strips.

When I looked into buying worms, the prices surprised me, and not in a good way.  The best price I found was $27/pound through an online supplier.  I feared that ordering them in the dead of winter would result in a pound of worms that were, well, dead (and crunchy), so I pursued a closer to home option — getting a start from someone’s worm bin.  I was skeptical that the coffee can or bucket of “stuff” they offered would contain a sufficient number of worms, but hey, the price was right (free), so I decided to give it a try.

By late Sunday afternoon, the worm home I lovingly prepared was ready to go, and I biked over to pick up my new friends . . . only to be greeted by a worm bin that improperly maintained.  I wanted to yell, “You’re doing it all wrong!” because it was obvious that they hadn’t read The Book.  Now, I was getting these worms from complete strangers that I met through a neighborhood listserv, so I politely accepted a small-ish container of the “contents” of their bin and mentioned that I read the book Worms Eat my Garbage, which I found quite helpful.  I returned home with a smelly container — vermicomposting done correctly should be odor free, or nearly so — with perhaps five worms, or about 0.5% of the worms I wanted to start my project.

So, I return to the drawing board as far as acquiring my starter worms.  Meanwhile, I hope that all of those soggy newspaper strips will dry so that I don’t have to start that process from scratch!

Rant ahead

Just found out that the case against the uninsured AND unlicensed driver who hit my husband was, “dismissed on payment of court costs.”  Ah, our justice system at work, complete with sleazy traffic lawyers.

I wonder how much the court fees cost.  I’m paying over $800 a year to drive my car around legally, but I might be on to something here — drop the insurance altogether and pay the court cost if I happen to be caught driving without insurance.  And a driver’s license?  Apparently I don’t need that, either!  If you can’t beat ’em . . . .

Meanwhile, our SUV driving friend, who SHOWED NO REMORSE when he hit a bicyclist, is probably out there driving around, right now.  Watch out, St. Louis!

Think you’re safe where you are?  I recently read that, nationwide, at least 1 in 7 (and possibly as high as 1 in 4) drivers are uninsured.  Now, my thoughts on car insurance (cough-SCAM-cough) would be the subject of a whole other post, but the fact that some of us are buying into it, while a large chunk of people are not?  That’s just wrong.  And I wager that most of the uninsured drivers are some of the least responsible and most dangerous vehicle operators out there.

Now I must go take deep breaths and think happy thoughts to reign in my blood pressure.  Good thing it’s ridiculously low to start, or I might really be in trouble!

Car costs

Are you one of the millions of Americans who jumps in your car alone every day?  Click here to calculate the cost of your commute.  I’ve heard of some people where the cost was as over $14,000 a year!  That’s a lot of money.

And the calculator does not take into account other “costs” of driving, including environmental and health impacts.

Is it worth it?  Are there other ways you can get where you’re going?  What about carpooling, to cut down the number of days you drive your car?  What about making some trips by bicycle?

What would you do with the money you save?  At $14,000/year, you could buy a very nice bicycle and still have lots of money left over 🙂

Food-like substances

I recently read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.  Pollan recommends eating “real” food, which he defines in detail (if you want the details, read the book).  It’s a safe bet that eating real food will be better for you and better for the planet.

Enter the health fair I worked last week.  Since I knew I would be working late, I lack a good excuse for being ill-prepared, but I found myself in desperate straights, food-wise, with a bag of Sun Chips in my hand.  There I was, a health educator, working at a health fair, eating chips.  Suffice it to say that I consumed said chips surreptitiously.

To further torture myself, I could not help but look at the nutrition label, which broke Pollan’s, “less than five ingredient,” guideline by, oh, about 30 ingredients.  This included some special ones like Yellow 5 Lake (artificial color) and the ever ubiquitous, “natural flavor” — ingredients that clearly put this “food” outside of the real food realm.

Green disputes

What happens when you’re ready to make green lifestyle changes and your spouse or partner is not on board?  Or is your spouse trying to make green changes that are driving you crazy?

Apparently, you’re not alone.  See this NYTimes article for more information.

I recently commented on the question of who is greener in our relationship over at Tiny Choices.  I only gave one example there (related to food), but, fortunately, we are pretty evenly matched when it comes to green choices.  The differences we do have push us both to be more eco-conscious, and there’s nothing wrong with that!