Greening your junk food binge

Despite the fact that we're trying to eat within 100-miles, both Cin and I are pretty busy with work and all the other things that take up a modern life. So there occasionally comes a time when you want somebody else to do the cooking. Or you just want a veggie burger and fries fix (mmm...fries). We never claimed we were perfect... Yet every time we go to our favorite local veggie fast-food restaurant we end up with a pile of plastic and foam garbage. It bugs us to have to accept our food in these disposable containers, both for our health (foam and plastic both leach toxic chemicals into your food), and also because there's no way to recycle these pestilential petroleum products.

Well, we've come up with a solution (certainly not new - we claim no credit) that hopefully won't cause too much angst for the shop-owner. We'll start carrying our own plates and cutlery - made of metal. We have ceramic coated tin plates we bought second-hand from a thrift store, and we both have a KFS set for camping. So the next time we give in to the urge for fast-food we'll slap our re-usable, non-toxic, recycled plates on the counter and say, "fill 'er up!"

[Incidentally, if you want to read on what comes out of plastic, including those ever-popular lexan water bottles, go here. Also, I am in no way affiliated with the owners of that site.]

The 100-Mile vs Vegetarian Diets

Cin and I went grocery shopping two days back. We grabbed our canvas, reusable bags and drove our car-share car down to our local MegaMart that stocks everything from Ecuadorian Coffee to Yukon Salmon-in-a-can. As we wandered and sorted through our usual load of groceries (some of it local), we chatted about the 100 Mile Diet phenomenon described here. Looking in our shopping cart we find rice "packaged in Toronto" but likely grown in Asia somewhere, Tofu and Veggie Ham all the way from Vancouver BC (and again made from soy beans probably grown elsewhere), soy milk (same thing) and peanut butter. While all of our items were as green as we could get them (low packaging, vegetarian, etc.) they all required huge amounts of petrochemicals in the form of transportation and storage to get them to the end of our fork. What good is eating low-packaged items when the fuel required to get them to us uses far more petrochemicals then does the packaging of a local product? We needed to go greener. And the 100 Mile Diet may just do that. We set each other the challenge to move to a 100-Mile diet over the next year. Then, giddy with the heady excitement of a new challenge, we wandered around the store looking for our local fair.

And we encountered a huge problem. First, 100-Miles pretty much covers the extent of the map above. There are no soybeans (to my knowledge), nuts, or wheat grown in that radius. Being vegetarian, what will we do for protein? Do we go back to eating locally raised, ethically farmed meat? Despite the fact that its local, ethical and organic, it still takes more water and feed to raise a cow then it does to feed a human - the original reason we went vegetarian in the first place. Second, it's very difficult to tell what items in our local MegaMart are actually from within 100 miles. The packaging will label "Product of Canada", or "Packaged for XYZ Company of Toronto" or better, "Product of Ontario", but there's still no guarantee that the item wasn't grown somewhere else and shipped to a processing plant in Ontario.

In fact, we were unable to find a single protein source that wasn't shipped in from SOMEWHERE. Eventually we gave up. And feeling like the runner who challenges themselves to run a marathon, then hops in a cab right at the start to get to the finish line, we buggied our non-local, vegetarian food to the check-out line, paid for it, and scurried out to our car-share car. There we sat, staring out the windshield trying to figure out how we can get through this challenge - how to eat local AND vegetarian. This one will be tough. While I could probably go back to eating locally raised meat, I don't think Cin would be comfortable with that.

We decide that we'll have to take this challenge in little steps. We'll purchase local when we can, and either give up a few things if we have to. Or for the essentials, accept the petrochemicals associated with their production and transportation, and try not to feel too guilty as we chow down.

No Impact Man

Here's a guy who appears to be attempting to do the same thing in New York that we're doing in Toronto. No Impact Man. Some good reading there.

Some good things, some bad things...

Well, we've toured our new neighbourhood (by TTC-ing it there, then walking around on foot). It's official - within 5 city blocks we have every kind of store we would ever need. There's a pet food store, a "grass roots" store where we can refill our cleaning solution bottles (YAY!), a "bulk food" store that sells some bulk items manufactured in Durham region (no joy yet on a source of locally grown flour), and a wine and beer making store for locally made wobbly pops. What's more, our new home has both a pear tree and a plum tree (plum wine), and a cold room in the basement - seems a perfect match.

However, we've run into three possible problems:

1. Our house needs some work, especially the bathroom and basement floor. Perhaps we can find a source of reclaimed tiles and flooring or something.
2. The only secure spot for my bike, (commuting vehicle) is inside the basement door. The only way to get it around to the basement door is through the neighbour's driveway. The previous owner says the neighbour is nice. Maybe they won't mind me coming through twice a day...
3. We need new appliances. Our current fridge and stove, while still perfectly functional, simply will not fit into the house's entry ways - even with the doors taken off. So Cindy and I have been scouring the Interweb looking for the most efficient of each of these items that will fit. We've found some likely candidates, but now we need to decide what is more practical from an ecological impact perspective. We could buy used items which would likely be less efficient (both of the new appliances are energy star compliant") but wouldn't result in the purchasing of yet another appliance (recycling old items is our mantra). Or, the energy savings associated with running energy star appliances would offset the manufacturing and transportation costs of new items. We still haven't wrestled this one to the ground.

And we often run into the same dilemma with other items. Is an item that is local and less "earth-friendly" better than something that has come from abroad? We're still undecided about this, and until we make a decision, we'll simply have to take things on a case-by-case basis.

In the meantime, we're going to have to find a way to keep our locally grown produce fresh.