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Posts Tagged ‘food’

Don’t forget to pre-register for the 3rd Annual Austin Green Holiday Party

Posted in Consumers, Energy, Global Warming, green jobs, recycling, Renewables, solar, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 5, 2010 |

If you haven’t already pre-registered to celebrate the holidays at the 3rd Annual Austin Green Holiday Party, do so soon.  It is coming up soon and this year it is hosted by 10 great organizations.

Fiesta Gardens  (2100 Jesse E. Segovia St., Austin, TX 78702)
Thursday, December 16th, 2010 from 5:30pm-9:30pm

Registration:  Pre-Registration ONLY for this Event (No Cash Accepted at Door)

Network and learn about the hosting organizations and come together for a unified 2011.  Celebrate the holidays with us and enjoy music, great food, beer, wine and other beverages, as well as holiday cheer…

Live Music by: Austin Eco-Musicians (Reed Sternberg, Bill Oliver, Frank Meyer and More!) with Tribal Nation, the Austin reggae band later in the evening.

Food:  Barr Mansion (Please help support our event sponsor and friend to the environmental community, the Barr Mansion.  They are catering this event, even as their own facility is being rebuilt after the fire.)

  • Blue Cheese and Winter Squash Sandwich
  • Chicken and Pepperoni Sandwich
  • Sundried Tomato White Bean Dip with Crostini
  • Basil Hummus and Cracker Shards
  • Local Organic Farm Salad Station with assorted dressings

Beverages: Beer, Wine, Sodas, Teas and water will be provided by the following sponsors:

The Co-Hosts: Texas Green Network •Public Citizen • SEED Coalition • Sierra Club • Design Build Live • Austin EcoNetwork • Solar Austin • NetImpact •
Texas League of Conservation Voters • Austin Physicians for Social Responsibility

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Green-up Your Life! Holiday Edition

Posted in Consumers, Efficiency, Energy, Global Warming, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 17, 2009 |

By Kirsten Bokenkamp

Happy Holidays! Just saying those words is enough to evoke joyful images of families gathered in the kitchen preparing a succulent holiday meal to be enjoyed together, or excited and wide-eyed children opening gifts next to a beautifully decorated Christmas tree. When I close my eyes, I can almost taste the cinnamon-spiced hot apple cider. Yum. Unfortunately, for some of us, the holiday season also means traveling long distances to be with our loved ones; fighting the crowds at busy stores as we endlessly try to find the perfect gifts; and paying higher energy bills resulting from our holiday lights and all of our cooking.

Amidst all the holiday cheer, sometimes it is inconvenient to think about how our activities might contribute to climate change. The purpose of the Holiday Edition of Green-up Your Life! is to give easy ideas about how to have the lowest impact on the earth while still enjoying the holiday season.

Time to Travel

With all the crowds and delays, flying during the holiday season can be really frustrating. And what about those 4 to 8 hour drives? Unfortunately for many of us, flying or driving are often the only options – for now. The future, however, looks bright. President Obama is already in support of investing in the high-speed national rail service, as it would reduce traffic congestion, cut dependence on foreign oil and improve the environment. It would also create many new green-jobs, something that we desperately need to jump-start the economy. What can you do? Click here to tell your Representatives in Congress that you are in favor of appropriating government funds towards the creation of a national high-speed passenger rail system. I have to admit, there is something romantic about taking the train home for the holidays.

The Gift of Giving

Giving gifts makes us feel good; it is a way to let our loved ones know we are thinking about them; and it is a token of appreciation of being part of another person’s life. Too often, though, we get caught up in the act of giving a gift, without thinking about the repercussions. By following some simple guidelines, you can keep your gifts environmentally friendly, and socially responsible.

  • Skip anything that you plug in, or that requires batteries.
  • Buy from local vendors when you can. I can think of many gift ideas, from hats and scarves, to food, to jewelry, to artwork, that you can buy from an artisan in your own community.
  • Think outside the box: Give a gym membership, a haircut, a massage, or tickets to a game or a concert.
  • Combine errands, or better yet, leave the car in a parking spot and walk from store to store.
  • Skip the wrapping paper: Use an old newspaper or a paper bag instead. Same goes for a card: Unless it is a private message, write something right on what ever material you wrap the present in.

Do you need a gift for people who already have everything they could ever want? Buy them something from Oxfam. A gift such as soap, purified water, manure, seeds for a garden, a cooking stove, a bicycle, or a dozen chicks will be delivered to somebody in the world who needs it, and your friend will get a card thanking them for their contribution. This kind of gift can be more thoughtful than yet another sweater, and it is a nice way to to contribute to those in need during the holiday season.

In the kitchen and around the house

One of the best things you can do, even though it defies tradition, is to skip the meat (or at least, if possible, buy it from a local organic rancher). Why is this important? Refer back to earlier blogs in this series – Eat Less Meat, and Go Organic. While I wish more people would do this, I do recognize that not everybody will. So, thankfully there are also other, less drastic, measures we can take in the kitchen. For instance, if you are slow roasting something, there is no need to preheat the oven. Also, each time you open the oven door, the oven temperature decreases by about 25 degrees. If you have an oven light, use that instead. When your oven is on, try to fill it up by baking multiple things at once. As long as there is still room for air to circulate, your food will be just as delicious. A helpful hint for stovetop cooking is to match the size of the pan to the size of the burner. According to California’s Consumer Energy Center, using a smaller pan on a larger burner wastes 40% of the energy!

Other hints around the kitchen include only running your dishwasher when it is completely full, and if it has an energy saver mode – use it! Try to limit the amount of times you open and close the refrigerator. Each time that door opens, the fridge needs to work overtime to keep the temperature at its setting.

Do your wallet & the earth a favor...no need to go overboard!

Holiday lights outlining the frames of homes and around the tree are beautiful, and are such a classic mark of the season. They also raise energy bills and are not all that good for the environment. One thing you can do is replace old lights with LED (light emitting diode) bulbs. They are more expensive, but because they are 90% more efficient than your average light bulb, they can start saving you money within the first year of purchase, quickly making up for the upfront costs. Another thing to do is turn off the lights in the day time when it is hard to see them anyway, and put them on a timer at night, so they automatically turn off once everybody has fallen fast asleep.

Happy New Year!

With many New Year’s resolutions in the air, it is a great time to make a commitment to living a greener life. When you think about it, actions that we take during the holiday season can be taken throughout the year. We have so many things to be thankful for, not least for the earth that sustains us. With that gift, comes the responsibility of doing our part to ensure that our families can celebrate for generations to come.

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By promoting cleaner energy, cleaner government, cleaner cars, and cleaner air for all Texans, we hope to provide for a healthy place to live and prosper. We are Public Citizen Texas.

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Green-Up your life! Start a compost pile…even in your freezer.

Posted in Global Warming, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2009 |

By Kirsten Bokenkamp

Did you know that in the United States, the average person throws away around 100 pounds of food scraps per year? According to the USDA, “just over a quarter of the country’s food — about 25.9 million tons — gets thrown in the garbage can every year.”

But food is biodegradable, and decomposes in the same manner no matter where we throw it out, right? Wrong. While we should all try to throw away less food, composting what we do toss-out reduces the impact on the environment.

Any food scraps or leftovers that the dog doesn’t eat decompose in one of two ways. Due to the airtight nature of landfills, the food we throw away with the rest of our trash decomposes in an anaerobic manner (without oxygen). One of the bi-products from anaerobic decomposition is methane, which is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In the first 120 days in a landfill, every metric ton of food can generate .25 metric tons of methane. On the other hand, food that decomposes aerobically (with oxygen) in a compost pile generates carbon dioxide – which is 25 times less potent than methane. If the U.S. composted the 25.9 million tons of food we throw out each year, the effect would be as if we removed 7.8 million cars from the road!

Because oxygen is the golden ingredient, it is important to allow air to get to your compost through the use of a functionally designed container, through turning your compost, or by using worms as a way to ensure oxygen can do its job. Read more about the basics of composting here.

According to the Composting Council the largest benefit from composting is avoiding the production of methane. But, the benefits don’t stop there. When compost is used in agricultural practices :
• Irrigation needs decreases by 30-70%, due to improved water retention in soil;
• Fertilizer (expensive, and often harmful to the environment) needs decrease by 33-66%;
• Carbon sequestration of soil increases by 6-40 tons of carbon per hectare.

Okay, so for those of you who live in farmhouses – or at least have a backyard and a small garden – composting seems like an easy and beneficial practice. You barely have an excuse! But, this is more of a challenge for the 80% of us in the US who live in urban areas. Where do we put a compost pile, and what do we do with it? Thankfully, there are a few options.

First, you can do as my cousin Elizabeth does in New York City. She freezes her food waste, and brings it to the Union Square Greenmarket once a week, where a farmer she knows gladly accepts it for the wholesome treasure that it is. Next time you are shopping at your local farmers market – ask around! Similarly, you can find a composter that accepts food waste in your area, where you can drop off your compost.

A second option, especially if you have a bit more room, or any indoor or outdoor plants that will benefit from it, is to start a worm bin. Worms love to eat kitchen scraps, and the nutrient-rich castings they produce are great for soil. There are many resources on vermicomposting – a great one is cityfarmer.org, published by Canada’s office of urban agriculture.

The third way of urban composting, and possibly the most important way towards the institutionalization of urban composting, is to tell your city officials that you live in an apartment, that you want to compost, and that you think it is high time for them to implement a curbside composting program. If you don’t think your city is “green” enough to do such a thing, look for inspiration and practical advice from San Francisco – where starting October 21 , it will be illegal not to compost, or other cities including Seattle, Boulder, and Minneapolis-St Paul.

Finally, if composting at home just isn’t going to happen for you, (at least until your city starts providing curb-side composting), talk your employer into it. For instance, the National Press Club has just started to compost, and plans on preventing 2 tons of food per month from heading to the landfill. Some state facilities such as prisons and universities also compost – for example, the state prison facilities in Nashville composts leftovers, and uses the compost on its own 100-acre vegetable garden, and Iowa State University has a compost system that can handle more than 10,000 tons of waste per year.

As an introduction to next week’s Green-up your life! blog – getting children involved – talk to elementary and high school administrators about starting a community compost project. By throwing away less food, composting the food we do throw away, educating our community members, and getting state institutions involved, we will soon be en route to a true environmental revolution!

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Green-up your life! Oct 1- Eat less meat.

Posted in Consumers, Global Warming, tagged , , , , on October 1, 2009 |

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is going to be one of our ongoing series on climate change and how we can all make a personal impact.  Since today is World Vegetarian Day, I think this is an appropriate way to kick things off.

With various climate change proposals circulating on Capitol Hill, and the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen right around the corner, we are all reminded that legislative action and global cooperation are needed in order to protect our planet. While it is the responsibility of our leaders to work out an effective agreement, we must not forget that normal people like us can also make a big difference in reducing greenhouse gases. The Green-up your life! blog series will discuss the many ways in which we can all make a difference, just by making small changes in the way we live. Today, it is about what’s for dinner.

Many discussions about climate change are full of scientific jargon and are political in nature, making them hard to follow. We hear about increasing wind and solar power, implementing cap and trade, and reducing industrial carbon emissions. For those of us who want to personally contribute to the effort, we might switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles, or install solar panels on our homes. In addition to these large (and sometimes expensive) personal changes, there are many little things we can all do on a daily basis to make our planet healthier. One thing we can all do to decrease global warming is not always on the top of the list: eat less meat and dairy.

So, does the agricultural industry really contribute that much to climate change? Yup. Meat production accounts for a whopping 18% of total global greenhouse emissions–more than all forms of transportation put together. About 9% of anthropogenic (read: derived from human activity) carbon dioxide emissions are attributed to agriculture. In addition, methane, the smelly heat-trapping gas emitted from both ends of livestock, warms the world 20% faster than carbon dioxide. Almost 40% of methane in the U.S. is generated from enteric fermentation (which takes place during a ruminant animal’s digestion process) related to animal husbandry. Beyond carbon dioxide and methane, agriculture is responsible for ­65 % of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide only accounts for 5% of total greenhouse gases, but has heat trapping effects 310 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, that’s not all. More than 37% of the earth’s land is used for agricultural purposes, and as the global demand for meat increases, the creation of more grazing land is a major contributor to deforestation, especially in Latin America, where 70 % of previously forested land in the Amazon is used as pasture, with the remaining 30% largely used for growing feed crops.

Beef is the largest culprit, but there are similar stories for all farm animals, including seafood. There is no doubt that agricultural practices contribute to global warming, both directly through emissions created from all levels of production, and indirectly through deforestation. Beyond this, it is just plain inefficient (as tasty as it might be) to get our calories this way. While most grains, fruits, or veggies require 2 calories of fossil fuel energy to create 1 calorie of food, this ratio grows up to 80:1 for beef!

When breaking bad news, honesty is the best policy. Nobody really wants to hear it, (and the agricultural industry most certainly doesn’t want to tell it), but as responsible stewards of our planet, and as daily consumers of food, one of the best things we can do is to eat less meat and dairy products. (Cutting down just on meat, but not dairy, will not make a big difference, because dairy cows burp and produce manure too). The silver lining is that what is better for the earth is also better for our health. Studies show that veggie-based diets decrease the chance of suffering from numerous types of cancers, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. When we do choose to eat meat, buying from local ranchers who raise pasture grazing livestock will ensure that we are limiting our impact on the earth. It appears more expensive to buy meat this way – but not when all the hidden costs are accounted for.

Nobody is asking that we all take up a diet of strictly brussels sprouts and brown rice, but if we all spend a little more time learning about the impact that our food systems have on the planet, a greener diet may just start to look more appealing. Stay tuned for next time, when, sticking to the topic of food, the importance of purchasing organic products will be discussed.

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