DAY 50_SAILING

3 October 2010

Guess what else doesn't use oil?

SAILING!!!

Powered by the unforgiving winds of Lake Calhoun, my uncle Jim-the captain of a 21 foot Reynolds catamaran took us out for a 2 hour tour.  Compared to a 2 hour outing on a motor boat, we saved about 30 gallons of gas.  This is 71% of a barrel of oil and equivalent to 1,098 kWh (about 5 months of our electricity bill).  According to this article... http://www.boatingmag.com/skills/calculating-fuel-consumption:

"On average, an in-tune four-stroke gasoline engine will burn about 0.4 to 0.45 pounds of fuel per hour for each unit of horsepower. Likewise, a well-maintained two-stroke outboard burns nearly 0.6 to 0.8 pounds of fuel per hour for each unit of horsepower it produces. These figures apply to carbureted and fuel-injected engines, but not to direct-injected engines such as Mercury's OptiMax and OMC's FICHT models."

This means that a 150 horsepower engine would use about 15 gallons of gas per hour.

In addition, 1 gallon of gas is equal to 19.564 pounds of CO2.  This website has some examples of how you can reduce your gas usage on a boat http://www.boatcarbonfootprint.com/. 

Or....you could just go sailing instead :)

captain jim

first sail ever!

pirate!

DAY 49_DEHYDRATING

2 October 2010

My brother Brian and sister-in-law Sarah are professional food dehydrators.  They lead trekking and camping trips and dehydrate food to cut down on costs and provide healthy, pre-prepped food to their campers. Thankfully, they were up vacationing from oil for the weekend and could offer their skills. 

There are different kinds of dehydrators; convection-only ones, convection with fan ones and solar powered machines.  My roommate's dehydrator is convection-only, so it has heat coils and the air is pulled through the trays as it cools to dry the food.  This cuts down on energy and is totally silent, but takes a LONG time. 

Brian and Sarah scared me into realizing that many of the foods I eat consistently now are going to be gone in a matter of weeks.  I have already frozen some pears and hot peppers, but space in our freezer is limited, and as soon as the heat kicks on, I am going to need to minimize my energy budget as much as possible.  Its hard to tell exactly when things will start to disappear, but to be on the safe side, I am starting to dehydrate now and will continue eating fresh until its gone.  Today we did:

_Apples
_variety of Bell Peppers
_variety of Hot Peppers
_Herbs: parsley and cilantro
_Cranberries

The funnest part was checking out with an ENTIRE basket of peppers (and then trying to fit it all in my bag).

Dehydrating takes a LOT of energy.  0.1 kWh per hour, if it is on for a day (about how long it takes for one load) that is 2.4 kWh, so definetly going to eat into my energy budget.  For comparison, the fridge uses .068 kWh/hour, but needs to be on all the time.  In this way, dehydrating may be one of the most energy effeicient ways of preserving food because once it is dehydrated, it doesn't need any energy until it is cooked.

foods in my bag

ready to chop

thanks guys :)




 

DAY 48_TRACE PRODUCT.INFO

The Wedge Co-op near my house does a great job of transparently showing information about many of the products they sell (especially produce and bulk foods).  The data on food sourcing they have is compiled at check out to give you a percentage of local foods and organic foods bought on a bar graphic on receipts (see below):


all local, all organic!


In addition, they provide the location of where each produce item (and some spices, bulk foods and dairy) is from, including the farm name.  This information is on cards (green colored ones for organic and orange for conventional) near each item and have icons identifying local foods.  This level of transparency is what has allowed me to compile the information I need for this project about where foods are from, as well as easily shop for only local, organic items.

My friend, Arlene Birt has been working on a prototype for an in-store, retail-wide system for displaying information on grocery product backgrounds at point of sale.  The product was exhibited at the Spark Arts Festival on the University of Minnesota campus today and we went to check it out...

Arlene's project proposes a combination/merging of the information which is currently put on cards and the database of information in each check-out computer.  This would allow each item to be looked up afterwards so people can begin to get an idea of where their food is coming from.  Really great.  Many co-ops already have most of the information needed for this kind of a system, it is just a matter of increased database information, and rigorous updating to allow consumers easy access to where their foods came from. 

"TRACEPRODUCT.INFO aims to visualize the narratives behind the seemingly ubiquitous everyday objects that we interact with as consumers; focusing on the ways in which these products connect us to the larger world.

By bringing the attention of the shopper to the detailed and factual backgrounds of their everyday choices, TRACEPRODUCT.INFO seeks to inspire people to understand more about how their individual purchases impact global environment and society."

At this point, the database of knowledge about each product's sourcing isn't compiled in a single location so it has not yet been installed. 

"But it is our belief that systems will soon be developed on a national-level to support such interaction. To convey the concept of what such interaction could be like once such information is more readily available, this system is populated with a set of example coordinates."

A you-tube video of the product is found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadWxWH8YYg
And link to the trace website: http://traceproduct.appspot.com/

Keep it going Arlene!

DAY 47_HEALTHY FOODS HEALTHY LIVES

30 September 2010

The University of Minnesota has an institute called Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives which works to improve the Universities and surrounding communities access and understanding of healthy foods by funding research and increasing connections and communication.  They put on a conference annually which I attended with a few friends today.  The conference was a day of listening to speakers about various food topics, the general consensus being that Americans need to eat MORE PLANT FOODS. 

The first speaker-Paul Coates-talked about dietary supplements.  50% of Americans use dietary supplements resulting in a $26 billion/year industry with over 50,000 products on the market.  Why are people so into dietary supplements?  Because we don't get enough nutrients from the diets we currently eat.  Ironically, the majority of people using dietary supplements are the ones who don't really need them.  They are the people who already eat generally healthy diets, are concerned about their health and exercise regularly, so these supplements really aren't successfully filling a need.  While supplements can be an important part of someones diet, they should not be used to 'replace' real nutrients found in foods.  The most healthy way to get the nutrients you need is to EAT them.

David J.A. Jenkins then spoke about foods for disease prevention and his 'Portfolio Diet' experiments.  His argument was similar to the one the author of "Green For Life" (green smoothies) book that I mentioned earlier, that our genes have not changed significantly over evolutionary time and we should be eating diets more more similar to our close primate relatives than the Standard American Diet (SAD).  Jenkins had done 3 test diets which had various levels of vegetables and greens integrated.  The most extreme version was the Simian Diet in which participants needed to eat 63 servings of fruits and vegetables a day in order to maintain their body weight.  This would be about 9-10 hours of eating, a total of 5.5 kg of food in and 1 kg of feces out a day (constipation is not a problem in this diet). 

A lunch of acorn squash stuffed with a wild rice mixture and steamed brussel sprouts and carrots was served to us. All local!  And we ended up sitting at a table of nutrition graduate students and the woman behind Spoonriver (a local foods restaurant in Minneapolis) - Brenda Langton.  I asked Brenda about the local foods served at Spoonriver and she gave me the same answer that many local foods restaurants have that they serve local food when it is in season exclusively, but as the weather gets cold, they switch to a conventional diet.  I can see why restaurants want to avoid freezing, drying or canning foods if not necessary (because they can get it fresh from another source) but I would be really interested and excited to see a local foods restaurant that was year-round local. 

After lunch, Melissa Laska spoke about food public policy issues.  She had some interesting statistics:
_$517.7 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on food at home, whereas $445.1 billion is spent on food service.  This means we eat 42.4% of our food from restaurants and fast food. 
_Food accounts for 11.8% of our total incomes (much less than in almost every other country of the world) Families below the poverty line, however, spend about 20% of their income on food.
_Each household spends an average of $6,000 on food/year.

There were some shocking statistics on how much of our food is imported:
On average:
79% of fish
16% of wine/beer
32% of fruit/nuts
13% of vegetables
12% of grains
11% of sweets
11% of red meat

98% of our limes come from Mexico, 51% of our garlic comes from China, 8 countries account for 80% of spices.

DAY 46_759,493 MILES PER GALLON

Below is a chart showing a typical week of bicycle commuting (click to enlarge):

In this week (sept 12-18th) I biked 77.2 miles.  It took me a total of 5:34.8 hrs

I wanted to compare how much energy would have been used if I had been driving my car everywhere instead of biking.

I used the following calculation to find how many gallons are used in each commute:

(33 mpg) (gallons used) = distance

For example on the chart, I would have used 0.53 gallons of gas on a day I commute 17.6 miles.  There are 36.6 kWh in each gallon of gas, so this translates to 19.398 kWh saved on that particular day. 

In total, I have 'saved' 2.325 gallons of gas and 85.095 kWh this week bicycling instead of driving. 

HOWEVER, I AM using some energy to get around with my bike.  It is about 500 calories worth of energy to bike 12 miles (typical distance biking). I converted my kWh per day amounts to calories to see how many calories you would need to run a car going the same distance:

1 kWh = 3,600,000 J
There are 4.18 J per calorie so,
1 kWh= 861,000 calories

In a day I commute 12 miles I use 13.176 kWh:

13.176 kWh x 861,000 calories/kWh = 11,344,536 calories that my car uses in a typical day of commuting, versus 500 on my bike.  So I am using 0.000044% of the energy my car uses by biking my commute (and I have pretty good gas mileage -33 mpg).  Whoa.

To make an even more ridiculous comparison, I calculated how many 'mpg' my bike gets from the energy I have to consume in calories to move myself:

1 gallon of gas = 132 MJ
4.18 J in one calorie (4.18 J x 500 calories = 2090 J)
2090 J/132,000,000 J = 0.00001583 gallons in 12 miles of biking

(mpg) (0.0000158 gallons used) = 12 miles

My bike gets 759,493.67 MPG.  Yeah, thats right, try to manufacture THAT Toyota.

midtown greenway

DAY 45_LEARNING TO LISTEN

28 September 2010

Germany's "grandfather of green building", Joachim Eble of Joachim Eble Architektur came to speak at the University of Minnesota today, I attended a brown-bag session with him which was a smaller group of people and allowed us to have more of a discussion than lecture.  My fellow architecture folks and I sat among a wide variety of people with different interests ranging from public policy and urban design, to people simply interested in starting to learn about sustainable urbanism. 

Many of the questions people were asking circled around the observation that many countries in Europe, including Germany have been able to integrate sustainable living into their urban communities in a way that is almost non-existent in the United States.  Residents come together in groups of families in Germany and create a kind of co-op housing situation in which they design their entire community from the ground up in order to live in a sustainable way.  Many people were asking, "how do we do that here?" and more pointedly, "how do we get people to be INTERESTED in doing that here."  Which eventually led to, "how can we get our government to pass laws to MAKE people do that here."  It really made me think about who it is that catalyzes change in society, a 'which comes first' scenario - is it the PEOPLE, or the GOVERNMENT who is responsible for making change.  WHO HAS POWER.

Eble (who talks really slowly and quietly) responded that "Every government is a mirror of the consciousness of society." To me that means, that, like most things, it isn't black and white.  Governments are made up of individuals as well, and individual change is the catalyst for any kind of change.  Governments need the push from people to make changes because ultimately, government can be seen as a our collective mind.  We are really responsible, in a way, for what everyone else thinks, and what we ourselves think.  And in that way, we are responsible for changes which need to be made and to reach some kind of collective decisions as a society. 

Personally, I don't think I have ever been that good at 'convincing' people of the importance of environmental issues.  It is easy for me to get frustrated with people who I don't think 'understand' the issues.  Too quickly, I jump to the conclusion that people are just ignorant, clinging to a way of life that is actually quite detrimental to themselves, as well as our environment.  However, a deeper look into the issue has revealed to me that we are really all fighting for the SAME thing.  We are all driven to act a certain way because a certain amount of FEAR we have of losing our WAY OF LIFE. 

One one side, there are the people unwilling to accept that humans are responsible for climate change, and, in the same category are those who understand this but are still unwilling to change their lifestyles in any way regardless.  Why are they unwilling to accept this? Even when climate change has been scientifically linked human behavior?  They are AFRAID, and rightly so, its kinda scary.  Can you really blame people though? As already outlined in this project, we are really DEPENDANT on resources (especially petroleum) to maintain our lives.  We actually DON'T KNOW how to live without this resource, we would have to re-learn-as I have begun to do- how to feed ourselves, collect water, get around, etc....There are many benefits in the end, but at least the transition can be very hard. Sometimes-lets face it- I am a hungry, tired, frustrated, surly, crabby bitch (which my friends can attest to).  Our natural tendency when we fear our lives (or quality of life) are in danger, is to defend it, AT ALL COSTS.  As humans, we have an amazing ability to justify our actions in the face of losing something we deeply value.  We will think of anything; "my husband needs to eat red meat every night to feel full, my wife won't sell her SUV because she feels unsafe on the road, I don't have time to use public transportation, I don't have time to cook myself a healthy meal" (Mark Bittmann at Healthy Food Healthy Lives 2010).  Unreasonable? Maybe. But people are afraid.

On the other side, until very recently, I didn't realize that my own motivations for trying to 'convince' people, and living life the way I do is also driven by FEAR.  What am I afraid of?  When I really think about it, I am also afraid, to lose my quality of life.  I am afraid that it will take our society and the world too long to make changes in our lives to make a difference, and we will reach a point of 'no return'.  I am afraid that people will cling so tightly to their over consumptive lifestyles that everyone-no matter how we have chosen individually to live-will ultimately be affected.  'Affected' is putting it too lightly, the downward spiral we are on has the potential to cause horrific distasters of mass starvation, water shortages, political unrest, unprecedented natural disasters, the list goes on.  Dramatic? Maybe.  But I'm afraid.

What I have realized is that if both sides are driven by fear (which is an irrational, unreasonable and dramatic emotion), we have almost NO chance at communicating effectively or resolving anything because we have made the issues personal.  When speaking to somebody from a place of fear, we are defending our survival.  We have to find a way to COLLECTIVELY open our minds, understand the fears within ourselves, and actually HEAR what people are trying to say to us.  Not their words, necessarily, but what they are afraid of, and how we can work together to eliminate those fears.

As Joachim Eble puts it "We have to learn to listen".

DAY 44_SMALL UPDATES (gnats, wrong greens, homemade mascara)

27 September 2010

Small updates lately:

GNATS:
_Gnats are getting better, hanging sticky tape up near the plants they were living in the bathroom has worked the best.  I also made some gnat traps out of empty beer bottles.  By making a funnel of aluminum foil with a VERY small hole, the gnats fly in and can't get out.  I put some apple cider vinegar in the bottle because the gnats are attracted to the fermenting smell.  These traps haven't trapped as many as the sticky tape, but have gotten at least a few of them.

COMPOST:
_Replacing the compost with my white sheet has eliminated the worm's escaping problem.  I'm thinking up ways to keep a translucent lid on the worm bin which will be easier than replacing the sheet/bungee cord every time...ideas?

GREENS:
_I learned the hard way to pay attention to what vegetables I am buying at the co-op yesterday... Its important to rotate the greens/vegetables you are consuming because it is easier to get a wide variety of nutrients, so I have been trying to buy new greens almost every time I go.  I picked up a bunch of big, dark leafy greens which were local and organic without even looking at what kind they were.  Took them to the checkout and the lady was like, "uh, what ARE these?"  , and I was like "oh, I have no idea, I just picked them up, ha.  So we spent about 5 minutes looking over her thumbnail sized, laminated sheets of vegetable identification pictures trying to find them.  The verdict-Rapini.

I threw half of the Rapini, one apple, a few frozen pear bits, 1 1/2 cups of water and some honey in a blender this morning (typical green smoothie I drink every morning with various greens), and when I went to taste it, OH WOW, SUPER bitter.  It was undrinkable.  So rapini really needs to be balanced with pretty sweet fruits (which aren't really available to me anymore).  HOWEVER, I found a recipe for a better way to eat the rest of the greens here (http://liveitupvegan.blogspot.com/2006/08/pennine-rapini-and-garlicky-bchamel.html).  It is a Penne, Rapini and Garlicky Bechamel. 

Cook the Penne, adding the chopped Rapini in during the last 3 minutes (don't overcook or it gets mushy) and make sauce while cooking:

"Make your Garlicky Béchamel by putting 1/4 cup vegetable oil in a sauce pan over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add 1/4 cup of flour (I use unbleached white flour or whole wheat flour or rice flour, etc) and mix well for one or two minutes. Don’t let it burn. Then, slowly add 2 cups of soymilk, stirring constantly with a whisk to prevent lumps, until the desired consistency. You can add more soymilk if you find the sauce too thick. Then add the garlic, the seasonings and let simmer on low heat."

Gonna try making this tonight with the local, bulk penne I found!

OIL-FREE MASCARA
_An article in my friend's ReadyMade the other day introduced me to two ladies; Siobhan O' Connor and Alexandra Sprut who have a blog called 'No More Dirty Looks', and book (by the same name). (http://nomoredirtylooks.com/).  While they are not addressing products made from petroleum directly, they outline what ingredients in cosmetics and other health/hygiene products contain chemicals and toxins which are harmful (many of which are petroleum based).  I'm in the process of trying to identify what ingredients come directly from petroleum, but, to be on the safe side am converting all my products to oil-free versions (recipes from their book, blog) as I run out of them.  Today I made mascara from charcoal tablets and aloe vera.  Charcoal tablets were $9 and aloe can come from a bottle or squeezed from an aloe plant (if you have one). 

1_Twist charcoal capsule apart and dump contents into a small vile/tube.  Many health-food stores and co-ops have a health/hygiene department which sell small jars for making your own products.  I found a small skinny jar made for fragrances.  Dumb the charcoal directly in the jar.
2_Scoop aloe vera gel into the jar until full (about .5 ounces)  The charcoal tablets could go a lot further because there is a lot of powder in each one, but I wanted to make small quantities so I could make it more often and it will be fresher. 
3_Stir up jar with a thin object (I used a little stick)
4_Clean an old mascara brush, dip in, scrap extra off on edges of tube and apply!

My friend Amber used a much cooler version of mine using wood charcoal off her grill to make an eyeliner!  In her own words, "I squished some gel out of an aloe leaf, swabbed by brush it it and then picked up some charcoal dust (just picking up a piece from the bag created enough fine dust on my fingers to work with) and lined my lovely lids. it worked like a charm. i think the aloe/charcoal is technically the mascara rather than the eyeliner, but it worked! hooray".  I've been using this for a few days, it stays on really well, doesn't run much (I should know-biking in the rain and all), but removals easily when you don't want it to come off. 

No worries about getting this stuff in your eyes, while you certainly don't want to rub it in your eyes it is much safer than ingredients that in most mascaras.  All ingredients can literally be eaten and be ok, in fact, the charcoal tablets are meant to be eaten to help with gas and digestion issues.  (pics when I get a chance, check back)