Today's blog entry poses a bit of a seize 22 situation. On the only hand, it's miles day of Thrift Week, however on the other hand, that is additionally the day at the same time as net web sites everywhere in the Web are going dark as a protest in opposition to pending portions of law, SOPA and PIPA, that might be used to censor quite heaps some thing on the Internet. As high-quality I can tell, these are well-intentioned payments supposed to forestall Internet piracy and copyright violation, which can be valid problems?However they have got been crafted with the resource of oldsters that do not in reality understand how the Internet works. I don't in fact understand it both, but I've been reading what the folks who do have to mention at the hassle, and they declare that those payments might not reach stopping piracy however will impose massive, high-priced regulations on content material providers anywhere. So I'd like to show harmony with the parents opposing the bill...However that is still Thrift Week, and that isn't always an event which could just be postponed. So I'm compromising by way of penning this access nowadays, but scheduling it to place up at midnight, at the 19th in preference to the 18th. The seven days of Thrift Week will still be protected, however two of them can be lumped collectively on in the destiny.
So with that out of the way, allow's talk about contemporary day event, which I'm calling Eat Sustainably Day. Sustainable ingesting, as I see it, takes severa forms, maximum of which I've discussed on this weblog earlier than. Sustainable meals may be any of the subsequent:
- Seasonal, because food that's in season doesn't have to be shipped long distances, or grown in hothouses, or kept in cold storage, all of which require energy.
- Locally grown, because fewer "miles to market" means less fuel burned, less CO2 emitted, and fresher food, to boot.
- Organic, because using fewer chemical inputs (fertilizers and pesticides) means less pollution and healthier soil.
- Fair-Trade, because a truly sustainable food system has to protect the interests of those who grow the food.
- Low on the food chain, because plants produce less waste and greenhouse gases than animals, and small animals produce less than big ones.
- Humane, because the animals we eat (or eat the products of) are part of our food system too.
I'm observing Eat Sustainably Day in several ways. The main course of tonight's dinner will be a free-range chicken from Whole Foods (given to me by my best friend as what was, I must say, the single most practical birthday present I've ever received). It receives a score of 2 on the 5-point Animal Welfare Rating scale used by Whole Foods, which means that the animals can be kept indoors as long as they are "provided with enrichments that encourage behavior that's natural to them." (This isn't quite up there with living on pasture year-round, but it's a darn sight better than what your typical supermarket chicken has been subjected to.) This will be accompanied by a salad of organic greens, which, remarkably enough, were priced exactly the same at the supermarket as the conventional ones—and when Brian got to the checkout with them, actually rang up for less than the price marked, making them even cheaper. (Is it possible that organic farming is actually turning out to be more cost-effective for some products than the "traditional" methods that came into fashion in the last century?)
But the real pièce de résistance of tonight's frugal menu will be my after-dinner activity: planning my vegetable garden for next year. After all, you can't get more local than your own back yard, and now is the time to choose my crops and get my seed order in if I want to be able to start my seedlings in February. I know I'll definitely want some sugar snap peas, lots of tomatoes, and two—but no more than two—zucchini plants, but beyond that I'm uncertain. I'd love to grow some winter squash, but all my previous attempts to plant it in the actual garden (as opposed to letting it run wild in the side yard next to the compost bin) have been abysmal failures. I've had good luck with arugula, mixed results with lettuce, and no success at all with spinach; my green beans produced only a small crop, even when I managed to keep the groundhog from getting at them; and my cucumbers did great the first year and were anemic the next. So I'm at a bit of a loss. Maybe I need to try new varieties...or maybe I should consider other crops I haven't grown before. Any suggestions?
