I don’t eat much fast food, but I make an exception for Taco Bell. They apparently have a corporate policy that the person taking your take-out order must ask how much sauce you would like. They often hand out much much more than you request. This leads me to wonder what the retail value of one of those little packets of sauce. I assume that the profit per meal is not high (e.g., we usually get the cheap items, such as the 89 cent bean burritos). I wondered whether Taco Bell still made any profit on our order. With $2 Billion in annual sales, that might be a LOT of wasted sauce. In the aggregate, it adds up.

Today, with several children in the car, we went through a Taco Bell drive-through. The woman asked us “How many packs of sauce would you like?” I responded, “Five packs of mild sauce, please.”

Here’s most of the packs of Taco Bell sauce she gave us (we discovered this after we got home and started eating). She actually gave us three more packs of sauce than you’ll see in this photo, but we used up those three prior to taking this photo.

I assume this is not an anomaly. Same thing goes for napkins. Sometimes, we find 30 napkins in the take out bag that contains only 5 or 6 food items. It just seems so wasteful, to go along with all of the heavily inked cardboard packaging for much of the food. I’m not trying to single out Taco Bell here–this wasteful packaging occurs at most fast food establishments, as well as most restaurants (even higher priced restaurants) that offer take out food.

Some states, such as California, are trying to do something about fast food waste:

Furthermore, fast food restaurants are a drag on local communities’ waste diversion rates. Currently less than 35% of fast food store’s waste is diverted from landfills, the vast majority of which is cardboard. Very little food packaging and almost no fast food plastic is currently diverted from landfills. This low diversion rate is surprising considering the vast majority of restaurant waste is not plastic–its main litter culprit–but rather paper, a perfectly recyclable resource.

In case you’ve been out of touch, a student in Florida took Our Lord Jesus Christ hostage a few weeks ago. He walked out of church with a consecrated communion wafer to show to a friend, rather than promptly eating the true flesh of the 2000 year old man. Ignoring the question of whether Jesus really did say, “Eat Me”, this little event became big news. First, the college and the church denounced and eventually impeached the poor kid. Demands that he be expelled and/or excommunicated flew. (Orlando Sentinel summary article).

Then famous rationalist and biologist PZ Myers got into the act. He published a post in which he suggested that those incensed need to get a reality-based life: “It’s a frackin’ cracker” said he. Myers even suggested that someone should procure for him one of these blessed wafers, so that he could personally desecrate it.

Then the spam hit the fan. Thousands of comments and emails and demands for his expulsion and his firing and even death threats followed. Well, back and forth over several posts. One woman made international news for being fired for using a company computer to send her death threat.

Finally, Myers posted “The Great Desecration” beginning with “It is finished.” He discusses the way the church has used just the allegation of wafer misuse in history to spur mobs to mass murder (with specific examples). He posts a few of the more lucid (and publishable) denunciations of his proposed desecration, with commentary. And finally, he shows a picture of the desecration itself. Not only does he drive a rusty spike through the cracker (wondering in print if Jesus has a current tetanus shot), he nails it through the Koran and into one of Dawkins’ books, then artistically covered it all with the traditional banana peels and coffee grounds.

Desecrating the Koran was a suggestion made by many of his Catholic detractors, who suggested that he didn’t dare offend the Muslims, but only picks on Catholics (the group from whom he received the most death threats) because they are so kind and forgiving.

Desecrating Dawkins is to point out that he is not selectively suggesting that the Biblical injunction against worshipping images be used only against Judeo Christian churches. But that all icons be examined from the point of view that the symbol is not actually the object. Or to quote Korzybski, “The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing”.

I wrote about complacency once before. I focused on the complacency of most Americans in the face of the energy crisis that is clearly upon us. We have no assurance that gasoline won’t double or triple in price over the next five or 10 years, throwing our economy into a massive depression. With stakes like these, you would think that prolific energy wasters like us would immediately jump on our energy consumption problem by enacting a national conservation plan to cut our petroleum use in half. This could be accomplished by modifying our wasteful energy usage in dozens of ways. For instance, we really could carpool. We could build up our mass transit systems and encourage their use. We could walk and bike more. We could make our homes much more energy-efficient. Instead of building new homes in existing farm fields, we could renovate homes that already exist. While we’re at it, we could cut our use of all other forms of energy in half too. For instance, the technology already exists to make zero-carbon footprint buildings.

Others have written extensively regarding many methods by which we could reduce energy use. Due to the widely accepted law of supply and demand, cutting our use of energy would also have the effect of lowering the price of energy (relative to whatever it would have been had we not taken such measures), thereby diminishing the financial damage from our perennial trade deficits and budget deficits.

My concern is that so many people (including many people I know personally) are absolutely complacent about the need to change the way we produce and use energy. I keep hearing people say that “they will make our gasoline out of corn” or “we have plenty of coal” as though some unspecified “corn plan” would produce net energy without causing people to starve or some fantasy “coal plan” could be a foolproof substitute for petroleum, without somehow contributing massive amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

People are finally buying more energy-efficient cars, but that is only in response to the spiking costs of gasoline. It’s like we need to be kicked in the shin in order to get our attention. Many mainstream news articles discuss that this price jump of gasoline occurred “suddenly,” as though it was impossible to see that high gasoline prices were in our future. We still don’t get it, though. For example, many news articles are currently talking about the high price of gas as though gas will continue to be five dollars per gallon five years from now, as though we’ve hit a stable plateau.

As I suggested in my prior post about complacency, I sense that there’s a rampant attitude that most of the big things in life are not under our control. Rather, they simply “happen.” According to many people, the “free market” decides what will be available for sale and at what price it will be sold. Similarly, “God” makes decisions about disasters and diseases such as heart attacks and lung cancer (even though people cause many of their own problems through climate change in lifestyle at choices). The people who are big believers in the free market and a sentient God see humans as powerless children who simply react to situations. We act like there’s nothing we can do to root corporate corruption out of our national political system.

From so many people, I hear this solution: “They” will come up with something to solve our energy problems, our medical problems, our food production problems, our natural resource supply issues and our pollution problems, as though these problems don’t start with each and every one of us. As though we are not responsible for what “they” need to do. As though we don’t make the messes that “they” need to clean up.

I have no doubt that we could cut our energy usage in half. We could substantially reduce our risks of certain diseases by changing our lifestyles. We could eat foods that are friendlier to the planet, such that the average item of food would not actually need to travel 1000 miles or more to our plates. We could start making difficult decisions that would ensure sustainable supplies of water well into the future, at least for many communities (Las Vegas might not be in the plans). By using much less of everything we consume we could substantially cut the amount of toxic waste we generate. When “we” live more responsibly, “they” have less work to do to save us.

Admittedly, some bad things do seem to just happen to us. On the other hand, many of our biggest problems are caused by us. Therefore, to act complacently as a general rule is a huge cop-out virtually guaranteeing disaster. The real solution is to force ourselves to follow the chain of production through our use of our products and resources so that we can see that our local actions often have tangible national and global consequences. We are incapable of assessing these big problems to the extent that we allow ourselves to overlook problems that have solutions that would be expensive or inconvenient to us.

Sacrifice is a dirty word these days. No politician wants to tell the citizens that we will need to give up some of our wasteful ways. The same thing goes for the many “greenwashing” articles out there. For instance, I read several “green” magazines, including Plenty; they are extremely light on the need for self-sacrifice. (more…)

Why grow grass when you can eat your front yard?   Grass is no longer cool, according to this article in Time:

The problem, as [architect and founder Fritz] Haeg sees it, is that the “hyper-manicured lawn” is looking increasingly out of date. In the 1950s, when suburbia first began to sprawl, a perfectly trimmed front yard embodied the post-war prosperity Americans aspired to. Today, amid rising fuel costs, food safety scares and growing environmental awareness, a chemically treated and verdant but nutritionally barren lawn seems wasteful, he says.

Haeg has also published a new book:

The publication of Haeg’s new book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, marks the beginning of a concerted national campaign to dramatically overthrow an American institution, the front lawn.

If you’re curious, visit the Edible Estates site. Invite me over when the tomatoes growing in your front yard are ripe . . .

How can your average item of food travel 1,500 miles to your plate?  Cheap oil, that’s how.  But be careful how you count the carbon generated by the delivery of your food.

The amount of “oil in our food” suggests that we will be eating a lot more local food, rather sooner than later.

There’s a new book out on cannibalism, in case you’re interested.  And, yes, you are interested.  It’s called “Among the Cannibals: Adventures on the Trail of Man’s Darkest Ritual” (Smithsonian Books, 278 pages. $25.95), by Paul Raffaele.  Here’s a short summary by Malcolm Ritter.

Here’s an eerie thought: In a world where we worry about the detrimental impact of raising big farm animals to eat, we’re throwing away a lot of perfectly edible humans.   I’m not suggesting that we eat other humans . . .

Americans are increasingly complaining that the cost of food is going up. Two recent articles demonstrate that Americans are profligate wasters of food in at least two major ways:

1) Obese people consume 18% more food energy than lean people and more than sixty million Americans are obese. Simply put, it takes more calories to maintain an obese body than a slimmer body, assuming both of them engage in similar amounts of activity.

2) Americans throw away an incredible 27% of their food. According to this article in the NYT:

Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

These two problems suggest two solutions. To save money on one’s food bill: A) Bring your body down to its appropriate and healthy size and B) Stop wasting good food by throwing it away.

Back in February, I posted a quote from The Gods Must Be Crazy about the needless complexity of modern life. The quote has made me stew on the topic ever since. We live in a world awash in technologies designed to make life easier, but that often only bog us down. An air conditioning unit may cool your brow and make you happier and more productive in the summer months, but only if you don’t spend seven months attempting to get your evasive landlord to either have the cursed, broken thing fixed or replaced entirely. Not that I would know. A computer makes it easier to write and send documents- unless it freezes, or the printer jams, or the email server has gone down, or you can’t get a decent wireless connection, or the power goes out. I hear, at least, that can prove extremely frustrating.

More technology spells more helplessness when that technology fails. If only I had just suffered through the heat, and adjusted to it; if only I had elected to write a letter by candle light! Instead, I became attached to the convenience of modern goodies. But technology is not the first or only huge complicator in our lives. No, today I’d like to focus on stuff. Things, junk.

We all have too many pieces of stuff lying around our homes, all designed to make life easier. I often suspect these handy doohickeys waste more space and money than their limited “uses” justify. I’ll take some examples from my own apartment:

The banana hook, a simple fruit-bearing tool. Few kitchen objects have such absurd specialization as this, barring the grapefruit spoon. Not even a devout fruitarian could really rationalize the space devoted to dangling a single, specific food product. Imagine if we required a special hook for every kind of produce in the house- my small kitchen couldn’t bear it, and I wager few could. Fortunately, we don’t need hooks for all our fruits. We don’t even need them for bananas. Don’t believe the shrewd marketing- a humble bowl will do. But at least I didn’t invest in the even more absurd banana hammock, right?
(more…)

I was in a bad mood after I wrote a post summarizing a recent Harpers Magazine article demonstrating that the United States government is working hard to keep its citizens from knowing whether numerous commonly used chemicals are dangerous.

After all, our government is supposed to be there to protect us yet it appears that our government is, instead, kissing up to the chemical manufacturers, allowing them to dump highly questionable substances into the products American consumers purchase and use.

And now, I’m in a worse mood. I just finished reading an extraordinary article called “You Are What You Drink Out Of,” by Nadia Pflaum. This article appeared in a local alternative St. Louis newspaper called the Riverfront Times. Pflaum’s story is available online, and thank goodness, because this is extraordinary piece of writing and it serves as an illustration of just how corrupt the system has become. I’ll give just the basic outline here. You’ll want to go read the entire article, however, if you want to be prepared to pull out Exhibit A the next time you get into an argument with one of the many remaining Bush-loving purported free-marketers.

The story centers around Frederick vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri. He is one of the leading experts on bisphenol A, a chemical that is ubiquitous in the United States-more than six billion pounds are produced every year. The trouble is that bisphenol A contains a substance that acts as a synthetic hormone that has been suspected of being dangerous for human beings. Vom Saal’s research found that the synthetic estrogen that leeches out of bisphenol A can pass it right into human cells at doses 25,000 times lower than any toxicologist ever before studied, and it wreaks havoc with developing reproductive organs.”

Vom Saal and his colleague, Susan Nagel (a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health), found that bisphenol A is so potent that exposing a developing fetus to it could permanently alter crucial phases of development. Their experiments showed that tiny doses of bisphenol A could trigger breast cancer. Their experiments also showed that tiny doses enlarged the prostates of laboratory mice.

The problem is that humans are exposed to bisphenol A everyday. We are exposed to it in the form of food packaging, almost every water bottle, eyeglass lenses and the linings of aluminum food cans. Bisphenol A is a synthetic material that is commonly used to make plastic.

But this is where the story only begins to get interesting. Vom Saal and Nagel published their findings regarding the dangers of bisphenol A and they were about to publish a second article (announcing that exposure to bisphenol A lowered sperm counts in mice) when they received a visit from a scientist from Dow Chemical who offered to pay the University a huge amount of money to conduct a new bisphenol A “study” at the University. Here’s the kicker: the Dow Chemical scientist (who told the university scientists that he represented the Chemical Manufacturers Association) asked “Can we arrive at a mutually beneficial outcome where you withhold publishing this paper until authorized to do so by the Chemical Manufacturers Association?”

University scientists knew that they were being offered a bribe. (more…)

The United States and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by contributing to an explosive rise in global food prices through using food crops to produce biofuels, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food said today.At a press conference in Geneva, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland said that fuel policies pursued by the U.S. and the EU were one of the main causes of the current worldwide food crisis.

The Special Rapporteur warned of worsening food riots and a “horrifying” increase in deaths by starvation before reforms could take effect.

For the full article, visit Common Dreams.

This is a no-brainer, or so I thought.  Before asking my extended family this question at a family gathering this weekend, I assumed that everyone would agree to my hypothetical proposal.  As distasteful as it might seem at first, I assumed that everyone in the room would (if given the opportunity) agree that they would eat nothing but dog food for one year in return for $1 million.

I write this post having tasted dog food on two occasions in past years.  On those two occasions, I’d chomped on a nugget of dry dog food, the kind that comes in a 40 pound bag.  I thought it tasted like cardboard, but it was not disgusting.  On the other hand, it was not food I would be inclined to eat again unless given an incentive.  Note: I have smelled canned dog food before, and I would not be inclined to eat that stuff.  The canned dog food I smelled had a strong disgusting odor to it.  It looked and smelled like it was no longer safe to eat.

So there I stood with various members of my family in my mother’s kitchen when I raised the question: who would be willing to eat nothing but dog food for the next year in return for $1 million?  To my surprise, the rejections and objections started pouring in, even though I went first and even though I proudly stated that my answer was absolutely “yes.”

Two of my sisters and my mother each rejected the idea out of hand. I listened to their excuses and I thought that I addressed all their objections, but they continued to reject the hypothetical offer.  One sister was concerned that if she went to all that work eating dog food for one year, they wouldn’t actually pay her the $1 million.  Therefore I changed the hypothetical so that it included an escrow account held by a person or institution she trusted.  Still, she refused to buy into the program.

Another concern (raised by a brother-in-law) was that even if dog food might provide most of the nutrition needed by a human being, it might not provide all of the vitamins and nutrients needed by humans.  Therefore, it might be dangerous over the course of the year.  Fair enough.  In response, I agreed that anyone engaging in this endeavor could take any vitamins or supplements that one might need (but that dog food might not provide).  That same brother in law then indicated that he might be willing to join the program, but only for $2 million.

I urged everyone to be honest.  We were talking about $1 million.  This is enough money to allow people to retire. I reminded everyone that they could buy their dog food at any supermarket or any pet store.  Their dog food could include any commercially available product labeled “dog food,” and this could include any type of dog food, dry or canned food, entrées or dog treats (I was hoping that the phrase “dog treats” would get everyone more excited about signing up for this hypothetical deal, but it didn’t).

I wasn’t suggesting that they would have to eat their dog food on the floor or that they would have to eat it out of a doggie dish.  They would merely have to agree to eat dog food, in any position.  They could light candles before dinner if that ambiance made the difference.  The main rule is that all of the food that they ate would have to be actual dog food.  The only fluid that they would be able to drink would be water, since that’s the only liquid that most people give to their dogs. (more…)

In an earlier post, I argued that people need to better appreciate that dollars are fungible (see here  and here).  Why is it important to understand that dollars are fungible?  A case in point is the new American enthusiasm for turning food into fuel. Consider this report from Fortune Magazine:

The growing myth that corn is a cure-all for our energy woes is leading us toward a potentially dangerous global fight for food. While crop-based ethanol -the latest craze in alternative energy - promises a guilt-free way to keep our gas tanks full, the reality is that overuse of our agricultural resources could have consequences even more drastic than, say, being deprived of our SUVs. It could leave much of the world hungry.

We are facing an epic competition between the 800 million motorists who want to protect their mobility and the two billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same resources.
 
This year cars, not people, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption. The problem is simple: It takes a whole lot of agricultural produce to create a modest amount of automotive fuel.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol, for instance, could feed one person for a year.

And consider this additional bad news from Earth Policy Institute: 

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.

The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs. Wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade on December 17th breached the $10 per bushel level for the first time ever. In mid-January, corn was trading over $5 per bushel, close to its historic high. And on January 11th, soybeans traded at $13.42 per bushel, the highest price ever recorded. All these prices are double those of a year or two ago.

As a result, prices of food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise. In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades.

Here’s are a few rhetorical questions to consider:  Can Americans justify filling up any more of those big SUV fuel tanks now that there is solid evidence that doing so will cause families on the other side of the world to suffer and die?  Can we justify cranking up the heat in the winter to stay toasty warm?  Should we merrily take long trips without considering the effects of burning this extra fuel on food prices (and thus food availability) to those people who are living on the margin?  Can we justify building more houses in the exburbs? 

We are now witnessing a collision between A) our desire to have fun and feel prestige through the discretionary buring of fuel, versus B) our ability to honestly look in the mirror to see ourselves as kind, decent and caring people.

“The free market–the invisible hand–will take care of everything.”

I’ve addressed this topic of the free market as alleged panacea several times before.  I’ve referred to this blind faith in the market as unsubstantiated.  I’ve mockingly referred to the common belief in the wisdom of the invisible hand as a belief in the Fouth Person in the Holy Quartet.  Why mock?  Because stark shortages of critically important natural resources loom in every direction.   And yet we’re in denial. You deny the denial?  Then how is it that we tolerate, this year, big U.S. metropolitan areas like Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta had only a few weeks left of their municipal water supplies?  We tolerate that we are drawing down unreplenishable water sources throughout the desert southwest.  Intelligent civilizations don’t deny such dangers.  They consciously deal with their problems.

I’ve just read a well-phrased description of why the modern version of the free market can’t save us from our problems regarding impending shortages of essential natural resources.  The following quote is from a new book available free on-line from Population Connection: PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by environmental analyist, Lester R. Brown (2008).

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, the market is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decision-makers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern for future generations.

Dick Cavett once said: “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”  Plan B 3.0 is the kind of information that those rare people ambivalently clamor to hear.    It’s clearly written and well documented.  There’s nothing shrill in Lester Brown’s book; just the facts—lots of facts that paint a dire picture.  Over and over, humans are overexploiting precious resources, and the situation is getting dangerous in many ways.  What’s at stake?  You name it.  Oil, food, water, forests, health, fisheries.   On the topic of fisheries, did you know that there are essentially no cod to be caught in the North Atlantic Ocean any more?   Gee, how did that happen?  Why didn’t the “free market” protect the North Atlantic Ocean?

Brown argues that we need to dramatically change the way we live and consume.   He argues that the “free market” is not a cure, unless we first make the true costs of over-exploitation visible and force purchasers to pay the full price.   We need to “Get the market to tell the ecological truth.” For example, the true cost of a gallon of gas is not $3/gallon, but more like $12/gallon. (more…)

The March 2008 addition of Consumer Reports contains an article called “Nine Ways to a Longer Life.”  There’s lots of common sense advice, such as get enough sleep, exercise and don’t smoke.  There is also some less-obvious good advice, including the need to eat the right kind of fat.  For instance, the monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats found in nuts, seeds, vegetable oils and fish have been demonstrated to keep people healthier.

What is the number one way Consumer Report lists for living a longer life?  It’s eating whole grains.

(I photographed this bowl of my favorite whole grains: oat groats) 

What are the benefits of eating whole grains?

They reduce the risk of heart disease, several cancers, and inflammatory diseases such as asthma.  Studies have shown that breakfasts are can be a good way to get grains.

What’s a good way to learn about whole grains?  I’ve talked about them before.  My first foray into whole grains was Walter Willett’s excellent book, Eat Drink and Be Healthy.

I recently attended a lecture on how to make bread.  The chef spoke quite highly of a website sponsored by the Whole Grains Council.  What kinds of information are offered at the Whole Grains Council?

The Whole Grains Council helps consumers find whole grain foods and understand their health benefits; helps manufacturers create delicious whole grain products; and helps the media write accurate, compelling stories about whole grains.

What are whole grains?

Whole grains or foods made from them contain all the essential parts and naturally-occurring nutrients of the entire grain seed.

Some of the most common types of whole grains are:

• Wheat Berries
• Kamut 
• Spelt 
• Rye
• Triticale
• Oat Groats
• Barley 
• Brown Rice
• Wild Rice
• Job’s Tears
• Millet 
• Quinoa
• Amaranth
• Teff
• Kasha (Buckwheat Groats)
• Bulgur 

Here are some more of the incredible health benefits of eating whole grains on a regular basis (and see here).  All health-conscious people should flock to eat lots of whole grain food, of course.   I’ve saved the best two reasons to eat whole grains for last. 

Whole grains are easy to cook.  You don’t need a fancy steamer (really, you don’t).  Just spend about $30 for a Black & Decker Flavor-Scenter steamer; Diana Mirkin has published easy directions for cooking all of the types of whole grains.  Recipes for using whole grains are available all over the Internet, including at the Whole Grains Council (I often stir them into chili, soups and salads, and use them where ever I’d use rice).  It’s incredibly easy. 

The other reason for blending whole grains into your diet is that they taste delicious.  After you eat whole grains for awhile, you’ll never get excited about refined grains (e.g., white rice) again.   Another bonus is that eating whole grains makes it easier to lose weight, due to the increased fiber.

Here’s the catch.  It is sometimes not easy to identify the products that are truly made out of whole grains.  In fact, the Whole Grains Council dedicates a long webpage on how to decipher misleading packaging claims that a product contains whole grains.

I learned of the issue of “downer cows” by reading a report on Common Dreams:

You wouldn’t think you could “spin” a video that shows slaughterhouse workers electric shocking downer cows, “water boarding” them, jabbing their eyes with herding paddles and ramming them with forklift blades while they squeal in pain, posted at www.hsus.org, but USDA is trying.

Bad enough the slaughterhouse, Hallmark Meat Packing Co. in Chino, CA, supplies the National School Lunch Program, a certain portion of children have already eaten the meat.

This disturbing report caused me to visit the Human Society site, where I made myself watch the video.  What assurance can I ever have that the next hamburger I might eat is not from an animal treated like this?

Many of them eat much the same food as you, but there are many differences too. This is a wonderful photo-essay published by Time.  The Photographs, by Peter Menzel, are from the book Hungry Planet.

The unvarnished facts speak loudly while you click through the series of photos. I found that viewing these photos was emotionally intense, sometimes celebratory and other times guilt-provoking.

The cost of the families’ weekly food added an interesting dimension to the experience.  The German family downs $500 of food (including lots of meat and dairy) per week.  One of the American families eats $341 per week (including lots of pre-prepared foods), while the other American family (from California), spends only half that much and eats much healthier food.  The family from Chad somehow gets by on $1.23 per week, largely on grains, with just a smattering of fruit. 

The essay is allegedly about food, but the houses and neighborhoods are incredibly interesting.  Many of the world’s families featured here live in comfort comparable to the American families.  But not all of them, to be sure.

The essay is ostensibly about different types of food consumed by different types of families.  But it is also about healthy eating versus unhealthy eating.  It’s about prepared food versus prepare-it-yourself food.  It’s also about the way family members relate to each other.  There are a lot of clues in these photos.

To flip through the whole series only takes a few minutes. I highly recommend it.

Yes, you could continue on your merry way, spending money on the wrong types of things for all the wrong reasons.  We’ve all done this.  But we don’t have to keep doing things this way.  To give you an assist, you can get some ideas and inspiration from New American Dream.

It is important to consider the long-term consequences of your purchases.  For example, what does it really mean to workers and the environment to buy bananas?   Here’s what (the site requires a simple and free registration). 

And what about bottled water?  It really is a big deal in the aggregate. 

Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

Why should we strive to eat local food?

Estimates on how long the average food travels from pasture to plate range from 1200 to 2500 miles. A lot of energy is expended freezing, refrigerating, and trucking that food around. Eating locally grown food means less fossil fuel burned in preparation and transport. Local food is often safer, too.

How else could you benefit by spending wisely and consciously?  Maybe you can avoid some of the insanity of the Christmas season. 

We offer tips on how to simplify the holidays by focusing less on stuff and more on connections with family, friends, fun, peace, and even a little rest and relaxation.

There are a lot of tips at this site, some seemingly more worthy than others–but truly lots of ideas for turning you into a responsible consumer.  And you do want to be a responsible consumer, right?

Senator Bernie Sanders writes that the American Middle Class is being decimated.  He cites some interesting numbers.  Here’s a couple shockers:

Robert Frank, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has detailed the lives of the rich and famous in the book Richistan. He writes that households with a net worth of between $100 million and $1 billion last year spent an average of $182,000 on watches. Meanwhile, in the real world, 400,000 qualified students were unable to go to college because they lacked the funds.

Frank also details how during this one-year period the economically elite households spent $311,000 on cars, $397,000 on jewelry and $169,000 on spa services. At the same time, President Bush presented a budget in which he proposed cuts that would deny child care to 300,000 families and food stamps for 280,000 families.

When you drop food on the floor, it’s generally OK to pick it up and eat it, according to this article from ScienceDaily. You knew this already, considering how you act when no one is watching!

The king of bad food, “the only specific food that clinical research has directly linked to weight gain,” is soda pop (though see here for an opposing viewpoint).   Nutritionally, there is almost nothing good to say about soda.  That is the focus of an article entitled “Nutritionists: Soda making Americans drink themselves fat.” 

The rise in soft drink consumption mirrors the national march toward obesity. At the midpoint of the 20th century, Americans drank four times as much milk as soda pop. Today, the ratio is almost completely reversed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, in the past 30 years the national obesity rate has more than doubled, and among teenagers, more than tripled, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Soda pop is a quintessential junk food,” said Michael Jacobson, who heads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which lobbies for government restrictions on foods it considers unhealthy. “It’s just pure calories, and no nutrients. It’s like a bomb in our diet.”

Not only is soda loaded with empty calories. Some scientists point to the high fructose corn syrup found in soda as the real problem.  Drinking it also sets up a vicious cycle of eating and hunger that lasts all day long:

The sugar in soda pop not only provides a massive dose of calories, but triggers a vicious appetite cycle, said [Dr. David] Ludwig, [a Harvard endicrinologist]. . . “It’s rapidly absorbed, which raises blood sugar and in effect causes the body to panic.” The body releases insulin to break down the sugar, “but the body overcompensates, and blood sugar drops below the fasting level,” lower than it was in the first place.

Recognizing low blood sugar, the body releases ghrelin and other hormones, inducing hunger, inducing us to eat even more, Ludwig said.

Here’s a doctor’s description of what all that sugar does to your body when you gulp down that soda.

This issue of eating meat is gaining more momentum, as people start realizing the toll that meat-eating is putting on the environment.  Raising farm animals contributes more greenhouse gases to the environment than all transportation (cars, trains, airplanes and anything else) combined.

This excerpt is from an article on Common Dreams, entitled “Nuggets and Hummers and Fish Sticks, Oh My! Why Vegetarianism Is the Best Way to Help the Environment”:

The vast majority of the calories consumed by a chicken, a pig, a cow, or another animal goes into keeping that animal alive, and once you add to that the calories required to create the parts of the animal that we don’t eat (e.g., bones, feathers, and blood), you find that it takes more than 10 times as many calories of feed given to an animal to get one calorie back in the form of edible fat or muscle. In other words, it’s exponentially more efficient to eat grains, soy, or oats directly rather than feed them to farmed animals so that humans can eat those animals. It’s like tossing more than 10 plates of spaghetti into the trash for every one plate you eat.

And that’s just the pure “calories in, calories out” equation. When you factor in everything else, the situation gets much worse. Think about the extra stages of production that are required to get dead chickens, pigs, or other animals from the farm to the table:

1. Grow more than 10 times as much corn, grain, and soy (with all the required tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on), as would be required if we ate the plants directly.
2. Transport — in gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers — all that grain and soy to feed manufacturers.
3. Operate the feed mill (again, using massive amounts of resources).
4. Truck the feed to the factory farms.
5. Operate the factory farms.
6. Truck the animals many miles to slaughterhouses.
7. Operate the slaughterhouses.
8. Truck the meat to processing plants.
9. Operate the meat processing plants.
10. Truck the meat to grocery stores (in refrigerated trucks).
11. Keep the meat in refrigerators or freezers at the stores.

With every stage comes massive amounts of extra energy usage — and with that comes heavy pollution and massive amounts of greenhouse gases, of course. Obviously, vegan foods require some of these stages, too, but vegan foods cut out the factory farms, the slaughterhouses, and multiple stages of heavily polluting tractor-trailer trucks, as well as all the resources (and pollution) involved in each of those stages. And as was already noted, vegan foods require less than one-tenth as many calories from crops, since they are turned directly into food rather than funneled through animals first.

A friend of mine impressed me long ago with his claim that morality begins with what we are willing to put into our mouths.   When we are willing put meat into our mouths we are affecting far more than our own bodies–we are affecting large swaths of the rest of the world.  I’m not only referring to land animals. This article makes it clear that eating fish comes with a similar set of environmental concerns.  

I still eat meat, though I’ve minimized my meat-eating over the years.  Articles like make me wonder whether even eating a little bit of meat is too much.

Every time we sit down to eat, we can choose to eat a product that is, according to U.N. scientists, “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” or we can choose vegan — and preferably organic — foods. It’s bad for the environment to eat animals.

One more thing - - the health benefits of giving up meat are spectacular.  In short, if you’re not motivated to give up meat for “the environment,” there’s good reason to give it up for your own health and safety.

This paean to Taco Bell, from Mark Dery of Salon.com:

No matter how sophisticated my palette has grown, nor how politicized it has become, I still feel a nostalgic fondness for Taco Bell tacos, triggered by sense memories of that first bite, when the shell would disintegrate into a heap of tortilla shards and meat on the orange wrapping paper that doubled as a tray. The sublimity of that crunch, the sensuous contrast between brittle, ultra-thin shell (worlds away from the chewy, chamois softness of the griddle-warmed tortillas served by Tijuana taquerias) and moist, spicy-sweet meat: Taco Bell tacos combined the delights of Pringles chips and sloppy Joes. For a kid in the late ’60s and ’70s, what could be better?

According to this article from Salem-News.com, it makes much more sense to filter your own water and reuse your bottle. What is the downside to buying bottles of water?

Around the world, factories are using more than 18 million barrels of oil and up to 130 billion gallons of fresh water a year to create something that, by and large, most people don’t need. But the product is so amazingly popular that sales are going up 10 percent a year, just like clockwork.

The big success story? Bottled water. And the resources mentioned above are just to make the plastic containers.

Another 41 billion gallons of water is then used to fill them – water that is often just tap water, and other times has less frequent monitoring for safety or purity than if it had come out of a tap.

“Bottled water has become an incredibly big business, up to $100 billion per year,” said Todd Jarvis, an assistant professor in the Water Resources Graduate Program at Oregon State University, and a research hydrogeologist with the OSU Institute for Water and Watersheds. “There are enormous amounts of money to be made here. Some of the profits make our business majors blush, and everyone wants in. It’s just astonishing.”

Consider that 60% of the energy expended by a resting baby is consumed by the baby’s brain.  A resting adult brain uses 25% of its energy.  Compare this to the average ape brain, which uses only 8% of the apes energy.  In short, having a big brain requires a lot of energy.

The June 15, 2007 edition of Science presents the article “Food for Thought: Did the First Cooked Meals Helped Fuel the Dramatic Evolutionary Expansion of the Human Brain?” [Most of the articles of Science are only available to paid subscribers online]. Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, realized that when we started pre-digesting our food by heating it, this allowed us to spend less time digesting the food.  From this observation, he realized that this would have given our ancestors a big evolutionary advantage.  “With cooking, we should see major adaptive changes.”  What would you do with that extra energy made available by chewing less?  How about things like cave painting or writing poetry are inventing airplanes?

Wrangham proposed cooking as one of the answers to a long-standing riddle in human evolution: where did humans get the extra energy to support their large brains?  “Even small differences in diet can have big effects on survival and reproductive success,” Wrangham states.  This article points out that australopithecines, (which lived from 4 million to 1.2 million years ago) had brains the size of chimpanzee brains.  About 1.9 million years ago, the brain of H. erectus showed dramatic growth to twice the size of the chimpanzee’s brain.  It was about this time that archaeological sites showed that H erectus was moving animal carcasses into the campsites for communal eating.  “It’s teeth, jaws and guts all got smaller.” 

One prevailing argument is that H. erectus were simply better hunters.  Wrangham argues, however, that we learned to cook between 1.9 million to 1.6 million years ago, and our brains grew suddenly.  Studies show that “cooking gelatinizes the matrix of collagen in animal flesh and opens up tightly woven carbohydrate molecules and plants to make them easier to absorb.”  Whereas chimpanzees spent five hours per day chewing food, hunter gatherers who cook only spent one hour chewing each day.  It’s important to note that H erectus had smaller teeth than that of his ancestors.  The lack of the large teeth characteristic of its ancestor is additional evidence that H. erectus had learned to cook.

Other scientists are showing enthusiasm about Wrangham’s proposal.  There’s a problem, however.  There is no clear evidence that anybody was cooking that long ago.  The article details solid evidence for cooking 250,000 years ago in southern Europe and indicates that there is evidence of controlled fire 790,000 years ago in Israel.  Wrangham notes, however, “that evidence for fire is often ambiguous and argues that humans were roasting meat and tubers around the campfire as early as 1.9 million years ago.

There’s also a classical approach to the question of where we got extra energy that does not necessarily require the cooking hypothesis.  The theory is that we began to eat more meat.  Eating more meat allowed our guts to shrink, which saves energy for digestion.  This is called the “expensive tissue hypothesis,” proposed in 1995 by Leslie Aiello.  This hypothesis is now receiving solid experimental support.