All Your Green Blog

I was recently eating a meal prepared partially from ingredients in my backyard, and began musing about home-grown food. I'm a rookie when it comes to the art of growing food in a limited amount of space, but I have the advantage of ridiculously good soil and plenty of sun and water. You can grow food here by thinking about food and staring at a bare patch in my yard. I love northern California sometimes.

But I digress. I began to think about the increase in locally-grown food being used in restaurants in the area. With a little selective eaves-dropping, I discovered this migration to locally-grown food wasn't motivated by the eco-friendly reasons put on the menus. It turns out that gas prices are impacting food prices, and my favorite restaurants are starting to feel the squeeze. Their solution? They started using more and more locally grown supplies, which are far less affected by increases in fuel costs. If the lettuce only has to travel 10 miles, it quickly becomes cheaper than it's mass-produced long-range competition.

For years, I've thought about the great foods of the world. French, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and so on. They all derive their distinct flavors and accents from the ingredients available in the region. Italian food, for example, makes excellent use of olive oil because... olives grow well in the Mediterranean! Japanese food uses fish and rice in ways that can't be expected from British cuisine. You see what I mean.

So, what makes American food special? We're known for cheeseburgers, our version of pizza, and generally greasy and uninteresting fare. Why? My theory is that the ease of transportation of raw materials and ingredients has made the food here homogenous across a rather large country. We have little of the benefits of regional stratification of flavors. We have a few exceptions, but they are rare enough to be cliche: New England clam chowder, anything called "south western" etc. With increasing fuel prices impacting food prices, I believe that scarcity will encourage local agriculture and food cultivation. By definition, not all places can grow the same food, although most habitable regions can grow food. That's where this new diversity will come from.

In addition to any other benefits from eating locally grown and cultivated food, we may yet see high gas prices drive the American culinary spectrum in a fantastic and more colorful direction. Our relatively homogenous food may just splinter into dozens of regional styles. Yet another reason for nuts like me to root for the end of the Era of the Escalade at the hand of fuel prices.

The WSJ reported recently that the FDA is claiming that there isn't enough evidence to support the current panic over Bisphenol A, a chemical in plastics that was identified as a potential risk to children and infants.

To quote their quote of a "senior FDA scientist":
[A] large body of available evidence indicates that food contact materials containing BPA currently on the market are safe, and that exposure levels to BPA from these materials, including exposure to infants and children, are below those that may cause health effects.

A month ago, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed:
The possibility that bisphenol A may alter human development cannot be dismissed

So, what happened in a month? Did the risk go away? Is there a government cover-up and conspiracy over the danger associated with plastic bottles?

In short, NO. This is the scientific process. The claim of the FDA scientist was a description of evidence, not an opinion. There is no other source of information and truth than the evidence available. The only thing to do now is continue to gather more information, and see whether the theory of the risk pans out.

Some people see conflicting sides to a scientific subject, and claim that "science doesn't know anything" or worse "scientists keep changing their minds! They must be wrong!" It's the scientific process! You develop a theory, then test it, and revise it for another round. So, in the end, what does this mean about plastic? It means research continues. No reason to panic! In the meantime, it's up to you whether to play it safe or not. The wasted resources and trash associated with single-use plastic bottles is enough for me. Health concerns were coincidental anyway!

Yay Science. Yay stainless steel water bottles. Both rock.

• WSJ: FDA: Bisphenol A in Plastic Bottles is Safe
• WSJ: Worries Grow Over Bisphenol A in Plastics

We've added some bright new items to the Apparel Category. Jimi Wallets are recycled, recyclable, made in the USA, durable, fashionable, and generally full of awesomeness.

The self-proclaimed "Wallet for People who Hate Wallets," these are pocketable, lanyardable (what? it's a word now), and are a clearly superior method of lugging around your necessary bits of plastic and paper. They have a removable billfold, and the best user's manual of any product we currently carry. There's just nothing quite as handy as a Jimi in your pocket.

So toss out that worn out, stinky old leather trifold, and upgrade to the Jimi Wallet!

• Photo Credit: www.gimmecorn.com

We aren't financial advisers, and don't want to be. But a friend referred me to a wicked-cool site that I've been playing with for a couple days... straight. www.Mint.com is a universal budget-management and planning tool that has a lot of the functionality of desktop applications like Quicken, without all the expense, connection configuration, etc. In less than five minutes, you can have just about any account you have with a bank, credit card, or credit union all automatically updating your Mint.

It's all highly intuitive, and a lot less work to keep your records up to date than its desktop app competitors. Oh, and it's free. Yup, free. They pay the bills by showing you offers for debt consolidation and other accounts and the such. For advertisements, they're well-targeted and tastefully displayed. Well worth the free software, to be sure.

So, why am I so excited about this thing? Aside from it being a well-implemented web utility (which I have a soft-spot for, being a web developer), it's the single most convincing argument to end all of my paper statements. I'm nearly paperless as it stands, but I'm very good about forgetting about when which accounts do what and for how much. Email notices are great, but they're out-of-sight out-of-mind. Here, I have the easiest consolidation of all my accounts I've ever seen. What's that mean? Zero need for paper mailings.

And finally, an anecdotal endorsement. A good friend of mine had an account with a smaller niche bank that stated weren't interested in offering a connection to Mint. He's now with another bank. It's that cool.

• www.Mint.com

If things keep going the way they are, our shipping page won't open with a joke for much longer. UPS might never ship with "zero emission magic dragons" but they did just order 200 hybrid electric trucks.

I found this news over at ecogeek so props to them.

Now I'm feeling flat out good about shipping with UPS. Sure they have financial reasons for greening their operations, mainly the rising cost of gas, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they are becoming greener. Come on zero emission dragons!