This is the part I’m looking forward to: Food.
Humans need to eat food, usually a few times a day. The food must be healthy, clean, safe and nutritious. Humans do not live long on a diet of gravel and sawdust, washed down with a cup of kerosene.
Since we need food and the Earth has a fair amount of it, this is good place to stay. Now, I’m going to let you in on a secret: Don’t tell anyone.
Humans eat other living things, including animals. Lettuce is a living thing until the farmer yanks it out of the ground and tomatoes are alive until twisted off the vine. Wheat is a living grass until swathed, husked, ground into flour and baked into bread.
Take two slices of bread, apply heat from electricity to caramelize the sugars in the bread, then smear on a little congealed milk fat from a pregnant bovine. At the same time, take two slices of raw, fatty, salted, pig flesh from the side or belly of a pig (You do have to kill the whole pig) apply heat to render out the fat, then solidify and caramelize the remaining proteins.
Slice the tomatoes, the reproductive organ of the tomato plant, add a leaf of the until-recently alive lettuce, two slices of that cooked pig belly and a bit of dried, ground up fruit from the piper nigrum vine.
Perhaps you want to add an emulsion of undeveloped chicken fetuses torn from their shells, whisked with spoiled white wine and some fruit from an olive tree that have been pressed until oil squirts out.
You get a Toasted BLT with Mayo. Now, I am being silly, but just the same…
The healthier the living things we eat, the healthier we humans are. Lettuce is something you could grow yourself, so you would know exactly how healthy it is. Same with tomatoes, corn, or papayas, if you can can grown papayas where you live.
Most urban North Americans don’t grow their own food. We go to supermarkets and trust that everyone else involved in making our food did things right. Most of the time the system works well enough. It is most often when basic, simple foods are messed with that we get into problems.
Read the side of a box of just about any prepared food. If you can’t pronounce or recognize the names of the ingredients, then there are too many things in there: The food is over-processed.
That isn’t to say that it is bad for you, in fact, vitamin fortified milk is actually good for you, but is Polysorbate 80? Is Xanthan Gum really necessary? Does artificial flavor do anything for the essential nutrition of what you are putting in your mouth?
Good food is food that is as natural as feasible. A chicken raised on untreated grains and allowed to run around without being jammed full of vitamins and antibiotics is a fairly natural product.
Cows, in a natural state, are ruminants who eat grass or grains and drink a lot of water. If the grass is clean and free of pesticides and the water is pure, then you get a healthy cow. Feeding a cow ‘bone meal’ increases the calcium in the milk, which is good for us. However, bone meal is dead cow parts ground up and dried, which is not good.
Kreutzfeld-Jacobs disease, or Mad Cow disease was a direct result of agricultural businesses making animals become cannibals. Very few animals eat others of the same species. Lobsters come to mind and that’s about it.
The less number of ingredients in your food is good, but then there is the Green side of it.
Papaya does not grow in Ontario, but I can get papayas, mangoes, star fruit, taro, yucca and all kinds of weird produce at my local store, all year long. Almost all of it is trucked or flown in, which costs energy to do, as well as the energy to store it before it gets to the supermarket. Tomatoes from Chile, Bananas from Ecuador, Cucumbers from Costa Rica, Oranges from the US, all takes trucks, trains, ships and planes to get that stuff to us.
There is a concept called the "100 Mile Diet" in which you try to eat or consume things that are grown, harvested, slaughtered, made, woven, or wrought within 100 miles of where you live. The idea is that you support local farmers, local businesses, local craftspeople and local manufacturing. It costs less energy to get the stuff to you and the sources being closer, you can see how organic, or sustainable, or Green the producer really is.
It is a good idea. However, it also means that in February you might be living on salt pork, sauerkraut, onions, storage potatoes, and home-canned fruit. It is do-able but not rating high on the fun scale without a lot of work. For me, the various pharmaceuticals I have to take to keep from dying, come from more than 100 miles away. Some come from Indianapolis, others from Richmond Hill and some from Montreal.
But the concept is sound. Buy local as much as you can. The Mississauga Farmer’s Market is about two blocks away from here. You can walk up to the grower, ask questions about how they grow their food and even taste it before you buy it. I’d rather give a local farmer my money, directly, than a produce broker in New Jersey who sells it to a distributor, to a middleman, to a store, then on the shelves.
The less hands and fingers involved with my food, the potentially healthier it will be and the greater potential that there was the least amount of non-renewable energy expended to get me to the point of cleaning up crumbs after eating a BLT with Mayo.
Which brings us to water.
Humans are about 90% water. We need to drink clean, fresh, uncontaminated water to live. For that matter, all the things we eat need clean, fresh, uncontaminated water too. Bad water applied to things we eat, means we get sick, sometimes quickly, like E. Coli tainted spinach, sometimes slowly, like mercury in tuna, or fire retardant in breast milk.
Using the Great Lakes as a toilet is Stupid. Running a dishwasher for three cups, two plates a handful of utensils and a cutting board is also Stupid. Allowing businesses to dump manufacturing effluent into a body of water is Stupid. Using water to keep a lawn green is Stupid, especially in a desert.
Potable water, the stuff that comes out of your tap, most often called ‘city’ water is generally clean, pure and healthful to drink. Rain water, the stuff that falls from the sky, is not, legally, potable water. However, it works just fine to irrigate crops, water the lawn, wash the car, or to hose down the family dachshund. I am assuming your roof isn’t covered with diseased carrion or nuclear waste.
Collecting rainwater is sensible and Green, reducing your use of potable water, but there are improvements that could be made. By law, all the water that comes into a house must be drinkable by humans. The water in the tank of your toilet is perfectly safe, potable water. The water that departs after you flush, is not. We must be protected from sewage and that makes sense. But the water from your shower, or from the dishes is, aside from being soapy, or greasy, or tainted with crumbs from a BLT with Mayo, is perfectly fine for the garden.
What we need is a way going forward to keep potable water, greywater and sewage separate. Sewage we all agree needs thorough treatment. Greywater, like the shower, the laundry or the dishes needs a little treatment. Potable water is already clean. Ideally there would be two sewer pipes coming out of the house. One for the sewage and one for greywater.
Following on, trying to be even more Green, one would go over to a composting toilet and use composted human waste as fertilizer. However, it doesn’t quite work in an urban highrise apartment building. The retrofit costs are too high and the payback is too nebulous for a landlord. There is also the "ick!" factor of using composted human waste products in a garden that is hard to get over, but is done in a number of countries, quite safely.
Reducing the amount of water you use is easy. Make sure the dishwasher is full before you run it. Use biodegradable soap and laundry detergent, as it takes less energy to clean the waste water. Don’t spend forty-five minutes under the shower, unless there is some very strong, compelling medical reason why. Use water restricting shower heads and taps. Put a bucket in the shower and use that water on the petunias or the impatiens. If you can, get a rain barrel and hook it up to your downspout to water the lawn. Capturing rain water means you can screw the Water Company out of a few dollars, which always feels good.
And the last two? Fix leaky taps. Hire someone, or learn how to do it yourself. The final one is this ditty: "If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, send it down."
The industrial side of it is a little harder to fix. Perhaps a law that the CEO of every company that uses water in their processes, must drink a liter of their wastewater every month. That would ensure that the water leaving a factory would be just as clean as the water going in.
RoadDave 