The boys have been reminding me, in a very earnest way, to reduce, reuse, and recycle, in keeping with their various school-related Earth Day activities. I think we do a fairly decent job of that in our house: we recycle everything we can, we use steel water bottles and reusable shopping bags, we try to keep our house from overflowing with plastic consumables, although this is fairly relative. The boys do have plastic toys, we did – due to Jake’s incessant talking about it – receive a landfill-destined Slap Chop for Christmas. The Slap Chop: thousands of years from now landfills will be studded with those monstrosities, possibly the best-marketed piece of junk ever invented. Vince, you liar. The Sham-Wow was a useful addition to our household, but the Slap Chop? Jake talked ceaselessly about it to his indulgent grandma and was thrilled when she gave it to us, and then was subsequently saddened when it became apparent that no, kids cannot use the Slap Chop and no, the Slap Chop doesn’t actually work. Don’t even get me started on the Graty.
Terrible plastic gimmicks and toys notwithstanding, we do try to minimize our environmental impact. However, there are many things I don’t do which I could do – I could walk the boys to school instead of drive, for example, I could xeriscape more and take shorter showers, I could use one of those Diva Cups if the thought didn’t make me totally squeamish.
It’s popular now to be a locavore, thank you “100 Mile Diet”. A friend and I were discussing the fact that people who you think should be compassionate and open minded are generally the opposite of that when it comes to food. Generally anyone who refers to their diet using the word “purist” is a zealot about it; however, I would probably be the world’s smuggest locavore if I lived in a different climate. I do purchase locally grown product when it is available, although I do not think that environmentally there is much difference between vegetables trucked from another province and ones that are grown in a hothouse in Alberta in the winter. For most of the year, if I was to eat only food produced within a 100 mile radius, I would be eating a lot of beef, pork, potatoes, wheat, and corn. My fruit choices would be Saskatoon berries and crabapples. Not to mention the fact that there are no nearby vineyards or locally grown coffee beans. So I think I will stick with my non-eco-friendly-more-than-100-mile-diet, with a side order of vague guilt.
What do you do that causes environmentally-related guilt?
100 mile diet is all fine and good but rather tough in the frozen tundra.
I keep forgetting my re-usable coffee mug and we have two cars. Not terribly good.
I’m not going to answer your question because you completely read my mind and that’s the topic of my next post. Ooo-weee-ooo. Freaky.
Did you watch the 100-mile-diet challenge on the Food Network? They filmed in near here and even in the heart of farmland these people found it tough. On one episode a woman was so desperate for a coffee like drink that she dug up chicory root from the weeds along the side of the highway and ground them up in hot water. Yum. I’m afraid I’m not that pure.