Living "Green"

[gams]

I'm not quite sure where to stick this, but in here seems like the most logical place. I read in a magazine about a web-site that offers daily tips for "green-living" - eco-friendly ideas.

www.idealbite.com

Actually, the entire April issue of Country Home where I found the website, is, in celebration of Earth Day, April 21, eco-friendly. Good information, and cool ideas. Worth a read if you get the chance.

[Quettalee]

I absolutely love this site; thanks for sharing. I have it in my favs now and will be a frequent flyer for sure.

Lots of good info there and I love the Marketplace.

[Quettalee]

And I didn't find this at the site--yet--but I did hear it on the news yesterday and this seems like a great place to stick it.

Props to SF, and hopefully more cities will follow suit.


SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) -- San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to become the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags from large supermarkets to help promote recycling.

Under the legislation, beginning in six months large supermarkets and drugstores will not be allowed to offer plastic bags made from petroleum products.

"Many [foreign] cities and nations have already implemented very similar legislation," said Ross Mirkarimi, the city legislator who championed the new law. "It's astounding that San Francisco would be the first U.S. city to follow suit." (Watch why it's no longer politically correct to 'think plastics' )

"I am hopeful that other U.S. cities will also adopt similar legislation," he said. "Why wait for the federal government to enact legislation that gets to the core of this problem when local governments can just step up to the plate?"

The city's Department of the Environment said San Francisco uses 181 million plastic grocery bags annually. Plans dating back a decade to encourage recycling of the bags have largely failed, with shoppers returning just one percent of bags, said department spokesman Mark Westland.

Mirkarimi said the ban would save 450,000 gallons of oil a year and remove the need to send 1,400 tons of debris now sent annually to landfills. The new rules would, however, allow recyclable plastic bags, which are not widely used today.

A spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who must approve or veto the legislation, called it sensible. "Chances are good that he is going to sign it," said Nathan Ballard.

[Quettalee]

**Satire

Whole Foods, Funny math and the Five Dollar Avocado
by Mike Adams-Holistic Nutritionist


I love Whole Foods grocery stores. I can't seem to leave the place without spending at least two hundred dollars on health food. Interestingly, that's only about one bag full of groceries from a typical Whole Foods store.

The last time I visited, I ended up buying a hundred dollars worth of raw food snacks. Thanks to Whole Foods, my monthly food bill now nearly exceeds my house payment! But I love every bite of it, and if it wasn't for this natural grocery chain being in Phoenix, I think I would literally have to move to California or Boulder, Colorado just to get near one.

But don't walk around blindly in a Whole Foods supermarket, buying up everything in sight under the assumption that it's all healthy and good for you. As much as I love the Whole Foods stores, the number of products they sell that contain questionable ingredients is rather surprising.

Much of the "natural" snack food section, for example, is made up of products with hidden MSG in the form of yeast extract. This ingredient is used by all sorts of natural-sounding food companies to enhance the taste of their products without having to list "mono sodium glutamate" on the label. Watch out for this hidden excitotoxin. It's in thousands of natural foods products, and many of them are sold at Whole Foods. The store describes itself as a "hydrogenated free zone" (meaning they don't carry products with hydrogenated oils, and that's a good thing), but there are plenty of other toxins found on its shelves.

That's just the beginning of the Whole Foods warnings. I recently purchased some potato salad from their deli and was later horrified to find myself chewing on a piece of bacon. Who puts bacon in the potato salad sold at a "healthy" grocery store anyway? There must have been some sort of anti-vegetarian food pervert hanging out behind the deli, tossing random slices of meat into the various dishes, just waiting for vegetarian-minded customers like me to come along and cough up a bite.

Needless to say, I ended up throwing away four dollars worth of Whole Foods potato salad. That equates to approximately three bites, since most food products sold at Whole Foods are marked up somewhere near the per-ounce price of precious metals. On a per-ounce basis, eating silver coins is probably cheaper than eating at the Whole Foods deli.


The salt that shrunk my head
Other selections from the deli also listed yeast extract right on the ingredients list! To avoid all the bacon and yeast extract, I decided to buy some fresh tortilla soup made by apparently famous sisters who are producing soup under the Whole Foods brand. I bought a large container of the soup, took it home, warmed it up in a pan (I don't use microwaves), and took a sip.

The blast of salt caused my lips and half my face to shrivel into a human prune that looked like a shrunken head from the Jivaro tribe in Ecuador. It required two liters of fresh water to rehydrate my face back to a semi-normal shape. (I'm still ugly from the incident and will now stick to radio appearances only.) It seemed there was enough salt in that container to kill a horse. Sure, the ingredient was listed on the product, but since the food was made locally, it had no nutrition facts label. If there had been such a label, the line for sodium might have read: sodium 25,000% - enough to power chemical rocket motors at NASA.

At this point, I was pretty sure that the anti-vegetarian food pervert who spiked my potato salad with bacon also had control of the Whole Foods salt supply and was madly dashing about the kitchen, shirking mounds of sodium into recipes that otherwise would have been perfectly fine to eat.


Funny math at Whole Foods

Fortunately, I also purchased a container of fresh fruit, which helped counteract the salt assault of the soup. (Kind of a tongue twister there. Say it five times fast: "Salt assault of the soup..."). The price of that fruit, notably, was enough to pay an entire crew of Southern California agricultural workers a week's wages. As far as I can tell, it's the most expensive fruit in the world. British royalty don't even pay this much for fruit.

Here's the best part: I actually found organic avocados at Whole Foods priced at (this is not a typo): 2 for $5 each

Now let's think about this for a minute. Two avocados for five dollars each. Isn't that the same as two avocados for ten dollars!?

Geesh! Why all the funny math?

Why doesn't Whole Foods just say 2 for $10? Because nobody in their right mind would pay five bucks for an avocado. Would you?

I got to thinking, why don't we expand this fuzzy math to other products? How about cans of soup sold at "5 for $2 each!"

Or, perhaps, gasoline: "10 gallons for $3 each!"

If you do this exercise enough times, you quickly realize that the formula of X for $Y each means the same thing regardless of the X.

In other words, the following pricing statements all describe the exact same price for an avocado:

1 for $5
2 for $5 each
5 for $5 each
10 for $5 each

See my point? The "X" part of this statement is meaningless. It all comes down to the use of the word "each," of course. The "each" makes the "X" irrelevant.

If this is bringing back groggy, half-drunken memories from your college entrance exams, don't fret. Just consider this: If a woman bought five avocados at Whole Foods and is on a train traveling East at thirty-five miles per hour because she could no longer afford to hire a cab, and there's another train traveling West at twenty-seven miles per hour...

Ah, never mind. Word problems and healthy food don't mix.

I have a message for Whole Foods: Just tell us how much the freakin' food costs, OK? Don't make us have to decode your little math brainteasers in order to arrive at a per-item dollar figure. Shopping at Whole Foods should be a health experience, not a math experience.

I still love the store, mind you, and I can personally handle the math requirements. But that's only because I eat a lot of avocados, and they're good for brain health.

My overall view of Whole Foods? Two thumbs up. Way up. This store rocks. Especially if you own shares of the corporation and get a cut of the profit on those avocados.

(Disclaimer: I own no shares in the Whole Foods company, but given how much money I spend there, I'm pretty sure that NOT owning shares is about the dumbest financial decision I ever made. Hopefully, YOU own shares in Whole Foods, and you're earning some dividends off my repeat purchase of fresh produce priced like gold.)


I thought this was interesting because we have of course experienced the same thing at our favorite Whole Foods every time we go. Although...I think we actually got out of there for around $55 the last time we went; but that has been the cheapest visit ever.

We barely slow down traveling through the fresh produce just because of the prices. Occasionally, there will be a good deal on a particular fruit, but I draw the line at a $3 bag of carrots or an apple that sets you back $2.

We do usually hit the breakfast/salad bar and share a plate. Mainly because I like to sample all the "oddities" that come from mixing tofu and anything. Some are really good, but just as good without the tofu. And what is tofu, but a meat substitute? I really don't miss the seared animal flesh at all anymore. The couple of things that I do miss (bacon, lunch meat sandwiches, a good hot dog--talk about a contradiction in terms--are so bad for you, it really isn't much of a thought anymore.

Alas...I wish I knew then what I know now. Thank the gods that you can reverse some of the damage by simply eliminating some of the bad.

[gams]

LMAO! I've never been to Whole Foods; I've never heard of it prior to you talking about it here, Q. I don't think we have one around here.....but this article is hilarious.

BTW, Whole Foods is mentioned in one of the books I'm reading, "Flower Confidential". Might be an interesting read for you, Q, (I just read you like non-fiction). It's about the floriculture industry; the good, the bad, and the ugly. You wouldn't believe all that goes on behind the scenes just to get a single rose to market.

Good news - there is a huge push to get organically grown flowers to market - at a huge advantage to the environment, the workers, and the customers. And while most consumers and even retailers never give a thought to there even being such a thing as an organically grown cut flower, (in the U.S. anyway - Germany and the Netherlands are big on them), Whole Foods is one of the places where they will probably make their appearance known.

[gams]

I met the most interesting woman today - LX's friend's mother. They recently moved here from Indiana, and this is the first time LX's friend's been over to the house; she's spending the night. I had to go pick her up from her house, because they have no car - they "went green", the mother explained.

No car, and most of the year, no house - May through October they live on a 30 foot sailboat docked at the marina. Now how cool is that....when the weather is nice.

I could not imagine living without a car; not here anyway. Our downtown is walkable; I run most of the errands I have down there leaving from my house on foot. But shoot - everything else is out of town - long distances of of town. And small towns generally don't have public transportation; ours doesn't, unless you count the one or two mini-buses that'll come to your house to pick you up and take you somewhere in town - if you schedule the trip a day in advance.

But she is an Earth Sign; she confirmed the fact that she was many times in the fifteen minutes I spent at her winter-house. I'm not sure what an Earth Sign is, but with the boat, and this winter-house, I'd peg her for more of a Water Sign; whatever a Water Sign is, I'm not sure of that either. Nor am I sure why she kept telling me of her Earth Signness.

The house! Their house sits with the beach out one window, lighthouse out another, and channel, less than a stone's throw from a third. It'd be dangerous for me to live there; I'd run the risk of sitting in front of the windows all day. As it was, I was mesmerized watching the waves roll down the channel as she told me once again she was an Earth Sign.

Whether all this greenness is the result of her recent divorce, which she mentioned between Earth Sign confirmations - (she got the boat; that she told me. He got the house and SUV?) - or because she's truly gone totally "green", this is one high-energy woman; screw the electric company - she seems to create all she needs herself. Sheesh, she wore me out.

[Quettalee]

She was making me tired, as well, C. I had to digest all that a day or two before I was able to do the two-minute drill to find out "my" sign. Of course, being "naturally inquisitive" and "thirsting for knowledge", I could only put it off for so long.

I am an Air Sign. Some of it was in the neighborhood...Chief fault is trickery. Air is crafty, underhanded and ingenious when it comes to evil...though not prone to physical violence. At its worst, Air is the epitome of mean-spiritedness and will invariably harbor a grudge. Air is swift to express opinions and is exceedingly opinionated. Air will not hesitate to verbally express anger, but physical violence is not generally a first choice in terms of an attack....would that be like my..."dark, Xena-side"?? "Grudge" is such a harse word. I usually don't have a problem "forgiving", but "forgetting"...that never happens.

OK, now knowing that you probably didn't take the time to two-minute this one, I did it for you. You are Earth Sign too! Did she tell you that?

Too funny, Gams. But the part about living on the boat is waaay cool.

[gams]

I am an Earth Sign? No, I'm not. Well, maybe; I dunno. I did do a two-minute Earth Sign drill after you said I was, but other than remembering at the time I thought most of it didn't fit, I don't remember what did.

Well, I ran into the Green Earth-Sign Woman again recently; our paths have crossed a handful of times since I wrote the post about her, and I have to admit I've cringed inwardly during each chance meeting. I find her to be more manufactured and artificially plastic than "green", and I suppose when I wrote the post, I was trying to change my first impression of her by attempting to come up with some redeeming qualities. Sigh. I came up short.

Have you ever done that? Tried to influence your own first impressions of a person by thinking to yourself, 'dang, give this person a chance, will ya'. There is a Chinese proverb that says: "Don't be over self-confident with your first impressions of people." Give the person the benefit of the doubt. But it is also said that first impressions are lasting impressions, and I guess that's the category the Green Earth-Sign Woman fits into in my mind; she struck me as being "phony" the first time I met her, and unfortunately, each meeting since as only re-enforced that feeling.

[Quettalee]

By the gods, Mare is always preaching to me to not be so judgemental of people at first impression. But I can't help it. If you study people the way I always have and you pay attention to what they do and how they react and their body language and facial expressions...and their eyes--especially their eyes, you get a pretty fair insight into what they are.

I am trying to grow and be more "open-minded"...but very seldom am I wrong. Well, about that, anyway.

[Joxcee]

I think first impressions are usually right. You should "trust your gut." That doesn't mean you shouldn't give the person a chance though. People do have bad days, and the 'vibe' they give off could be a bit tainted.