Saving the World, One Towel at a Time

Unfortunately I don’t have any epic adventures to blog about this week. Just some random musings…
I gave the bus another chance! I took it to Santa Monica to get a little nature time in at the beach. I knew what bus to take and where to get off, so it wasn’t a ridiculous debacle like last week, and all in all it was a very enjoyable trip. I still get annoyed with the amount of time it takes to get form point A to point B, but that’s mostly because patience is not one of my strong points.
I’m still vegetarian, and I had been planning on integrating meat back into my diet at the end of the quarter, but after watching Our Daily Bread and Food Inc. and reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’m not so inclined to be carnivorous at all anymore. Actually, I don’t feel like any food is safe anymore! I’m really freaked out by the volume of corn we eat on a daily basis. You can’t avoid it. I suppose if I really wanted to escape the world of corn, I could try to live solely off of fruits and veggies, and maybe get the rest of my food from the wild, but I’m not exactly Bear Grylls and I really don’t see hunting and gathering in my future. Joel Salatin and the McGrath farm have me conflicted about organics and sustainability as well. I don’t know what criteria to include in my cookbook anymore, because it seems like everyone has a different idea on the criteria our foods should meet. Imported organics? Locally grown but with pesticides? Grass fed beef or no beef at all? What is a girl to eat?! Fortunately, or unfortunately, I don’t really know which anymore, I don’t have too much room to make decisions while I’m on a meal plan and more or less confined to dining hall fare. I have no idea where my food comes from or what processes it went through to get to me. Sometimes things are marked as organic, but I have no idea what benefit that brings anymore. I suppose ignorance is bliss, because if I knew the biographies of all of the foods I eat at school, I would probably starve to death. Thank you Brian for exposing me to the ugly truth about food and ruining my life. Hehe I’m kidding. Mostly…
On a side note, I really enjoyed the Big Organics chapter of Omnivore’s Dilemma. They talk about Earthbound Farms and the Salinas Valley, which is where I’m from! Agriculture is life here. Salinas is the Salad Bowl capital of the world. Woot woot…Just about everyone is involved in some part of the process of growing or selling it. Right across the street from my house are fields. I’ve been on tons of school fieldtrips to farms, so the trip last weekend to the organic farm was no novelty for me.
Speaking of home, I’m currently home for the weekend and I am enlightening my family about all the things I’ve been learning about sustainability. I’m probably getting on their nerves by now, but I’ve convinced my mom to make a few changes. I was telling her about how I don’t like to do laundry so I use two towels each week. She says, “If I had a bigger bathroom to hang our towels I would do that.” I look at her and say, “Mom, I share a shoebox of a bathroom with two other girls, and we all hang and reuse our towels all week. Your bathroom is the size of my dorm.” My family uses a new towel each time they shower, and if they shower every day (which I hope they all do) that’s 21 towels a week. She realized how much less laundry she could be doing and was convinced. Success! Saving water, energy, laundry soap, and time! And I talked her into using reusable shopping bags, mainly because they can be pretty cute, but another success nonetheless. And now I’m trying to get her to warm up to the idea of using reusable water bottles. They go through a ridiculous amount of bottled water here, but baby steps…
Tune in next week to find out what else I’ve talked my family into doing : )