Westward Ho!

East Coast Post...

Really more of a bookmark for myself: a list of restaurants that Slow Food NYC has given its Snail of Approval.

Restaurants

Alias
(Manhattan)        

applewood    
(Brooklyn)    

Blue Hill
(Manhattan)        

Blue Hill at Stone Barns    
(Pocantico Hills, NY)    

Cookshop
(Manhattan)        

Craft    
(Manhattan)    

Esca
(Manhattan)        

5 Ninth    
(Manhattan)    

5 Points
(Manhattan)        

Flatbush Farms    
(Brooklyn)    

Franny’s
(Brooklyn)        

The Good Fork    
(Brooklyn)    

Hearth
(Manhattan)        

Home    
(Manhattan)    

Ici
(Brooklyn)    

Il Buco
(Manhattan)        

Lupa    
(Manhattan)    

Maremma Trattoria Toscana
(Manhattan)        

Mas (farmhouse)    
(Manhattan)    

Pearl Oyster Bar
(Manhattan)        

Prune    
(Manhattan)    

Rose Water
(Brooklyn)        

Savoy    
(Manhattan)    

The Tasting Room
(Manhattan)        

Telepan    
(Manhattan)    

The Award For Best New Meme of the Holiday Season Goes To...

Siel at Emerald City for "enviro-grinching."

As for me, my major faux-pas this December will be flying cross-country. Being Jewish, I'm not going to have a tree, nor Xmas lights. The few presents I'm buying will be (a) for grownups (no lead-containing toys from China) (b) minimally packaged. I'll be in NYC, and my parents do have a car that they use on the weekends, but aside from trips with them, my M.O. is to ride the subways and walk everywhere, possibly taking cabs if it's late and I'm drunk. :-)

I'll try to keep the grinching to a minimum.

Paper Or Plastic?

Like a good Californian -- and believe me, there are bad ones -- I'm a neurotic environmentalist and sustainability nut. Sure, those are easy claims to make these days when so many of the permaculture movement's hangers-on are so shallow (scroll down for painfully hilarious article commentary). But I really do lose quite a bit of sleep worrying about where the things we consume actually come from and where they go, and what they're made of, and how much energy is used to produce and recycle them, and whether the material is carcinogenic and/or toxic. Even the word "recycling" is fairly meaningless until we define our terms and look closer into the process at the local and larger scales.

I've never wanted to be one of "those" people, and I'll readily concede that I'm still sometimes guilty of choosing convenience over correctness, but I do try. Someone's gotta. The most important thing to remember re sustainability is to choose your battles wisely. Environmental, financial, social, and personal health concerns often have their own separate sets of issues and mitigation tactics. Figure out what's most important to you and fight the good fight, but don't put yourself in the looney bin if you can't be all things to all species. That said, don't be superficial either; think holistically about the world you'll be passing down to your kids.

A while ago, I picked up Daniel Imhoff's Paper Or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World (Sierra Club Books, 2005). The book is a well-researched info guide to one of the world's biggest industries, demystifying what most of us take for granted -- the stuff our stuff comes in. I appreciate the at-a-glance sidebar blurbs, such as the one I'm excerpting below, "Beverage Containers":

Foil Pouch
Advantages: Convenient, lightweight, and easily compressible.
Challenges: These multilayered, nonrecyclable materials are destined for the landfill. Soft-drink companies are rapidly adopting this packaging system, often to package a high-fructose product.

Single-Serving Plastic Bottle (accompanied by pictures of the various bottles mentioned below)
Advantages: Flexible and lightweight. Sometimes burned for energy generation.
Challenges: Only #1 and #2 have high-end recycling markets. Plastic #3-#7 lack a strong recycling infrastructure. Pollute waterways and marine areas. Oxygen barriers, fillers, and other coatings on bottles prohibit recycling. Plasticizers and other additives can potentially be toxic.

Gable-Top Carton (e.g. cardboard container of milk)
Advantages: Long-distance solution. Can be repulped and downcycled into paper towels and tissue paper at the end of life.
Challenges: Only reprocessed in certain markets. Can rot if not collected and reprocessed in a timely manner.

Aluminum
Advantages: Easy to recycle and has fairly brisk recycling markets in many areas of the world. Very strong material.
Challenges: Virgin aluminum is extremely energy-intensive. The mining and production of virgin aluminum has heavy impacts on habitats, particularly aquatic systems. Ultimately, it rusts and breaks down. While recycling does save considerable energy, the cans are not refillable.

Single-Serving Glass Bottle
Advantages: Highly recyclable. Strong markets for glass recycling in many regions of the country. Efficient use of materials.
Challenges: Heavier than many plastics and often not seen as desirable for long-distance transport of beverages. Doesn't biodegrade.

Refillable Glass Bottle
Advantages: Highly reusable. Ultimately recyclable. Works on a refill deposit system.
Challenges: Heavy weight limits the glass bottle to short-distance transport and therefore favors local food producers. Requires producer and consumer commitment or strict legislation.

greenKarat

Not that I'm in the market or anything, but an ad for a jewelry company called greenKarat came up in my Gmail and it made me think of an ethical-minded friend who was getting married and requested to her fiance that she would rather wear a cubic zirconia ring than contribute to the whole "blood diamonds" industry. Rightly so (although I'd sooner wear a Cracker Jack ring than something I've always associated with the Home Shopping Network). And of course there are considerations about mining limited natural resources in the name of human vanity. So if you know anyone with knot-tying on the brain, pass this link along.

Their mission statement says:

Throughout history, jewelry has held a special place in the fabric of human culture. Unfortunately, industrial methods of extracting jewelry’s precious metals and gems from the earth damage the land and endanger ecosystems. Further, industrial values frequently reduce the labor component of production to the level of a cog in a machine.               

Because of the cultural importance of jewelry, it is impractical to impose an end to its use. Efforts to create startling change rarely achieve significant impact. Long-term progress is realized when consumers internalize new values and infuse them into custom.                     

Our greater goal at greenKarat is to end destructive gold and diamond mining. We do not, however, strive to force that change through radical activism. While activist organizations play a critically important role in educating and motivating consumers, we believe that widespread and permanent change will ultimately occur through the voice of consumer buying decisions.                     

Our mission is to provide an ecologically and socially responsible jewelry alternative to those who seek change. We want to help you, in some small way, become part of the permanent solution. Together we can make a difference.

neosporin... now 44 percent more portable!

[N]ot only were the lame words "Neosporin tote" now lodged in my head, but I had one more pointless piece of plastic in my life. This little ointment vessel is hardly the worst offender out there, but as an example of insidious disposable culture, it's typical. I decided I should learn how it came into the universe. Behind our current environmental unraveling is not some vast and unknowable engine, after all, but a bunch of people, myself included, going to work in the morning and not being part of the solution.

SF Gate, via green LA girl

Flickr set: Lake of the Ozarks

Some of my favorite states are the ones that aren't rigidly northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest, or even what we think of as "midwest" (which can mean "west of Pittsburgh" or "north of Kentucky" or "east of Colorado," with some general agreement about where it all begins and ends but no consensus). I love the mid-Atlantic/Delmarva/Chesapeake states (New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia) because they're neither New York, New England, nor (strictly) the south, but driving through the farms and swamps of lower New Jersey, you can really start to feel the eastern seaboard's southward gravitational tug. Historically, the Mason-Dixon line starts along the bottom border of Pennsylvania, and if the line continued east out to the ocean instead of taking a downward right-angle, about a third of New Jersey would be "the south." And many people jokingly refer to the red-headed stepchild northern-bordering the MDL as "Pennsyltucky."

Parts of the mid-south are weird like that too -- the aforementioned Kentucky is directly below Indiana and Ohio (either far-west northeast rust belt or far-east midwest, depending on where you live), but Kentucky is invariably considered either midwest or mid-south. (Is there an upper south?) (If "Pennsyltucky" is rust-belt, is Kentucky itself at all rust-belt?) Missouri shares a border with Kentucky, and faces a similar identity crisis. As does Kansas, although much of that stems from confusion between Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO. And thanks to Route 66 running through Illinois, the "west" arguably starts way back in Chicago. Another thing that begins in Chicago is Amtrak's Southwest Chief line, which eventually hooks up with the right-of-way of the Santa Fe Trail, starting in... Missouri.

All this is leading up to Neato Coolville's Flickr photoset called Lake of the Ozarks, taken at the Lake Ozark amusement park and around central Missouri. Motel signs, muffler men, Indian kitsch, and best of all, the Jesse James Hideout. Reminds me of The Thing (Mystery of the Desert!) in Arizona. America is so beautifully bizarre; every time I get angry at the state of things and ponder fucking off to Chile or something, I see pictures like these and instead become really sentimental about the can-do spirit and warped creativity that made this country what it is.

Power Outage

We had a power outage in my neighborhood this afternoon. It only lasted about an hour and a half, but a lot of the local business owners seemed annoyed by it -- that their perishables were going bad, that their cash registers weren't working, that they might have to close during the blackout and lose the already small trickle of midday customers they were lucky enough to have. This is my second outage since I moved here; the first was in the middle of the night and lasted for several hours. I could have just slept that one off, but I ended up pacing my apartment in the darkness, listening to the schizophrenic across the street bellowing out his paranoid delusions and shattering glass. Short-term outages like this are rare in New York City -- we just let it build up until all the circuits overload and then get situations like the '77 citywide blackout, or the one a couple of years ago that apparently started in Ohio and took down the whole northeast power grid.

In today's LA Times there's an article about the heavy power usage that comes with heat waves like the one we're experiencing. The piece suggests we can prevent worst-case scenarios by conserving energy -- and that's something we should be doing anyway, but in weather like this, even the greenest thinkers will be chaining themselves to their air conditioners like Darryl Hannah to a South Central tomato vine. This also comes at a time when our public beaches are too contaminated to swim in, and there's pathetically little honest-to-goodness parkland where people can sit comfortably under shade trees. How are we supposed to turn to nature to keep us cool? My little western-exposure terrace is wonderful in the morning or after the sun has gone down, but it was so impossibly hot yesterday afternoon that I didn't even want to go out there to water the plants.

The greatest moment in TV history was on Married With Children when the Bundys decided they'd had enough of the heat and moved into the freezer aisle of their supermarket. Would that Ralph's actually bothered to keep its food cold...