Organic Booze??

I have not thought about that before because we rarely drink alcoholic beverages but of course it exists. 
David Suzuki's Queen of Green wrote about the Pemberton Distillery in her article Is the organic in your vodka? 
Very interesting indeed! 

Re-occupy your body or accept the 3 reasons to die for

Veggies on Wheels is the newsletter that comes with Pfenning's organic box and this time it reports on Pfenning's participation at the Guelph Organic Conference (which I did not go to because it's in Guelp and I don't have a car to get there). One of the biggest issues were GMO, courtesy of Monsanto. Apparently the majority of Canadians still don't know anything about GMO (which box do they live in?). The reader is then referred to the article Re-occupy your body and a pamphlet has been enclosed from Cban.ca (Canadian Biotechnology Action Network) with info on GMO but I talk about that in another post.   


I have not read the whole article yet because it's long but I'm sure it's good. The three reasons that are most threatening to our health, and according to the newsletter make up the primary causes of disease and death nowadays, are: 
- bad food 
- most prescription drugs
- a poisoned environment

Which one disturbs you most and which one can you influence the best? Go figure. 
I am not concerned with the second point (yet) as I don't take any drugs. The first one is half-concerning to me. I know we still do not eat completely organic.  I am not feeling great about our daughter drinking non-organic milk but she drinks lots and the non-organic costs enough. Also, I am sure we'd eat a bit more meat if the organic stuff did not cost a fortune. But it's not actually that difficult to eat healthy and decent food. You do the shopping, you decide what's in your cart, it's in your hands. And by the way, buying non-organic produce and peeling it in the hope to get rid of the bad stuff does not seem the best idea. You are still supporting the farmers who contaminate our environment and the bad stuff will go through the skin of some fruits and vegetables. 

The poisoned environment is a huge concern, especially with this government that's big on setting up environmental disasters. You can't really "un-poison" the environment and get rid of all the harm that has been done but we can slow down the add-on of chemicals and toxic substances to our air, water and soil. Looking around me it still doesn't happen enough. For example, when I cycle or walk I probably breathe in more greenhouse gases than the car drivers. That's nuts! I'm the victim of other people's polluting habits. I noticed that most people are happy to give me a ride (if I ask) but carpooling is still not very common. That's nuts too! Driving is just one issue, but you scan make up the list yourself of activities that harm our environment. And then start ticking off the bad habits you give up. This should become a mandatory, annual exercise for everyone. I wonder how slowly or quickly things would change and how big the procrastination rate is.  

Organic is better

In our organic box today we had blueberries from Earthbound Farms. On the inside of the packaging it reads: 

Earthbound Farm's organic produce is grown by 150 farmers on 33,000 acres, which keeps about 1 million pounds of conventional agricultural chemicals out of the environment every year.  

YEAH to organics!

I'm still Alive without pills

I finally went into the organic store just around the corner because our produce box was not delivered this week since the family that runs the business is on vacation (lucky them). They had the Alive magazine lying around and I took a copy home just out of interest. My first guess was proven right though and I am not impressed with the magazine. My hubby kindly reminded me that it was for free which explains the huge amount of advertisement. Actually, the advertisement abounds so much that I had trouble finding the articles when skipping through the pages. What a waste of paper! Even worse most of the advertisement are for some sort of pill! Natural and organic pills of course but I am so put off. I know there's no money to make in advertising fresh fruits and vegetables but to tell people that obviously make an effort to eat and live healthily (why else would you be in an organic/ health food store?) to take pills to stay healthy simply annoys me. How stupid you think people are ... okay, we are not going to discuss this here but I do not think that I ought to be taken tons and tons of pills if I have a healthy diet and exercise regularly and do not suffer from any physically or mentally impairing conditions. Granted, we do currently take Vitamin D and C supplement pills, D because there's not much sunshine around and C because of this crappy weather (change from below to above zero and vice versa every other day). If one fine day I'll be diagnosed with something devastating it's probably too late to start taking pills but I am not going to take a handful of them now in the hope it will prevent all kinds of stuff and I don't need to worry about eating junk food. And even though the content (the pill) might be natural and from organic ingredients it comes with a lot of packaging, mostly plastic, which is not good for our planet. Produce at the store comes without the packaging - that's much better.       

My news about diapers, meat, balcony and parking

       Our daughter now uses the potty at home when she is wearing panties. I am so glad she got the hang of it now even though she has not learned yet how to pull her panties down but we'll get there. At least she fights having diapers put on which is understandable now that she is all proud to use that thing that her parents kept pushing under her bottom for quite a while. When we go out she is in cloth diapers and at night we have to use disposable. I can't squeeze enough layers around her and into her diaper cover to prevent her from soaking through. Only disposable will keep her dry. 

We ate organic meat that we had actually purchased for the first time tonight. I can order from the same store that delivers the organic box and is does not even cost more than the supermarket stuff. Surely, it is the only organic meat we can afford right now. A roast of beef (around 1.5kg) costs $74. Organic ground beef is it for the next while or else we eat vegetarian and fish and thinking about it, salami and wieners from the European Import Store. Luckily I don't get there too often.     

I love our balcony. It stores our bikes, I dry the laundry there and it's a great playground and place to catch a fresh breath of air when need be during any nerve-straining home activities. Looking out on the buildings car park, a line of tall trees and dead-end neighbourhood street and in the distance the city centre light pollution is so little that we can see the stars, when they happen to be around. I noticed neighbours drying their clothes on their balcony as well. 

The car park with 70 spots is always half empty which we take as a good sign. There are about 46 units in the building. That means that not every unit has a car and most units defnitely do not own two cars.Talking about parking, the newly opened Waterloo Regional Museum has only built the minimum number of car parking spots required by law. Great, but they should have advertised this more before the Grand Opening today. Once the car park filled up drivers just put left their cars along both sides of the road despite the no-parking signs. The option to take a shuttle bus from the nearest mall was not well advertised either. We took a bus from home and then walked 2 km through a park to get there. Alternatively we could have taken two other buses and would have been gotten off 900 m from the museum. But the connection was so time-consuming it would have taken longer than the walk-option. If that's the nearest bus stop to the museum though arriving without a car will not appeal to many visitors.

Food's important

One of the first things we did in Kitchener is obviously to check out stores, food stores. There are different supermarkets here that weren't in Edmonton. Instead of Safeway and Save on Foods we have Food Basics and Value Mart. I was shocked to not find any organic fruits and vegetables (nothing beyond bananas) in any of the supermarkets. Even Sobeys and the Superstore are lousy. So we got straight into business with Pfennig's Organic Box delivery and I am happy as anything. Don't get me wrong, these big stores do have packaged organic foods just not fresh produce. The offer at the farmer's market was meagre too. There I could not believe how many stalls sells their produce for cheap, really cheap, obviously having bought it wholesale somewhere and needing to get rid of it. There was nothing like that in Edmonton, it was all local and at the time of the year were there's barely any local fruit and vegetable the stalls simply got filled with local crafts and arts. Not saying, one or the other way is better, just mentioning it. I suspect that in order to buy for example from the Mennonites here in the area we' d have to drive into the countryside and get it directly from their farm. We can still try the Farmer's Market in Waterloo but for this season it's closed. 

The other thing I noticed is the higher prices for dairy here and whole wheat flour. The latter one really bugs me. First of all it only comes in 5 kg and nowhere in 10 kg bags and then, depending on the store, costs 60-100% more than in Edmonton. Argh! So I'll keep now white flour in my cupboard too. I have taken to baking our own bread again very quickly because the first two loaves of bread I bought in Kitchener in different stores both were mouldy on day 3. 
Today my bread rose so well it does not fit into the freezer bags. Can't wait to taste it tomorrow.                

Alternative Agriculture

is the title of an episode of The Nature or Things that I watched on DVD from the library. I don't know how old it is and again it was not all new to me but it was very very wonderful to see green, trees, fields, and animals roaming freely in the foothills of the Rockies. Yes, I am feeling very deprived of nature at the moment, especially hearing about daffodils and cherry blossom from Europe. I am currently pressuring my husband into moving somewhere greener where we are not buried under snow and ice for six months and then wade through deep puddles for another month, before finally by mid- or end of May the first bits of green spring up. Sorry, I can't handle this! 

Back to the film. First of all, all the good examples of agriculture came from Alberta. There was the farmer with rare breed cattle & pigs, the farmer with organic pigs & chickens, and the farmer way in the Southwest of AB who raises organic cattle in the foothills. He belongs to a Co-op of 5 or 6 farmers that all got certified organic. It's better for the land, the livestock, the people, not only the farmer but also the consumer. This last farmer made the statement that some people make donations to organisations whose goal is to conserve and protect nature but when they go shopping they roll their eyes at the high organic meat prices and buy the cheap (bad) stuff instead. I agree. I do it although not often because we eat meat only once per week. At this point I should buy organic because it's not going to ruin us financially. Leaves me with the problem to get to where the organic meat is ... If you eat lots of meat though I guess buying it organic will leave way bigger holes in your pocket than the occasional donation. At least we don't donate money on a weekly basis, more like every couple of months. But his point is right: With what we buy we make a big statement about what we want and what we will not accept and supply follows demand, right?!


Second, the bad example came again from the US, North Carolina to be exact. Apparently it's THE pig country of the USA and of course the pigs are raised in crowded, feed lot conditions. The sewage generated by the pigs sits in ponds, smelling horrendeously, until it gets sprayed onto fields. The fields receive way more sewage though than they can cope with and the sewage seeps right down into the ground water and waterways. Consequently fishes die and the waterways sooner or later collapse. What's being done about it? Not much because the hog industry denies all accusations and surely being such a big industry they will have politicians "under control". Here's a great article from back in the 1990s: Watch out for killer algae: years of dumping hog wastes into North Carolina rivers has created a monster


Also in the US, around 90% of all antibiotics are fed preventatively to healthy livestock, and more than 3/4 of the grains grown in the US is fed to livestock as well.



Last but not least, I don't like the title of the documentary. Organic farming, or farming in a way where the livestock is respected and kept humanely and eats grass instead of grain and antibiotics should be the only way of farming. Isn't it terrible that our agriculture has gone so far that the natural approach to farming as it had been done for a long time before the industrial revolution is now the "alternative"!? 


 

Organic Milk

The Organic Box sells organic milk from Saxby Foods, an Edmonton business. In its latest newsletter they list all the organic dairies the milk comes from as well as some of the standards of how the cows are fed. The Edmonton Journal recently had an article on Saxby Foods too which is quite interesting. For example, does Saxby Foods not only sell their organic milk (and soon other dairy products) via independent retailers such as the General Earth's Store they also sells through the Safeway brand O Organics. As much as I dislike Safeway for being just another huge chainstore, it is the closest supermarket we live to and knowing that this milk is from local farms and processed by a local creamery makes me somewhat more inclined to buy it. Being a wholesaler the milk is also less expensive compared to other stores, unfortunately. 


In the newsletter I also hear from the infamous genetically modified crops again. Since most pasture crops are already contaminated with  GMO farmers are currently fighting to keep GM alfalfa out of the country. Alfalfa is at the moment still a very important food for organic cattle. If it becomes GMO contaminated organic farmers might be forced into what they usually try to avoid: feed grain. Looking at the link to the Organic Alberta Association an article catches my eye immediately:  Conservatives continue to block vote on moratorium on GM Alfalfa  Of course it's the effing Conservatives who spoil it, quote: “Conservatives are trying to play both sides of this issue because they know farmers want GM alfalfa stopped, but Conservatives don’t want to cross Monsanto. Presumably, Conservatives delayed the vote so that an election could save them from having to take immediate action to stop GM alfalfa.”

Too bad I can't vote and I am not convinced yet that there's enough smart Canadians to not tick the C box but this is just unbelievable. How can they even think about pleasing Monsanto, at the same time putting a large part of the organic food industry at risk of survival. Eating anything non-organic seems already almost suicidal to me and with a growing demand for organic food one really hopes the turn will come and people stop buying crap food so farmers stop growing crap food, I mean food stuffed with toxins. This would also stop the contamination of our soil, water and air with all those toxic chemicals.

The other side of plastic bags

I was at the dentist yesterday for check up and cleaning. As always I got a goodie bag of tooth brush, floss, tooth paste, more floss... The little plastic bag, that I wanted to reject, had an environmental logo on it and was from EPI (www.epi-global.com). I looked it up. They claim to have found the solution to breaking down plastic bags and making them biodegradable. Of course, if you read their blog posts they make all other bags bad, especially reusable cotton and jute bags. Below are the links to those articles. 

A study in the UK found that plastic bags have a smaller ecological footprint than reusable bags, unless you use your reusable bag more than 51 times. Honestly, I don't know why I wouldn't and throw my reusable bags out? They last a long time, I have had mine for years.  I don't even have to worry that they rip apart while I walk home. The study also assumes paper bags are used once only. When I go to the bulk food store I take my paper bags with me to fill them with cereals, nuts, grains etc. You bet I use them more than once because they are sturdy, too. Then somewhere it says that there is a hell lot of plastic packaging around us any way so why make such a fuss over plastic bags. Because you have to start somewhere. Maybe one fine day we are all back to bulk stores and you bring your own containers. That will automatically reduce the amount of recycling, not to talk about the volume of landfills. Dream a little dream. The other article tells us that E.coli and other bacterias grow in reusable bags, a problem not occuring in plastic bags. Sure, it's a world full of idiots, isn't it. Did I have to mention that you should wash your bags once in a while? Also, didn't we just say that most of our food comes in plastic packaging already, so what's the issue? It's not that you put your bread, fruit, cheese, sausage etc. without any packaging into the tote bag. If you worry about those bacteria how can you eat anything out of a non-organic supermarket - it's full of  things that are bad for you! And ever wondered about the bacteria within the supermarket, ever noticed that supermarkets are quite dirty places. 


I bet people who love their one-time-use plastic bags will love those articles. I don't. They don't mention that your jute or cotton regrows but the oil for your plastic bag does not.Of course, you could take bets now what will disappear earlier - oil or land that is still capable of growing crops. If the latter wins, we'll starve to death in no time so we don't need plastic bags any longer.
   
 http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/plastic-fantastic-carrier-bags-not-ecovillains-after-all-2220129.html


http://epi-global.com/blog/epi/alternative-to-plastic-bags-sparks-widespread-health-concerns/

When you go to Europe look for Eosta

Let me write about food again because we all love eating.  Daniel Goleman writes in his book Ecological Intelligence about Eosta, Europe’s largest distributor to retailers of organic produce. I had not heard of them before but then again, when did I shop the last time in Europe ...  Anyway, Goleman spoke to Managing Director Volkert Engelsmann and found out that every product has a 3-digit code. This code will give the consumer details on the farmer and a profile of the farmer's operations when entered on www.natureandmore.com! That's pretty awesome, similar to our Organic Box which tells us the originating farm of every product. Engelsmann believes in the power of a transparent market place. - Knowing the background of a product wins more and more importance amongst Canadians too according to a new study. Instead of complaining to a company about their "bad" product (from sweatshops etc.) though Canadians simply don't buy it and find something else. I hope so.     

Back at Eosta, Engelsmann also says: “We serve an awareness elite, people who are concerned about health, the environment, social issues.” I don't like that "awareness elite". Dave & I think of ourselves more as hippies than an elite. We simply want to eat well and we are willing to spend a little bit more money on food, if that keeps crap off our table. We are not keen on picking up one of those Western diseases either. For Engelsmann the term elite justifies high prices that only the "high-income elite" (I made that up) can afford. Great for the farmer but only to the point where you have enough rich people to afford your food. The Organic Box always aims to pay a good price to the farmers too but once they are way better off then we are I am not sure I want to give them that extra money. Even buying organic food I do compare prices. If I can get my cereal at one organic store for $20 per kg and at the competition for $12 per kg, guess where I will buy.  

Back to Eosta again:  Products are rated by independent experts for healthiness, social qualities, and ecological impact. Environmental aspects include for example water consumption and composting. Eosta does a full Life Cycle Analysis on all greenhouse gas emissions throughout the supply chain, from farm to plate, supervised by Germany’s national certification agency. Eosta supports innovation to reduce methane, a greenhouse gas. The reason is simple: If you compost organic waste instead of adding it to the landfill, and keep turning it properly, it will not produce any methane. It will turn into a stable compost that increases soil fertility, which in return erases the use for mineral fertilizers, and increases the soil’s water holding quality (less runoff). Crops are also more pest resistant. Much to the contrary, nitrogen fertilizers popular in common farming cause greater yields but crops are more susceptible to pests. That's why farmers then need pesticides. Producing and applying conventional fertilizer contributes 16% of all greenhouse gases, especially nitrous oxide which is 300 times more aggressive than CO2.      

Also let's not forget that “most agriculture takes place near rivers and in deltas, where chemical fertilizer runoff causes eutrophication", meaning the growth of algae explodes, the water is depleted of oxygen and other forms of wildlife lose their habitat. Engelmann continues with, "The World Bank has financed a program to hire people to cut back the algae this causes before it chokes off the oxygen aquatic life need. But we said, instead of burning the algae and other alien vegetation, we’ll use it for compost and gradually replace the need for mineral fertilizers that cause the problem in the first place.”  Pretty good, eh. There's such a (seemingly) simple way of dealing with the damage our modern society creates. If only the made the farmer clean up the algae who used the fertilizers in the beginning - he might rethink his agricultural practices. Learning by doing - you are in for a lesson.

The last two paragraphs make me think that there lies the reason for the high prices - Eosta does an all-around-job which I much appreciate. The consumer might need to know all of this though to accept the high prices, and still have the money to pay for it. When a friend of ours joked he needed a mortgage to pay for his organic beef, I thought we simply eat vegetarian instead. And I for my part will keep comparing prices of organic products and chose the cheaper one, and keep receiving the Organic Box so I don't have to buy the not-so-fresh organic produce at our closest supermarket.  

Organic Food and other things we eat - part 2

When I am at school supervising my first-graders during lunch it occasionally makes me shiver what parents give their kids to eat. Junk food, that’s what it is. That name is there for a reason. Kids bring sandwiches made from white bread, dry buns with chicken nuggets in between the bun halves, 2-minute soups, macaroni and cheese, and worst of all, “lunch mate” kits - lots of packaging for a few DIY-mini hot dogs or mini pizzas. Some bring fruit but unless it’s chopped into bit-size pieces they take a bite or two and throw it away because the whole apple is too much for them. If I catch the kid on time, I tell it to take the fruit back home or finish it later. I dislike food waste. Ruby only gets food that I would eat. We had once packaged organic baby food that gets mixed with water – it tasted like water. Of course, I don’t add spices, salt or sugar to Ruby’s food.      

The food of most school kids is low in nutrional value and high in fat and salt and that’s because a lot of it is processed food. I don’t believe the claims that processed food from the store is cheaper than preparing meals yourself. We’d be bankrupt if that was the case because I avoid processed food wherever I can. At a recent food fraud talk the speaker, a dietician, pointed out that when you read the ingredients list what you don’t want in your food (e.g. salt) should be less than 5% and what you want (e.g. carbohydrates or fibre) should be at least 20%. Good luck finding something with less than 5% salt! I am notorious for reading ingredients lists and I put a lot of stuff back on the shelf because of its high sodium or sugar content. Processed organic food is not necessarily better than non-organic. I held an organic vegetable lasagne in my hands the other day – it had 30% of my recommend daily amount of salt in one serving! Oh no!         

That’s still not where it stops. Remember Monsanto – I mentioned it before. It’s a chemicals-company gone agriculture. They developed genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) – corn is the best-known example. I’ll write more about it later because I watched a DVD about Monsanto but they also got these GMOs approved by the US American Food & Drug Administration (FDA). It makes me very suspicious about foods from the USA. How they managed? Oh well, the same people that work for the FDA have at some point worked for or with Monsanto or have otherwise ties with the company. No questions asked; the crops were not properly tested for their food safety before they were approved and today Monsanto has spread its crops in 46 countries - and in my understanding these crops have become pests themselves. Alone the name makes me sick: Monsanto – Mon Santo – My Saint, there is nothing saint about this company, it should go to hell, the faster the better.     

Organic Food and other things we eat - part 1

Have you wandered about the organic movement that’s taken off in recent years? I have. I always though food is organic matter, biodegradable, compostable. I thought all that we eat derives from plants or animals that are fed plants, apart from salt of course. But it’s obviously not that simple. So I looked up “organic” in the Canadian Dictionary of the English Language from 1997. Besides other explanations I found the following meanings for “organic”:

-         using or produced with fertilizers or pesticides;

-         free from chemical injections or additives, such as antibiotics or hormones;

-         simple, healthful, and close to nature

If I interpret this my way then non-organic food is unhealthy, far from natural and stuffed with antibiotics, hormones, and chemicals for example from fertilizers. And we eat it? Help! Obviously, at some point chemical fertilizers and pesticides meant huge progress, raising yield enormously, seemingly the solution to hungry people (if only the food was distribute evenly) and we would not have to worry about ever running out of food despite the rising number of persons on Earth. Sweet deal, right? But I am still sceptical about all that non-organic food, it just does not seem right.  There’s for example the food at McDonald’s that does neither decompose nor rot, not for months and maybe not even for years but we’ll have to stay tuned for updates since the person who put a McDonald meal on her shelf only did  this about 9 months ago. The article I recall from the news dates back a while now.

Similar as for cosmetics there’s a dirty dozen list for fruits and vegetables too because in the meantime we know that especially non-organic produce is not all that safe, neither for our health or our environment. Fruits & veggies tend to receive a lot of fertilizers and pesticides to keep bugs away and they can’t just be washed off. A recommendation I read on how to wash a non-organic peach went like that: wash, peel, wash again, eat. Would you bother doing it? And what’s that ripe peach going to look like once you peeled and washed it. Root vegetables can absorb a lot of “junk” from the soil, too. Thanks to our baby we switched to organic produce. We receive the Organic Box which sources as much produce as possible locally. Fruit tends to come from Southern B.C. and California. The quality is much better than the organic produce at our local supermarket that has a small range of organic produce to start with. There’s another problem though: Labelling. Most certified organic are certified by one or the other organisation and they might have different standards. With the Organic Box I trust the company here in Edmonton to check out there suppliers. After all, they tell you for every product which farm it comes from so I can also check out the farm’s website.                        

I remember asking someone I know if they were eating organic. No, it’s too late for us, she replied (They are 50-60 years old). But she works in the health sector too and attended a talk about harmful substances in cigarettes and foods. It did the trick, they eat almost all organic now, not just produce but also meet and sugar and … we can’t afford that yet. Unbelievable! Healthy, naturally grown food costs close to a fortune! I understand why but to me it’s just another example of science and economy gone astray.

Anyway, she said that one eats more consciously once you have paid a lot of money for that loaf of bread or that cookie. Yup, I think so. You don’t just shove it down your throat while driving or in front of the TV, bad habits altogether. It’s back to almost forgotten and abandoned table manners. The other profit from organic food should be less food waste – buy only what you need soon, plan meals ahead of time. A Canadian friend said once that it would be smarter the European way – have smaller fridge and shop more often for fresh food in smaller quantities. Without a car you don’t even get tempted to buy lots of food without knowing what to do with it.           

to be continued ...

Renewable Energies - Bullfrog-powered

We receive the Organic Box (www.theorganicbox.ca), fresh organic produce sourced in Northern Alberta, Southern BC, and a few Western US states such as California. They also offer local organic milk, bread, eggs, flour etc. They tell you the name of the farm or producer where your food comes from which is nice. Anyway, in their last newsletter they informed us that their operations, running the office, the warehouse, the coolers, are now bullfrog-powered.   

The Rocky Mountain Soap Company produces its "100% natural skin care" in Edmonton. Besides their own shops their products are being sold at the gift shop of our favourite museum in the city, the Royal Alberta Museum. That’s how I found out. Reading the website of the Rocky Mountain Soap Company I learn that they not only care about the ingredients of their products but also about the packaging, shipping, lighting, and the energy they use. They are bullfrog-powered.      

                 

Bullfrog is an Alberta power company offering 100% wind power for an extra 2 cents per kilowatt hour. They reckon it adds 40 cents per day to the average family’s electricity bill. I pulled out our last monthly bill – we used 85 KWH. For us that would be $1.70 per month extra, no big deal. But that would mean that the average household uses as much electricity in 4 days as we use in a month. We then thought about the average household … must be a house, with bigger or lots of rooms and possibly lots of appliances. Admittedly, our heating is not included in our electricity bill, we have a coin laundry in the basement and we don’t have many appliances or a block heater for our non-existing car. That leaves us with lights, phone, fridge & freezer, stove and laptops. Period.

Our power bill is actually something that terribly annoys me. We pay less then $30 per month, $5 is for the power, the rest is distribution and administration fees. Where is the incentive to save energy, please? Seriously, if we weren’t renting, we should simply install solar panels on roof or balcony and get off that grid. Even more so, because most of Alberta’s energy still comes from coal. Edmonton (and the rest of the prairies possibly) gets so much sun every roof here should be plastered with solar panels. It works fine for Germany and the sky there is more often grey, overcast, or something else but sunny.  I can hear the scepticism already, like, what about the angle of the sun in winter? Will it produce enough? Probably not, but winter does not last 12 months here. What about summer?! Imagine operating your air conditioning with solar power. Fancy! I mean, wind power seems to work and really it is not that windy in Edmonton. When I first came here I used to mark in the calendar when there was actually a breeze outside, it seemed so rare to me.With everything humanity has invented I am sure there's a way to install solar panels so they catch the most sunshine possible. Some smart brain will now how.   

Taking shopping to a new level

I went to check out the Earth's General Store - you greener grocer (http://egs.ca) today. It's an independent store that opened recently not too far from us. "Not too far" is measured on the size of Edmonton. It's 20 minutes on the bus. It's a great store. They sell grains & cereals, body care products and laundry detergents in bulk, some of them also pre-packaged. But they encourage customers to bring their own containers - great idea. They sell mesh bags that have a pull cord on top - 4 for $13 - I better make them myself. Otherwise, for the dry stuff they have paper bags that cost 5 cents each but there's no containers offered for the liquid stuff. 
Apart from foods and toiletries, they have diapers and a few other baby products, worm compost boxes and worms, rain collection barrels and lots of information on all kinds of "green things". The owner tries to offer a wide range of products in a small space so there's only a few containers of each product on the shelves. I bought Dave a toothpaste with all natural ingredients for his sensitive teeth and it costs about 5 times as much as the cheap paste I usually buy - and it was still the cheapest tooth paste in that store. I bought soap, borax and cereal, one is hemp cereal - yummy - and one is a 7 grain mix that needs to be mixed with liquid and I hope it will work for Ruby. I would love to shop there regularly for everyday foods but for now I think it will stretch our budget a little but too far. Alone switching to organic produce had a remarkable impact on our food budget which might be because we eat mostly vegetarian. Anyway, I think it's worth  it and I think we have a good diet. I'll come back to organic food in another post.