Food has become a nightmare

This morning I had a another fit about American food. Oh yes, I miss German food. We don't add vitamins to our pasta and we don't colour our cheeses orange or marble. I hate cheddar in the meantime because it seems to be the only cheese for under $20 per kg and I don't understand why. What's so difficult about making other cheeses - why can only cheddar be produced so cheaply? Gouda, Edam and Co taste much better. When I was pregnant I was always asked at the doctor's office if I was still taking my vitamins. No, and I never have been. I eat a healthy diet so what do I need vitamins for? 

Do you know Michael Pollan? If you care a little bit about what you eat you will have heard of him because he writes one book after the other about food, American food or the Western diet as he calls it. Actually, the Western diet for him consists of "food-like substances", not actually food itself any more - I agree. Due to very strong lobbying groups in the American food industry nobody dares any longer to say you should not eat red meat, dairy, avocados or what ever. Instead they boiled it down to nutrients - don't eat saturated fats, carbohydrates, MSG (which I recently found on a shelve in the spices section of a shop - who would buy that?) ... and so on, but do eat Omega-3-fats, vitamin D, fibre, blablabla ... now go figure where you find or not find these nutrients. Of course, the food industry can manufacture lots of the "good" stuff now into almost any processed food and then advertise it big. Try HARDER! We eat very little processed foods so I don't care. Besides, everything seems to be about calories and reducing fat and sugar and ... we don't all want to slim down so again, I don't care, but I'm tired of this nonsense. Did I mention yet that I found a super yummy yoghurt the other day, produced in Quebec it's called Liberte - in fact, it's liberating to eat because those 8% fat and lots of fruit are very satisfying. Besides, we received organic lentils from Saskatchewan with our Organic Box and they smelled like fresh from the field!           


Of course, there's lots of processed and junk food in Germany, too. Europe takes on too much stuff from the USA anyway and crap food is part of this. Meat also is sold wrapped in styrofoam and plastic wrap and lots of food is packaged in single portions and there's too much fat and sugar in food products ... but we have decent cheeses and chocolates that taste better and are cheaper. There was a hint in the last sentence - watch for the packaging of your food, less is better.     

Busing around

I am terribly in love with our new jogging stroller but I still prefer to go to bed with my husband. Sleeping by the way is a very green "activity" because one is not consuming anything else but air. Anyway, with our new stroller we can really enjoy fresh snow since it simply ploughs through the white stuff. That consumes some of my energy but with a few home-made cookies, so I know what's in them, this is not a problem. On the bus I still take the old smaller stroller. 

I take the bus across the city to school now and my colleagues are worried about that. It takes so long and the service is so bad ... amazing what picture there's about public transit in Edmonton especially from residents that never use it. Others think it is just plain crazy to commute so far by bus (45 min). I know mostly stay-at-home-mums and non-working-women-whose-husbands-earn-a-fortune in Edmonton so they don't have to commute at all. In Edmonton these people do not leave their neighbourhood very much because the city is set up so that everything is relatively close-by (malls, leisure centres, libraries, certain medical services). The important word here is relatively because people still feel like they need a car to be able to live in Edmonton due to its sprawl. This is a controversy to me, one I have trouble getting over, too. I have not ever seen such an attitude in any European city before. In fact, having moved to the other end of Ed turns into starting all over again - might as well have moved to Calgary. 

Public transit has for sure an image problem in vast parts of North America. In Edmonton it is for poor people: students, homeless, old and decrepit residents with walkers or crutches, a few weirdos and us. But I’m a European and I don’t see what’s wrong with public transit. Living in a city should not require a car. Apart from driving gas-guzzling cars – I have never seen so many pick-up trucks and vans as in Edmonton - 89% of all drivers in Alberta are distracted while driving. Besides the majority of car rides in Canada cover less than 5 km. So why on earth do people not walk, cycle, and take the bus, if they are not only harming the environment but also endangering their own life and the life of others? It's an addiction that has not made it yet as far as prescription drugs - a professional needs to sign that it's good for you.

Here another attitude in need to be erased. Drivers here think gasoline is expensive, especially for living in an oil-producing country, but happily buy that bottle of water or pop that costs more and by itself has negative environmental impacts. In 2007 having a Cavalier-sized North American car would cause its owner costs of around $9,000 per year (including depreciation), with the average Canadian driving 18,000 km per year. Considering that most households have two cars out the door, this cost is obviously not high enough for city-dwellers to demand better public transit, or at least try it as it is currently. There's a reason why Edmonton Transit advertises "the every day way to save $5500 a year".

A visit of a different kind

In autumn we visited the Waste Management Centre in Edmonton  which claims to be the most sophisticated in North America. At the facility they recover 6 out of 10 garbage bags through recycling and composting, the rest still goes to landfill. Additional facilities to recycle more materials are under construction with the goal to recover 9 out of 10 garbage bags. I never really thought about the ratio of garbage that gets recovered but I was honestly a bit shocked by the small ratio of recovery that apparently is a big one. I mean, other cities seem to stuff even more garbage right away into landfills and don't further think or care about it. Urgh. 

Edmonton’s Centre has been a huge investment that lots of communities are not willing to take, but that’s desirable. Coastal cities that dump waste into the ocean, incinerators that produce the most toxic man-made substance on Earth (Dioxin), and exporting waste to places like India because countries like the USA create so much waste they can’t cope with it are not good for our future. Getting industry to design products that last would be a huge progress but we also need to remind ourselves that everything that gets dumped stays on the planet, no matter what. In order to keep this fact in people's minds it should be part of every school's curriculum to take the kids to a waste management facility ... and make the facility an operating exhibit. Just like in Edmonton, only that here they do it with proud which cities with incinerators will not do.   

http://www.edmonton.ca/for_residents/garbage_recycling/edmonton-waste-management-centre.aspx

Read on and make use

I wanted to mention a few interesting websites: 

The Good Guide website, http://www.goodguide.com/, scientifically rates a vast range of every day products according to established health, society and environment criteria. You can filter products with the help of these categories depending on what you care most about, search by product or simply look at the best and worst products in each category. The down turn is that it is for the US market so if you do not live in the USA it might not have products you use.    

The Outdoor Industry Association has an Eco-Index, http://www.outdoorindustry.org/gov.csr.ecoindex.html, that "is a ground-breaking environmental assessment tool designed to advance sustainability practices within the outdoor industry." I think that is a great idea because companies that make their money thanks to the 'great outdoors' ought to protect exactly those spaces. All other companies should do that to but as always  somebody needs to make a start ...   
The Energy Bulletin, http://www.energybulletin.net/, is a website I stumbled upon accidentally but it's just bursting with great articles. If only I had more time to read.

Paperless New Year's resolutions

David Suzuki Foundation asks on Facebook "What is your green New Year's resolution?" I wonder how many people have a green NY resolution at all. My skepticism says not too many and surely not enough. But I hope that losing weight and watching less TV aren't top of the list for millions again that will give up on their goal within a month. Both of these goals could be achieved by living a greener life, walk - don't drive, eat veggies not processed foods and lots of meat, exercise ... Despite growing concern for the environment amongst us I think most people still think of themselves not the planet when it comes to New Year's resolutions. Personally,  I don't have any resolution - I don't need New Year to change something.When I come up with something, a change for the better for myself or the environment, why shelve it until New Year? If I had one of those great ideas today does it make sense to wait 362 more days to implement it, 362 more days to neglect the environment or myself? Nope, it does not. But I don't want to demotivate anybody who does have NY resolutions because usually it is something worth pursuing so it's better be done sometime rather than never. 

Living at the new place we wanted to sign up now for Bullfrog Wind Power. Mountain Equipment Coop is bullfrogpowered, too, I noticed today. Yes, we live closer to this store now and just bought a bike trailer that is collapsable and converts into a stroller with lots of space for shopping and big wheels for snow. :-) Back to Bullfrog Power, it turns out they want the site number of the building we live in. It happens to be on our EPCOR energy bill but of course we have not gotten one for this place yet. We'll wait but not forget about it. Today I also signed up again to receive our energy bill online instead of by snail mail. That EPost option via our bank account needs a little practice but maybe I got it right this time. All our other bills come already by email. If we could now receive our pay check by email too that would be great but to be honest I have had this option only in one job so far, that was in New Zealand through Adecco.  Do companies have green New Year resolutions? That would be a good one.

   
  

A few recent occurences

Dave was given by his dentist a tooth paste for sensitive teeth with "instant relief" guarantee. Reading the small print it turns out this stuff is highly dangerous, recommending users to call Poison Control if they happen to swallow more than the amount needed for brushing their teeth! How did this stuff get on store shelves?

Our new apartment also needed some serious cleaning and I was recommended to get CLR, a cleaner that removes stubborn stains from calcium, lime and rust. Reading the packaging I was shocked about the aggressiveness of this product and considered not to get this near my household, not only because we have a baby but also because this stuff should stay where it is - safely in its bottle, unopened.


Have you wondered how our bath versus shower water consumption turned out? My husband uses more water for his bath than I use for a simple shower, that is without washing my hair. So maybe his bath comes to about the same as my shower with washing my hair. He still uses less for his bath than his shower.  The last days I have taken a few bathes in a puddle because our new shower head is terrible and needs to be changed, the sooner the better.

I hate urban sprawl, once and forever

Walking around our new neighbourhood today we thought once more about the wasteful way Edmonton has been built over many years. Edmonton has the second largest urban sprawl in North America which is obviously due to large residential lots, one-storey houses (bungalows), wide streets and roads as well as back alleys, and of course malls with lots of big box stores and huge parking lots. 

Back alleys seem a convenient thing for the city to pick up garbage and residents to park their vehicles instead of using the already spacious street in front of their houses but they sometimes more resemble a landfill, depending on the neighbourhood. I'd love to see Edmonton shrink in a computer simulation that cuts out all those back alleys - must make a huge difference. In my opinion it's a lot of public land that's being used poorly and that keeps neighbours separate. With everyone going out the back door where the car's parked the front streets tend to look deserted and if you were lost you'd have trouble asking for directions ... maybe that's why everybody has a GPS here.  

In the newer suburbs city planners learned from the past - there are no more back alleys. Instead there are often walkways now, especially when the neighbourhood borders one of the many ravines in town. But the streets are not logical any more. There are crescents, dead-ends, curves and bends, a far cry from the simply grid system that once started off the city. I guess they try to prevent through-traffic but in the end they get people lost, driving around searching, wasting gas in the meantime.  

Urban sprawl is fine when it's for the sake of parks. I, and hopefully nobody else, would ever complain about the river valley being park land instead of residential lots because the river valley is for Edmontonians the biggest recreational space. We just moved away from it but come summer I know I will miss it. Get the bikes out, honey!           

I know we chose to live close to a mall for the convenience of shopping with baby by foot. From our new home I have to walk further but we can't see the mall which is very nice. The layout of malls always bothers me, not much space for pedestrians but instead car drivers can stop right outside the shop they are aiming for. Worst of all, there might even be a drive-through to the shop. When I first came to Edmonton I noticed drive-thrus that until then I had no idea they existed, a drive-through for  ATMs and pharmacies for example. Excuse my language but for me that's for lazy fat-asses. Your car is not your home, get out of it once in a while.

A Bylaw in Edmonton requires parking space for any facility. Right next to the apartment buildings in Terrace Heights where we used to live is a little park. The South East Edmonton Community League Association would like to build a Skateboard park there. Great idea. But the fact that they have to put a parking lot in where there is terrible road access already kind of screws up the layout. When they had an Open House on the proposed park we let the city know it's a stupid idea. There's lots of parking space already due to shops, more shops and a mall across the road. For the proposal SECLA was not required to have a bus stop, a bike lane or a pedestrian walkway included in the project. Since the skating area will be incorporated in a park with new trees and benches the architect put a walkway in but that's about it. A fine example showing how stiff some of Edmonton's regulations are, harming progress more than helping it.