Grace2's Profile

You would never enter a home in Asia without removing your shoes. That would be so rude and uncouth.

On the west coast, polite guests have been removing shoes whenever they see that their hosts do the same. I noticed this starting in the 1980s. Now even non-Asian families take off their shoes in their own homes.

My mom told me her mother tucked her in with warm sweet potatoes (tied in a sock) in her bed, by her feet.

We use a clothesline in pricey coastal LA. Not only does it save energy and $ and reduce our carbon footprint, we are helping to keep the Beach Cities affordable!

Seriously, my neighbors don't seem to mind and about half of them use a clothesline for at least part of their laundry.

I put a tutorial about line-drying clothes at
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-use-clothesline.html

If it is a commercial carwash, the water has to be recycled. I posted about this last year.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2007/09/missing-guest.html

Driveway carwashing is one of the top 2 sources of groundwater pollution in LA. I learned this at a UCLA Institute of the Environment meeing about groundwater hydrology.

Here's an excerpt from what I learned:
n fact, the stuff coming off cars is so toxic, that the sediment in the water holding tank at the car wash has to be hauled away by a toxic waste hauler. That's right. Road grime is toxic. In addition to the organic alphabet soup of petrochemicals, they also contain lead residue and heavy metals that escape from catalytic converters.

Commercial car washes are required by law to recycle water and properly dispose of the sludge. The heavy metals can even by separated and recycled. The platinum and palladium is too valuable to waste.

I didn't find the book high on new content or inspiration. I've read most of the ideas before. Perhaps I read some of his essays in the Atlantic previously.

The year of eating covered the same territory as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

The Durable Future tries so hard to leave us with optimism for the future. But how can he discuss Bangladesh without saying anything about salt water incursion into fresh water wells due to global sea level rise? Irrigating from contaminated wells poisons the soil with salts. Why didn't he mention this? Bangladesh is in real danger.

The most interesting part of the book to me was the first chapter, After Growth. I wished he expounded more about how we grew richer only by working more hours and using the earth unsustainably.

In response to SFGail, you are funding my healthcare and helping me make a living and set an example for my daughter. You funded my disability leave when I was life-threateningly ill.

You are funding my environmental research.
You have funded my education through a PhD in science.
You are funding my child's education.

http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2007/04/thank-you-to-american-taxpayer.html

I am reading along, but a little bit behind. I hope to catch up by next week.

Actually, the bees do not like giving up their beeswax. They expend a great deal of energy to excrete the beeswax. They reuse those honeycombs. If the honeycombs are harvested, they have to tucker themselves out all over again, thus endangering their survival.

Do the poor bees a favor and use soy candles.

I finished reading the book last month, before boarding a jet from LAX to New Zealand. (Horribly not green.)

Our host in NZ told us that they don't practice feed lot factory farming in NZ. They raise all their animals on pasture. (He has a degree in applied science which is like our agriculture/land management programs.)

Because I am allergic to several common antibiotics, eating "conventionally-raised" US farm animals often causes me to break out in rashes. In the interest of science, I ate lots of lamb, beef and chicken. No rash.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-we-eat.html

Because it was their summer, I ate lots of summer produce. Everything tasted wonderful. Instead of shipping NZ produce to us in the northern hemisphere in the middle of our winter, perhaps we can ship ourselves to NZ instead? I wonder how that works out in the carbon budget? ;-P

I am reading along with the book club, at chapter 10. I would like to finish the book this weekend, but life gets in the way.

Like Stephanie, I feel a wee bit guilty about buying "organic lite" dairy products. The milk carton even brags about the organic grain that they feed the cows. Do they think that people won't notice that cows evolved to eat grass and not grain?

The grain gives the cows uncomfortable gas and makes them vulnerable to infection, hence the antibiotics in the feed. Kingsolver does a good job, sounding the alarm about the role of industrial farming in breeding and spreading MRSA.

I had a food awakening moment at a work-related meeting last week. The entire blog post is here:
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2007/12/what-we-eat.html

I serendipitously walked by poster H41C-0661 at American Geophysical Union (AGU): Tetracycline Resistance in the Subsurface of a Poultry Farm: Influence of Poultry Wastes

* You, Y (you.yaqi@jhu.edu), Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins University and a whole bunch of other people, including her PhD advisor.

Ya Qi helpfully told me that tetracycline is fed to chickens to help shorten the time to market (40 days from hatchling to roast chicken!). It is fed to pretty much all 'conventionally raised' animals. tetracyline is so prevalent in our food system that the TcR gene has been found in organic beef (and even flies). The presence of the TcR gene in an animal doesn't mean it has been fed tetracycline. It only means that tetracycline resistance is now a common characteristic in our environment, due to heavy and indiscriminate use in the past and present.

How did dumping drugs and other chemicals into our food chain become 'conventional' farming and not doing so become 'alternative' farming?