basilbias.com

It’s generally a bit embarrassing to admit that I try not to buy food in plastic packaging. It’s as if being vegan wasn’t restrictive[1] enough, as if cutting out all animal products didn’t have enough potential to make other people think I feel superior. Well I don’t. I don’t know why I’m compelled to do these things. “My actions are abstract and absurd, and they are neither saving the rain forests nor feeding the world’s hungry,” writes J.B. MacKinnon in Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet. I’m not naïve enough to think that refusing to eat meat exonerates me from the horrors committed daily on factory farms, or that I’m doing my part to stop global warming by biking to work. I’m all too aware that no matter how conspicuously I wield my glass jars in the bulk section at the Berkeley Bowl, that huge roll of plastic bags will be used up by other shoppers in a matter of hours.[2] The guilt of not doing enough weighs heavily on me no matter how much I give up.

[T]he essential pointlessness of such a gesture [as eating only local foods for a year] is not lost on me[.] I am acutely aware that efforts like the 100-mile diet are readily dismissed as “the new earnestness,” which is currently enjoying a very temporary cool, and I am not deluded enough to feel that I’m making a difference or being the change I want to see in the world. Both of these contemporary platitudes contain kernels of truth, but both are also overwhelmed by stark realities. I have traveled these ethical pathways in one way or another for twenty years now, choosing to ride a bicycle in homicidal traffic, to reuse my tinfoil and plastic bags as though I lived in the Depression, to shop little and buy less. It doesn’t make me feel “good.” It makes me feel like an alien. As I pedal through another midwinter rainfall, virtually every indicator of global ecological health continues to worsen, from biodiversity to energy consumption, and my being has done little to change the world (p. 17).

And yet. The Plastic Trash Challenge long over, coming up on a year of strict veganism, I’m not slowing down. I can’t seem to bring myself to go back to buying tofu in a tub, or yogurt in a carton.[3] After reading Plenty, I’ve even started thinking harder about where my produce comes from. It used to be, if it said ‘California’ (or even ‘Oregon’) and ‘organic’ on it, I was good to go. But California is a big state, and I have no idea where Watsonville is.[4] It sounds nice and local, but it could be 400 miles to the south for all I know. And after reading about Earthbound Farms[5] in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’m wary of even organic produce that seems too corporate.

Which is why I found myself biking the 3.3 miles to the Berkeley Farmers’ market yesterday. It was a beautiful day, the second spring-like day we’ve had in the past week. I hadn’t been to a farmers’ market all winter. I had wiped all the winter grime off my bike, wired my saddlebags to the rack,[6] and set off in sunglasses and a sweatshirt. Plenty had inspired me to shop without a list, to buy whatever the farmers were offering that day, whatever was in season that moment. I tend to think that cooking needs to be complicated and meticulously planned to be good, often forgetting that some of the best meals I’ve made have been thrown together with whatever was on hand.[7] And so I got a bunch of dandelion greens, two chanterelles,[8] two baby butternut squashes, some beets, purple carrots, and rapini. Today for lunch, on my day off when I’m usually loathe to cook,[9] I thought I’d sauté my precious chanterelles with the dandelion greens. But the vegetables demanded more of me. ‘Crêpes,’ they seemed to be saying, ‘we need crêpes to nestle in.’

Et voilà.[10]

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[1] Or irritating for people trying to include me in their dinner plans, either.

[2] In the six months that I’ve been lugging my own jars back and forth to the grocery store, a couple people have remarked at what a good idea it was. But not once have I seen someone else with their own jars.

[3] Though last week, out of desperation on lunch at work one day I did buy a plastic tub of hummus and a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. I was very hungry, Smart Alec’s was closed for repairs, my 30 minutes was running short and I had no cash for a sandwich at (what used to be called ) Intermezzo…

[4] Lots of produce at the Bowl seems to come from Watsonville. Naturally, I Googled it just now, and Watsonville seems to be anywhere from 88 to 104 miles away by car from where I live.

[5]30,000 acres of certified organic industrial farming.

[6] To deter thieves (or the ones without wire cutters or the patience to unwrap a bit of wire, anyway) from taking them while I shopped. My saddlebags are cute and very functional when hooked to a rack, but too unwieldy and awkward to carry around a farmers’ market.

[7] Of course, so have some of the least edible…But even using a recipe isn’t disaster-proof.

[8] All I could afford. But Michael Pollan’s prose on the subject of chanterelles convinced me that $5 per quarter pound is a steal for these amazing fungi.

[9] I love cooking for other people, but when I’m alone and hungry, it usually seems like too much trouble to spread some peanut butter on a slice of bread.

[10] Vegan crêpes are not only possible, by the way, thanks to the miracle of chickpea flour (which has a protein similar to that of eggs,) but they are also just as delicious as the more traditional dairy-laden kind. See Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Brunch or Veganomicon for a recipe.

Michael Pollan on the disconnect between food, health and the environment.

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When my mother informed me on the phone that she had stopped using her dryer,[1] I pictured my parents’ tiny first floor laundry room that doubles as a guest bath thick with clotheslines and garments in varying states of dampness.  In the dead of a Midwest winter, they couldn’t have installed a clothesline outside, right?

It seems I underestimated my parents. When I arrived in Madison a couple days ago, I discovered that they had indeed put a clothesline on their screen porch. What’s more, the towels and clothes they had hung on it in frigid temperatures miraculously hadn’t frozen. ‘They feel a little clammy, but they’re dry’ my mom said as she pulled some jeans off the line. ‘It just takes a little longer in the winter.’ [2]

Having thus defied the laws of physics, my parents moved on to a few other improvements. Food scraps, which for years went down the disposal or in the trash,[3] are separated into soup stock makings and compost, and are collected in a couple coffee cans in the freezer. The compost gets brought outside to the compost bin periodically. My dad has had more luck than me making soup stock that doesn’t taste funny, even though he flouts all the rules about what should and should not go in it.[4]

They also got the back stairs refinished by Mr. Sandless,^TM a company that uses certified low VOC finishes. ‘It smelled like orange juice instead of polyurethane,’ my dad says.

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[1] When asked why, she said the thing about EnergyStar not even certifying clothes dryers bothered her, especially in light of the fact that dryers are unnecessary. ‘When you really think about it,’ she commented, ‘it’s like using a hair dryer to make your clothes dry a little faster.’

[2] My mom says that when dryers first started appearing in houses in the fifties, women of her mother’s generation used them as a last resort, preferring the fresh scent and crisp texture of clothes dried en plein air. She remembers my grandma’s sheets freezing in the winter occasionally when she took a chance and put them out to dry in spite of the weather. It’s funny how we still think of the aesthetics of ‘real’ living as ideal in our chemical age- even dryer sheets, which couldn’t be more fake,  sell themselves with allusions to fresh breezes and cool mountain air, and more often than not portray clothes on a line on their packages.

[3] We had a compost bin when I was growing up, but over the years my parents lost interest in keeping it up. What it was about decaying vegetables that couldn’t hold their interest for longer I’m not entirely sure…

[4] When I told him that the cauliflower I was chopping up had to go in the compost, not the soup stock bin, because cauliflower is cruciferous, he looked at me like I was nuts. ‘It’ll get bitter!’ I insisted. I think he threw it in the compost just to humor me. This is the man who taught my mom how to cook, but who can count on one hand the number of times he’s followed a recipe in his life.

A lovely piece on food in America, by Maira Kalman.

These are the stragglers that didn’t seem to be ripening in situ. So I finally decided to pick them and give them a chance to ripen on the kitchen sill. If that fails, there must be something you can do with green tomatoes besides frying them…

The latest BPA findings are still not conclusive, but they’re scary nonetheless. In the face of all the scientific uncertainty surrounding this ubiquitous chemical, this New York Times op-ed piece quotes Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network:

When you have 92 percent of the American population exposed to a chemical, this is not one where you want to be wrong. Are we going to quibble over individual rodent studies, or are we going to act?

Which makes me wonder, why are chemicals considered safe until proven harmful (beyond any shadow of a doubt) anyway?

I started writing this months ago but after getting my cavities[1] filled, my interest in finishing it diminished considerably. Even with a hyper-attentive and -concerned dentist wielding the drill, I was still kinda traumatized. But I’m over it by now, so here it is: my take on going to the green dentist.

I didn’t have particularly crooked teeth as an adolescent, but I had a particularly authoritarian orthodontist.[2] And yet, for all the time he spent barking out instructions to his many assistants[3] (who did all of the actual orthodontic work) he never took even a second to explain anything to me, the person whose mouth was most affected.[4] And so I became accustomed to dissociating from whatever unidentified discomfort was deemed necessary during each visit, and instead eavesdropped intently on the technical exchange going on above my head, trying to parse it for clues.

BARTing my way to the green dentist this morning, I was reading this:

“What Gately can get from what she says to Dr. Pressburger is that there’d been concern that Gately might have got a fragment of whatever projectile he got invaded with in, through, or near his lower-something Trachea, since there’d been trauma to his Something-with-six-syllables-that-started-with-Sterno, she said the radiology results were indefinite but suspicious, and somebody called Pendleton had wanted a 16 mm. siphuncular nebulizer dispensing 4 ml. of 20% Mucomyst q. 2 h. on the off-chance of hemorrage or mucoidal flux, like just in case. The parts of this Gately can follow he doesn’t care for one bit. He doesn’t want to know his body even fucking has something with six syllables in it.” (Infinite Jest p.921)[5]

Gately has been lying in the hospital with a terribly painful, infected gunshot wound for a long but unknown (to him and the reader) period of time by now, and only pieced together a few pages ago that the reason he couldn’t talk was that there was a tube down his throat. This fact was so obvious to his doctors, nurses, and even his visitors, that no one thought to mention it to him.

Despite the fact that my own experience with medical and dental professionals has been (thankfully) incredibly limited in comparison to Don Gately’s, I could totally relate. Whether or not you have an actual, physical tube down your throat[6] preventing you from talking, it always seems to feel like it in a medical setting. It’s not even that questions are discouraged- it’s simply taken for granted that you don’t need or want to know. Anything. It’s like your understanding is superfluous.

This inaccessibility that characterizes most doctor and dentist offices was why I was caught so off-guard when I walked in to the green dentist’s office this morning and was greeted by the dentist herself. She heard me come in and ran out from somewhere in the back especially to introduce herself and lead me to a tiny conference room to ‘get to know me.’ The tiny room’s diagonal feng shui chair arrangement and obligatory ’soothing’ fountain[7] and the direct, searching gaze the (gorgeous) dentist leveled at me as I tried to explain ‘who I was’ made it all a little awkward, but I appreciated the gesture anyway. Because even if she wasn’t as concerned and open as she purported to be, even if it was just a ploy to get more clients, I appreciated the effort. As David Foster Wallace might have said, even pretending that it was important to pretend to care made the experience less soul crushing than it might otherwise have been.

Next, the dentist introduced me to one of her coordinating, modishly-clad assistants[8] who embarked on a tour of the office’s green features. I was not getting special treatment for having mentioned I was interested in the environment. Nope, it was standard procedure to show each new patient around. Pretty much everything she showed me I had already read about on the website (water filtration system, recycled denim insulation, paperless office, high-efficiency autoclave, etc.) except the couch in the waiting room, which was actually from the dentist’s old living room, but, again, it was a nice gesture.

The second half of the visit felt more like a normal dentist, save for the constant[9] checking to see if I was comfortable, and the dreaded warm shoulder wrap, which only made me hot. I got to see the digital X-rays they took on the computer screen, but maybe all with-it dentists do that now (I hadn’t been to see one in three years.)[10] Oh, and they did offer me some sort of high tech goggles to watch a movie while they cleaned, or at least headphones to listen to what the dentist temptingly called “meditation music.” I think I disappointed them by refusing both.[11] Clearly, I am not quite their demographic.

So why am I not focusing on the green innovations I encountered at the only eco-friendly dentist in San Francisco?[12] Because, for the most part, they seemed so obvious. Cloth bibs, reusable tools, eco-friendly toothpaste, typing directly into the computer rather than filling out paper forms. Who wouldn’t think those were good ideas? Filter the ecosystem-destroying mercury from old fillings out of the water before it leaves the building? That’s crazy talk!

No, as great as all that was, what really struck me about the green dentist was that it wasn’t merely a dentist office with eco-friendly features. It was a re-envisioning of dentistry as we know it.

Just as feminism began as a quest for a single equal right for (white) women and came to embody a critique of entire societies and came up with whole new ways of doing everything, the green movement shouldn’t limit itself to carbon footprint size. Nor can it. To be truly effective, I think, we can’t just substitute green products for the toxic and wasteful ones we were using before and be done with it. There has to be a fundamental shift in the way we understand the world.

In Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, he discusses large-scale industrial organic farming. It turns out that, when you merely substitute organic inputs for chemical, it’s in some respects actually worse for the soil, because more disruptive tilling is needed for weed-control. Trying to farm with the existing industrial model to organic specifications is possible,[13] but not nearly as effective as adopting a true, all-encompassing organic outlook would be.

In the same way, a dentist’s office that regards its patients as human beings rather than so many sets of teeth and takes a holistic view of health is so much greener than an office that simply employs all the latest in green technology. Becoming green should and must entail a reevaluation of the way we do everything, not just a by-the numbers reduction of emissions and pollution, as vital as that may be. Because to keep the old industrial, reductionist view of how the world works entirely misses the point.

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[1] Which, I just discovered in Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World, were virtually unheard of until the 16^th century when sugar plantations were developed. Seriously, medieval peasants, the ancient Greeks, even hunter-gatherers (who it seems actually had a pretty cushy life) didn’t get cavities. No toothbrushes, no flossing, no dental professionals, no fluoridated water necessary.  It’s enough to make you want to cut out sugar altogether.

[2] But maybe that is the nature of people attracted to teeth-straightening as a profession.

[3] All of whom were female, incidentally, and all of whom wore such hideously patterned smocks that they just had to have been designed to go with the office’s blandly offensive decor.

[4] The one time I saw the inside of his conference room, he likened the spacers he was about to insert between my molars to having a piece of meat stuck in your teeth. This metaphor was, of course, entirely lost on me, and my mother and I glanced at each other and burst out laughing. Which, you could tell, totally flustered my sad, straight-laced ortho. Maybe that’s why he never took us into his conference room again…

[5] In retrospect, probably not the best choice of reading material to take my mind off of my appointment. But it sure beat the hell out of my statistics textbook.

[6] or plastic thing holding your mouth open, as my orthodontist was particularly fond of.

[7]At least I’m pretty sure there was a fountain. My imagination could be supplying extraneous details, but you get the idea…

[8] Did those chic black-and-white numbers of which each assistant wore a variation come from the same dental hygienist apparel universe from which my orthodontist’s poor assistants ordered their smocks?

[9] And by constant, I mean every couple of minutes. It bordered on annoying, but better to err on the side of overly-attentive than negligent.

[10] Hence the cavities. I do brush and floss, I swear!

[11] I was a little curious to check out their movie selection though. I could only imagine: Escape to Nature Vol. II: Underwater Peace? The World’s Most Beautiful Places? Power of Flowers: Dreaming Orchids?

[12] There is another one in Berkeley, but it seemed even more new age-y than this one. The website’s description of a complimentary foot massage during your cleaning combined with the vague threat that I was going to be forced to meditate at some point, made the extra effort of getting on BART seem well worth it.

[13] At least with the current, less-than-exacting USDA certification standards.

Clothes dryers are so inefficient that Energy Star doesn’t even certify them. What’s more, they are totally unnecessary. Why are Americans still using them?

The trailer for Drying for Freedom, a film about laundry in America:

Read more from Project Laundry List about how much energy dryers use here.

Thanks to the effects of climate change and urban sprawl, the checkerspot butterfly is likely to be put on the endangered species list, the Chronicle reported today. I think Rasputina says it best:

Who knew that the sky is now found to contain
Benzene and methane and chalk
And bloody mud, muddy blood from the sky
From the sickly sweet wings of Edith’s checkerspot butterfly
They die in the ocean
Their legs are broken
The rain slows their flight as it soaks their wings.

A microphone will listen for thunder
The telephone will dial the number
To deliver a-a clearer picture
Of weird wet weather
This puts all previous discoveries in doubt
These are things we have theories about.

This appeared in the New York Times last week:

Government ministers in the Maldives are taking scuba lessons and learning hand signals in preparation for an unprecedented underwater cabinet meeting intended to highlight the threat of global warming. Since taking office last year, President Mohamed Nasheed has emerged as an important voice on the impact of climate change amid fears that rising ocean levels could swamp his nation within a century. The Maldives is the lowest-lying nation on earth. The ministers, who will wear scuba gear for the Oct. 17 gathering, plan to sign a document calling on all countries to reduce their carbon emissions.

Symbolic? Yes. But what else can a tiny island nation of 300,000 do, exactly?  Although a plan to become the first carbon-neutral country on Earth is already in place, without getting the rest of the world’s attention, the Maldives will still be ocean in no time.