basilbias.com

In fewer than 20 days, these will be french breakfast radishes (or so says the packet they came from.)

Already, I think they’re even cuter than their name.

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.

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…

So they figured out a high-tech way to ensure that most calves born to dairy cows (who must be kept continuously pregnant in order to continuously produce milk, recall) would be female, who could then grow up and make more milk. Doing away with the problem of useless male calves who, in the past, had to be slaughtered soon after birth. And now there’s too much milk for the market. So what do they do? The New York Times reports

“Desperate to drive up prices by stemming the gusher of unwanted milk, a dairy industry group, the National Milk Producers Federation, has been paying farmers to send herds to slaughter. Since January the program has culled about 230,000 cows nationwide.”

Well at least that makes sense…

I’ve heard that it’s possible to keep bread fresh in a cloth bag if you sprinkle it with water periodically. But that seemed mold-inviting to my American sensibilities.[1] Hence my solution to keeping artisan bread[2] fresh without disposable plastic bags: a reusable bread bag. I took a plastic produce bag which, used on its own, would develop holes, and encased it in two layers of cotton fabric. So far, it’s kept my rolls fresh for three days. Washing it might be a little tricky, but it shouldn’t need to be washed too often and I think with a little creative inside-out flipping, handwashing won’t be a problem.

I was never the type to carry a Nalgene,^®[1] so when the BPA[2] story broke, I wasn’t all that alarmed, and I didn’t feel the need to rush out and buy a Kleen Kanteen^® as it seems everyone else on the planet did.[3]

And then it occurred to me one day while I was Tupperwaring^®[4] up some leftovers that, judging by its clear, hard, durable[5] plasticky-ness , my favorite food storage container was probably made of the same stuff as those formerly ubiquitous Nalgenes^®. How else but with toxic chemicals could it remain so scratch-, crack-, and miraculously stain-free, even after years of use and tomato sauce and turmeric onslaughts?

I put the thought out of my head for months. It became one of those things I was always meaning to look up online, but could never remember when I was anywhere near a computer.[6]

Fast forward to last night, when I was lovingly rinsing out one of my two Rubbermaid^® StainShield^TM containers, which I had used to transport my lunch to work, and which I planned to use for tomorrow’s lunch as well. For whatever reason, the time had finally come to find out for sure what I knew in my heart all along: that I was being slowly poisoned by my most treasured off-brand Tupperware. ^®[7]

It didn’t take a whole lot of muckraking. Rubbermaid^® Inc. readily admits on their website that many of their food storage products contain BPA. You know, so their customers can make ‘informed decisions’ about a chemical that Rubbermaid still claims ‘has been used safely in the manufacture of thousands of products for years.’[8] If their customers ever get around to looking it up, that is.

The ‘manufacture’ of said products may technically be safe, but what about the consumer use of these products? Exposure to BPA, which, according a study by the CDC, is now present in over 93 percent of Americans’ urine, has been linked to breast and prostate cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and developmental changes in children.[9] The FDA ruled last year that BPA was safe, based on two studies funded by plastic manufacturers. It recently announced, however, that it is reviewing the latest BPA studies and will determine by Nov. 30^th of this year[10] whether BPA is safe for use in food packaging.[11]

I’m not waiting on the FDA to quit using my StainShield containers though. I’ll be using more reused glass jars[12] for storing leftovers in the fridge, and I’ll use our other, BPA-free Rubbermaid^® Servin’ Saver containers[13] when I’m biking somewhere. I may eventually buy a nice ‘eco-friendly’ stainless steel container, but not unless I really need it.

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[1] Eight glasses of water a day always seemed a little excessive to me, so I admit I felt a little vindicated when it turned out that not only was the necessity of drinking that much water a myth, but that everyone who kept swinging their Nalgenes from their carabiners emphatically, urging me to ‘hydrate,’ was in fact slowly ingesting their favorite accessory.

[2] Aka Bisphenol A, of endocrine disruption fame.

[3] I find it concerning that the widespread switch to eco-friendly (-looking, in some cases) alternatives often involves massive-scale exploitation of even more resources. Aluminum and stainless steel are way more resource-intensive to produce than plastic. Thanks to the BPA scare, (and after a mention on Oprah by Julia Roberts,) Sigg increased their production of aluminum water bottles by 90 percent last year alone. When will we realize that rampant consumerism is not compatible with sustainability?

[4] Or, more precisely, Rubbermaiding^® though that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it…

[5] I’ve had my two StainShield containers since at least 2005, and I’ve dropped them onto hard surfaces I don’t know how many times.

[6] Other things in this category include: shorthand, how to fix squeaky bicycle brakes, and two-letter Scrabble words.

[7] Microwaving food in a polycarbonate container being one of the more effective ways of getting high amounts of BPA into your system. (BPA leaches out of plastic at much higher rates when it is heated.)

[8] And continues to be used without qualms, apparently. Although the StainShield line has been replaced by the Premier line, it too contains BPA.

[9] Including early puberty in females.

[10] BPA has been suspected of being hazardous to humans since the 1930’s…

[11] Most cans are lined with BPA (Eden Organics beans [though not their tomatoes] are some of the rare exceptions). Due to the high processing temperatures of canned foods, they can contain high levels of BPA.

[12] The metal lids of which are often lined with BPA, but since food doesn’t come into much contact with the small surface area of the lid, and since I won’t be heating up the jars, I don’t think that’s a huge cause for concern.

[13] Abandoned by an old roommate who had her sights on eco-chic stainless steel when she moved out.

1. Limit (or better yet, eliminate altogether) intake of animal products.

This is the single most effective way to reduce your carbon emissions.[1] The New York times reports:

[W]ith worldwide production of milk and beef expected to double in the next 30 years, the United Nations has called livestock one of the most serious near-term threats to the global climate. In a 2006 report that looked at the environmental impact of cows worldwide, including forest-clearing activity to create pasture land, it estimated that cows might be more dangerous to Earth’s atmosphere than trucks and cars combined.

It’s hard to reduce your consumption of meat and dairy without keeping track of it. So if you don’t want to give them up altogether, try eating one or two vegan meals a day, or eating vegan a certain number of days a week, or only eating animal products when you go out to eat. Even forgoing meat one day a week will make a big dent in your carbon footprint, as this handy chart shows.

2. Waste less.

Peter Singer and Jim Mason write “According to [...] a U.S. government-funded study, more than 40% of food grown in the U.S. is lost or thrown away- that’s about $100 billion of wasted food a year. At least half of that food could have been safely consumed.”

Much of this food waste come from food industry practices like buying more than will be sold so that the shelf looks full, or because of a quantity discount. But household waste is by no means a negligible factor: the same study found that “about 14% of household garbage was perfectly good food that was in its original packaging and not out of date.” Buy only as much as you need (I find it helps when buying food for a recipe to write the quantity called-for down on my list so I can buy the exact amount,[2] or at least eyeball it, at the store.) Eat your leftovers. Compost scraps that can’t be used for soup stock.[3] And when you have a weird combination of straggler vegetables that didn’t get used during the week, be creative.[4] That said, unless you know what you’re doing or you’re one of those lucky people who can eat anything, it’s generally a good idea to at least consult a recipe to ensure that the results come out edible.

3. Bring leftovers for lunch.

For any given dish, the energy needed to cook two meals-worth rather than just one will be less than twice as much (unless each serving needs to be cooked individually for some reason.) So by cooking enough for lunch (or dinner) the next day, you will have reduced the amount of energy expended per serving.

4. Store and transport food in reusable containers.

Bring your own jars (or at least reused plastic bags) for buying bulk foods (ask at your local grocery store if the store needs to weigh them before you fill them.) Go a step further than bringing your own grocery bags: bring cloth produce bags too![5] And always try to bring a container when you go out to eat.[6]

5. Buy only high-quality cookware that you really need (and then use it for the rest of your life.)

Rather than getting the cheapest utensils, pots, and pans that you can, and then throwing them out after a year of use, always buy high-quality, durable cookware that has many uses. Cheap stuff ages badly and doesn’t work very well in the first place. If you need a pan, get a cast iron one instead of a brightly colored non-stick one that will look pretty for all of two months. Get heavy bottomed, stainless steel pots. Get the best knife you can afford.[7] Avoid super-specific cooking gadgets (anything that does only one thing- like a quesadilla maker or an avocado slicer.) Check thrift stores before you purchase anything new (they don’t often have high quality stuff, because who would give away a nice cast-iron pan, but if you dig through the plastic colanders and novelty ice-cube trays and dented aluminum pots, you might find what you’re looking for.)

6. Use reusable tea strainers and coffee filters.

If you drink coffee, there is no reason not to own a reusable filter.[8] Buy one, and you’ll never have to remember to buy the paper ones again. If you drink tea, get a tea ball or teapot with a built-in strainer, and switch to loose leaf tea.

7. Cook more efficiently.

-Don’t preheat the oven before you’ve made your cake batter or chopped your root vegetables. I know recipes always say the first thing to do is turn on your oven, but ovens only take about ten minutes to warm up, max. If you are making pastries, bread, cake or cookies, wait until you have only about ten minutes left before whatever you’re making will be oven-ready. Most other foods can be started in a cold oven, especially if they need to bake for an hour or more. Also, use glass or ceramic pans in the oven whenever possible, as they retain heat better (it’s rumored that glass and ceramic are so effective that you can even turn the oven down 25 degrees.)

-Use an appropriately-sized pan on an appropriately-sized burner. The smaller the pan, the less energy it takes to heat it up. Don’t choose a huge pan if you’re only cooking for two. The pan should completely cover the burner, On an electric stove, the pan should not extend more than an inch past it. Consumerenergycenter.org says “A 6 inch pan on an 8 inch [electric] burner will waste over 40 percent of the heat produced by the burner.” On gas stoves, they recommend using a lower flame setting to save energy.

-Put a lid on it. When boiling water, making soup, cooking rice, steaming vegetables, etc. use a lid.[9] Things cook faster with lids- they trap the heat. Of course, remove the lid when you add anything likely to boil over, like pasta, or if you want whatever you’re cooking to fry or reduce.

-Don’t boil more water than necessary. Some purists (and all pasta boxes) say you need 4-6 quarts of water to make a pound of pasta, but I’ve never had a problem using much less.[10] According to a recent article in the New York Times, you really only need 1 ½ to 2 quarts per pound.

- Turn the heat down after things have started boiling. High heat is only needed to reach the boiling point. If you have an electric kettle (water-boiler,) use that first, and then pour the boiling water into a pan on the stove to save energy and time.

-Put reflector dishes under your burners and keep them clean and shiny.

-Use a toaster oven or microwave to heat small portions. From my own calculations, I suspect that toaster ovens are more efficient than microwaves.[11] Either way, though, both use a lot less energy than heating up a full-size oven.

-Defrost frozen food in the refrigerator rather than running it under copious amounts of hot water. Putting it in the fridge will actually improve its efficiency.

-Don’t open the oven door while food is cooking. Doing so lowers the temperature by about 25 degrees. Just turn on the light and look in. Rearrange oven racks before you preheat the oven. And don’t put foil on the racks- this blocks the flow of air in the oven.

-Get a pressure cooker.[12] They can reduce energy consumption (and cooking time) by 70 percent.

8. Wash dishes with less water.

If you have an energy-efficient dishwasher, scrape any food off your dishes (but don’t rinse them!) fill up your dishwasher all the way and turn it on. It will use way less water than you could ever hope to doing the dishes by hand. My roommate likes to turn the dishwasher off before it starts the drying cycle, and let the dishes air dry with the door open, or dry them with a towel. I couldn’t find anything that said this saves energy, but common sense suggests it would.

If you don’t have a dishwasher, use as little water as possible when washing your dishes. I use cold water to save energy unless I’m washing something really greasy. Turn the water off while you are scrubbing each dish. When you rinse a dish, let the water run into the next dish to be cleaned, or into a pot that needs to be soaked. Scrub a bunch of silverware and then rinse it all at the same time.

9. Buy organic, local, in-season food whenever possible.

Buying local isn’t enough. If something was grown locally in a greenhouse (because it’s out of season) it most likely took more energy to produce it than it would have taken to ship it from somewhere warmer. In most cases, if something requires conditions which are not present naturally (like heat or a lot of water,) you’re probably better off buying an imported one, provided it traveled by boat, train, or possibly truck (depending on how far it went.) For instance, growing rice in California is so energy- and water-intensive, that even if you live there, it’s more environmentally responsible to buy rice grown in Bangladesh.

However, you can’t generally tell how food was shipped. So it’s best to stick mostly with organic, local, in-season, climate-appropriate food. Although it’s been pointed out that smaller growers’ trucks use more energy per pound of food per mile than a semi would, assuming they don’t travel nearly as far and taking all the other benefits of buying locally into account, I still think farmer’s markets and locally-supplied grocery stores are the way to go. In a supermarket, it’s impossible to do all the carbon emission calculations when deciding between two tomatoes, because the necessary information is almost never supplied. At a farmer’s market, at least, you can ask the growers directly how they produce and transport their food.

10. Avoid packaging.

Buy more fresh fruits and vegetables, bulk goods and other foods that come with little or no packaging, or with packaging you can reuse or which can truly be recycled (that means no plastic!) If you take into account the environmental cost of producing and disposing of the packaging and the extra shipping weight of pre-prepared foods, it often makes more sense to make things from scratch.[13]

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[1] As well as improve your health and reduce the amount of animal suffering your lifestyle is responsible for. If you eat meat and you haven’t read graphic descriptions of  factory farm practices recently, you are unknowingly condoning cruelty. And if you still believe that milk “does a body good,” realize that it’s common knowledge among medical researchers that dairy is bad for humans. For myriad reasons, the physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine recommends cutting dairy (as well as meat) out of your diet. Here’s why.

[2] Those hanging produce scales aren’t just for cheapskates!

[3] See footnote 2 here for soup-stock-making guidelines.

[4] I am notoriously bad at remembering to use up my food before it goes bad. I just can’t eat things fast enough. However, recently I’ve started making scrambled tofu in the mornings, and throwing in whatever leftover vegetables I have (like the rest of a bunch of scallions, the last mushrooms, the rest of some fresh cilantro I bought for a recipe, or some shredded carrot or kale.) And, if I can’t think of a way to use something up right then, I often throw it in the freezer to use for soup stock later.

[5] Because, really, what’s the point of putting individually plastic-bagged veggies and fruits into a canvas tote? You can easily make your own produce bags out of sheer fabric or netting, or you can buy organic cotton ones here.

[6] One that, I admit, I haven’t gotten in the habit of doing yet.

[7] This is my biggest peeve: cheap knives. The purpose of knives is to cut. Cheap knives (especially those serrated ones that supposedly never need sharpening [not to be confused with bread knives]) don’t cut. Why buy them? The same goes for cheap tools in general. Buy one really good tool, rather than a bunch of differently-sized, but useless, cheap ones.

[8] Unless you own a French press or stovetop espresso maker or some such device that doesn’t need a filter.

[9] Seems obvious, but I’ve seen people try to steam things without a lid!

[10] And I make a lot of pasta…

[11] My toaster oven uses 118 watts for maybe 5 minutes to heat the same thing my microwave takes about 1130 watts for 2 minutes. Of course, this will vary depending on your appliances and  what you’re heating, as some things are more suited to microwave-heating than toaster-oven-heating.

[12] I haven’t gotten one of these yet. My parents always used them when I was growing up, but they remain mysterious to me. The time my mother made split pea soup in a pressure cooker and it (the soup) ended up on the ceiling may have something to do with this.

[13] Though not always: Slate did a comparison and concluded that buying canned beans is probably slightly more energy efficient than cooking dry beans yourself. Either way though, they concluded, “you can rest assured that getting some of your protein from beans instead of meat is a kind move to make for the planet’s sake.”

I apologize to my readers who do not live here in the East Bay, as this post concerns a local grocery store and will thus be irrelevant to your daily life. Actually, if you don’t have your own local grocery store stocked with everything you could ever desire (or that could ever possibly be called for in a recipe), perhaps you’d better not read this, or you’ll be green with envy.

I am almost always against new, larger locations of anything, on principle. However, if you’ve ever so much as set foot in the old Berkeley Bowl, you can’t deny that the ratio of shoppers (and products) to square footage is way off. Shopping there regularly, you either develop Zen-like patience or you stop caring how many people give you dirty looks (and snarl a little bit, sometimes) when you wedge your way in between their carts to get at the French beans. So, despite “neighborhood”[1] protests that kept making headlines in the local papers, I came around to the idea of a sprawling new Bowl, since it is still independently owned and makes an effort to carry a lot of local produce.[2] And the thought did occur to me that a newer, shinier store might draw the crowds away from the old location.

In the month or so it’s been open, that hasn’t so much happened. The old location is just as crowded as ever.[3] And when I stopped by the Berkeley Bowl West for the first time today, it didn’t seem overwhelmingly huge (I’d heard it compared to an aircraft hangar) so much as overwhelmingly…empty. As in, no shoving my way through the front door over to the baskets, even.

I have to say I was kind of at a loss as to where to go first. What, no crowds to determine the order I should shop in?[4] Madness.

After picking up a loaf of bread and checking out the vegan cheese selection,[5] I headed for the bulk department. I was hoping it would be even more extensive than the old store. Unfortunately, although it’s more spacious and organized,[6] as far as I could tell, the new bulk department has pretty much the same selection as the old one. But it seemed that it wasn’t all the way set up yet, so maybe they’ll add new and exciting bulk items in the future.

On to produce, then. I didn’t even look at the commercial produce because the organic produce has its own section! You have to bring your organics up to the weighing counter, which on one hand is great because that means they don’t have to label things organic with that pink tape or prepackage unmarkable things like onions and mushrooms. However, as I was picking out some peaches, I saw a guy go up to the counter with two pears and the guy behind the counter automatically put them in an (albeit biodegradable) plastic bag so there’d be something to which to adhere the sticker. Normally, I just put fruit directly in my basket, but I figured I better put it in one of the reusable cloth bags I’d brought. Even then, though, the guy gave me a hard time because the sticker wouldn’t stick to the fabric.[7]

I then went to find the tofu, which wasn’t hard because it has a twenty-foot refrigerator case to itself. Of course, all of it comes in plastic except the bulk tofu, which I have to admit I’ve been leery of, since at both stores it’s labeled only “Quong Hop tofu, 59¢” Why is it so cheap? Is that per pound or per chunk? Is it shipped all the way from China? Is it firm or soft? And is it organic? Well, at Berkeley Bowl West someone had scrawled on the label “organic.” So I went home and looked it up. Turns out, it is organic, it’s made in South San Francisco, and it got a rave review on vegansaurus.com. So that solves my tofu dilemma.

Good news on the dental-care front too: not only does the new Bowl carry Eco-Dent floss (which comes in a cardboard box,) but they also carry 3 different brands of replaceable tip toothbrushes.[8]

I forgot to check to see if they have bulk shampoo (which they now have at the old Bowl) and when I called them later to ask, after a skirmish with the phone system, which apparently hasn’t been hooked up to the actual departments yet, they hung up on me (by accident, I presume.)

I also strolled through the dairy section kinda hoping they would have vegan yogurt in glass containers, but I knew that was asking a lot. They did have a couple more brands of animal-derived milk and yogurt in glass jars, though.

Biking to the new Bowl (even from Urban Ore, just across Ashby) was an ordeal not made much more pleasant by the truncated stretch of bike path they put in to Ninth Street. But the improved bike racks[9] and their prominent placement right by the Bowl’s exit do help to make up for the hellish traffic situation in that area.

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[1] The area strikes me as pretty industrial for that term, though Google maps does indicate some houses a few blocks north.

[2] And they’re keeping the old location open, rather than closing it and leaving the huge abandoned building there to deteriorate the way Wal-Mart would.

[3] As evidenced by a five minute wait to reach the bulk rolled oats the other day. Since they are relying on word of mouth rather than advertising, though, it may take awhile for the crowds to migrate to the new Bowl.

[4] I’ve become accustomed to taking an opportunistic approach to grocery shopping: scan whatever department you’re in, determine which of the items you need has the fewest people in front of it, and take the path of least resistance to get there. It may take a little longer than a more systematic approach, but its much less agonizing than patiently waiting while the woman in front of you examines every single cherry in the bin.

[5] Three whole shelves of vegan cheese products, probably the largest selection I’ve ever seen, but alas, all wrapped in plastic.

[6] There’s even enough room to form a line at the bulk counter, if that were ever necessary!

[7] Also, as I was standing there, someone came up and asked if the store is unionized, which it’s not (though the old Bowl finally is, after a protracted battle.)

[8] Which all come packaged in plastic, but one of them at least claims the packaging is made out of (ironically) recycled soda bottles.

[9] As a man once pointed out to me as he was helping me disengage my bike from between another bike’s handlebars and the rack they were both locked to, whoever came up with the fat-wavy-tube design of the archetypal bike rack has obviously never parked a bike before.

Our yard made strawberries! (Berries picked and photo taken by Fig.)