Eating to Live!

Tempers are flaring

Time and time again we are told that we, the consumer, are the reason for global warming, high oil prices and food costs. We are told that we eat too much, we drive too much and we use entirely too much fossil fuel. The United States is said to be the biggest consumer of fossil fuel and it’s our entire fault, that is, the people who use it and pay for it.

Sunday afternoon, while I was making my lunch in the kitchen, I turned on the little countertop television and put on The Weather Channel. I normally don’t have the television on at all on the weekend, yet when I do turn it on, I am always reminded of Bruce Springsteen’s song, “57 Channels and Nothing’s On.” Change that to 100-plus channels, and still nothing on. But I was home alone with my dogs and cats and decided to see what the predictions were for the upcoming week. It is no secret that I have been pining for spring, so a little good news about upcoming warmer weather would have been helpful.

The Weather Channel, it seems, does more than predict the weather. They give “helpful” tips on gardening, how to deal with bad weather when it comes and even, as in the case of Sunday afternoon, how to make your own bio-diesel fuel. I’m sure I haven’t yet seen everything, but this tops the list.

I didn’t catch the opening, but what I did see was the presenter taking a gallon-sized glass jar and putting in a large amount of clean, unused vegetable oil along with a small amount of methanol and a catalyst to help combine the two, sodium hydroxide or lye (potassium hydroxide). Shake well and pour the mixture in your bio-diesel gas tank and drive away smelling like French fries. The reporter stated that for every gallon of bio-diesel fuel you use, that’s one more gallon of oil that doesn’t have to come out of the ground. The reporter also added that you need to check with your local government because to make your own fuel, you might need a permit and, big surprise, you might have to pay a tax on the fuel you make.

Now, I’m not a mathematician, but something here just doesn’t add up. Statistics show that as drivers, we aren’t the biggest users of fossil fuel. Sure, we use a lot, but as consumers, we use more, or should I say, we eat more. The fuel that goes into shipping our bagged green salad from California to grocery stores in Ohio in February, not to mention the fuel used by the machines that harvest the greens, as well as the fuel used to create the fertilizers, pesticides and keep weeds away from those gardens, is way more than I use driving 14 miles from home to the office five days a week.

But that’s not all. Everyone thinks bio-diesel fuel is the wave of the future in helping cut down on our nation’s use of fossil fuel. Yet to farm the land that will provide this fuel will mean using more of it to run those same plows, planters, cultivators. We will need even more corn than we are using now. Not to mention that if more of our corn crop goes toward making fuel, less will go into our food supply (which may not be entirely a bad thing), but will also increase the costs of said food.

Here’s what I propose instead. Buy a freezer. Go to the local farmer’s market and get all the fresh, locally grown food you can. Eat some and put the rest in the freezer for next winter. When shopping at the grocery store, pass up the food items that have traveled thousands of miles to get to your plate. Go for Ohio-grown, or at the most, food grown, harvested and processed in only neighboring states.

Instead of turning your lights off for an hour in protest of energy consumption, quit feeding the bank accounts of large corporate CEO’s who get 85 cents of every dollar you spend on food, and start supporting your local farmers.

And quit blaming me for using too much gasoline in my car.

In order to practice what I preach, once I use up the last of my already-purchased tropically grown bananas that I use in my morning oatmeal, I will be searching for a new go-to fruit and you can bet it will be as locally grown as I can find.

The greenhouse is up and running (yes, we heat with natural gas, but hopefully only for the next couple weeks and only at night). I don’t feel guilty because we don’t run our home’s gas furnace during the day all winter long, using only a small wood burning stove. We only use our furnace at night. Wood is a renewable resource and it works for us.

Breakfast on Sunday was the banana-laden oatmeal. Lunch was a turkey burger, made last week and frozen on a French bread roll baked at my local store bakery. There was no HFCS in the rolls. I have no idea where the turkey came from other than my grocery store. Baby steps.

For an afternoon snack I decided to fix a small plate of cheese and crackers to munch on while I read my book, so I did and took this photo. Just as I sat down on the sofa, someone came to my door. I set the plate on a nearby table and went to answer. While talking in the next room, I looked in at my plate only to see one of my little dogs gorging on the cheese. I managed to get the plate away before he got to the crackers. So although you see Swiss cheese on this plate, I actually had two wedges of Laughing Cow Swiss cheese instead. My dog slept well afterward as he digested his stolen booty.

Dinner was a roasted pork loin with roasted potatoes and butternut squash along with steamed fresh broccoli (origin unknown) and milk. I did put a teaspoon of butter on the broccoli.