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By Lonnie, on April 27th, 2008%
We’re avid readers of Anthony Bourdain’s books. Two of them have impacted our family somewhat dramatically. The first was Kitchen Confidential. Aside from being just a great read, it was also the third book our then-early-adolescent son read. He read it cover to cover, but it was at the third chapter that he came running to announce that he wanted to be a chef. Why? He pointed to the title of Chapter 3: “Food is Sex”. That did it. A couple culinary degrees under his belt, he’s now in charge of the mignardises in a restaurant in New York.
But the book that continues to inspire me is A Cook’s Tour, and specifically the chapter, “Where Food Comes From“. Read it, and you’ll understand why he says that where our food comes from is not always pretty. But it’s the larger concept behind that chapter that makes me think a lot and sometimes do strange things.
Strange thing #1: I make coffee in a 70-year-old vacuum coffee pot.
Continue reading Where food comes from
By Lonnie, on April 21st, 2008%
How’s it going with the reusable grocery bags, folks? Some time ago, I started blithering about the switch from plastic to something safe and reusable. It was oh so hard to remember to carry the danged things into the grocery store. Sometimes I even forced myself to walk twenty yards back out to the parking lot – in the snow! – to fetch them. Oh my. Continue reading The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is going to bite us.
By Lonnie, on April 8th, 2008%
Lots of opportunities to clean up Eastwood this year! Here’s one in the park:
Join your neighbors at the
Sunnycrest Park
Earth Day Clean-Up!
Saturday, April 26
8:00 a.m. to noon, rain or shine Continue reading Earth Day clean-up in Sunnycrest Park
By Lonnie, on March 3rd, 2008%
Take a drive down West Onondaga Street and notice the amazing architecture. One mansion after another, some in great shape, but far too many broken up into apartments, turned into slums. At one time, these were the McMansions of their time. The same holds true for much of James St. Think this couldn’t happen out . . . → Read More: The next slum is not in the city
By Lonnie, on January 13th, 2008%
That’s not my title. It’s the title of this article. I’m shocked. I’m thrilled. I’m in the USA. Oops. We weren’t the first to do it! Dang! Oh well. We can do it soon, right? We can do it with panache. We can do it fashionably, with all of Hollywood to promote it and all of the government behind it. Continue reading China bans the use of plastic bags
By Lonnie, on December 7th, 2007%
No-one creates a blog like this one if they don’t love the city in which they live. But not all the news is good. Syracuse is being used, fairly, as an example of environmental racism. Did you know that we were featured in Ms. Magazine last spring? Take a look. From that article:
The civic leaders of Syracuse, like those in other places, put sewage and water-treatment plants, along with numerous other environmental hazards, within or very close to the city’s poor communities. Not surprisingly, the health problems experienced by residents of those communities as a result of the pollutants are tremendous. To take just one measure, the asthma rate of the predominately African American community situated on the edge of Syracuse’s industrialized area and the interstate is 13 times higher than in the rest of Onondaga County. Women and children in particular bear the brunt of the health problems.
I don’t know about you, but I find this appalling. Continue reading Syracuse: nationally known for environmental racism
By Lonnie, on November 30th, 2007%
What a brilliant idea! Beautiful cloth holiday gift bags. We’ve all used those paper ones, even recycled them. But think how much longer a cloth one will last. Give a gift – maybe some Chicobag bags?- and bag it in a bag they can use over and over! Continue reading Recyclable Holiday Gift Bags
By Lonnie, on November 19th, 2007%
I’m being really lame tonight and not writing much of anything. But I will report that my reusable bag usage is up to about a 80% compliance rate. That means that I actually am getting used to carrying those reusable bags into the grocery store! My next step: reusing plastic bags in my waste baskets, not throwing them out into the larger plastic bag. One day I’ll stop using them altogether. How did our pre-1960 parents handle waste baskets, after all?
The following is from the Bagonaut website: Continue reading The Facts About Plastic Bags
By Lonnie, on October 26th, 2007%
It’s almost November and we’re still harvesting tomatoes, basil, thyme, rosemary, peppers and red cabbage. Come to think of it, every plant in our experimental raised-bed garden in our urban yard is still producing! I learned a lot this summer: Continue reading Gastronomy in your back yard
By Lonnie, on October 26th, 2007%
More than a billion plastic bags are given away free every day, yet there are costs that we don’t generally think about. Take a look at the costs here. We pay, our environment pays, our children will pay and so will theirs. Recycling doesn’t solve the problem (see the bottom of the above page.) We simply have to stop using them.
I dutifully bought five reusable grocery bags at Wegman’s on James Street. Price Chopper gives me a 3-cent discount for every reusable bag I use, no matter what store it’s from. This is good. So why can’t I remember to bring the dang things in to the store from the car? I’ve tried everything. I have a note on the dashboard reminding me. I don’t see it any more. I have forced myself to walk all the way back out to the car to get the recyclable bags. The memory of the extra walk disappears and I continue to forget them. So now I’m hoping a public confession will help.
Continue reading More plastic – and what each of us can do
By Lonnie, on October 22nd, 2007%
By now it’s pretty obvious that the type of light bulbs we have all over our homes does, collectively, make a difference. The type of car we drive, the neighborhood we choose to live in (how many miles do you drive to work as a result of that choice?), how much meat we eat… all this has a small but important and global impact in a time when air pollution in China really does get into our own lungs. We are truly all interconnected, like it or not. Continue reading To touch a flower is to stir a star
By Lonnie, on October 19th, 2007%
The Halloween decorations are popping up in Eastwood and leaf collection begins November 1st. But the leaves are still on the trees and it’s 74 degrees outside. Normally around mid-October, we’re wearing several layers indoors trying to keep from turning on the furnace until the last possible moment. Yet this year, like last, dandelions are . . . → Read More: A cogent argument for action
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