The road less cycled

Food is such a big part of our lives. This simple fact is impossible to escape, much as we might prefer to haphazardly eat what we’d like, when we’d like. Good food really excites me, especially when it’s locally produced and more or less benign – and Sundays at our house really take the cake.

We have glorious Sunday breakfasts that have evolved from a meat, cheese, peanut butter, and jam affair to a veritable feast at which we have Silver Hills sprouted bread, and a choice of: lettuce greens, broccoli/garlic sprouts, tamari, hummus, tahini, eggs, peanut butter, jam, onion, tomato, and butter, together with a black or twig tea. Such variety and exquisite taste simply can’t be beat.

Then over the rest of the day, we had a salad picked fresh from the garden, handfuls of fresh salmonberries and thimbleberries, and a garden smoothie containing lamb’s quarters (a plant related to Quinoa), dandelion, carrot thinnings, very young carrots,  and then made palatable by adding banana and apple. Last and probably least was some cooked cauliflower, quinoa with apples & cinnamon, and black beans with pasta sauce.

Such fare is simply extraordinary, and makes me wish it could be summer in perpetuity, as it is only in summer that it is so easy to find abundant food, and even now, we are still buying produce grown in California, not to mention the things like pasta sauce produced who knows where. Still, a day like today where we had control over so much of what we consumed leaves me feeling empowered, and motivated to do better yet. I am reading Steve Solomon’s “Growing Food in Hard Times” which asserts that with about 2-3 000 sq.ft. of land, cutting one’s food cost in half is entirely within reach with only 2 hrs. of work per week, not to mention the health benefits this would bring. I’d say this is very realistic, and while I only have about 1 000 sq. ft of land that is shaded until noon or later, I can foresee the day that I work at least 3000 sq. ft.

Because I can eat, cook, and sleep anywhere – for that I don’t need to own land. The land I need to own is the land that I work and condition the soil on. If that land happens to also have a place to lay my head, bonus, I’ll take it. But at the end of the day, it’s the productive land that matters, because we can’t rely on Californian imports forever.

Today I want to do something I never thought I would. A shout-out to a multi-national, ubiquitous corporation with the type of success that borders on being a monopoly. Starbucks. As much as my sweet tooth loves the store and it’s drinks, I really like something the store does that sets it apart from almost all the stores out there. Starbucks has a coffee-grounds giveaway program – one that has turned me into a literal Starbucks junkie. Not because I need my caffeine fix, but because my garden needs its nitrogen.

I’ve been stopping in at the 3 Starbucks locations that I pass by virtually every day to grab the roughly 5 kilo. bags that contain used coffee grounds, which Starbucks staff package up and put out for people to take home. In addition to the grounds being a good source of nitrogen and trace minerals, this saves the grounds from going where they would otherwise go – the landfill. It reduces Starbuck’s trash load, saving them money in disposal, and has made me one loyal customer. Because of course when I stop to grab my coffee grounds, I can’t resist grabbing a drink or a pastry either. It’s basic economics; I’ll spend my dollars with the companies that have practices that I support, and while I don’t drink much coffee, if that happens to be Starbucks, well, then it’s Starbucks.

Edit: Apparently, Go Go Beans in Abbotsford does the same thing. Actually, I suspect a lot of coffee shops will if  y ou ask. But Starbucks makes it soooo easy….end edit.

In my garden I’m growing a few types of crops. Lettuce, carrots, bush beans, pole beans, arugula, chard, broccoli, and raspberries, not to mention the grapes and pears that were present when we moved in to the property. In addition, there’s a roughly 3×3m. area that I use for composting, and it’s the compost where most of my grounds end up. Just yesterday I turned the pile, and to my great delight, could feel the warmth emanating from it, and even see some steam rising from it’s centre as I forked it over. The heat is generated by the copious abundance of micro-organisms feeding on the kitchen and garden waste that I add to my compost, and they do especially well when they have an abundance of nitrogren to feed on – something coffee grounds are high in. The hotter your pile, below a certain temperature, the faster you will get compost and the stronger it will be.

Another use for coffee grounds is as a foliar fertilizer. I soak the coffee grounds in water for a day or so, strain out the solids, and then use a hand-held sprayer to spray the leaves and stems of any plants that I think can use a boost. The liquid nitrogen content of the water, as well as the other nutrients it absorbs from the grounds, is highly absorbable to the plants who get it. For instance, I used it on a couple of squash plants that I had to move because they were growing in my lettuce bed, and suffered from root disturbance following the move. They seem to be recovering now, but like with natural medicine, you really don’t know if it’s because of the treatment or whether they would have recovered anyway.

So a big kudos to Starbucks for going to the effort of making coffee grounds available for people to filch; we might be playing footsie with the planet’s systems by moving the nutrients in coffee so far around the world, but at least this is one step towards closing the loop and getting some use out of what would otherwise be a waste product.

Nope, Starbucks didn’t hook me with their caffeine, but I’m hooked to Starbucks nonetheless.

Just goes to show; if they don’t get you one way, they’ll get you another.

I should have tried to sell them this post.

I wrote this short blog post a while back in response to a posting on the Care2 site, www.care2.com, for cause bloggers. I didn’t hear back, but felt I had to give it a shot. I obviously didn’t give this post enough time or energy or the right direction, but even so, getting paid to blog would be a little beyond belief. I doubt it would have been much, but still….

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I first came across the Care2 community way back in early high-school. My idealism and passion for a better world immediately pulled me in, and I enthusiastically began using Care2’s leveraging of the power of advertising to save just a little bit of big cat habitat, conserve marine wetlands, and protect the rainforest. I wasn’t quite changing world events just yet, but I was making a difference, however incremental, and that’s what I cared about. It thrilled me to see an organization aggressively using online media and the power of economics to effect change. Today, I still see Care2 doing exactly that.

–Edit–: In fact, since I wrote this, I’ve learned from Care2 Founder Randy Paynter’s blog that Care2 is currently combating a DDOS attack – a malicious effort to seriously undermine Care2’s effectiveness. Randy writes: “We do not know who is behind the attack. Clearly, someone is threatened with the impact the PetitionSite is having. It’s possible the attack is being coordinated by a single unhappy hacker, or it’s possible it’s related to some of the petitions we’ve recently had related to international events. It’s pure speculation at this point as we simply do not know, however its size and characteristics suggest it’s a well coordinated attack.”

So there you have it. As some reader’s have pointed out, the fact that whoever is behind this attack feels threatened by Care2 means it’s making a positive difference. I encourage you to use or explore Care2. — End edit.–

Since that time, my activism has counter-intuitively expanded to become more local. I’ve passionately raised awareness about my watershed and its salmon populations, chipped in with the local cycling advocacy group, and participated at the civic table. But I’ve also come to realize that though we might want to change the world, there are limitations to how much we can do, and it’s important not to overextend, but to function within our capabilities.

These are tumultuous times, to say the least. Gone are the days when the only thing that mattered was “making it” in the big wide world. Fashioning a product to sell, acquiring personal property, growing your family and staying in touch with your network – it’s easy for these things to pale in comparison to the challenges that science and intuition tells us are coming, if they’re not here yet. A rapidly warming climate, proliferation of packaging and industrial waste, growing worldwide debt loads, all these things and more call on us to act differently, to do more than we ever have before, above and beyond the demands of our careers, and yet for many of us, simply staying afloat in the ever-changing sea of current events and economics is challenge enough.

Some give in to apathy, reckoning the pace and scale of the things that are happening are simply too much to effect change over. That’s not the spirit we need. If we can cultivate an attitude of passionate involvement, and value effort even when the result doesn’t materialize, we can change the course that we’re on. It’s what I’m working towards in my areas of interest, and I hope you do the same in yours.

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Today I’m using Care2 more than I ever have before. I mainly use their e-mail service, figuring that if I’m going to do e-mail anyway, why not do it with an organization that spreads goodwill by raising money for habitat and endangered species preservation among other things, rather than with some anonymous, for-profit, corporation like Hotmail or Gmail?

–Second Edit– One other Care2 feature that I’ve contributed to is absolutely free, and amazingly ingenious. It involves using advertising dollars to fund preservation initiatives. Companies are given the opportunity to advertise on the Care2 site, and Care2 hosts a link that people must log onto the site in order to click. By logging onto the site, they are exposed to that company’s logo, and voila, these companies have gained exposure while contributing their advertising dollars to preservation. For example, one company that stands out as gaining profile in my eyes is Kashi  - the high-fibre healthy cereal company. Now I don’t buy much cereal, but when I do I’m more likely to buy Kashi because of their contribution to the Care2 “Click-2-Donate” sites.

To do some vainglorious chest-thumping, but also demonstrate Care2’s effectiveness (something I was skeptical of for a while) since I started clicking, which I did pretty much daily in early high school and have only recently started doing again, I’ve made the following contributions out of the Care2 totals:

Offset 18 lbs. of carbon/2 549 495 lbs. total

24 THOUSAND sq. feet of Marine Wetland, American Prairie, and Rainforest habitat/ 612 MILLION total

305 ACRES of Big Cat habitat (tiger, jaguar, snow leopard)/ 27 400 SQ. MILES total

830 pcs. fruit for primates/ 18.7 MILLION total

supported Care2 kids for 505 days /18.2 MILLION total

659 pets/ 18.3 MILLION total

1218 letters protesting violence against women/ 12.5 MILLION total

As well, Care2 supports  efforts to help seals, oceans, and to eliminate the environmental causes of breast cancer, albeit with less tangible ways of measuring progress.

I really see Care2 as a shining example of one of our primary options in this rigged economic climate. Until we can achieve wide-reaching reform, we have to try to create a shift in spending habits from supporting harmful practices to supporting beneficial ones, and being willing to pay a little more for it if we have to. Done en masse, this can effect change.–End second edit–

Those of you who read here regularly will have noticed a precipitous decline in the frequency of my posts of late. This is no accident, and has a definite reason, so don’t despair! For the time being, I’ll be posting infrequently, and with little mention of myself. That’s probably as it should be anyhow.