With less money to spend every month, many Americans are turning to coupons to stretch their food budget. Last weekend, I decided to join the ranks, and sat down at my kitchen table, armed with scissors and the two inserts from our Sunday paper. And started clipping away.
I decided to separate the coupons into three piles:
Coupons that passed the test of my health conscious, green filter, and the only ones I may possibly use:
Minute Maid Juices, Lipton Teas, Stash Tea, EarthGrains Whole Wheat Bread, Tabasco - not a hundred percent sure about the EarthGrains Bread, I tried to check the ingredients online, without success -
The suspicious pile, coupons for products that won’t kill you, but all come with health/nutrition problems attached, to various degrees. Red flags such as too much salt, too much sugar, too much fat, GMO baggage, unnecessary packaging, radiation, pesticides, excessive processing, toxic eakage from plastic linings, added chemicals, grains stripped away from their wholeness, empty calories, fried potatoes, too much red meat:
Progresso Chicken Broth, Green Giant Frozen Vegetables, Star Olive Oil, Vinegar, and Olives, Mrs. Dash Seasoning Blend, Spice Islands Spices, Quaker Oatmeal, Fresh Express Pre-cut Salad, Del Monte Canned Fruit and Vegetables, Ragu Pasta Sauce, Skippy Peanut Butter, College Inn Broths and Stocks, Uncle Ben’s Long Grain and Wild Rice, Lawry’s Seasonings, Newman’s Dressings, Swiss Miss Cocoa, Bisquick Pancake Mix, Best Foods Mayonnaise, Pillsbury Dinner Rolls and Biscuits, Daisy Sour Cream, PoppyCock Nuts, Pam Spray, True North Nuts, Lipton Dinners, Kraft Salad Dressings, CountryCrock Cinnamon Apples, International House of Pancakes, Black Angus Steak House, Bakers Square Dinners, Betty Crocker Au Gratin Potatoes, Jell-O, Planters Nuts, C&H Sugar, Tyson Fully Cooked Bacon, Fiber One Toaster Pastries, Betty Crocker Cookie Mix, Quaker Chewy Granola Bars, Lee Kum Kee Sauces, Hillshire Farm Cocktail Links
The obviously junky bunch:
Betty Crocker Frosting, Cool-Whip, Big G Kid Cereals, Chuck E Cheese Pizza and Coca Cola Drinks, White Castle Microwavable Burgers, Reddi Whip, Entenmann’s Doughnuts, Hershey’s Chocolates, Kozy Schack Desserts, M&Ms
If I had any lingering doubts about the intentions of the food industry as a whole, this little exercise put them to rest. Coupons were not created with the interest of consumers in mind. Rather they are yet another marketing tactic from consumer packaged goods manufacturers to push their highly processed foods, regardless of their actual health benefit or lack thereof.
I say, let us not fall into the coupon trap, and seek instead, other, smarter ways to save, that won’t hurt our health.
Have you tried sorting out the information on fish? Which kind can you eat without worrying about mercury, PCBs, chlorinated pesticides, dioxins, furans, PBDEs, and other nasty contaminants? You would think there is one central place with all that info, neatly packaged into one pocket size guide. There is. Actually, there are, and that’s the problem. Several sources, all with different recommendations:
To be safe, I guess I will just stick to the ones they all agree on: anchovies, catfish (farmed), clams (farmed), crab (Dungeness), crawfish (domestic), mackerel (Atlantic), oysters (farmed), salmon (wild, Alaska), sardines (Pacific, domestic), scallops (bay, farmed), squid (Pacific, domestic), tilapia (farmed, domestic), trout (fresh water, farmed).
What the f…? This is the third time I see an ad for the new 2009 Silverado Chevy Truck. Not in a car magazine. Not in People magazine. Not on TV. No, I saw it in three very respected green sites, out of all places.
This brings up an issue that’s faced by green bloggers all the time. If you are going to take advertising, how can you make sure that the ads do not go counter to your message? Green certified ad networks are still few and far between, and sometimes have requirements, like Natural Path Media, that preclude the smaller blogs. Of course, there is always the option of handling one’s own ads. But, who has that kind of time?
Met with KoAnn, from Sustainable Life Media for lunch, at local deli. I asked lady at the checkout counter, “Do you have compostable spoons?”. I was met with same blank stare I have encountered before in similar situations. Mainstream America does not know about compostable plastics, and even less so, sustainability. Not that the lady was not open to learning. She seemed fascinated when I explained compostable plastics, and why it mattered. She would ask, she said.
Back home, in preparation for this post, I did some more research on the topic. Googled, compostable plastics, Fake Plastic Fish. And found post from my friend Beth Terry, ‘Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should‘. Of course, I can always count on Beth to set me straight. No easy way out here. The way to go, really, is good old fashioned metal spoons. Only energy required is from dish washing. Most likely the lesser of all evils.
Next time, I go to the deli, I will ask the lady about metal spoons instead.
We’ve all witnessed that scene. A mom, obviously not rich, waiting in line with her brood, at the checkout counter, her shopping cart overflowing with bottled water and sodas. Inspired by that image, I decided to take a look at some hard Nielsen data on U.S grocery sales, and came across some rather stunning numbers:
La Marguerite Blog Compilation
Add it all up, and you’ve got the majority of households spending between a fourth and a third of their grocery budget on junk, and empty calories. That’s a lot of money, that could be used on other more nutritious groceries such as milk, fruit, vegetable, meat, and other non processed food. It’s also wasted precious dollars in increasingly dire economic times.
There are plenty of reasons why women - the primary grocery shoppers - persist with such deplorable spending habits. Ten, according to a recent report from US News & World Report, ‘10 Things the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know’:
Junk food makers spend billions advertising unhealthy foods to kids
The studies that food producers support tend to minimize health concerns associated with their products
Junk food makers donate large sums of money to professional nutrition associations
More processing means more profits, but typically makes the food less healthy
Less-processed foods are generally more satiating than their highly processed counterparts
Many supposedly healthy replacement foods are hardly healthier than the foods they replace
A health claim on the label doesn’t necessarily make a food healthy
Food industry pressure has made nutritional guidelines confusing
The food industry funds front groups that fight antiobesity public health initiatives
The food industry works aggressively to discredit its critics
Will the stores take the relay and act as advocates for the shoppers? According to another study, this one from Bishop Consulting, ‘In-Store Nutritionists Will Be as Commonplace as Pharmacists within Ten Years‘, some encouraging trends are taking place in grocery retail, along with initiatives from some manufacturers.
Sarah Palin should not have mocked Barack Obama for being a community organizer. If anything, tonight’s results proved her wrong. Our new President has given new meaning, and strength to the concept of community organizing. And he has shown us what citizens can do, when given the means to organize towards a cause, that’s greater than themselves.
Tonight I am thinking of the thousands of Obama offices, volunteer networks, and fundraising organizations, along with the sophisticated Internet machine, and the organizing methodology, that went into getting Barack Obama elected. As the signs are coming down, the thank you emails go out, and the temporary offices go back to their original owners, I wonder, is that it? Will we go back to business as usual, each in our homes, going about our private lives?
Or will we use the skills learned during the Obama campaign to mount a national community effort, this time to address the threat of climate change? The last time I checked, we had less than ten years to get our act together. Citizens have a crucial role to play on the conservation end. As someone who has tried for the last year and a half, to curtail my consumerist and energy appetites, I can testify on the difficulty of accomplishing such changes at the individual level. Instead, we need to summon the power of community to help each other.
Tomorrow, after you have come down from your victory high, I urge you to keep alive the citizen spirit that made you pick up the phone, and knock on doors, and put up signs on your lawn. Take that energy and become an organizing force in your community. Start a No Beef Lunch at your kids’ school, or a telecommuting initiative at work, or a volunteer home insulation project in your city . . . The climate cause may not have a face like Barack Obama, but it’s all the more reason to take it on.
“Why are you placing so much hope on Barack Obama becoming President? It is up to you, and all the other citizens to make changes.”
This is a refrain that comes up a lot, including from some La Marguerite readers.
I say, this is a false debate. The answer is, we need both a competent leader, and responsible citizens. A new President who understands and places sustainability, climate change solutions, and energy independence on top of the national agenda. Citizens who believe in their power to make a difference, in their support of new environmental policies, and in their daily lives. One without the others won’t work, and vice versa. The last few years should be proof enough.
Tonight, my mind’s shut. My heart too jumpy from the waiting. I feel like Larry David:
I can’t take much more of this. Two weekssix days to go, and I’m at the end of my rope. I can’t work. I can eat, but mostly standing up. I’m anxious all the time and taking it out on my ex-wife, which, ironically, I’m finding enjoyablemy dogs, who keep tripping me when I take them for their nightly walk. This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it’s worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there’s still a potential cure. With this, there’s no cure. The result is final. Like death.
SIx more days. And I shall come back to my former green obsessed self.
I can’t quite remember what the ad was about - but I was struck by the images, and mostly what I felt watching. The outdoors, a person reaching out for a fruit, in a tree. My reaction was, sweet! . . . and boredom. It failed to grab me. I stopped to think, and wondered, is that how I feel, genuinely, with nature imbued narrative, usually? And my response was, yes . . . and maybe others are too?
Contrast this with the excitement from my friend, after he had just come from watching the Waste=Food documentary:
When I heard him talk about the Chinese story, and also Nike’s revolutionary process for making eco-friendly shoes, I wanted to learn more.
In the search for a more sustainable world, we humans may be more impressed by stories of our own ingeniosity, than nature’s goodness. Technology, creativity, and news seem like a potent recipe for effective green communication, worth using over, and over again. Not so, bucolic scenes, and the romanticization of our natural world.
It’s that time of the month again, and I am due for the Green Moms Blogging Carnival, this time over at Best of Mother Earth. I am supposed to write about gratitude, specifically three green things I am thankful for.
We behave with nature, the same way we might with a faithful lover, when we are forgetting how much we are being given, and how much our lives depends on such constant love. That’s the irony, we take nature for granted, because it’s so good to us, most of the time.
Take a few minutes and . . .
imagine a world without trees, and birds chirping in the trees, imagine the silence, and the scorching sun, and the absence of shade and coolness,
imagine a world without water, as in here:
imagine the air so polluted that you could no longer breathe freely, and would have to wear a mask 24/7, or stay indoors,
imagine . . .
While we may never know such extremes in our lifetime, we may get dangerously close, sooner than we think, if we don’t all change our ways.
Today, I am thankful for the trees, and the water, and the air.
How about you? What do you appreciate the most in nature?
