Compost it.

If you’ll recall, a few posts ago I took a reader poll on our next nerdy enviro-topic, and garbage disposals vs. compost bins won in as much of a landslide as you can have when about 15 people vote. So without further ado, here is what I have learned about what happens to food when it goes down that garbage disposal (and what happens when it doesn’t).

We’ll start with the most straight-forward option (which, as usual, is also the best choice). Composting is ideal, it turns out. It takes the food straight out of your kitchen and puts it back into the ground as nutrient-rich soil. The process does produce carbon dioxide, but there are worse/more byproducts out there (see below) and at least you’re getting something extremely useful out of it.

If you can’t compost (or don’t want to, more accurately, since everyone “can” compost, technically), the next best thing is the garbage disposal, but it is not a close second by any measure. It depends largely on how the water treatment plant nearest you functions. Here is the Philadelphia Water Department’s own description of how they treat organic waste in our water:

Secondary Treatment. Secondary treatment uses biological processes to remove organic materials – materials from living organisms – still dissolved or suspended in the wastewater after primary treatment. The wastewater is combined with activated sludge, material containing the same microorganisms, or “microbes,” that decompose sewage in nature. The wastewater and activated sludge are aerated with air and mixed together in aeration tanks.

This creates an ideal environment for the microorganisms to “eat” the organics. The wastewater from the aeration tanks then flows to the final sedimentation tanks. Wastewater slowly flows through these tanks, allowing the solids to settle. The settled solids, secondary sludge, are pumped to another process where they are thickened to 4% to 5% and then pumped to the digesters. Just before reaching the river, the water is mixed with enough chlorine* to kill any remaining disease-causing organisms. The EPA requires 85% removal of suspended solids from wastewater. The treated water that leaves the plant – called effluent – is even cleaner than that.

The digested sludge from the Northeast Plant is barged 12 miles down the Delaware River and up the Schuylkill to the Biosolids Recycling Center where it is thickened, or dewatered, to 25% to 30% solids. After dewatering, the biosolids may be composted, land applied or landfilled off-site.

As you can see, some of the organic “sludge” (formerly your banana peel), does get composted, but they don’t say how much (although later in the article they say that “most” gets recycled). And of course, that whole process initially releases a whole bunch of methane at the plant and then I would assume still produces a significant amount of carbon dioxide when it’s actually composted. Some water treatment plants capture a good deal of their methane and reuse it to power/heat the plant. I did not see evidence of this on Philadelphia’s water site, but I also did not call to check–one would assume they would want to brag about it prominently if it were happening, though.

The worst choice is putting your food waste into the garbage can. As we all have heard a million times, landfills often prevent any sort of useful decomposition, since no oxygen actually gets to the stuff in there. (Although the website for the company I most often see driving around Philly has a lot of pages of PR stuff about how green and sustainable they are…including capturing methane, so maybe landfills have made more progress than we assume from our childhood days!) Another problem I found listed on a number of sites is that the more food waste in your garbage, the wetter it is. And the wetter trash is, the more likely it is to help someone else’s hazardous waste (because we all dispose of our paint thinner and batteries properly, of course) leach from the landfill into the ground and then into our water supply.

I should note, here, though, that although composting was the unchallenged winner in this battle, there was some disagreement across the interwebs about how much better a garbage disposal is than the garbage can. Some sites actually recommended the trash as a better option because of the extra water used by the disposal and the strain the organic waste can put on your city’s sewage system. And if you think about it, if your city’s water plant sends most of its organic sludge to the landfill, you’re really just adding a middle man with more opportunities for inefficiency/waste. So probably, if you are not going to compost, the most responsible thing to do would be to compare the processes for your own municipality’s water treatment and waste removal services and go with the one that is most environmentally cutting edge.

When you think of it that way, though, isn’t it just far easier to compost?

So there you have it. Composting is best. Garbage disposals are second best (by many accounts). And landfills should be used only as a last resort (in many cases). Oh, but I almost forgot (and this one is for you, Larms!): Incinerating is the absolute worst choice. Don’t do that. (And I of course don’t mean to imply that Larms burns her trash, but it’s possible that she knows people who do.)

For my part, I’ll be signing up for the curbside compost pick-up next month, folding it seamlessly into our family’s new budget that I’ll be creating around that time, thanks to the help of Larms and our savvy readers! I’m thinking when Li’l Miss is old enough to appreciate learning about the process, we can add a worm bin to the mix at home, but for now I know that would only be a drop in our organic waste bucket and take up time and floor space I just don’t have.

Up next month (which is actually just later this month because we still need June’s topic and we’re already in July): What about paper? Should it be recycled or composted?

And because this song has been going through my head the entire time I’ve been writing this post, I have to leave you with some classic Sesame Street:

*As an unrelated aside, just as a public service announcement: They also must chlorinate our drinking water to kill germs that would spread typhoid and such (and I use “must” loosely because there are other ways to do it, it’s just that chlorine is the cheapest). This is a good thing in that we don’t get typhoid, but it is a bad thing in that the chlorine will give some of us, at some point in our lives, cancer and/or other health problems. This is a trade-off the EPA is willing to accept, not unwisely probably. But it is also why you should really filter your tap water before drinking it. Although this article (promoting filters, natch) is making me want a dechlorinating filter for my shower head something fierce, too.

Better Late than Never: Organic vs. Local Produce Edition

Yes, I’ve decided I need to make an actual name for posts that arrive a month (or two) behind schedule. Because I can’t promise that it won’t happen often. But once given an assignment, I ALWAYS deliver! As my most loyal readers will recall, back in February I set us off on a quest to find out “the truth” behind many pieces of environmental conventional wisdom. In March we discovered that conventional cotton sucks. In April I started to get overwhelmed and totally dropped the ball. So here is APRIL’s wonk-fix. (And just because I went MIA in May does NOT mean you won’t get a May topic. I’ll crank that out next week, and then we’ll be back on schedule for June. See tomorrow’s post for my first-ever reader-poll in which YOU get to decide May’s topic! (Who says you can’t rewrite history?))

So, produce. I’ll be straightforward. It’s complicated. It seems that when considering what kind of fresh food to buy from where, there are at least SIX major and often competing factors that matter:

1. Your family’s health (i.e. how pesticide-laden is this?)
2. The Earth’s health (i.e. how many ecosystems are pesticide-laden and how much carbon was burned so that I could eat this?)
3. The health of the people who did the work to bring this to you (i.e. how many migrant farm workers will get cancer in twenty years because of their cumulative direct-pesticide exposure and in any case can’t feed their own families right now because they aren’t being paid a living wage?)
4. Your community’s health (i.e. am I supporting the growth of my local economy?)
5. Our overall food system’s health (i.e. is this purchase enabling the worst of agribusiness–see numbers 1-4?)
6. The food’s taste (i.e. something picked this morning is bound to be more delicious than something picked last week, dipped in preservatives, and shipped across an ocean.)

All of these factors are important and the questions related to them worthy. Every person will probably choose a slightly different ranking based on what is most important to them. (By the way, I listed them in no particular order–but then went back and tried to re-rank them in order of importance to me and found it was REALLY difficult, so just left them in their no particular order for now.)

I’m going to start with the obvious: The BEST choice is locally and sustainably-grown organic (maybe from your own backyard or maybe from a small, worker-owned/co-operative farm–oh, if only!!).

But of course we’re having this discussion because that is not realistic for most people (especially here on the east coast–where apparently the humidity makes it extra hard to grow organically and keep off bacteria and fungi).

So what’s the next best choice?

Well, it all depends on what is important to you…and that decision can be maddeningly complex–so much so that I can’t even begin to lay it all out in clear step-by-step terms that would apply to everyone equally. Let’s walk through my own train of thought on all this and see where I end up.

1) Local AND sustainable is better than organic BUT from 3,000 miles away and/or a giant factory farm.

I belong to a CSA (that pic up top is the bounty of last week’s harvest). Every other week for the spring/summer/fall and once a month through the winter I get to go pick up extremely fresh, locally-grown produce and dairy products. In this instance, it’s nice to let other responsible, like-minded people make the where-to-buy decision for me. Their farm is not technically organic and neither is the food they source from local farms, but I believe them when they say they seek out sustainable, responsible partners. I guess it’s kind of a “semi-organic-in-spirit” if not “in-certified-USDA” kinda thing. Which frankly, gives me a lot more reassurance than, say, this kind of certification. In the end, I know that I’m supporting the types of businesses we need more of in this world, and lending momentum to a movement that is of vital importance to the health of my community and the local environment.

When it’s not my week to pick up the CSA share, I can always hit up one of many farmers’ markets around the city to the same effect.

2) Local (from a responsible farm) AND (by definition) in season is better than organic BUT shipped from down south so that you can have your tomatoes year-round.

This is one I’d like to get better at. But because we have come to expect (nay, demand!) that we can get ANYTHING at the grocery at ANY time of year, it is going to require a lifestyle shift on my part that will slowly evolve over the next ten years or so. In some ways I actually look forward to the journey, because I do think it will add to that feeling we all love in temperate climates that “every season is unique and special” (and hey, in 20 years when winter here amounts to like, a month of semi-chilly drizzle, we can probably use all the added ambiance we can get–oh, but wait, when that’s the case I’ll be able to get my tomatoes year-round here, too. SNAP!). In any case, right now you can pry Li’l Miss’s bananas out of her cold, dead hands–thus, it will be a work-in-progress for all of us.

3) If it’s on the dirty-dozen list, organic might very well be better than local, especially if you eat it a lot.

When I think about how many strawberries and blueberries my child eats per day, and how many apples I eat in a week, it just seems to make sense to go with organic when it comes to these guys. Especially when I see that glaring “80% reduction in exposure to pesticides” statistic–feels like a no-brainer when presented in terms that stark. And maybe for the items on the dirty dozen list where organic is hard to find or too expensive or only grown in New Zealand, I need to think about simply skipping them most of the time.

And hmm…I might have just sort of covered most of my bases there! My main rules of thumb then would be:

• Go local (and ideally sustainable) whenever possible (and think about skipping it if it’s not in season near you). Support the small farms/farmers’ markets in your neighborhood over the big chains.

• Go organic when you’re dealing frequently with a member of the dirty dozen.

• If it’s something you’re not willing to give up, but will never be available locally (for us that would include bananas and avocados at the moment), might as well go organic when price allows.

After all that is it really so simple? C’mon guys, time to add your ifs, ands, or buts to the mix!

This is NOT an essay on produce.

That has been officially pushed back until sometime near the end of May.

To throw you a very small bone in keeping with the theme, though, I have two nifty links tonight:

1. A ridiculously beautiful photo essay of agriculture all over the world

2. A handy-dandy and oh-so-cute printable chart to keep with you so you’ll always know when to buy organic (sent to us by extremely alert reader Carrie!!)

Where’s the coupon for that can of organic store brand beans?

I will delve deeper than most of you ever cared for me to go into the topic of organic produce later this month, but today I wanted to touch on it briefly, in a gut-feeling, not-yet-completely-edumacated kind of way, for our ongoing “To Coupon…or Not to Coupon?” series.

Largely driven by having a new, relatively unsullied and ever-eager mouth to feed in the family, I have over the past few months placed an increasingly high priority on the intangible “savings” of feeding that mouth, and the mouths of her parents, food that has not been sprayed with tons of pesticides and preservatives. After all, what is more important to me? Doing my best to ensure that all three of us live long and healthy lives or ensuring that I can go on an annual cruise in my retirement (that would then no doubt be cut tragically short by colon cancer)?

(Quick requisite disclaimer: I acknowledge that having a choice between options such as these is a privilege many cannot imagine, and I in no way believe that families who are struggling to make ends meet should be worrying about whether or not their lettuce comes from a family-owned organic farm (unless they want to, of course). By the same token, I think we would ALL be a lot better off if the families who CAN afford to think about such things do, as those families have the power to drive the market for everyone else into healthier, more affordable directions. (Wal-Mart’s numerous and insidious societal sins aside, their recent move toward supporting organic and local produce comes to mind here as a result of the mainstreaming of organics. (Let’s not take time right now to ponder whether they’re price-gouging those small farmers, k?)))

While I like to get as much organic stuff as I can, I also don’t want said organic products to send my grocery bill skyrocketing. I like to find the right balance between reasonable prices and a grocery cart with as few toxins as possible.

(Just one other aside before I continue: I am also lucky to live near a Whole Foods as well as a Superfresh (A&P) that has recently launched their own totally decent organic store brand (Green Way). Larms will probably have a few choice words for me and all of us at some point about how tough it is to even FIND varied options like these out where she lives.)

Here are a couple rules of thumb (in no official order of priority–I’m still working out the hierarchies myself–any advice on that welcome!) that make me feel pretty comfortable:

1) If the organic version is no more than 10% over the conventional price, go organic. So if the organic can of beans is $1.09 and the coventional is $.99, I’ll choose the former–10 cents on the dollar seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for my health.

2) If it’s an everyday staple of our diet, go organic. For instance, I eat oatmeal every single morning, so whatever toxins are in conventional, I’d be getting a huge dose over time if I didn’t mostly stick to the organic version.

3) If it’s primarily for the kiddo, go organic. Now that she drinks milk, we buy the organic stuff for her, even though it’s ungodly expensive in comparison. Here is a case for me where the price difference is so much that it doesn’t seem quite worth it for the adult milk in the house, given how little of it we actually drink, even though it makes the dreaded list in Rule #4 below.

4) If it’s on this top 12 list of foods that retain pesticides, go organic (unless otherwise decided due to another rule taking priority–although looking at the original article and seeing the list of known side-effects associated with the pesticides in these foods, I might be changing my mind on that soon). It’s not all bad news. These are the top 10 foods where organic doesn’t matter so much. (If you’re trying to make a tropical fruit salad, you’re GOLDEN.)

5) If it really seems important to go organic (like with the meats) but organic is wicked expensive, just don’t buy it very often. We have meat with our meals only once or twice a week. This saves a good deal of money and means that when I do buy it, I can splurge to get the good stuff like grass-fed beef or free-range pork, or whatever seems less shady than steroid-infused chicken parts packaged in China. Or if it’s not the good stuff, at least it’s not going into my body every single day. (On that note, my husband is SUPER-psyched about the advent of the Elevation Burger fast-food chain and wants to let Corporate know that they BETTER be bringing their Philly franchise to a block near us).

We’re back! (And we brought veggie dip!)

Confession: My “couple day” break to catch up turned into a full week because it just so happened that last weekend was Larms’s baby shower! The event was a ton of fun, but basically put us both out of commission for the duration. Although she’s still trying to dig her way out of the pile o’ gifts and I’m still trying to unpack from the trip (I am so bad at transitions it’s not even funny), we’ll do our best to get back to posting–we’ve got a great series on couponing, or rather, our utterly fearless and ridiculously simple lack thereof, lined up for you over the next week.

Until then, I’ll leave you with a recipe from her shower that is delicious, absurdly easy, and yes, comes from Rachel Ray. I know what I’ve posted about her in the past, but as one of my friends put it so accurately, when you shoot out 8 million recipes a year, a few of them are bound to hit the mark.

Don’t know what the official title is. Let’s make up something that would make Ray-Ray proud…

Creamy Lemon Zinger Veggie Dip with Fresh Herbs, Asparagus Spears and Haricots Verts

Ingredients

1 lb asparagus, trimmed

1 lb fresh green beans, trimmed

salt

1 cup mayonnaise

1 lemon, zested and juiced

1 small shallot, finely chopped

2 Tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon (4 sprigs), chopped, plus extra sprigs for garnish

2 Tablespoons chopped parsley leaves, plus extra sprigs for garnish

Few grinds of freshly ground pepper

Directions

Cook the asparagus spears and green beans in one inch of salted boiling water, covered, for 3 – 4 minutes (I only do 3). Drain and cool; arrange on a serving plate.

Combine the dip ingredients in a small bowl and garnish.

The most delicious finger-food you’ll ever serve to guests that doesn’t involve bacon

Curried Snow Peas with Peanuts

Ingredients:

24 fresh snow peas

4 ounces cream cheese (softened)

1 and 1/2 Tbsp. mango chutney (I use Major Grey’s)

1/2 tsp. curry powder

1/2 cup dry roasted peanuts chopped fine (can also use honey roasted)

Directions:

1. Remove the strings from the snow peas. Rinse them and pat dry.

2. In a small bowl, beat together the cream cheese, chutney and curry powder until well blended. Place the chopped peanuts in a shallow bowl or soup plate.

3. Spread a small amount of the curried cheese on one end of each snow pea. Then dip end in the peanuts to coat.

(I find that there is enough cream cheese mixture to dollop a “healthy” amount on each end. It can/should cover a good 1/3 or even a bit more of the length of the pea. Actually, they’ll look exactly like those holiday cookies with the chocolate on the ends when they’re finished! But, you know, a lot greener.)

Martha has an empire for a reason.

A few years ago, when I decided that it was time to start home-cooking meals on a regular basis and simultaneously thought that it might be a good idea to broaden my recipe options beyond pasta, pasta, and more pasta, I went on this Rachel Ray kick. Someone had recently given me one of her cookbooks and she was starting to get super-popular, so I figured I’d see what the fuss was about and mix up our menus a bit. Also, I thought–30-minute meals? That’s perfect for this teacher-on-the-go who is generally too tired to stand, much less slave over a hot stove at the end of the day.

So I started plowing through a bunch of her stuff, and over time learned four key things:

1) It all tasted pretty good.
2) For the most part, the average time start-to-finish was closer to 1 hour.
3) Nearly all of her meals contained massive amounts of meat.
4) Her ingredient lists were absurdly long, really quite expensive, and routinely left me with a refrigerator full of half-used specialty food items that were impossible to finish off in a timely fashion.

My biggest issues were with numbers 3 and 4. While we are not vegetarian, we do try to limit our meaty meals to about two per week. I often found myself flipping through dozens of pages to find something that didn’t have a title resembling: “Ginormous Mediterranean Venison-Sirloin-Pork Burgers with Spicy-Sweet Chorizo Chutney Glaze”. (Okay, in fairness, not many recipes actually used MULTIPLE meats, but most were built around the meat such that you couldn’t take out or substitute it or even just use it sparingly and still have a meal to serve at the end.)

But even more maddening were her ingredient lists. I’m sorry, but a meal that is supposed to be PREPARED in 30 minutes should not have instructions that take 30 minutes JUST TO READ. Or a list of ingredients so long that it would take you an additional 30 minutes just to take them all out of the cupboard (not to mention far more than 30 minutes to FIND them all at the grocery store). On page 90 of her 356: No Repeats book is a recipe that is actually called “Gravy-Smothered Cajun-Style Meatloaf Patties with Maple Pecan-Glazed String Beans”. This recipe has TWENTY-THREE ingredients! I get that she wants us to try new things and all, but I feel there are better ways to use new/interesting ingredients than as part of some overwrought, gimmicky meal that, in the end, tastes fine but is not necessarily anything to write home about.

And I realize that I could have done a little more work to pick the less-ingredient-heavy recipes, or to read more carefully through the directions and find substitutions and things that could be left out, etc., but isn’t all that effort sort of defeating the point of a meal that’s so super-awesome because (supposedly) it only takes 30 minutes of your time?

Well, THANK GOD, just as I was starting to despair, a copy of this book arrived at my doorstep, courtesy of a friend who loves me very much and wanted to save me from a life of pointlessly-complex recipe-wrangling. And then a few months later, the Everyday Food magazine started arriving, also courtesy of the same friend, god bless her. I’m probably the last person in the world to realize what a great find the whole Everyday Food brand is, and now I can’t get enough of it! Really, these recipes are the polar opposite of Ray-Ray’s. You’d be hard pressed to find a dish with over ten ingredients, and most are closer to seven or eight. The total time for many is between 20-40 minutes, and I find the estimates generally to be realistic. Vegetarian options are, if not abundant, at least readily available. Because the recipes are so straightforward, it’s very easy to see where and how you can modify them to fit what you already have in the fridge. And the payoff is far greater–the food is generally just really simple, really delicious, well-made and well-conceived food.

So, Martha. It’s very hard for me to say this, considering that the last time I caught a bit of your show you were telling your guest that you had never once in your life had orange juice that wasn’t fresh-squeezed, but despite all signs pointing to your being utterly detached from the average lady’s life, clearly you get mine on at least one level. So, thank you for simplifying things around here. I really do appreciate it.