Examined Lives

Waste or Want: Pantry oddities

I started thinking about this post when I noticed a few truly antique items in my pantry and freezer - packages crusted over with ice; dented boxes of exotic grains; twelve varieties of stale nuts.  Too many items to list individually, really, and plus right off the bat, we know they're going to waste.

But I'm going to plow ahead anyway, because the amount of stuff sitting there unused is truly wasteful.  I mean, imagine if you added up the stuff everyone had sitting unused in pantries and basement freezers!  I bet you could come up with Thanksgiving dinner for every homeless person in New York City.

So, I polled a few friends to find out what they had in their freezer, to compare similarities with my own excesses, and here is the resulting list of items that linger, in order of popularity (or non-popularity, however you choose to think about it):

1. Quinoa. A grain-like crop that originated in South America, cheap and very high-protein, most of those polled mentioned quinoa (KEEN-wa).  Fabulous, but I've yet to find a person who can cook it so that it is edible, or even knows how to cook it.  Boxes of these pebbly bastards grace a lot of shelves, including mine, if they haven't been trashed already. I vaguely remember using it with cauliflower and cheese to make a casserole a decade ago. 
2. Coconut milk.  Why, why, why?  Because the name sounds good.  Meryl Streep once said on The Actor's Studio, when asked her favorite word, that she had posed the question to her young daughter, who immediately mentioned the infamous unused ingredient.  Yep, sounds pretty.  But unless you've got the curry and lemongrass and rice noodles and what-all that usually go with this to make a dish, you're screwed.
3. Bulghur wheat. Same story as quinoa.
4. Panko bread crumbs.  Because you never know when you're going to fry up a batch of tempura shrimp!
5. Matzoh meal.  Making matzoh ball soup must be complicated.
6. Tomato paste.  Classic thing that you pick up, thinking, "Oh, think I'm out of that!" and you never are.
7. Turkey chili and beef jerky for a planned camping trip that evidently never occurred. Or if it did, they ate wild greens.
8. Soba noodles.  They're great.  I just never got around to cooking them.
9. Confectioner's sugar.  Quite a few bags and half-bags out there.
10. Lotus nuts in syrup.  (That was my husband's inexplicable contribution.)
11. Half-box of frozen ice pops. Weather changes, who wants 'em.  The other half of the box, still in liquid state, sits on the pantry floor.  When I bought these, the cashier cheerily said, "Hey, I've had a box of those in my room for about five years!" 

The moral here:  Beware of buying ethnic food ingredients if you aren't making the entire meal tonight, and already have everything you need.  Clean the pantry every year or so so you don't keep buying the same staple items over and over.  Go easy on seasonal items. Oh, and stick to a list when you shop.

Now, would they like Panko crumbs for the school Thanksgiving food drive...

~BurbMom

Waste or Want: PEVA shower curtain

It was time to update the girls' bathroom from fluffy rugs and pink checks to something a little hipper and more modern. I started with the light, installing a sleek tubular model from one of my favorite lighting designer brands, George Kovacs. (Too bad it's much smaller than the previous light, necessitating a paint job over the remaining white space that will probably take me months to cover.)

Installed a teak shower mat, which won't harbor dust, cat hair or dampness -- and never needs to be machine washed, hoorah.  Now for the shower.

As you all know, I try to avoid heavy swathes of material whenever possible, as mold is darned hard to extinguish and those nasty neurotoxin pollutants, PCBs, are most likely to linger in house dust. Plastic might be fun and clean, and give the room an edgier look, but most shower curtains are made with PVCs, or polyvinyl chloride, and ooze phthalates, a nasty chemical that acts like a false hormone in our bodies and has been linked to developmental and reproductive problems.

What to do?  Well, as it turns out, there are now eco-friendly plastic shower curtains.  They're made from PEVA or EVA, which has no vinyl or chlorine, and is based on polyethylene plastic. It's not biodegradable, but is generally regarded as less harmful to use and to make than PVC.

I chose an Ecoplast brand PEVA curtain in a fun cats pattern, playing off the black-and-white photo prints already hanging in the room, from vitafutura.com. For $28.99 plus $7.98 shipping, it wasn't cheap; though certainly cheaper than nice fabric ones. When the curtain arrived (from Germany, where it's made, via the online retailer in Tampa), it had no odor, unlike PVC models. It is, however, a bit on the thin side, and has no grommets for hanging, which makes me worry that it will rip easily. Time will tell. It was nice and long, though, and completely watertight.

I'll finish the room with a Benjamin Moore Kitchen & Bath low-VOC paint in sunny yellow, in case you were wondering.  When I'll get to it, that is.

The Verdict: At the outset, PEVA is a great alternative to PVC shower curtains.

~BurbMom

Waste or Want: American (line-caught) Tuna

Oh, la, another dreary grocery shopping trip at my local A&P. Same place, same items, just like yesterday.  But wait!  What's that I spy? Something new!  Something...environmentally responsible!  Cans of line-caught tuna from American Tuna, a brand I haven't seen before. I pick up a can.

"Small, surface caught albacore are low in mercury," the can claims, and who am I to argue with the director of the Oregon State University Seafood Laboratory? 

I buy the can. At home, I dig a little more and find that American Tuna is actually six fishing families. This just gets better and better.

At $4.99 for six ounces, this better be good. But actually, $5 to feed two kids with possibly the most nutritional protein available isn't bad.  Even the mystery nuggets at school cost $1.85 per kid, and here we have 42 grams of pure protein, the body's building block, and more than 10,000 milligrams of and brain-boosting omega-3 fatty acids (tuna is a major source).  There are no additives here; no broth or water.

And given the preciousness of line-caught fish, $5 is about the right price. As writers like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman have pointed out, fish just can't be your everyday cheap-o food; thinking that it was is what has depleted fisheries and led to environment killing, toxin-filled fish farms.  Grocery sushi!  Shrimp poppers for everyone! We eat fish by the pound, but they're not cows, pigs or buffalo (which should probably also be consumed in small-ounce servings. 

Now for the taste test. I'm happy to say that this is indeed the best-tasting canned tuna. There's more tuna than water in the package, which is a rarity, and the meat is firmer and more fresh tasting, wholly unlike the usual greyish stuff you pry out of a can.  The can itself is a bit of a sticking point, since it's undoubtedly lined with bisphenol A, but at these prices we won't be eating a lot of this stuff.  Then again, I doubt I'll go back to my old tuna.

(Another nice item is when I mentioned to the A&P fish manager how much I liked the American Tuna, he told me the entire A&P is truly trying to do the right thing and stock only sustainable fish. Sounds too good to be true, right?  But I'll be checking up on them.)

The Verdict:  A great catch!

~BurbMom

Photo: American Tuna

On the Kindle: To Buy or Not to Buy?

This may sound like a Waste or Want but it's not, only because I have yet to try the Kindle. The New Yorker's Nicholas Baker just did, and boy does his review of the e-reading machine feel like a takedown. Among some of his complaints: The typeface ("it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words"); the background color ("it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray."); what it doesn't include ("Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen."). 

I'll have to get my mitts on one before I give my final review, but there was one point Baker made that I totally appreciated. Fans say that among the Kindle's many virtues is that it's environmentally friendly, and if there's anything you may have learned about BurbMom and me, it's that we're hugely invested in trying to be ecologically sound. But sometimes, a decision feels far more virtuous than it actually is. 

Baker acknowledges that one does, to a fashion, conserve paper when one switches to an electronic reading advice. Then again, there are other ramifications: 

"On the other hand, there’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled."

My takeaway? Get a Kindle if you want one, but don't think it's because you're being green. As for me, I'm sticking to books for now. When I'm done, I'll do what I always do: Keep them for re-reading later—that is, if I'm absolutely floored by them—or pass them on. There's nothing wrong with good, old-fashioned recycling.

  

—CityMom

Waste or Want: BJ's Wholesale Club

First came the two kids. Then the house in the 'burbs, with fearsome, ass-clenching mortgage to match. The stationwagon sidled right on in, to our lacklustre, resigned welcome, as is its wont. The essential finished basement, replete with computers and toys and completely unnecessary full bath "for resale value," lurched into existence to help contain the morass. Two pets, one for each kid, jumped into place.

Could bulk shopping be far behind?  It could not. And hence our first family trip yesterday to check out the closest BJ's, to succor The Dude's recent cost-cutting mania.

Despite the huge parking lot, where we narrowly avoided being backed into by an SUV (Why does this always happen to me?  Is it just because I'm short, or am I marked for death by them, in some kind of cat-piss territorial manner?), it wasn't bad, as shopping experiences go.  Big, bare-bones, well-lit, clean.  I'm here to buy kitty litter, so it seemed just the place.

The thing is, the stuff people were piling their carts with?  They didn't need 30% of it.  Bottled water; paper towels; canned soup; boxes -- boxes -- of candy; -- soda; juice boxes; paper plates.  Another 30% consisted of huge packs of factory-farm meat, milk and cheese, containers of phthalate-laden shampoo, corn-syrupy cereal and catsup and the like. While I don't discount the need for hard-up families to buy essentials this way and these days, this is just the kind of crap, and crappy habits, we have to shift away from in the long-run.

And, seriously, who needs to buy 20 washcloths?  An eight-pack of antibacterial wipes? 

I compared a few prices of other items from their Web site to what I could buy online elswhere. Neutragena oil-free moisturizer for sensitive skin.  BJ's price:  $14.99.  Drugstore.com: $12.99.  Mango Tango Pet Carrier: $39.99 plus $8.99 shipping at BJ.com; $30.99 plus $11.63 shipping at Amazon.com.  A huge wooden swingset by Adventure Playsets:  Same at BJ's and Amazon.

The stuff I got was, I thought, an o.k. buy.  Kitty litter; cat food (albeit in eco-nasty individually packed cans), paper napkins for school lunches; a three-pack of Starbuck's Breakfast Blend. Then, lo and behold, I find in my local A&P napkins on sale for a good $1.50 less (for two packs) than what I paid at BJ's.

And some people even buy a membership to shop here, $45 for a year, $85 for two, for extra savings and "rewards" (we got a free Household card). Add to that the huge amount of heated/cooled house space needed to store all this stuff, plus the fact that many people, especially me, will forget they have a hidden store of unused paper goods and simply go out and buy more.

The Verdict:  BJ's blows.

Waste or Want: IKEA

I have gotten painstakingly re-acquainted with IKEA over the past few weeks, even though my kids are neither babies nor college-dorm-age; having spent many, many pennies to build our home offices, there are precious little left to furnish them. "How was it?" a friend (a fellow middle-ager, need I add) asked dubiously, when I mentioned my third or fourth forage.

My answer:  As fabulous as I remember when The Dude and I took a bus to the only IKEA around, in Elizabeth, NJ, to furnish our 400-square-foot studio in Manhattan. How long that was ago, I leave to your imagination.

Now, I know IKEA is everything I have said I hate; as big-box as it gets, with furniture so cheap they practically invented the throw-away mentality. Give me a visual: "An old futon I bought at IKEA." You're picturing something left at the curb for the bulky trash collectors, right?  I rest my case. So, when I bought a house, I figured I'd grown out of IKEA, and devoted my floorspace to antiques (the ultimate recyclables!).

Well, the stuff is still cheap, but much more durable than I remember -- of course, there aren't (many) drunk folks stumbling and retching all over it.  It's still cannily designed and bright. The assemblage instructions are still wordless, but are less confusing.

And somehow the place still seems to give off the vibe of simple, small living (amid the mounds of crap for sale). They do good things environmentally, and let you know it all the way along, by not giving out plastic bags, for example, and by trying to minimize waste in manufacture and packaging.

Further, IKEA products are as chemical-free as the toughest legislation out there, EU Reach, mandates. That means no PVC in kids' toys, formaldehyde-free paint, and flame-retardant-free furniture.  Plus, they just gave $48 million to UNICEF, which scores big points with me.  They are also scrupulously careful, by all reports, about the use of child labor.

Lastly, the cafe, with its big play area, is the perfect haven for tired parents with kids. The food is excellent yet cheap, and comes in wee servings for kids to minimize waste. The people-spotting is fun; apparently a certain arty crowd has never deserted IKEA (nor have Manhattanites), along with chic Europeans and their precociously stylish offspring.

The Verdict: Want. Now and forever.

~BurbMom

Waste or Want: the Method Omop

After a long period of internal dithering among increasingly grimy floors, I finally broke and reached for my heart's cleaning desire, Method's Omop starter kit.  It's basically one of those plastic-mop-with-removable cloth jobs, which I have been using for a few years now, being far too lazy for the old but effective bucket and mop, or the hands'n'knees drudgery -- even in the face of touch cleaning jobs, which believe me, I have.

My reticence to dispense elbow grease showed quite clearly on my floors. The wood was dingy and the tile had this caked-on clay coating from my attempts to clean up during our big construction job with a li'l ole wet Swiffer.

Ergo, I shelled out $32.99 at the grocery store, which gave me pause for months, before giving in to the Omop, which I bought in part because it's cute. (Home Shopping Network is selling them for far, far less, I discovered later.) A starter set includes the hard-plastic mop (of quite nice quality and a sexy curved shape), three biodegradable corn-based dry-mop sheets, a microfiber mop cover (washable) and a 14-oz container of the almond-smelling Wood for Good cleaner. 

So, you squirt the cleaner over a small area, stick on the microfiber pad, and have to.

The mop head is large and not easy to steer, and the microfiber head initially snagged on my wood floors, probably because it couldn't move through the filth, though possibly because I squirted too much cleaner, because it smells so durn good. When it started rolling, though, the change was incredible -- the floor was smooth and shiny and a richer color, the wood of my dreams. I believe I may have made an audible moan, startling The Dude.

After you're done, you pop the microfiber thingie into the washer, assuming it isn't as absolutely filthy as mine was (it required some rinsing first).  That's just about as easy as it gets, short of hosing the house down, which, believe me, is my ulimate goal.  My next house will be hoseable.

Of course, being Method, the stuff is all nice and green, with no nasty petroleum-based surfectants, ammonia or other harsh cleaners.

The Verdict:  Thrilling to the tips of my clean-even-barefoot toes.

Waste or Want: Do I need all this space?

Something has been bugging me for a while. There has been a fleet of dust-stompin', door-slammin', trucks-everywhere-parkin' construction dudes at my house now for literally months. We're "finishing" our basement into a playroom and home office(s), and it's a huge job, as the basement spans the entire house.  Essentially we are adding an entire floor.

Now, the constant dirt and noise has made me a haggard shrew, and let's not even talk about the expense, because I shiver awake in the wee hours with fear about that. What bothers me is, with all my talk about small is beautiful, and conserving resources and energy, and the obscenity that is the McMansion, did we even need to do this?  What a hypocrite I am. 

Let's break it down by square footage. We had about 1,800 from the get-go, with three bedrooms, and an eat-in-kitchen, and a big living room for play, and closets, and an attic.  From the perspective of my city friends, it's plenty of room. Former city dwellers ourselves, we lived compactly, barely using the third bedroom and leaving nothing at all in the attic or basement; owning only one t.v., and so forth. (My position has long been: if you have to store it out of sight, you don't need it.) The basement re-do adds another 650 square feet of usable space. And a full bath, which is completely unnecessary, but which my husband and dad insist is a must for resale value.

See, out here, everybody has a huge family room or basement play room or big yard (with swing sets that look like small Oompa Loompa cities) for their kids. After all, the average American house now stands at 2,349 square feet, according to NPR. I hear again and again, "You'll be so glad to have the space!"  "You need that, you really do."  My kids asked again and again for a playroom; and frankly, tiring of the stomping of little feet during endless and messy playdates,I caved. 

But do we need the space? Sure, my husband and I are both freelancers and work from home, but our bedroom can accommodate our two small desks. We could have used the eat-in kitchen as an office, too. The kids each have their own bedroom, which is an amazing luxury compared to other kids in the world. We could have bunked them together and made that extra room the playroom, like my thrifty Japanese neighbors. And sure, my parents have recently downsized their home, and have moved their excess "stuff" into -- where else? -- my previously pristine attic and closets.  But we had the space.

Thing is, we got used to the idea of needing more. So have we all. In the 1950s, the average home was about half the size of what it is today. We need space to accommodate all the other things we have to have, like big-screen t.v.'s and 20 pairs of jeans and a fully equipped miniature kitchen for Junior. Even oh-so-green New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who has written eloquently about what other countries have done to conserve energy and water, lives in a new 11,400-square-foot home (he tore down the house that used to sit on his seven acres).  His exuse? It's energy-efficient, and displaced what could have been a multi-family development.

Uh, that's the point, Tom. Many families could have occupied the space, sharing resources, in which you have parked your big a...I mean, your big ego. (Friedman has been hilariously called on his house on HuffPost, among other places - check it out.) And I could fit a couple of Beijing families into my basement. 

The Verdict:  A waste.  But I need it.

~BurbMom

Waste or Want?: Crawling helmets

Okay, I am probably going to get flamed for this one. (Anything about child safety can be testy, to be sure.) Understand that neurotic that I am, I place a huge value on safety. I researched the best carseats; I cut out cleaning chemicals in my household; I don't microwave food in plastic plates and bowls. In short, I am protective as hell. So why oh why are my hackles up about crawling helmets?   

By crawling helmets I mean exactly that; padded headgear that babies and toddlers wear when they're learning to crawl or walk. (One catalog company calls theirs "bumper bonnets.") It's meant to insulate babies from the hazards they encounter when they're getting ready to take flight. 

My kids got their fair share of "owies" when they were learning to crawl; I remember cringing every time I'd hear the thunk of an elbow or knee and bracing myself for the wail that would sometimes follow. But I believed that this was part of the process: That in learning how to crawl and toddle, and getting battered (a bit), they would know to start avoiding certain spots or learn the value of hanging onto the sofa or wall. Their neurons are firing and making connections. And they're learning to strategize so they don't get hurt.

It's sort of like life, isn't it? We have to get knocked around a little to learn what works and doesn't, and, more important, to discover how to get up when we're down. With parents hovering over us all the time, or helmets (and knee, elbow, and shin guards, too—why stop at helmets?) to strap on, literally and metaphorically, how will we know the value of pain? Or learn that the world is a maze we have to learn to navigate? 

Besides, the helmets look kind of dorky.

The verdict: Waste. UNLESS—and this is a big caveat—there is a physiological reason (balance problems, sensory issues) that make it necessary to provide your child with another layer of protection.

—CityMom

(Photo via Daddytypes.com.)

Waste or Want: Clorox green works

Whenever a big company formerly in the habit of peddling crap to the masses says they're going green, my greenwashing antennae pop right up.

And then Clorox, the bleach people, got into the fray by buying Burt's Bees, which had environmentalists in a cold fury for months, and by launching their own line of "green" products.

Now, we have seen this kind of thing before. For example, many Windex products have a Greenlist(TM) sticker on it, suggesting that all the ingredients are somehow environmentally friendly, but the prized list is actually describing their own internal rating sytem of all their ingredients, and it doesn't say which, if any, ingredients in the bottle you're buying have bad ratings. (Treehugger has a great review here.)

The thing is, unlike Method stuff, the Green Works products can be found on sale in big bins at my local A&P. I scanned the ingredients lists, and other than corn-based ethonol, it doesn't look half bad.  And I think it works great. It beats my green Trader Joe's all-purpose cleaner hands down (Sorry, TJ!) and smells a lot nicer than plain old vinegar and water, my default all-purpose cleaner.

There is another question:  By supporting a company that may have other practices I object to, like selling other cleaning products with bleach that can hurt us, is it wrong for me to buy other of their products?  Or is any improvement a good thing?  Shouldn't we applaud green initiatives that make an impact by their sheer volume (Green Works has an approximately $40 million market already)?  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Green Works hasn't cut into the market for other green products in the same category. Except for me, that is.

The Verdict: Undecided.

~BurbMom