August 22nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

First off, apparently TIME is reporting on unsustainable farming practices. It’s nice to see that this is a topic which is finally filtering over to the behemoths of the mainstream media, and in a decidedly readable form, too.

Then there’s the various Victoria-area entrepreneurs who have started making a go of their own small-scale local/organic grocery stores. Yeah, I know it’s Victoria and you expect this kind of thing to come out of Victoria, but still–it’s pretty rad. If you live in the area, be sure to give them a shot.

Finally, there’s the new KFC Double Down. Seriously–scope the nutritional information on this thing. Y’know, when Burger King introduced the Enormous Omelet Sandwich, I felt perversely compelled to try one. This, I’m pretty sure I can skip.

August 17th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Lisa: Dad, did you know the Chinese have the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity’?
Homer: Yes! Crisitunity!

It could have been a lot worse than it was, but it still sucked.

Over the past year or so, “the office” in our house has morphed into “the storeroom” and things that I’ve decided not to immediately part with but which we we don’t have room for in the rest of our modest-sized house have made their way there.

Yesterday, after Carla and I came home from a lunch/shopping/window-shopping expedition we discovered our landlord (who lives in the suite above us) at our door in a bit of a state. It seems the pipes were backing up in the house. The laundry room had flooded with black water and he wasn’t sure where the blockage was coming from. He did, however, need two things from us:

1) To not use the water at all, maybe for another 24 hours or so.
2) Access to the storeroom where the plumbing access valves were hidden in the walls.

After not being able to get into the access valves himself, he called in a favour from a plumber friend who came over and determined that our personal plumbing wasn’t blocked and we could use our water (yay), but that he couldn’t find the blockage in their plumbing, so he needed a plumbing snake to find it. They went off to Home Depot to rent one, but not before telling us: “You’re going to need to move some of this stuff out of here.”

“How much of it?”

“Whatever you don’t want potentially flooded.”

Considering that almost every box in that room was filled with books, I considered that as an encouragement to empty the room top to bottom–posters, stuff on shelves, EVERYTHING. And so we did. In 20 minutes flat, Carla and I emptied the room to the bare walls. And just as we moved out the last box, our landlord and the plumber returned with the snake.

Long story shorter, they found the blockage (NB for GeekUnplugged Readers: don’t put grease and coffee grounds down the garburator–your pipes won’t like it), only sprayed down the walls with a bit of black water, cleaned up the mess (thankfully) and departed. The only problem was that the contents of the storage room were still in our living room. Carla and I could have just moved them back (probably in only another 15 minutes or so), but I preferred to see it as an opportunity to strip down my belongings yet again.

See, my problem with keeping stuff in storage is that, by definition, the various belongings aren’t available to access. And if you can’t access them, you can’t use them, so why do you have them? I know I may have more display space eventually (though I’m not counting on it), and some of the things I don’t have room for I do still want, but I bet I don’t need everything in the 20+ boxes that were in there.

So, before the Chris & Carla Overflow Project goes back into storage, I’m going to go through all of it again to see how much I can live without. In point of fact, I’m going to challenge myself to take advantage of this near-disaster and get rid of as much stuff as humanly possible. I’ll report back when I’m done and let you know how well I took advantage of this crisitunity.

August 13th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The last two times Carla and I have been to the supermarket, we’ve bought a beet. We like beets–they’re tasty and provide a nice earthy accent, especially grated on top of salads. Both times, our cashier has rung our purchases through, gotten to the beet, started at it blankly and asked us, “What is this?”

“It’s a beet,” Carla responded cheerily, both times.

The girl we ended up with on the second occasion was not fazed by this response. “What do you do with it?” she asked.

“You eat it,” Carla responded, just as cheerily, proceeding to go into the various ways which it could be cooked and/or eaten raw.

Okay, so, I know that society’s eating habits are changing and things familiar a generation or so ago have become strange and dropped out of our eating habits, but has the next generation (because both cashiers were probably 21 or younger) become so out of touch with produce that it can’t identify one of the most common root vegetables? Also, is it out of line to think that supermarket employees should be able to recognize such, or at least not brandish a look of extreme bafflement after being told what it is? These are the thoughts that keep me awake at night.

August 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
(Vintage)
ISBN: 978-0679314837

At some point, my aunt asked me to review something happy in order to help assuage my cousin, who apparently is going through what I went through a year or so ago and is suffering a bit of the “PEAK OIL IS HAPPENING TO US AND CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO COLLAPSE AND WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE IN A ROAD WARRIOR-LIKE WASTELAND!” And my mom, after I handed her my copy of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (because I thought she might appreciate the info therein), asked, “This isn’t going to make me depressed, is it?”

Yeah, I guess there’s a lot of gloom and depression mixed in with environmental books nowadays, because (depending on who the author is) it’s either too late or almost too late to fix things in the world, and while that may be the actual state of affairs, it’s not exceptionally heartening to have it repeatedly hammered into your skull. This review, then, is for my cousin, mother and anyone else who may want to read a book review of something inspiring a certain degree of hope.

The premise of The 100 Mile Diet is simple: a couple decide that all they’ll eat for a year are those things which can be produced within a 100 mile radius of where they live. The premise provides ample opportunity for elitism, snobbiness and hard-linery to proliferate in the book and could have easily turned into a proscription for Righteous Living, but it is miraculously devoid of more or less any of that, instead making its case as a sensible suggestion. This is a marked difference from the usual doomsaying environmental bestsellers who seem to think that telling you “IF YOU DON’T LIVE YOUR LIFE THIS WAY, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” is a practical and non-alienating course of action. In fact, without trying to give too much away (SPOILER ALERT: they make it through the year), at the end of the book they go back to eating some of the things they weren’t allowed to. But that’s essentially Alisa Smith and JB McKinnon’s point: for all of us to move into an ethical future is for all of us to live as ethically as we can and do the best we can; not to embrace some unrealistic hairshirt environmental dogma which requires us to martyr ourselves for unattainable goals that nobody else cares about.

No, there is no coffee grown within a hundred miles of Vancouver (which, coincidentally, is where I’m from and where Smith and McKinnon are based). But there are free trade and ethical choices you can make in your coffee consumption. Or black tea. Or chocolate. Because again, no one is asking you to be a monk—just do what you can. What the book does encourage, though, is putting in the footwork and not giving up in your quest for viable alternatives. By putting themselves in a situation where they couldn’t bend the rules, they were forced to keep looking for things like wheat, which—despite the lack of grain farmers on BC’s coast—they eventually found. Yes, we who occupy the Vancouver/Victoria area tend to be a little spoiled in our options, because most things can be grown in our neck of the woods, but wherever there have been permanent settlements of humans, there have been the means to thrive locally. Of course, that equation has become pretty skewed with the rise of the metropoli—you can’t feed a city of 1,000,000+ on purely organic, locally raised food (not under our current structure, anyway)—but the general principle is sound.

But why, you wonder to yourself, would I want to eat locally in the first place—what’s the point? Well, there are a few of them.

- Locally grown food is more nutritious. It’s not that organic produce has a bigger selection of vitamins or nutrients than vegetables grown on industrial farms, but local produce is generally picked much closer to its sale date than the stuff in your supermarket. Since produce accumulates nutrients as it approaches ripeness, it only makes sense that a tomato picked the day before it’s sold will be more nutritious that one that’s picked and shipped when it’s still green.
- Locally grown food is likely to be more ecologically sound. Some small-scale farmers use toxic pesticides and chemically-laden fertilizer, but not all of them do, and if you’re buying from the grower personally, you can ask what their standards and practices are yourself. Plus, on a very basic level, locally grown food is good for the environment because growing things benefits the environment. I hope I don’t have to explain this point.
- Buying local is also good for the economy—your local economy. It will probably cost more to shop that way, yeah, but if and when post-peak oil becomes a reality, food prices will start to go through the roof regardless, and I’d rather pay higher prices and support someone I know on a first-hand basis because I buy from them all the time than funnel my hard-earned food dollars into a faceless corporation’s coffers in exchange for some comparatively bland food.
- Which brings us ’round to the last (and possibly most) compelling reason: locally-grown food tastes better. It does. Seriously. Vegetables are delicious enough to eat steamed with maybe a touch of butter. Dishes in general require very little seasoning due to their nearly overwhelming natural flavours. No, the stuff we’re used to eating in packages isn’t what food is supposed to taste like—it’s a “good enough” approximation of a home-cooked meal. Somewhere along the line, though, we forgot what scratch-cooked food was actually like and accepted the food corporations’ assertions that what they were giving us was the real deal—besides, it was faster and even if it wasn’t excellent it was still, well, good enough. But the thing you have to prepare yourself for is that once you start eating local food, “good enough” isn’t good enough. You may keep eating it, but you’ll likely come to view it as filler in between the meals made with organic veggies and meat.

And what if you’re in a position where you don’t have access to a farmer’s market or its equivalent? The 100 Mile Diet also has buckets of inspiration to go around. Thanks to the non-preachy, non-guilt laden approach, you may find yourself inclined to do some gardening by the time you’re done… or bee-keeping… or cheese-making… or salt-distilling… or, for that matter, any combination of the above. None of these are impossible, and not all of them are necessarily very hard. We (as a culture) had most of the skills it takes to do those things up until 100 years ago or so—we’ve just forgotten them in the meantime. Smith and McKinnon have written a book encouraging us to reacquire them, and I’d encourage you to do the same. Moreover, I encourage you to do it for purely selfish reasons (on your part) but toward an altruistic end. You may or may not contribute to the ultimate salvation of our world by buying local food, but you’ll certainly contribute to the betterment of your diet and palate by doing so. To paraphrase Buckley’s, it tastes awesome and it works.

August 5th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I don’t want children. Ever. Neither does Carla. On either our first or second date, we had a conversation that went something like this:

Chris: Babies?
Carla: No babies.
Chris & Carla: *whew*

There are a variety of reasons for this decision, not the least of which is that I’m pretty sure I’d be a bad dad. I’m not looking for reassurances, here–my dad is a stubborn bastard with periodic rage issues and I can see some of those qualities in myself. Carla and I are also not ready to give up as much of our lives as we’d have to (a couple of decades or so) in order to raise another human being. But the overriding reason not to breed, for me, has always been the fact that there’s too many people on the planet already. I’ve watched the population soar in my lifetime and the thought of bringing yet another person into an already overcrowded world smacks slightly of insanity. I mean, if you all want to have babies, that’s your choice; I understand the biological imperative, but the more children brought into the world, the larger the ecological disservice done to the planet–an argument borne out by this blog entry.

Yes, thank you for sorting your recycling and driving a hybrid car. Now, for your next environmental contribution, please stop making more babies.

August 4th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Picture of Light
Director: Peter Mettler
(Microcinema)
 

Most documentaries have a straightforward mission. They shoot footage of something and intend to present to you the thing’s reality. It’s a visual dissection, stripping mystery from the subject in a clinical manner. Picture of Light is a different type of film. Ostensibly about the aurora borealis, the documentary follows a film crew to Churchill, Manitoba where they attempt to film the Northern Lights. What emerges, though, is a much more enigmatic piece which explores the landscape of the north, the psyches of the people who live there and the lights themselves. Despite the fact that an astronaut is filmed in the space shuttle giving an explanation of the phenomenon, his words still do not fully concretize the footage and the lights playing across the screen appear to owe as much from Inuit folk tales as they do from science. Science’s hold over winter on the tundra seems tenuous at best and as sparks shoot through the air inside a train car the elements willfully defy any attempt at rationalization.

There is certainly breathtaking footage of the aurora contained in Picture of Light, but almost more notable are the snapshots of humanity not often seen—of people living on the edge of civilization (the edge of the world, as they put it). People who develop a symbiotic relationship with their dogteam (without one, the other will die), and people who will put a bullet through their exterior wall to watch snow seep in through the knothole and develop in drifts across the floor, simply to relieve the monotony. And then there are the scenes of the frigid snow, the endless cold, the trackless waste, impermeable and unstoppable, majestic and terrible in its own right, possessed of its own very real and unpredictable personality.

Picture of Light is a singular film, haunting and evocative, not explicit in any regard. It shows you what the landscape has to offer, then leaves you to your own conclusions. Perhaps it’s best to accept its offering without putting too much weight of explanation on it, perhaps its best to appreciate the north for what it is without trying to unravel its mysteries.