More Part I: What is waste?

We really fell off for a while there. Sorry. We last left you after dinner on August 3rd.

This is as good a time as any to contextualize the idea of living "waste-free." In terms of outright food waste, we were already producing very, very little of it. Cooking for two is pretty manageable, especially if you're not opposed to eating leftovers for lunches and snacks. This was not something I was raised doing -- my parents spared us from Mystery Casserole Night and other culinary horrors the likes of which are portrayed in pop culture and Audrey's therapy sessions. (J/K, Aud.) But I was raised in an environment that lauded my bottomless adolescent stomach, and since an early age I've been happy to perform in the capacity of human garbage disposal.

Every once in a while we'll let the last fifth of a container of sour cream sit for too long in the back of the fridge, or we'll go too many weeks between making patches of pasta sauce and a half a tin of tomato paste will mold. But other than that -- between lunchtime leftovers and my own unflinching dietary habits -- we mostly don't throw out food. Anything that does go bad or stale or stinky or uneaten (rare) is composted or becomes chicken feed, which is arguably not even *waste* as it becomes an additive to our next season of gardening or batch of eggs.

Yeah. Yeah! We don't waste food. Not us.

Or do we? I came across this article from Grist.Org recently on the InterWebz, and it made me realize that there is a lot more we can do to reduce even the amount of food "uneatenness" we produce. Audrey already follows some of the basic suggestions -- she makes generous use of broccoli stems when she makes her famous broc-cheddar soup -- but there's definitely room for improvement. We often talk about making vegetarian broth/stock out of inedible leftovers yet those scraps seem to always find their way into the compost jar. The article also shares some more extreme techniques such as "milking" sugary syrup from kernel-denuded corn cobs. Cool! Definitely some room for improvement there.

Here's a quick bullet-list of our definition of waste for the purposes of this project:

Waste is...

• kitchen waste only (i.e. we're still using TP, floss, and other hygenic goodies with impunity)
• recyclables, but not return-ables (i.e. a cardboard milk carton isn't allowed, but a glass bottle of Strauss milk that we return to the Co-Op is okay [yes, the plastic top to the Strauss bottle is a no-no])
• packaging, but not bulk or "unavoidable" packaging -- a disposable bag/box of rice is obviously not allowed, but we do know that even the rice we buy in bulk from the Co-Op originally came out of a 25-pound paper bag or plastic sack. This is the minimal amount of packaging we can "stimulate" without harvesting our rice directly from the paddy 
• not basic, basic materials -- we can reduce a lot of packaging waste by making our own bread and buying fresh bread rather than the standard sliced-bread-in-a-bag. But the yeast has to come from somewhere, so we're giving ourselves a pass on über-basics like yeast, baking soda, etc
• not uneaten food, because we compost it, but we should (and do) generally avoid this
• not Freegan food -- if we glean a cardboard case of individually wrapped granola bars, we get to eat them in all their nutritious glory. Think about it -- the bars were on their way to a landfill already. I swooped in and grabbed them, ate the majority of their bulk/weight, and recycled the foil wrappers and cardboard box. It's actually a net reduction in waste, which I would argue gives us some wiggle room on the overall project
• not the small stuff -- try as we might, it's hard to avoid the stickers that come on produce, the twisty-ties that bind bunches of cilantro, etc. But don't we get some credit for going Freegan in some ways? Also, compare the amount of waste you'd produce in a year buying hyper-packaged Trader Joe's produce to the trash you'd create in twelve months living off Co-Op and farmers' market produce. After all, 98 percent is just as much an A-grade as 100 percent, right?

Some other thoughts on waste...

Check out this video (courtesy of MB) that focuses on a family that has taken waste-free living to another level. Interestingly, the video's opening concession (yes, the family does produce some waste) reveals what appears to be random candy wrappers and maybe string cheese wrappers. (Rather than, for instance, produce stickers.) We used some of this family's techniques in preparing for (and executing) our own experiment.

What about recycling? One could argue that only waste ends up in a garbage can is truly waste; by corollary, anything composted, recycled, donated, or reused is not waste. I'm sympathetic to the claim, but we also have to look all the way up- and down-stream before we pass judgment.

• If you accept a plastic grocery bag at the store and then "reuse" it by filling it with pet waste and throw it in the garbage, you've really just turned a stinky organic mess into a stinky organic mess wrapped in an inorganic, possibly toxic sack that will break down into thousands of tiny flakes over time.
• If you "donate" your 32" CRT television set to a thrift store that doesn't want it or can't sell it and which then turns around and sticks it in a shipping container bound for Ghana where it will be smashed into bits by child workers poisoned by its toxic innards, you haven't done Mother Earth any favors.
• If you buy lots of over-packaged food and then place the plastic boxes and wrappers in your municipal recycling bin, you may or may not be helping. Does Waste Management or Allied Waste actually "recycle" that stuff, or do they send it to the landfill whenever the prevailing market price for the material isn't high enough?
• Even if it is recycled, what are the up- and down-stream effects of that process? In this country, we recycle glass by melting it down and re-forming it into new glass containers. (Everywhere else in the world, they recognize that you don't get cooties from sanitizing a beer bottle and reusing it. They also use the Metric System. Go figure.) Glass recycling in the U.S. is extremely energy-intensive (say, compared to aluminum recycling), and the recycling of plastics can create byproducts and additional wastes. So we are stuck trying to measure the trade-offs between various important goals (reducing landfill waste, protecting the planet, using resources effectively, etc). The best option seems to be avoiding the packaging in the first place.
• And yes, composting is great but as we pointed out above it would be better to harvest every possible calorie or flavor molecule out of our food before setting it out to rot.

Sorry for the bummer of a post. One of the many lessons we are learning from this experiment is that achieving eco-perfection is nigh on impossible unless we're willing to drastically re-work our lifestyles. But we can make some huge steps away from the status quo by making some very palatable adjustments to our lives.

(Quick shoutout to JM for his comment on my last post re: veganism. I'll try to touch on that soon and continue the discussion about absolute changes vs. tinkering at the margins.)

-k

Slow start, first dinner

Julie's Organic Sorbet. Yum.

Okey dokey. We're running a little behind schedule due to some foreseen circumstances. Our original plan was to hit the ground running on August 1 with our fridge barren of anything but package-free ingredients. As it turned out, we left town for almost two weeks leading right up to the beginning of the month and despite our best efforts we still have a few perishable, packaged items to plow through.

Maybe that's Lesson One -- getting rid of food packaging can be harder than it seems. Or, there's more hyper-packaged stuff in your fridge than you may realize. After tonight's dinner, we are left with a package of grass-fed ground beef, a blob of mango sorbet, and a smattering of condiments.


We'll get more into the nitty-gritty of this experiment in later posts, but we want to repeat that the goal here is no net kitchen waste. That's more involved than you might think...it's not just about eating our peas and avoiding food waste but also about avoiding producing waste in the first place in the form of ubiquitous-yet-invisible packaging.

Okay. On to the fun stuff. Here's what Audrey made us for dinner last night:

From left to right, clockwise: frosted glass of ESB homebrew, freegan organic butter on homemade carrot-currant-walnut bread, garden veggies salad on fresh mozzarella, and garden kale chips.

This meal met our standard and was a tasty success. As we'll probably reference later, we have calculated that the homebrew is a net waste reducer: we get bulk ingredients (albeit in three or four small plastic bags) from the Reno Homebrewer, reuse our bottles and six-pack carriers, and create new waste in the form of bottle caps. We compost our spent grains and leftover beer muck, reuse our glass bottles, and our beer (probably??) has a lower transportation footprint than bottled beer.

(We'll reach out to the Reno Homebrewer folks in the course of this experiment and try to fill in some of these gaps.)

buttahhh

If you're wondering what "freegan" means, here's a better overview than I can give: http://freegan.info. As you'll see, we get some (but by no means all) of our food from dumpsters and other commercial waste/excess. In this case, we scored more than 30 pounds of organic butter back in mid-February and stacked it in the freezer. We've still got about a third of it left.

Audrey will share her wisdom in the arts of homemade bread, kale chips, and others in a future post. The fresh salad she made was a clever hodgepodge of garden tomatoes (Early Girls), gentle red onion, cucumber, and bell pepper tossed in some olive oil, red wine vinegar, and balsamic. The veggies that were not grown in the backyard were bought at our local Co-Op along with the bulk oil/vinegars.

Now, the mozzarella. We'll have to see if this can be replicated. We did some pre-August recon and found that our local Whole Foods will provide bulk, packaging-free cuts/servings of its delicious, organic fish, meats, and cheeses. This is, of course, easier done with sharp cheddar than with fresh mozzarella. As luck had it, when Audrey showed up with an old cottage cheese container the cheese folk were whipping up a fresh batch of mozz and were able to ladle two mounds of it with the water/juice on the spot. If we try to repeat this, we're gonna have to get the timing just right again or else the cheese will be prohibitively sealed away in a plastic container.


Hopefully this kept your attention enough to warrant further reading. We'll get into the swing of things, work our way through more of those leftover foodstuffs, and add some macro themes to the micro-level analysis. See you then.