Category: low-footprint living

A person could have a whole full-time occupation just trying to use and / or give away food that’s being discarded but is still good. Oftentimes the surplus food ends up being far away from the hungry people.

Today it’s 15 little cartons of skim milk and about as many cartons of juice. All have been sitting in a friend’s freezer as they were unwanted by clients of a meal distribution service.

If any of this sounds like blaming anybody, it’s not. This is a reality of life in a society where people are spread out and the distribution doesn’t always match where the needs are.

My friend hates to waste food as much as I do, but she didn’t want to drink the milks and juices herself.

The church down the street wasn’t answering its bell or phone. And a friend I called from another church said his church probably wouldn’t want them — which I understand because it’s perishable and they don’t know where the stuff has been.

I share a fridge and freezer with two housemates so there’s usually not freezer space for so many items.

For various reasons, today I have taken the approach to keep the juices and use them up soon in some sort of beverage to share.

And to try making homemade evaporated milk from the milks. I’ve never made evaporated milk before but I have seen instructions online. In short, you cook it down by simmering for 45 minutes or an hour or so. Don’t let it boil.

Today I’ll try doing one batch in the solar oven and one on the stove burner. I’ll reduce it to as small a volume as possible and then use it in cooking and baking.

BTW I’m really happy because as of yesterday I finally have a nice little swivel stand for the solar oven. I took apart a chair someone had thrown away at curbside. Removed the wheels, and the chair back. This was after trying to use the chair as is. The oven kept slipping off and being hard to keep level and so on. My latest version of the swivel-stand consists of only the horizontal part of the seat, plus the legs with the wheels removed.

Fun fact (NOT!): Did you know that sometimes people maliciously tamper with food before giving it to homeless / hungry people? Like as a hideous ghoulish prank.

So even if there were a bunch of people around right now possibly wanting a little carton of milk or juice — which there aren’t because they are laying low, understandably — it’s gotten harder to distribute surplus food.

The craziest examples are for example sometimes pounds and pounds of whole shelled pecans or walnuts will show up, then make its way through the neighborhood as unwanted surplus. Some fancy thing that retails for $15 or $20 a pound but there’s a huge surplus and it just ends up at the curbside. Dried cranberries and so on, I kid you not. Or cans and cans of salmon.

(I love all kinds of fish, fresh or canned, and was able to use a lot of the extra as bait for the trap neuter release effort in our neighborhood where we are trying to get the feral cats spayed and neutered.)

Well, just some thoughts on using up surplus food that’s gotten jammed in the distribution system. I’ll let you know how the evaporated milk experiment goes.

I really admire people who run food pantries and can cook something and a bunch of people will want to show up and eat it. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and I really appreciate the work you all are doing.

Photos of the solar setup etc. here.

Update: The evaporated-milk experiment is working.

One advantage of keeping “hurricane jugs” of stored potable water, is that it also works during a boil-water notice! I try to keep 5-6 days’ worth on hand for each household member.

In response to a question I got from someone on my personal page: Can the stored emergency potable water go bad?

My answer: It can but we’re vigilant about swapping it out. If it’s stored in plastic containers it can take on a plasticky taste.

Plasticky taste (and possible yucky chemicals related to storing in plastic bottles) is not a problem with glass bottles etc., but even in glass bottles if it’s stored in a place with too much exposure to light it can get algae.

All of these things are easily solved by not keeping the storage containers in a bright place, and/or not using light-permeable containers. But the most readily available and least expensive option for most of us is probably sturdy plastic jugs. Many of which are light-permeable.

If in doubt, I disinfect water with a few drops of household chlorine bleach and let it sit. Haven’t felt the need to do that though.

I have several of those big water cooler jugs which people toss at the curbside trash. They are about 5 or 6 gallons. Not sure why people throw away containers that are great for storing hurricane water, but there you have it.

And I feel that swapping it out at least once a year is key. I often swap ours out around this time of year, to use the water on the yard during the dry season.

(Generally I use zero city water on my yard at all. This past week I did a couple of Chris Searles -style trickle-watering experiments, which probably used a total of 40 gallons of city water via the hose I keep on hand for emergencies.)

Footnote: Our city came under a boil-water notice a couple days ago. They still haven’t lifted it. Our city’s public-works department is excellent, and they err on the side of caution. No known contamination has happened. But the city issued the notice because electric power outage caused the prescribed water pressure in the system to drop, which can cause harmful bacteria to multiply.

When there’s a system glitch like this, people can be tempted to point fingers at a person or department, but it’s really more an artifact of complex centralized systems. Many of our modern systems are inherently brittle. Such as a water system that relies on electricity to do its job. (Again, our public works department is excellent and I expect they do have various redundancy built-in, but glitches can and do happen, it’s just part of life.) As always, the best takeaway for us is to build parallel, redundant, resilient systems into our lives. Such as rainwater tanks, and hurricane water jugs.

PS. Chris Searles’ trickle-watering experiments, I have mentioned on my pages but if you haven’t yet seen, check out his BioIntegrity channel on YouTube. Here is a 48-second clip that’s very encouraging:

How to water big trees out of drought; 48-second video clip with Austin Youth Council.

And Chris also has many more detailed and lengthy videos in which he explains and documents his drought-busting experiments.

PS. Good news rain update! OK, I’m not trying to go all “post hoc ergo propter hoc” on you guys, but I’m just saying, 30 minutes after I did “big laundry” this morning (using about 7 gallons of precious stored water from the rain tanks) and hung it out on the line, it’s raining here! (“Big laundry” = giant sheet which I fold in half and use burrito-style, + thicker sheet used as coverlet, + pillowcase & other smaller items.)

Prompted by a link to an article that popped up in my social feed. In The Atlantic. The Evermaskers. The isolation of people who take precautions against Covid has only gotten more intense. By Daniel Engber.

I can relate to this. I avoid indoor meetings when possible, but it’s not always possible, and I’m really frustrated that people have indoor meetings unnecessarily. There’s a lot of times when we could be meeting outdoors or by zoom.

I had Covid once, it wasn’t a bad case but I think I got long-term effects. I’m not worried about dying but I am worried about worsening effects if I catch it again. And there are other viruses too.

And it’s not just about me. I am a relatively healthy person after all. But I’ve met a lot of people via social media who constantly have to mask and avoid any kind of close contact with people. Add, all of us in my household have had health challenges and I don’t want to expose anybody unnecessarily.

One time I was indoors and masked, expecting others to be masked because most of them are older than me. Nobody was masked, one person sort of speaking for the group said they feel protected enough by the vaccine. I belatedly had the thought also that it might be they felt protected because they have good healthcare access.

And of course there are times when I take my life into my hands willingly, to go see a film be in a social situation. It’s a bit crazy, navigating all this.

I do think my immune system recently got better after I dealt with some long-term emotional junk that had been weighing on me.

I don’t like that people who mask and practice distancing are labeled the weirdos. I hated watching things get back to normal because it seemed like such a blatant ploy to restore consumer spending and prop up office real-estate.

One of the most generally conscientious people I know, who recognizes & acknowledges the situation re communicable diseases (as well as various other situations in the world), said to me, “I’m just tired of thinking about it.”

That made me draw a sharp breath.

And boy, once people who are cushioned by wealth and social status get tired of thinking about something, that’s just that. Don’t look up.

And I realized how many things that’s true for, including the signs of biospheric collapse. That even people who share a common recognition, many of them are just plain “tired of thinking about it.” And for whatever reason, they don’t have to think about it if they don’t want to.

Nobody is pretending the shutdowns were a glorious good time. but they had some unexpected silver linings, both ecologically and socially. I mean in terms of social movements but also maybe even in terms of prodding us to find ways to deepen our social connections even while we were physically constrained from gathering.

One thing for sure, the rise of widespread teleconferencing enabled activists from around the world to participate in conferences that we never would have been able to afford to participate in person, and maybe wouldn’t even have been invited to or otherwise had access to (even if we had been able to justify the eco-footprint, which I would not have).

BTW I lived in Japan for five years in the 1990s, it was a revelation to me at the time that people would choose to wear masks in public simply to protect others from catching a cold etc. How refreshing to have lived in a culture where it was normal to be so considerate of others.

On a related note, a recent article in I believe it was The Guardian highlighted a study showing that people will take more action on climate if they believe that others care as well. Makes sense. Behavioral contagion (or at least attitudinal contagion even when people in this consumerism-infected society struggle to find ways of matching their behavior to their beliefs) does matter.

Yes, here you go, it was in The Guardian. Spiral of silence: climate action is very popular, so why don’t more people realise it? By Damian Carrington.

To the people saying that migrants don’t deserve due process if it turns out they got in illegally:

1) In order to determine whether they are here illegally, there has to be an investigation; we don’t get to just grab people off the streets and throw them onto airplanes and send them to prisons.

2) Let’s say they do turn out to be here illegally, and/or have committed a crime etc.. They still have rights.

If criminals don’t have rights, then all the government has to do is find some excuse to label people as criminals, and voilà, those people will no longer have rights.

It’s what every tyrannical government in all of history has done. This is why people who break the law still need to have due process.

Due process may sound messy and inconvenient, and may even sound wrong. But think about it.

Due process FOR ALL protects all of us against capricious and tyrannical government — the kind of tyranny that our founding fathers set out to safeguard against. Which is why due process FOR ALL is enshrined in the Constitution.

(And yes, other administrations have done wrong with immigration policy as well. Just because we criticize the current measures does not mean we don’t and didn’t criticize previous administrations.)

(Yes, in case you might be wondering, this is still an environmentally focused blog. The environment is not something that can just be picked out as a separate issue. Tyranny and the carceral industrial complex have an unacceptably high ecological cost on top of the other problematic aspects.)

PS. Regarding the political climate in general — I actually think things have been taking a downward turn at least since 911. People in the USA started to be willing to trade liberties for what they perceived as “security.” We got beefed-up militarization and policing. I don’t feel more secure, and I think probably a lot of other people don’t either.

I love to assemble 3-D “collages” of old tins and bottles and such. 3-D art in my everyday surroundings. They evoke, in my mind, “collages” of memory and imagination.

See the post with photos here.

Third photo shows the position of the “collage” relative to my workspace. I love walking into my workspace and looking up and seeing the tins and the bottles and the old map and the old calendar etc.

Sharon Astyk just posted a great piece. “On Staying.”

Sharon’s whole post is great, but her point #4 is my favorite:

“THIS IS MY COUNTRY. THIS IS MY HOME. There is nothing wrong with leaving when things are unsafe, but there is also every reason to try and protect your home, your neighbors, your community and the wealth of mutual support. My ancestors helped colonize this place, helped take land and resources from people who deserved to have them.”

This. Me too. I’m staying. Not only because no country would want me nor would I qualify, but also because I simply do not want to leave. My work is here. I’ve talked about this extensively on this blog, on my social pages, and in my talks.

Love this post on Facebook. Basically it’s about moving the Overton window by redefining what’s centrist versus radical left.

“Going to start calling myself a centrist and then listing my leftist views as proof …” the post from Maura Quint on BlueSky starts out.

(I’m not actually on blue sky, but a lot of people on Facebook are cross-sharing across platforms these days. It’s a great thing. Amplifying wholesome ideas.)

My version for example: “I’m just into those centrist ideas such as healthcare for all, abolishing prisons, ICE, and wars, guaranteeing food and basic housing for everyone…”

Great idea! And this is also giving me ideas regarding my environmental/climate action communication.

“I’m just a very mild, middle-of-the-road when it comes to practicing water conservation, household thrift, retrofitting a basic urban dwelling to be free of dependency on electricity and city water (while still being fully on grid and supporting the grid), mutual aid, and basic Degrowth principles, land back, decolonization, & all that basic middle-of-the road stuff …”

Too many people tell me I’m the most radical environmentalist they know. They need to meet lots more people! I keep sharing the pages of those “lots more people”!

I guess I also need to publicly promote myself as a very mild centrist sort of eco-social activist.

On a similar note, I have taken to speaking to my fellow Boomers in an age-focused way — I’ll say things like “Well, you know, me being in my 60s, I just didn’t grow up with all this single-use plastic.”

Or me being the age I am, we just didn’t grow up with air conditioning.

Or, we just didn’t have this concept of water being sold in plastic bottles when I was growing up; we drank tapwater.

We didn’t have straws unless we were in the hospital.

Or, we just didn’t have these huge houses with more bathrooms than people, I never got comfortable with that. Etc.

Since I’m on the young end of the Boomer generation, most of the people I’m saying this to are older than I am, so my words might have some potential to prompt reflection. I’ve seen a few times where that seemed to happen.