TED Conference Sessions You Should Watch

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of TED Conference videos – hoping more 2009 videos will come out.  As I keep checking back, I keep finding more that I like.  They’re quite addictive.  The best part is that you can add them like a podcast right to iTunes and voila, they’re on your iPod/iPhone/iTouch, etc…or you can download them and put them on any other device.  They even have a section called “A Greener Future?” that contains a lot of eco-videos.  Keep checking back because they’re putting new videos from this years TED Conference up all the time.  I’m waiting for Ray Anderson of Interface Carpet’s talk.  He’s a visionary and a great speaker.

So what are my favorites?  Here ya go

Charles Moore discussing the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”
Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he’s drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.

Al Gore discussing new findings since The Inconvenient Truth
Al Gore presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists recently predicted. He challenges us to act. 

Al Gore’s 15 Things You Can Do To Avert The Climate Crisis
This TED talk was before Inconvenient Truth hit the theaters.  It’s pretty funny and a quick watch.  Enjoy.

Michael Pollan on the Omnivore’s Next Dilemma
What if human consciousness isn’t the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn’s clever strategy game to rule the Earth? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see the world from a plant’s-eye view.

Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat
In this fiery and funny talk, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman weighs in on what’s wrong with the way we eat now (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking), and why it’s putting the entire planet at risk.

Andy Hobsbawm on how to Do The Green Thing
I’ve met Andy on a few occasions – whether he remembers or not.  His main gig is being European Chairman of Agency.com where I spent 8 years in the Chicago office.  Of couse I found out about his green passion just as I was leaving the company.  He lanched a site called Do The Green Thing in late 2007.

A few non-green TED Talks to check out:

Evan Williams founder of Twitter
Keep hearing about Twitter and don’t know what it is or what the point is?  Watch this 7min video and get addicted…then follow us @screamtobegreen

Mike Rowe of Dirty Job’s
Mike Rowe, the host of “Dirty Jobs,” tells some compelling (and horrifying) real-life job stories. Listen for his insights and observations about the nature of hard work, and how it’s been unjustifiably degraded in society today.

Move over Tupperware, It’s A Worm Composting Party

I was reading the Trib this morning and my wife told me to checkout page 4 of this particular section.  Much to my disbelief, there was an article on vermicomposting – or worm composting for the layman.  So not only was the article talking about worm composting – which my wife and I are happy to know we’re not the only “weird” ones around the area – but it was talking about a house party – like a Tupperware party – for getting started.  Who knew there was an Urban Worm Girl in Chicagoland?  Stephanie Davies is her true identity and she hosts worm composting parties.

Whatcha do is gather up a bunch of friends for a little party – just like these crazy ladies do with Lia Sophia jewelry, candles, or “Surprise” toy parties – but this time they will be buying vermicomposting supplies.  Stephanie will show up and push the wares and more importantly educating all in attendance.  It’s a pretty phat idea if you can get the people there to suck it up and enjoy the worms.  They’re not going to hurt anyone.  Host Stephanie at your house, buy a starter kit complete with a three tray worm bin and all the red wigglers you need.  Then pick yourself up a kitchen compost pail to hold your scraps – you can get them at Target, Amazon, Crate and Barrel, and World Market (among numerous other places).

We’ve had worms in our basement for about two years or so now.  They are hearty little suckers.  We feed them and feed them and get a crapload (pun intended) of castings and worm tea.  Why don’t we just throw away the food scraps?  Food scraps just break down in a landfill and go away, right? Well – yes and no.  The food scraps do start to degrade in the landfill – but what happens is that they decompose and create a leachate.  The leachate is the liquid that mixes with who-knows-what that is in the landfill and then it seeps into the groundwater and soil.  It starts to flow away from the landfill.  Another huge benefit is the brilliant compost and tea you get from these guys.  It’s like organic Miracle Grow.  It’s thick and rich and buttery (maybe not buttery).

Check out Urban Worm Girl - and maybe even buy a t-shirt – they’re pretty pimp!

PS – Hey Stephanie – you should check out Chicago Green Drinks if you haven’t.

Stevia Goes Big Time with Truvia and PureVia

As many of you have known for the better part of a month, the FDA has approved - or not objected - to use of the herbal sweetener stevia.  Stevia has long been favored in the holistic/natural health community as a sweetener.  I’ve used it here and there.  To me, it tends to change the flavor of my coffee too much.  I prefer blue agave syrup.  Anyway…since the FDA has come out with this, I see that stevia products are being marketed.  ConAgra and Coke have Truvia on the market.  Right now, you can buy it as table-top addition – an alternative to Splenda.  Soon, Coca-Cola will begin putting Truvia in it’s beverages with “Sprite Green” and who knows what else (energy drinks, “waters” etc).  I can imagine that Truvia will be in food produced by ConAgra in the near future as well. 

Don’t discount Pepsi – they have PureVia.  In South America, Coke and Pepsi have already brought some beverages to market.  I like the marketing ploy of having it’s own brand – but I guess Coke and Pepsi own a lot of brands.  PureVia is from the “Whole Earth Sweetener Company.”  Truvia goes right after Splenda in it’s not so subtle ad “Our new sweetener is more than splendid.  It’s natural.”

I’m happy that this is coming mainstream. Why not?  It seems to me that it has to be safer than Splenda or Sweet-n-Low or that blue packet.  It seems like the war is on, though. You can’t really patent stevia, so there will be some competition making it tasteless and sweeeeet.

Watch the commercials:

Truvia Commercial

Truvia Infomercial

PureVia Infomercial

Corn Refiners Assoc Lobbying for HFCS

I was talking to my wife last night and she brought up these commercials she happened to witness. Maybe the Corn Refiners Association is scared that people are becoming aware of HFCS. It is amazing how high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has changed the food industry.

The commercials claim that HFCS is natural because it comes from corn. In April, the FDA debunked this. Even though the FDA has no regulations on the term natural, they still had this to say:

[From NutraIngredients.com] “The use of synthetic fixing agents in the enzyme preparation, which is then used to produce HFCS, would not be consistent with our (…) policy regarding the use of the term ‘natural’,” said Geraldine June.

“Moreover, the corn starch hydrolysate, which is the substrate used in the production of HFCS, may be obtained through the use of safe and suitable acids or enzymes. Depending on the type of acid(s) used to obtain the corn starch hydrolysate, this substrate itself may not fit within the description of ‘natural’ and, therefore, HCFS produced from such corn starch hydrolysate would not qualify for a ‘natural’ labeling term,” she concluded.

Watch the commercials below..and enjoy…I’m not a corn grower, but we definitely try not to purchase products with HFCS no matter how great they try to tell me it is.  People weren’t as fat and the diabetes rate was much lower – I don’t think it’s by accident.

More Michael Pollan Than You Could Ever Want

Here is a lengthy four part interview with Michael Pollan, author of In Defense Of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Enjoy.

Ecoist: Don Cheadle

Love the Cheadle ever since he was in Boogie Nights.  He’s a smart man and I love his Ecoist segment.  He starts by talking about our supermarkets in the States and how it’s loaded with all kinds of food no matter what season it is.  It’s something that is also addressed in the book, The Paradox of Choice.  Enjoy.

Review: King Corn Documentary

 Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are best friends from Boston, Mass.  For some reason, they decide to see what their bodies are made of and human hair is the tape recorder.  They visit University of Virginia scientist Steve Macko who is an expert in analyzing hair.  They find that the carbon make-up of their body is predominantly corn.

Why are our bodies so filled with corn?  The meat you eat every day from beef to pork to chicken is fed with corn.  In the supermarket, everything is made with corn.  Cookies are made with corn.  Juices are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. Cereal is made from corn.  Everything has a form corn in it from HFCS to the corn glutens to corn starch. 

Most cattle feedlots only feed their cattle corn.  It allows the cows to hit market weight fast – and it’s a good thing because the cows would die from disease and stomach issues from eating just corn.  Past 120 days of eating just corn, many of the cattle suffer from acid overdose or acidosis. 

Coincidentally, Ian and Curt both have great grandfathers that hail from Greene, Iowa.  A tiny midwest town – just a speck on the map.  Since they found out they are made up of corn, they decided to pack it up and and move to Iowa for a year and plant one acre of corn – trying to follow their corn from planting to harvest to the food stream.  In their grand parent’s day, 30%+ of the take home pay went to food – today it’s 10-16%. 

After securing a one acre plot in a corn field in Greene, Iowa, the boys head to learn more about corn.  Corn is a very close relative of turf grass – just on steroids.   They also learn that because of the farm bill and subsidies, they will earn $28 from their one acre of corn – without doing a thing.  Thanks to pesticides and fertilizers, one acre of corn can produce up to 200 bushels of corn (4 times what their great grandfathers were capable of harvesting).  That’s 5,000 pounds of food.  So the boys start planting.  They spread plant 31,000 kernels on their acre by machine and the field is sprayed with anhydrous ammonia.  31,000 kernels of Liberty  Lake corn is planted in 18 minutes.  Once the corn is growing, weeds become a problem.  They spread Liberty fertilizer which is specially formulated to kill everything except for the genetically modified Liberty Lake corn.  In the end, the boys harvest 180 bushels from their acre. 

More facts:

• 32% of corn goes to ethanol production
• More than half of the crop will go to feed animals
• Livestock consumes 70% of the antibiotics in the US
• An Iowa farmer can’t feed himself from his land because the corn is inedible until it’s processed
• Real vegetables for eating aren’t subsidized

Watch the movie or buy the DVD and watch the guys make HFCS in their kitchen. 

Overall, I really liked the documentary.  It was recently on PBS.  I thought it flowed pretty well.  It was more about their journey than the facts over how predominant corn is in our society.  I guess it left us to draw our own conclusions.  I really think that without so much corn everywhere, America would be a leaner society.  Michael Pollan is interviewed in the movie.  I always think of when he said in an interview,  ”don’t eat food that doesn’t rot.”  It’s so true.  So much of food isn’t real.  The western diet is that of convenience and total crap – yet most of us (and I am definitely one of them) don’t know how to prepare and eat real food.  I’m definitely infinitely guilty of eating crap.  I even know I’m not making smart food decisions.

Source: King Corn Website, PBS

Rising Food Costs – Maybe It’s A Good Thing?

Should I care that food prices are rising?  Sure, I care because it affects my pocket book, but like gasoline prices, I’m not entirely sympathetic to the masses who bitch daily about it.  I agree that ethanol is a sham and is a dirty industry that is driving up the price of corn.  Corn, corn, corn…glorious friggin corn.  (see my old post on Cornfed America – great video there) 

Here’s a thought or food for thought.  Before WWII, everyone ate organic.  You didn’t have a choice.  If it was fake, the product had the word “immitation” right on the front.  Now, corn is the substitute for everything.  Corn is everywhere, I mean everywhere.  The shiny sheen on your cereal box – yeah that’s from corn.  There are a ton of examples – just watch the King Corn documentary sometime.

Like I said before, I liken the food prices rising to the gasoline “problem.”  If you’re reading this, you probably know that we don’t pay the true cost of food anyway.  The gas problem is that maybe people will start making smart choices about the vehicles they buy if the prices stay high.  So the way I see it with the food industry is this.  If the farm bill doesn’t get corrected and these friggin subsidies keep coming and corn stays a commodity that is over inflated because of that shit fuel we call ethanol, then maybe, just maybe, industry will look at something else to use in your food rather than corn.  Can you imagine a world where the sweetner of choice isn’t corn syrup?  Maybe you sweeten with natural products like pineapple juice or even the white devil – sugar – or even better yet cane sugar.

Sorry for the rant – it just pissed me off this morning.  I’m going back to sleep now.

The Neighborhood Garden Project

Deanna Glick, a blogger for the multi-blogger blog (that I happen to read religiously) Green Daily, is starting a project with her friends called The Neighborhood Garden Project.  My wife, Kelly and I have been talking a lot about a home veggie garden and trying to plot our strategy.  Around the time we were first discussing it, I emailed our local town government and inquired about a community garden.  Nope – none exists.  I didn’t think much about it again.  This past Wednesday night, I went to Chicago Green Drinks where the topic was about farming and urban gardens.  Then this morning I was watching The Sierra Club Chronicles and it was all about community gardens.  Now I read about Deanna’s project.  It must be a sign. 

Like I said, Kelly and I have been talking about our forthcoming veggie garden for the past few months.  We have the usual perennials and shrubs now, but nothing edible.  I’ve had the itch for a long time and I think the past year of her reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and other eco-books has convinced her that it’s time to take action.  We had a CSA membership last year, but didn’t like it much.  This year, we decided in addition to our own garden, we’ll use the money we spent weekly on the CSA and combine that with what we spent at the farmer’s market to spend more at the local farmer’s market getting greens we want to eat, yet still helping out and eating locally.

I grew up on a small farm - I guess you could call it a hobby farm.  It wasn’t out livelyhood or anything, but it was a lot bigger than the 1/3 acre that I live on now.  We always had a very large garden with fresh vegetables.  I didn’t fully appreciate what I had back then.  We were locavores on the 100 yard diet.  We ate pork, beef, and a slew of vegetables all raised within 100 yards of the house (and even drank goat’s milk instead of cow’s since we had a goat to milk).  Although I moved away from that environment when I was 15yrs old, it makes me the resident farmer expert (even if I’m far from it).  To be honest, we’ll be relying on the little I know paired with projects such as The Neighborhood Garden Project and Katie & Chris over at Gardenpunks (and probably friends and family…and of course…Google).

The Neighborhood Garden Project is really intriguing.  It almost reminds me of EcoMoms that has been getting so much attention lately.  There are womens clubs, moms clubs, gourmet dinner clubs, bridge clubs and so on.  Now there is a group of women neighbors starting their own micro-garden club together.  It’s not your typical garden club where you learn about plants at a monthly meeting and have a plant sale.  It’s a hands-on social club. Deanna and her neighbors are starting a small community garden right in her own backyard – literally in on her property.  From the video, the project is in it’s infancy with the garden just starting out.  It’s going to be exciting watching her progress (and hopefully my own progress). 

In some urban cities of the country, there are eco-terrorists – or “green guerrillas” who go to a vacant lot under darkness and plant a garden. All of these ideas are very intriguing to me.  Behind my house there is a large dry retention basin.  Just beyond that is a stretch of land that has been on the city drawings to be a road since the 1970’s.   It’s still sitting there vacant.  Just weeds.  Should I contact the village and ask permission or just start growing stuff there?  What if I just scattered seeds there and see what grows naturally?  Hrmm… so much to ponder.  Good luck with your new club, Deanna.  I hope you start a trend!

The Neighborhood Garden Project

Source: Green Daily

Don’t Eat Things That Don’t Rot: Michael Pollan Interview

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. 

Here are a few of the exerpts that I particularly found interesting:

• Don’t eat foods that don’t rot.
• Shop the periphery of the grocery store.  The healthiest foods are at the outer edge.
• Eat locally when you can and support your local farmers
•  Grains were refined so much that all the nutrients were ground out of them thus producing a longer shelf life and thus the rats were no longer interested in them.
• Many cuisines are very healthy – Japanese, South American, Mediterranean.  The one that seems to be the most unhealthy is the Western diet. 

It’s really a great interview that has a lot of information.  Listen to his take on farming, subsidies, and many facts on food that when you really think about them are frustrating.  The more we refine and put more junk in food, the cheaper it gets whereas whole foods – foods that are good for us – are more expensive and just can’t compete.    Sugar or fruit juice can’t compete with high fructose corn syrup.  Why?  Corn is a subsidy and we’re not paying the true cost of the grain – we are, however, paying with our health and the health of our children. 

You may also like to read the transcript in it’s entirety or watch the RealAudio stream from the DemocracyNow! website.

Listen to the Michael Pollan Interview from Democracy Now!  (around 23:00)

Source: DemocracyNow!