90% Reduction
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90% Reduction: Food
Posted by Tawny on 26 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction
they eat in a week.
This is the most difficult category to quantify usage and impact. Money isn’t a good metric because buying cheap food from Wal-Mart is certainly not better or less polluting than buying slightly more expensive food at a local farmer’s market (not only is the latter grown locally, it is more likely to be organic, and the all proceeds go to small farmers). Counting food miles is difficult in all but a few stores, and the relevance of the system is controversial.
The method chosen by the 90% Project coordinators is not to compare your usage to the average American, but to set some goals concerning your food sources, and try to live by them. These goals are expressed in terms of trying to get certain percentages of your food intake from the more desirable sources…
| Food Category | Goal |
| 1) Local (or homegrown) and organic: | 70% of your diet |
| 2) Dry, bulk, unprocessed: | 25% or less of your diet |
| 3) Conventional, transported goods: | 5% or less of your diet |
Personal food habits
We buy most food in bulk from Costco (categories 2 & 3). For the last couple years we got an organic produce box every two weeks (some of which is not local, especially in winter), but stopped it midway through this summer intending to go to a farmer’s market. Unfortunately, we only went twice. We discovered some difficulties with transporting produce on bikes - squishy fruits don’t handle the jarring of hitting bumps very well if you don’t take a lot of care packing them. I found a couple apple trees next to the recycling bin, and in the spirit of Fallen Fruit I picked a bunch each time I dropped off some recycling - over the summer we made a couple quarts of applesauce, a couple pies, apple challah, and plenty of dried apples for adding to oatmeal and granola and for snacking on all winter. I made a drying rack out of some cube shelving slid between a couple tabletop CD racks I found at Goodwill. Since Denver is so arid, I just left the apple slices on the shelves for a couple days until they were dry.
Although we aren’t particularly good about buying local or organic, we do eat a lot of whole and homemade foods and little highly processed foods (we use a fair amount of canned food though - beans, diced tomatoes, pineapple, etc). I make nearly all the bread we eat, homemade granola, and some pasta (thanks to Shaun’s mom for the pasta machine). I tried making hard cheese once, and sometimes I make yogurt, but it’s not worth it unless there’s a good source of milk. A few years ago I worked at a petting farm for a summer and made lots of fresh goat cheese (the most basic, unripened kind) and yogurt, and brought home eggs every day. I made a bunch of apple, plum, and berry jam at the same time that we are just now finishing up (stretched by our mothers’ wonderful homemade raspberry jam). Sadly, I haven’t found any public fruit in Denver aside from the apple trees.
grows almost all of their own food.
My best guestimate of our household food consumption is about 5% local and organic, 50% dry, bulk, and relatively unprocessed, and 45% conventional, transported goods. Not that great by Project standards, but we plan to make better use of farmer’s markets next year.
Obviously, many of us in America could reduce our food impact another way as well: stop overeating.
Easier said than done, I know.
90% Project: Notes on Consumer Goods
Posted by Tawny on 13 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction
90% Reduction: Consumer Goods
Posted by Tawny on 24 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction
For Sale: Financial, environmental, spiritual burden. $2500 obo
Posted by Shaun on 12 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Electric Bicycle, 90% Reduction
90% Emissions Reduction Project
Posted by Tawny on 07 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction