Today I bring you this fun quiz from CNN, which talks about what we can do to keep our planet. I totally failed it, by the way. I think I got a 40%. If you take the quiz, you will see that a lot of it has to do with curbing our waste, in particular food waste.
I’ve told this story before, so if it sounds familiar, please skip it. When Gordon and I were young, before kids came along, we rented a shack at the top of the mountain in NC, the only shack we could afford. It was a drafty flimsy house, with a wood stove as its sole source of heat. In the winter we would sleep next to it on the floor in the living room, because it was too cold to sleep anywhere else. Our rent was $200 per month.
NC gets snow storms pretty much every winter, but that winter we were hit by a massive snow fall. Knowing it was coming, we went to the store and stocked up. We bought enough meat for at least three weeks, vegetables, milk, cheese.
The storm hit and our power went out. The first day we huddled by the stove. On the second morning my then-fiance made a critical decision to risk driving down the mountain in the snow to go to his aunt’s and uncle’s house, which still had power. He got us there in one piece.
The storm passed, but the county took its time turning the power back on. When we came back, five days after the power went out, I opened the freezer and it smelled like a dead body.
We had to get a garbage bag and throw out everything we bought. We had no money to replace food. I cried. I’ve never cried over food before. I just remember feeling completely hopeless. It left a deep psychological scar.
As soon as we could afford it, I bought a chest freezer and filled it with food, because it made me feel safe. Then once every six months or so I would throw out rock-hard freezer burned food and put more in there. Because safe. Diving into that freezer was like being in a spaceship and finding an ancient cryogenic pod. If I had found a frozen alien in there, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised.
The average American throws out 300 lbs of food per year.
The Swag
Every pound of food is paid for with energy. Planting it, growing it, harvesting it, transporting it, refrigerating it… Lots and lots of energy. The more we conserve, the less wasted energy.
I shudder to think how much energy I wasted with that freezer over ten years. I’m proud to say we have no chest freezer. I also don’t try to buy an entire year’s worth of food anymore. I buy enough for a week and that’s that.
I do other things to try to waste less. I gave up on plastic containers, because they inevitably end up in the garbage. I have reusable straws, although I don’t all the time use them, because I suck. I try to cook just enough to avoid leftover nobody will eat. I am trying to talk Gordon into letting me have a big old compost bin. I want my kids and their kids to have a habitable planet. But I have to tell you, the first time I decided to clean the freezer and not buy anymore food to go into it, well, it almost killed me.
Well, I may be a biologist, but I flunked this one big time. Ha
…right?! I know I partly went astray because I was thinking in terms of the best things I could do to reduce *my* carbon footprint in particular but I clearly need to look into what’s up with refrigerants! (And this after hanging out with the MyGreenLabs folks and sort of taking part in the freezer challenge. Sort of only because we didn’t have a -80 freezer, so we could only up our efficiency rating.)
I work in a biochemistry lab that has two large -80s, a large -20, and two small -20s as well as a walk in 4 degree celcius room. I shudder at the energy expenditure of them all and the enviornmental cost of the refrigerants.
Check out My Green Lab. One of my favorite groups, especially considering all the resource intensive stuff that goes on in research! (Allison in particular, the founder, is just the sweetest. We used to have a standing date to get together and chat each year at SfN.)
Same. Even as an ecologist i only got around 34%. I kept mixing up the top two rankings. Some suprises there too. As i thought solar topped wind power
Oh, your story hit a little too close to home! Substitute Virginia for North Carolina, and a 200 year old caretaker cottage for your shack and I’m right there with you. We ate oatmeal for each meal for a week waiting for the paycheck. We ran out of milk halfway through the week. To this day, when milk gets low in the fridge, I get antsy. As long as we have milk we will survive. Wish our rent was $200 though. We had to pay $850/mo for the privelige of sleeping next to a kerosene heater.
Same reason that I must have a full gas tank. Anytime it goes below half full my stress \ birch level goes way way up.
Also the reason that I cannot eat baloney, bologna or whatever. Too poor, too long.
birch = bitch.
Horticulture degree, Fruit Crop production. Flunked it big time, too. And I opted for the recycle and reuse policy throughout because I am originally from a 3rd World country. Still got only 25%.
56.3…wow I thought I wd have done better….thanks for enlightening us with this quiz
Okay, so this quiz is not entirely accurate. A lot of this stuff was based on perspective and does not cover the full ecological impact of things. For example, one of the questions asks about land usage. It lists tropical forest preservation as first, which was right, but then it listed wetland conservation as last and planting bamboo as second. Planting just one plant is not going to conserve anything. It is vulnerable to pests and diseases. Not to mention that bamboo is invasive in many areas. As for wetlands, they are some of the most important natural areas that we have. They are tied to everything. Without healthy wetlands all other ecosystems suffer. Wetlands filter the water, protect oceans (which are the real key to stopping climate change), prevent erosion, and stop eutrophication. I guarantee that just about everything in your life is somehow connected to a healthy wetland.
I am all for conservation and individuals engaging in more sustainable practices. But I caution everyone to be careful. A lot of sources have misinformation or like this quiz, are almost right, but leave out key details. It is things like this that cause people to believe things that are not entirely accurate.
If you want information that is more accurate and carries less bias, check out your local extension programs. These are all run by the land grant universities. The entire goal is to aid the public and give you the best information possible. Everything is free, peer reviewed, and understandable.
This is the extension program in Florida (every state has one): http://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/
I agree!! I think I listed bamboo planting as last. Coastal wetlands were a whole lot more important to me as they preserver not only plants and animals but also the integrity of our shores and the ocean Without the coastal wetlands, the devastation of hurricanes has increased and the amount of pollutants pouring into the ocean has increased.
And as far as I’m concerned, nuclear needs to go away permanently, so I placed it last. We have no place to securely store nuclear wastes we already have amassed, we don’t need more.
Thanks Brianna for the comment. I’m not a scientist and am trying to be aware of confirmation bias but some of their answers seemed off. The quiz is from Project Drawdown and I should check their credentials for bias. Not sure that I will but should. One way is to see if the original source cites reliable data.
It did make me aware that I should be doing more research on what I can do which is a benefit but never a good idea to just use one source for information. At the moment I have some doubts about CNN.
Ha. I have not taken quiz yet but I can tell you CNN is not a reliable news source. Not sure when they crossed the line as at one time they were. Mother presently gets all her news from CNN and an assortment of religious channels. We eat at cracker barrel pretty exclusively because they do not serve alcohol according to her. Apparently serving pork is bad but alcohol gets you banned from places family can eat. Shrug. I constantly have to clear up her facts. The hardest are when one of her assortment of prescribed medications are recalled according to CNN. sigh. But I usually try to have more than one source of data and I keep in mind different strokes for different folks as today Trump walks on water and tomorrow Trump is devil. Dementia. A terrible thing.
I totally agree about your points, and I would like to add that this is also a vegan point of view kind of test. There are multiple studies that show that plant based diet does more damage to the environment, than meat based one. 1) It requires a lot more transportation of goods, because in few places you can have a balanced plant based diet on local produce all year around.
2) It requires a lot more place for planting. This often destroys forests, natural habitat of animals, plants, insects, waterways and so on. It destroys ecosystems totally.
This are just the main points. So no, a plant based diet is not a good solution.
It’s not wrong to say that being vegan helps the environment. You may eat more imported plants, but the meat you eat has to eat way more plants than you do, and that is imported too.
Not saying being vegan is the solution for everything, but cattle really does eat a lot.
Bamboo is a major resource in Asia, like the rain forests they are being destroyed. Bamboo can be invasive in an American garden because it not indigenous. Not everything is about the USA.
No, not everything is about the USA. However, this quiz and project is. And, like anything, planting all of one thing is not beneficial to the environment. Monocultures are vulnerable to pests and diseases. What I think they were talking about was using bamboo as a way for carbon sequestration. It grows really fast so you can quickly convert CO2 to plant compounds. Bamboo is also nice in that it has a high lignin content that takes longer to break down. However, if we are talking pure conversion of CO2 to biomass than any number of plants or kelp would work.
I agree – it is a cute quiz designed to get you thinking which is great! But there are inaccuracies. I am an environmental engineer and I am constantly fighting misinformation so I do wish these quizzes explained their numbers a bit more.
For example, based on the current method of mass meat production you can argue a plant-based diet would have a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions. This arguement is lessened considerably if you compare it to sustainable farm operations such as rotating pastures and factor in transportation costs as mentioned previously.
Also, it’s important to realize that many times these analyses don’t perform a full life cycle analysis on the products. What happens when some of these technologies go into a landfill? Many aren’t recycled. Always interesting to consider.
One step at a time, we will get there.
I agree with your take on the wetlands issue. Then I decided that they were simply looking at CO2 output/uptake and that’s why the answer was plant bamboo. Which was an invasive plant in SE Texas where I grew up, so I’d never plant bamboo in a million years.
Another point that bothered me was the Number 1 answer being “more electric cars”. We saw something within the last week that says electric cars won’t help as much as everyone thinks they will because they have to charge their batteries with electricity, which is often supplied by a coal-burning power plant. Sigh.
I would not take this CNN test seriously.
You are right about the electric cars thing.
A number of years ago the UN was upgrading their car fleet in Geneva. My brother-in-law was in charge of making the decision on which car and what kind to get.
His conclusion was that the Toyota hybrids were the best in the market. But in the end, he opted to buy economically more viable GAS models.
Why ?
Because the electric batteries had a life span of 5 to 7 years at best and Switzerland was not going to start having landfills that could eventually lead to lithium and other chemicals to leak and pollute their ground streams, plants and land.Considering
Considering that Switzerland has microclimates that exist all over the mountains that allow them to have vineyards and crops all over the country and even halfway up the mountains with perpetual snow on their peaks, can anyone blame them?
Totally agree with you.
Dems to me that this was more a politically correct test than anything really applicable in real life case scenarios.
That was supposed to be seems not Dems . Stupid spell check
My relationship with food is complicated. Growing up, we always had to be very careful with our food. We were never really hungry, but we were always very diligent about only putting one slice of bologna on our wonder bread and we were allowed exactly a teaspoon of mayonnaise for our sandwiches. That sandwich and an apple was our lunch every. single. day until I graduated high school. When I turned 11, I was given the responsibility of cooking for the family. This meant that I had to create a meal plan and ensure that we came in under budget. The budget was strictly enforced and if I messed it up, we had pancakes for dinner for a few days (we usually had flour and eggs). When I went to university, I was very used to budgeting, and quickly realized that there was almost no money for food. I still had my sandwich and apple every day for dinner, but lunch was usually crackers or ramen and breakfast was a glass of water. Once a week I’d “splurge” on a 99c ice cream cone. Eventually I finished school (with a BMI firmly in the “underweight” category) and got a good job. The very first thing I did with my very first adult paycheck was fill the fridge to bursting. I ate and I ate and I ate and I gained 40 lbs 😛 but it was glorious. I have a very hard time dieting, because it instills panic in me not to have access to food. When I met my now-husband, he was living in Sydney and I decided to move in with him. I gave away all my worldly possessions, except my cat, laptop, and one suitcase of clothes with an excited grin. The last day before we left I had to clean out my fridge…and I broke down in the worst kind of soul torn sobbing. I had such a hard time throwing away any of the food that it felt physically painful. I had to leave the room so he could do it instead. Since then we’ve had 2 kids who have only experienced bologna as an exotic meat our german friends eat. They’re so incredibly wasteful with food. Part of me is gutted anytime they refuse to eat something or only eat half their dinner. In my head I rant “Do you have any IDEA how lucky you are?!” then I realize how very relieved I am that the only answer they could give is “no.”
Everyone has their own issues, don’t they 🙂
I once had a conversation with a “mother in law” whose daughter in law didn’t really have a stocked pantry, purchase junk food, or do a big shop based on a weekly meal plan. It gave her couponing mega-meal-planning mother in law such hysterics that she had to relate to to a stranger she just met 10 minutes ago (myself) while on vacation. Or that her grown son might walk into the kitchen and not find anything to eat.
Another time I spoke with a woman in her 20’s who locked her bedroom door as her little tween/teen brother would eat her food. Healthy food like fruit and greens because she was trying to improve her diet. My cousin kept on asking why not let him eat it and I flat out told him people have their own issues. It could have been for budget reasons, or perhaps she had food/storage issues.
Food and food stocking relationships can be complex.
I got 37,5%. However, not all the facts given by CNN are correct, or can be reduced to a single parameter. Electric cars cost a lot more CO2 in production than conventional ones., so you need to drive a significant minimum number of miles to reach the break even point. And that is assuming that the electric power you need for your car is produced by wind or solar power. If you burn coal or oil to power your electric car, do not even bother.
And (the current form of) nuclear power is anything but green – nuclear waste is far worse than CO2… Now if we manage to get nuclear fusion working, that would be an entirely different ballgame.
I failed big time. 28.1%. Guess I need to study some more. ♻️
You beat me. I got a measly 25%.
Guess we can’t cheat off of each other. ?
Not necessarily. If we got different questions wrong, then together we’d score 53.1%. That’s better than Ilona! 😉
The only question I got completely right was the Women Empowerment one.
Good point! I think the women question was the only one I got all correct as well. There might have been more than one that I got all wrong though. ?
me to!
this quiz feels weird? to me, possibly because its american, because in germany
classic lightbulbs are outlawed, literally.
u can only buy energysaving ones or LED.
we have a lot of on- and offshore windparks and windwheels?? on private property decentralized, as well as solarenergy. there are even rules about putting some on the roof of a new build home.
so the saying of harnessing windenergy didn´t make much sense to me.
on the other hand driving an electric car —- mmmmh u still need energy and the minerals needed to exchange cars to electrical are not there u simply can´t do it.
but i totally agree with the meatless diat, or better meat reduced.
I love composting and planting my own food i even did it on the balcony tomatos, cucumber and herbs works just fine.
but to each their own, we have to work together to protect the only planet we have
good luck to all of us
I completely get you on the food freeze/hording. I am still there, but do a pretty good job of using things up. It helps that I try to only go grocery shopping about once a month so by the end of it I am forcing myself to use up things that I otherwise would not use.
I have moved on to other securing things though. I stockpile batteries and light bulbs. But at least those don’t go bad and get wasted.
Very interesting!! I totally failed though!!
invest in nuclear power? are they insane? I’m from Austria and we don’t have any nuclear power plants. I have to admit we buy nuclear power from other countries, because it’s cheap, but we have a lot of hydroelectric power plants along our rivers. And the government is funding more and more solar panels on houses so there’s that. But nuclear power can’t be the solution to any problem concerning preserving and sustaining the planet!? O.o
It’s all trade offs, though. I’m from Washington State, which is a region that tends to be, well, passive aggressively proud* of it’s hydro electrics and the inexpensive energy it produces. But even with all the salmon ladders and suchlike, putting in those dams have done a lot to mess up the salmon runs and other fisheries in the area – which are already under strain from a lot of other sources. (And this is pretty important, because oceanic food webs are falling apart.)
* It’s a PNW thing, what can I say?
Everything is electric in Seattle! It blew my mind how inexpensive electricity was compared to California. I learned a lot though in PNW about sustainability. I miss it’s clean air and abundant nature every day.
Hey, I still had natural gas for heat and hot water! (Not to mention my greatly missed wood burning brick oven.)
It’s a complex issue. Hydro-electric power creates changes to ecosystems so that needs to be taken into consideration along with the increasing demand for water resources. Solar panels are great except for the demands on resources to both build and replace them (given the life cycle, there are issues with waste) Wind & wave power is better but this power has to be distributed across populations that are not always close by and there is the issue of storing power generated by those sources. Again, you have to look at the product cycles to get a true indication of how “green” the power actually is. Nuclear options are very good except for when there is an accident, then it becomes very bad.
As I said, it’s a VERY complex issue.
My problem with this quiz is that it largely ignores the elephant in the room, population growth. Even if the quiz is correct on the appropriate priorities, which most of us have questioned, if we do not address the underlying issue of population growth we will inevitably face the prospect of an unlivable earth. And we cannot continue to pretend it is only the population of underdeveloped counties that is at issue, we first worlders continue to use as far greater proportion of the world’s resources and our population growth has a correspondingly large effect. I remember the zero population growth concept but it seems to have slipped far off the eco-radar these days.
Huh. Something must have happened to my original comment.
Good point about overpopulation, Mimi. Especially since it ties into a lot of the other issues, like developments encroaching on natural erosion barriers, more vehicles on the road, more food waste, etc. And none of those items can really be attributed to underdeveloped countries.
They did touch on it (barely) when they mentioned women’s access to education and contraception, since those reduce the number of children a woman is likely to have by a fair amount.
I did horrible?
I didn’t do as well as I thought I would–a reflection of ad-hoc “paying attention” vs. active learning.
One thing which struck me was the issue of refrigerators, air conditioners, stoves, and electric cars. I’m a renter in a city filled with tenants, and that’s a trend that’s increasing nationally. A homeowner might invest in a new energy efficient stove or fridge, or installing an outlet to charge their car, because they get a few dollars back every month. But a landlord only sees a return if the spiffier appliances let them bump the rent–the reduced utility bill isn’t part of their equation. If we want some of these upgrades to happen, it will require a government incentive program.
The landlord could also get a tax break with some of those items. Not as much as they probably would if it were their primary residence, but it should help a little bit.
I understand the food thing. I’m not horrible, anymore, but the most horrifying thing in this regard was helping my sister-in-law clean out my mother-in-laws home after she died. She had lived through the 1930s and WWII in Northern Italy, and was a definite food hoarder. Two freezers full of undated, minimally marked meat, most freezer burned. Closets of self-canned foods. Oh, and somewhere around five large garbage bags of yarn all bought on sale, because the world may run out of yarn. This is not to mention the unworn clothing and small appliances. Yeah, doing without to that extreme messes with us. It’s a human thing.
When my English war bride grandma went into a home we gathered together to clean out her basement. There was the equivalent of a large black garbage bag just of elastic cuffs cut from jogging pants/sweatshirts. She had also saved all the hook and eye sections from old bras.
I solved most of my leftovers problem. My mom lives alone and does not like to cook. I bought a bunch of one-serving containers and all leftovers that can be frozen are made into individual meals for her. Every couple of months, I stock her freezer (and empty mine) and come home with dozens of empty containers for the next round. (It’s not all leftovers—I’ll make a batch of her favorite Greek lemon soup or rice casserole to go with the leftovers.) Anyway, we’re both happy with the way it works out.
I agree that the quiz, although interesting, seems simplistic. I did learn from it though.
I’ve never hoarded food, and, though I had some very poor times when I was young, I never went without. My preparation for the apocalypse involves worrying about the power grid. Since I went all digital for my books, my solution was to buy a solar charger. The world may fall apart, but I’ll be able to keep my Kindle charged.
I scored 40.6 and have some research to do in order to help the environment!
This quiz is totally skewed to the North American listing of importance. Try the quiz again from the viewpoint of a small island nation and then reassess…. Its not easy to step out of a familiar frame of reference but if gains are going to be made across the board then solutions have to be adjustedfor….
Water and land scarcity so population control and water utilisation education come first
Transport of foodstuff and essential items and services require aircraft…or ships.
Powering all of that is relatively easy as solar, wind and wave are what we have the most of.
There is no easy answer.
I had the same experience when my son was three! I was a single mom, so poor that I seriously considered shoplifting some baby Tylenol when he was sick — I didn’t do it, but that stuff was so expensive, it hurt. My freezer broke and I couldn’t save the contents. I literally cried. It was such a hopeless feeling. I actually took the other lesson from it, though, which was never to have more in the freezer than I could afford to lose. But you have my total sympathy. Food uncertainty sucks.
I am a recovering food horder. I have never starved, but I’m thinking it some genetic memory from my peasant forebears. I have to stop myself, time and again, from buying a huge amount of something, just because it’s a killer sale. I have a chest freezer, and it makes me feel safe, too.
Alas, we just had to throw out a refrigerator-full of food today because our son decided it wasn’t cold enough and set it to “zero”. Which, actually, is “O” for “Off”.
Kids: gotta love them.
Middle daughter is a French teacher-middle and high school. She took a class about the differences in socioeconomic levels. My mom’s folks were cotton farmers and raised and slaughtered their own meat and grew their own veggies and fruit. Gist of differences-middle or rich class-did you like the food? Poor-did you get enough? My daughter grew up hearing me always say did you get enough to family, friends, guests. I always taught them that it was shameful to not offer more food to a guest. We always had ways to stretch a meal if unexpected company came. Never thought about it, as I never felt poor as a kid. Had fried bologna (sliced by the butcher), scrambled eggs, toast, boiled buttered potatoes, pinto beans, and corn bread a lot for dinner. One of my faves as a little kid. My dad was an alcoholic and mom a nurse. He drank up the money and hocked our things at the pawn shop. Mom charged at the corner store and paid monthly. If she had car troubles etc the grocer would carry her. He’d say “ I know you’re good for it, Miss Storey.” We always paid something, and my farmer grandparents would send us home with vegetables and apples , peaches and pears. Raspberries and strawberries too. If the crops were good, you paid off your bank seed loan. Bad, the bank carried you. I never thought of myself as poor, and once my mom divorced and remarried, my mom cooked the same, but more beef, chicken, and roast mixed in. So asking did you get enough was an indicator to that instructor that I grew up poor. I am strong middle class and still cringe inside if someone drops in and I have nothing sweet or a snack I can quick make to offer. I still have a freezer for when meat goes on sale and divide things up, put on the date, and place in a freezer bag. I give to our daughters if my bounty is too much. Throwing things that are still usable away but not good enough to donate is another hard thing. Too much influence from the grands who lived through the dust bowl years. I get it, and have changed my ways in some things. Food is a knee jerk reaction, and a hard one.
So, if you’re like me and ask both, does that mean I grew up in the middle of middle to poor or that my class changed? Hmmm, that actually sums up my early childhood. I never went hungry, but I knew the budget was tight. ?
Same here. I got 0%. I feel so ashamed. I used to do the same with food for the same reasons and now I only have that small freezer above the fridge. Now, I only trash one or two chickens a year. Still bad but better than before.
Don’t feel ashamed! It’s ok. ((Hug))
My overall score is 43,8%. But what got me quite surprised was how I manage to get the food-thing all correct! XD
turns out 40% is an excellent score!
Ilona can kick this if it’s out of line. But one of my ways of reducing food waste and cost is to subscribe to https://www.imperfectproduce.com
They buy the produce left with the farmers because of overproduction or minor imperfections and deliver it to my door. Seasonal but I can choose what I want.
They have also expanded into pantry items.
Look them up and see if they’re in your area?
No worries, I am all for it. Unfortunately, they don’t deliver to my area.
I don’t know if you’ve run into Sarah Taber (cue Sarah Taber fan folk, we are legion, she’s a crop scientist and general commentator on all things farm) but she’d recently had a twitter thread on how the ugly produce movement, while it can be helpful, is in some ways based on misconceptions about food wasted. I went looking for the thread… and saw that it was turned into an article – so much easier!
So, ugly produce can be useful! But she’s recommending a lot of the things… that are kind of the basis of this thread. A good article, anyway 🙂 https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2019/03/09/commentary-farms-arent/
I usually don’t comment on the blog, but the freezer story is something I strongly relate to. I was raised in large part by my grandmother who, despite being an American citizen by birth, was stranded in Slovakia during WWI when her mother took her to Europe to visit their family. They lived in a small rural town, but food was scarce. It stayed with her always. I don’t know if they had reliable electricity in Slovakia because instead of filling freezers my grandmother’s habit was collecting food in cans. The basement shelves were full of every kind of canned food product, (and sometimes dry, like beans)despite expiration dates long past. If there was a canned food sale, she was on it. She could not throw any food away. Any vegetables from her garden at the end of the season were pickled. She also tended to hide cans of food in different places around the house too. These were habits that she never broke, not out of a sense of ecology, just her memory of poverty and not having enough to eat. Looking back as an adult I realize that she must have been traumatized by her circumstances as a child and never really adjusted to food being available as an adult.
I tease my parents that they are part of the country food mafia. One neighbor raises a steer for each of them. So they have beef. They also keep chickens and garden. When I retire Iwant a cow, yes I know how to milk it. Or maybe a milk sheep.
You know the cow has to have a calf to have milk. Cows are not chickens.
We have a compost bin, it’s a dozen cows. I fill my ice cream container, no meat or dairy and take it to them.
One good power outage even in the dead of winter and a gas stove without electricity, I can use both stove top and oven, makes you appreciate stocking up on spaghetti sauce not meat. But…. then there’s the lack of water…..
I too have learned to buy what we eat – mostly, it’s still a work in progress – and not stock the freezer or buy those bulk sales. My grocery bill actually decreased.
I’ve been fighting the food waste battle myself, but for us it’s a matter of buying things we plan to make meals with and then not sticking to our meal plans tight enough. My partner and I both work a fair bit and for a while we were falling back on ordering in which is expensive as well as wasteful. Now we use our freezer to store leftovers, meat for the next week or two, and premade ‘quick’ meals for nights we feel to tired to cook. When we go to shop we check the fridge and freezer and try to use what’s in there first, I will sometimes buy to replace, but the goal is to consistently rotate what’s in there.
I do fall into the pantry hording trap but I’ve been trying to apply the same system to our snacks and pasta. Make a plan to use something, replace the following week. His parents brought us a bunch of crackers so now there’s a ‘no new crackers’ rule until we’ve gotten through some of what we have, backed up by ‘Today is a cheese board lunch day.’ Small steps I hope are helping a bit.
I have not read all the comments …but I will add my 2 cents worth. I was often in the same boat/freezer….with freezer burnt foods – until 3 years ago I bought a Food Saver. It is AMAZING. I even freeze soups and sauces in zip lock bags, then when frozen, remove them from those bags and Food Saver bag them. I have salmon I froze a year ago that looks and tastes like I just bought it. Food Saver – worth every penny. I never throw away freezer nasty food any more.
We don’t throw out very much food – we live in a NYC apartment and the only freezer we have is what comes with our fridge. The grocery stores are close by so we buy what we need fresh and plan our meals. Add to that the fact that groceries are expensive in NYC means you don’t waste much (grocery stores are big and their rent is astronomical plus state and city taxes etc etc). A gallon of Orange Juice is $10 here in midtown. It is $4 a short distance across the river in New Jersey.
By the way BDH did you know it is world book day on Amazon? Free books!!!!. You have 2 days 6 hours from now to download
https://www.amazon.com/article/read-the-world?ref=CWBD19_MNIM/ref=pe_26383970_394855000_pe_CWBD19_MNIM//
@Simone,
Thank you so much for the tip about Amazon’s World Book Day!! I was looking for something to read and there’s a good cross-section of books to choose from, so I’m a happy camper 🙂
I laughed and shut it off after the first question. People don’t need to eat more plants, they need to eat less all together. I find it amusing that no one ever talks about the real issue of our current state: a 7 billion (and growing) population is not sustainable. We need less people on the planet. A LOT LESS
Ok, Thanos, we know it’s you. You’re not fooling anyone. Why don’t you put down the gauntlet and come have some tea with us. We have cookies.
Hahaha, I love the marvel movies, but I’m not gonna lie. I kind of sided with Thanos in Infinity War. His tactics are a bit suspect but his ideology is sound.
Did you see this, Ilona? Figured you’d get a chuckle out of it.
https://www.foxtrot.com/2019/04/21/infinity-beans/
43.6%. I have a chest freezer, I keep it pretty full of food… I use it, tho… and seldom have freezer burned anything (if I do, I make stock out of it.) Last spring and summer we were living on $200 a month… that was to pay all our bills and feed the 5 of us. That full freezer and pantry came in VERY handy, altho by the time we got our finances straightened around I was doing a lot with the flour and sugar from scratch… and bartering with my friendly local farmer with bread and cake for vegetables.
My kids have weird food sensitivities. We cook a LOT from scratch… the kids prefer it.
My son (who is now 18 and studying to be a chef) told one of his doctors, when he was about 10, that his favorite food was “mac and cheese.” The doctor said “Ah, good old kraft.” My son, with a look of horror said “I can’t eat Kraft, it has dye I’m allergic to. I like HOME MADE mach and cheese.” The doctor said “How do you make home made mac and cheese”. My son said “Well, first you make a bechamal sauce, that’s one of the French mother sauces, then you add cheese. I like goat cheese, but you can use any cheese you like. An extra sharp cheddar is good. Then you melt the cheese and pour it in a casserole dish and mix the pasta in, then you cover it with cheese and bread crumbs and bake it.”
We knew he was going to be a chef very early.
We seldom throw away food… (my boys are 23, 18 and 15. They can eat more than an army on a good day.)
My mom made homemade baked Mac and cheese – we begged for Kraft. (sigh) Fast forward 40-some years to working at a restaurant, and one of the night managers was warming up his dinner. I said, “Somebody loves you, you have real Mac and cheese!!” He laughed and said, “Yeah, my nonna really spoils me.” The kids we worked with were intrigued by homemade Mac and cheese, being only familiar with the boxed (orange) variety.
Nearly the same here only with 3 persons more … so no leftovers …
Another low scorer here. I thought the quiz was pretty well done. And another food hoarder. I’m eating down a freezer in hopes of getting rid of it, and buying fresh. I’m hindered by the fact that I buy meat direct from the ranchers, and it tastes so much better than store-bought. But they only sell in bulk, and I’m not eating that much meat anymore.
I took the quiz, got a 21.9%. Like Brianna said, a lot of it seemed subjective. But as in anything, if it makes you think and look into what you can do for a conservation effort, it does some good.
Population growth is a complicated issue – areas with the highest population growth still don’t use as many resources as places like the US (where the fertility rate has dropped dramatically)
Your story was hitting kind of close to home for me… because I’m about to move to a little cottage in the woods in North Carolina. Okay, it’s a lovely little passive solar cottage four miles south of campus, but it is legitimately in the woods (up a gravel road, even). I will be paying rather more than $200 a month for rent, I am afraid…
And like others, the rest touches a lot. I didn’t feel a lack of food growing up (mostly). When I moved out on my own… well, I was very poor, and a lot of the time I was pretty proud too. And I guess I set that pattern that for me security food is non-perishables – starting with my brown rice and lentils (and flour, though I baked for the whole household – and made soup for everyone as well). It was a long time before I was nearly as good at growing vegetables as herbs, but in the PNW it’s pretty easy to find edible greens if you even halfway know what you’re doing. Later on… well, I made a pretty conscious effort to cycle through my stockpile and not let it age too much. I can be un-trustworthy at the farmers market at certain seasons, but the answer for that is usually to cook for everyone I know.
It freaks me out now that I’m an obligate carnivore. Even more, I suppose, that my body really prefers fish and seriously, most of our fisheries kind of suck. (If I get a chest freezer, it will probably be because I’m part of a salmon CSA… and it will have some kind of back up power source. Also, I might be sharing it with my sister.) I was a happy bicycle riding vegetarian :-p
I totally get the freezer. I do it too. I try really hard not to fill it but I remember going without quite times as a kid and for a year in college existing on 1 bag a grits a month for several months. I never want my kids to go through that so I stock the freezer. I almost had a breakdown when the power went out & we lost everything in it. My wife thinks I’m nuts but she humors me.
Off to do the quiz.
Hi – a few random comments, but first … worm composting is a great way to start … I accidentally inherited a worm bin at my last house and, without much effort had a great place to put all my food scraps and get compost! This website has a lot of great information … and Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm has been extremely supportive in getting me started at my new house.
http://www.homecompostingmadeeasy.com/wormcomposting.html
I have been an avid reader since 2009, and have greatly enjoyed all of your books and stories … even if I may not have liked a particular event or path. Having said that, I felt strongly enough about the discussion on the Julie books to say that just because there is a vocal minority that dislikes her as a character … well, they don’t have to read any books about her. I think you all have done an excellent job taking her from what I originally thought would be a side line character into a young woman. Some may like her and some may not, but she has depth and is interesting aside from her relationship to Kate. So if the muse moves you to reconsider your series on her as the main character, please know that there are lots of us who will absolutely support your efforts!
Thank you for being the great team you are – and please remember there are tons of us out here who just don’t normally interact but love your work .
Throwing out, not eating left-overs – I can’t even image. I love left overs, we so rarely had them growing up. I always try to take left overs home when I go out to eat.. But I never had the freezer issue. But that could be because I grew up in FL and there was always the probability of electricity going out in a hurricane. We were much more into canned goods.
I’m amazed the discussion here is mainly on the food. Yes, it is a big part of our daily life and putting every thing in the freezer and never use it is painful for the environment and purse. Yes, there is a difference between Germany (Europe) and America, BUT there are several (small) things one can do to start to go green 😉 even without political pressure. For example, what kind of soap, washing powder and softener do you use? I prefer to clean my house with the old-fashioned backing soda, “green” soap (?) and washable microfiber-cloths. The soap decomposes easily with extreme little harm to the water. When my kids were babies I used washable diapers – it saved me from paying double for the trashcan. For most of the stains I use backing soda, (cow)bile soap or soap herb (vegan 😉 ).
I do have 3 compost bins and once a year I have people turn them over for me, searching for the worms (about 2 pounds) as they use them for fishing – and I have beautiful earth for my garden. I try to plant a lot of flowers year round for my bumble bees nesting in my garden since 20 years. I grow tomatoes (for my kids snacking during their “helping”), cucumbers, green peppers and herbs. I use as much collected rainwater to water my small 100 sqm garden as possible so I don’t have to use “cleaned” water. Even as the space is so small, I do have a lot of visitors: bees, wasps, hornets, dragon flies, lots of butterflies, lady bugs, grasshoppers, lots of small birds native to the voralpen mountains etc. and every year a hedgehog stays over during the snow-period. THAT is funny to watch when it collects leaves and cleans out its “room”.
Another point are the modern domestic appliances: do you check how much power and water they use? Of course before you buy them new, nobody has a money tree to throw out perfectly working machines.
Further look around, is there a possibility for carpooling?
Does one really need everything (especially clothing and furniture) new? Or is the old nightstand, perhaps with a lick of paint, perfect for the printer in my home office? Upcycling something is often possible. 50-80 % of the clothes in our family are hand-downs or second-hand. With a little bit of creativity they are as modern as you want.
Since 10 years, we have solar panels for water heating on our roof. I love it! They reduced my power bill by 25%. At the moment we are doing a research whether it is possible to change the toilet flush from “normal” to a rainwater-basin and how to build a walkable roof garden on our carport.
Some of these things aren’t possible when you rent your space or are living on a tiny budget – been there have the grey hairs to show for – but still there is so much one CAN do, get information and do it!
Annemarie, that’s lovely. However, you are measuring all of us by German standard.
Some of us in US work 60 hour weeks with very few holidays and very little time for casual gardening. Most appliances in the US are now very efficient. And in Texas in many counties collecting rainwater is illegal or strictly controlled. Rainwater is part of the collective aquifer and is community property. When you collect it, you are subtracting it from the collective water reserve. So for many of us reducing food waste is a good start.
I’m sorry if I offended somebody that was definitely not something I wanted to do. I know I’m fortunate that my husband earns enough for me to be able to be mainly a stay-at-home-mom (4+2 foster) and I still work 15-20 hours a week as fill-in-teacher (math & operational economics), gardening is – next to reading – my go to for relaxing with a side-effect of maintaining a tiny piece of healthy environment.
Your comment just showed me how different countries feel about using rainwater as it is recommended in big parts of Europe for gardening and if (new!, not subsidized) possible for flushing toilets otherwise the costs (also for the environment) to clean it to drinking quality were too high for “wasting” it for the above, especially as in the end it goes back into the cycle. In South-Africa they have a similar view on this topic. My parents live in Cape-Town and have a more than 4 years draught period. They are restricted to about 3.5 gallons water/person/day including toilets, shower and cooking – animals, even on farms, are allowed none. Extreme heavy fines if you go over the limit. So as soon it starts dripping everybody runs outside with pots and pans etc. to collect as much as possible. The condense-water from the ACs is used, too. Meanwhile house owners started to infest in water tanks for the toilets and showers. As far as I know there is no limit on how much one is allowed to collect. At the same time the area around Johannesburg/Pretoria is over flooded pretty regularly …
When I started my post-college life, bills got paid but I did a lot of ramen noodle math (calculating how many meals of Real Food I have to exchange for instant ramen if I decide to splurge on a luxury item like pork chops, a new book, or the soft toilet paper; or if I have an unexpected expense), and we had a hard rule of “never say no to free food.” I’ve worked my way up; I now have a mortgage that I pay more than the minimum on, I have money in savings, and I recently took a vacation to another continent. I still have a hard time turning down free food, even when I don’t really like the food item.
A lot of my freezer burned food becomes bird treats (if fruits/veggies) or dog treats (if dog-edible). Throwing out food is really stressful for me because I see it as wasted money, so I don’t keep much extra food around.
Hmmm, this test is more than a little dubious. I’m an environmental scientist & I can categorically state quite a few of these rankings are incorrect or don’t take into account the bigger picture. CNN should be ashamed of themselves
I actually had to look up what “freezer burn” is : apparently, manual-defrost freezers and smaller packages do not lead (easily) to freezer burn.
I (italian, live in the country, law-mandated house energy-exp.) found the test kind of weird: it can be that the population density in Italy makes solar farms a problem to place AND a potential soil-waster (we are vastly encouraged to go solar power on the roof of houses, factories, public buildings etc), that our cities already tend to be more concentrated and thus more walkable, that composting (or separated compostable trash disposal, which is the same) is pretty much mandatory in most urban realities.
The whole test felt very American-living slanted, and some things just made no sense (bamboo? HERE? What about biological diversity and alien invaders?!?).
I did the quiz and my score sucked, 25% But I must say the way the quiz was made sucked too, IMO. Take the last question, for example. I ranked number two as five, all the others were spot on. But it resulted in 20% for that question. On some things, I was wildly wrong, true, but relatively small errors are judged too harshly. No, I don’t think it was a fun quiz, educational, but not fun. 🙂
the irony of it is if you just left all your food out on the table or buried it in the snow outside it would all have been frozen and fine when you returned.
No. By the time they turned the power on, the storm had passed and it wasn’t cold enough anymore.
I haven’t read all the comments, so sorry if this was already posted, but this food digester is a good alternative to traditional composting. You can put it right in your garden if you want the compost it provides, but you can also just plant it anywhere in your yard with good drainage. It accepts meat scraps and animal waste as well, which you can’t usually compost.
http://www.abundantearth.com/store/GreenConeDigester.html
While the ultimate goal of reducing climate change is noble, I found this particular test to be poorly designed.
One, it’s never fun or truly informative to be quizzed on things you haven’t studied. It tends to make people feel stupid and in the end produces a negative response that is counter productive.
Two, in this case it was difficult to know if I was being quizzed on what I could do to make change, or what we as a community or world could do. Both at once, it turns out, and that muddied my responses and results. I’ve won awards for my personal efforts in reducing, reusing (not even mentioned in the quiz), and recycling, and yet my score was abysmal.
Three, some of the solutions were not as right as they could be. For example, swamps and wetlands are extremely good at sequestering carbon, as is the practice of composting (which works for decades after only one application). Perhaps not as perfect as tropical re-forestation, but this particular article and quiz make it seem as if local efforts in the US would be a waste of time. What everyone should do is troupe down to Brazil and plant trees. The way this quiz is presented, we either go do that or we’re useless, which is disheartening. Another example is bamboo. My husband, a landscaper, points out that bamboo is invasive in many climates, and while it might be great at sequestering carbon, it also has the potential to destabilize established ecosystems. He had other complaints as well. I’ll spare you the pain.
I love that reading this blog has brought this report to my attention and the issue even more into the light and the conversation. I would caution people that getting a low score on this quiz doesn’t mean you don’t know what to do in your own life to reduce your water and energy consumption, reuse things when you can, and recycle what you can’t reuse. As it’s done for me, I hope this encourages all of you to delve deeper and find out more.
I work in the carbon capture industry, and have to attend scientific conferences on the subject. Source bias is real, and this author had it.
If you live in the south, paint your roof white. If you live in the north, paint your roof black.
Dry your clothes on a clothesline. (#1 residential change)
I feel that the quiz is a good way to get people to think about what they use, do, throw away. I also understand that a lot of our habits stem from how we were raised. I am 54 and grew up on the poor side. I am used to offering refreshments to people who come over and yes, like the poster above it throws me when people just drop in and I have nothing to offer. I also am used to eating leftovers and do enjoy them for the most part. As our children are not around as much I have gotten better at smaller meals and really think about what I make. Baby steps
I live in a rural area and having a stocked freezer is important as the grocery store is a fifty minute highway drive away. ( trying to reduce fossil fuel use) However we have experienced two cyclones in the last few years. The last one lead to a power outage of eight days. It was hard to throw out all the cold food, but even harder to not restock to the same level once the power was back. Even more difficult is to control the buying for the pantry, the ‘just in case’ tin of tomatoes that get lost until all of a sudden you have five. The pantry is like a promise that we will get through the next natural disaster. Food is so tricky.
I look at my pantry and feel ready for the zombie apocalypse. As long as I could stand dry cereal, I’ve got a years supply for a family of 4.
Not sure I could keep out the looters though…
When we moved into our newly purchased house last year we were going to redo the kitchen which had an almond range with electric burners instead of the smooth top we had become accustomed to over the last 20 years or so. But as we discussed it, piece by piece and did some shopping, we found that prices had gone up a whole lot more than we thought. We had replaced the double sink with the large single as we had done in our last 4 houses and found that we didn’t miss the dish washer at all, so we didn’t take out the cabinet that had replaced a former dish washer. We did put in a stainless steel microwave above the almond stove, because most of our cooking is done there.Almond is no longer being manufactured. Now it didn’t match the almond refrigerator.
But here’s the kicker. Any refrigerator that would fit in that space would have the same cubic feet, even if it had fancy french doors and was stainless steel.
Being vegan, we buy fresh produce every 2 or 3 days which leaves the standard refrigerator 1/3 to 1/2 empty all of the time, We have found that there is hardly any food waste because we can see at a glance what we need to use. Our former selves threw out tones of food because the refrigerator was always stuffed.
And we almost never use the oven or more than 2 burners at a time. So it seemed foolish to replace either appliance. Because of that it seemed silly to replace the cabinets just because they were an older style absolutely plain and were made to be used without knobs or handles. So we painted the cabinets and the walls a misty gray, slightly darker on the bottom , matched the tile to the walls and faux- finished the counter tops. No one who has visited has ever noticed that the appliances don’t match.And if that was something that did bother them, it would be a clear sign that we weren’t going to have much in common philosophically anyway.
We have a friend who, when his neighbors brag about how much their kitchen renovation has cost asks,” So, does the food taste any better?”
And for us that sums up the kind of question we should be asking before making any purchase. In essence, “How is this purchase really necessary? Will this really improve my life?” Getting in touch with essentials eliminates so much waste –time, energy, money,
and stuff we only bought to fill some perceived emotional need, that didn’t fill it after all.
31.3%. I posted the link to the quiz on my Facebook and page watched as my friends, one by one, start to share it on their pages.
We were very short on money when we purchased our first house ,it was 800 sq feet including a bend over half room up rickety stairs….one day my Lipizzaner Stallion walked in to visit ,I was scared to death he would fall through the old floor…he didn’t….
The only heat was a trash burner wood stove in the kitchen….those were rough years and we also had a big freezer and like you, a power outage ..ruined ..lots of our food ,including a lot of farm raised meat we bought from friends…loosing all that food was devastating…I get it…
We now have a generator that goes on automatically if the powere is out more than 30 seconds….since we purchased this expensive equipment there have been few power outages…it’s Murphys Law…..you are prepared .
Nothing happens…..
We installed about 40 solar panels to cut down on our carbon foot print…
We drive electric cars because !the Vampire was right ,fossile fuels are not a renewable resource…my husband started with a Prius then got a Volt …then a barely used Tesla….now I have the Volt,and rarely use the gas….
and so it goes…..
I just defrosted my freezer. The waste was shameful.
There is a way to have both peace of mind and be eco friendly , simply buy a supply from one of the half dozen prep places that sell 25 year lasting freeze dried food supplies, st. augies, mountain house, wise, nutri foods, chefs banquet, ect. ( though would try some variety selections to see what you like first) than can live what ever life style you choose, knowing that you will always have that month to a year of food security . Will not matter what disaster happens, you are food secure. ( though would pick up a water filter/purifier from hiking places as does require clean water )