more about food and numbers and fear.

fifteen minutes beginning 9:52 a.m.

i'm feeling a little naive about the 90% down project. i'm looking at my numbers and seeing some of them already within the guidelines or very near within. i'm looking at what i could do to bring them down, and it doesn't seem that difficult. maybe it's because of where i live that it feels this way. i mean, i definitely COULD bike to work every day most of the time. it does require buying a bike, yes. and a helmet. and a chain. i can buy local food every weekend at the farmer's market. i mean this week even we made a trip to the union square market (omg. what a FEAST that is!) and we spend $60 on local foods there, plus we spent $45 at stop and shop (mostly spent on cheeses and salsa and turkey bacon), plus $25 at the veggie stand (celery, broccoli, oranges, almonds). that's 46% local, 34% stop and shop, and ~20% veggie stand. now, i haven't broken down the non-local things into dry vs wet yet, which would make it more in accord with the guidelines sharon has laid out. and this is just the beginning of the season. i understand that during the winter, it'll be much less varietous to eat local. *sigh* i just worry that it's going to be more difficult than i think it will be.

plans for food:
- rice and dry beans in bulk bags (instead of cans the way we generally do now) until we manage to grow beans ourselves
- continuing to make bread from local flour (blew family farm)
- more seasonal veggies in our diet
- bulk tea from the indian foods store rather than coffee

i'm thinking that winter foods will be lots of beans, whole grains, cabbage, apples, winter squash, bread, milk, cheese. maybe i'll start eating potatoes again.

what scares me about the way i'm doing this is that i'm still relying on others to provide for me. i'm relying on the farmers in the area to get their goods to the market in the city so that i can buy them. while this is a big step toward more sustainable living, it's not quite good enough for me to feel 'safe' should something actually happen that breaks down the infrastructure (see sharon's post about avian flu pandemic here).

wow. is fifteen minutes up already? dang.
(and i didn't even get to talk about the convo i had with Emily the Biology Major about humans as an evolutionary failure!)