What is slow food? 16 ways to benefit (without becoming a snob)
Stefan Müller via Flickr
Fast food has been around for a long time now. Slow food directly and deliberately opposes it.
In 1986, McDonald’s announced plans to build a 450-seat store, its largest in the world, in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. The announcement sparked protests, including unsuccessful litigation to stop it. Plaintiffs claimed that the odor of fried food would pollute the air and destroy the atmosphere of the neighborhood. Carlo Petrini and partners elsewhere in Europe channeled this rage in 1989 to start Slow Food International.
The Slow Food movement’s manifesto declared that importation of a new culture could only supplant and ruin the culture already present. To go up to a counter, order from a limited menu, and have someone almost immediately hand you the food, spread the virus of always being in a hurry.
Slow food, then, became a “vaccine” against this constant rush. The Slow Food movement urged people to eat locally grown food prepared according to their culture’s original style. (It has always been an international movement, so there was no sense in telling French or German slow food advocates to learn Italian cooking.)
But beyond the attitude of “good food takes hours to prepare,” the whole idea of slow food encourages people to eat it slowly enough to savor the experience.
What is fast food?
Ask that question, and immediately thoughts go toward McDonalds and other chain restaurants. You go up to a counter (or sit idling and breathing everyone else’s exhaust fumes in a drive-thru lane). In a very few minutes, someone hands you your food—exactly the same food you would get in any other restaurant of the same chain.
Fast food isn’t limited to those restaurants, however. If you rush out the door in the morning stuffing a protein bar in your mouth instead of taking time to eat breakfast at the table, you are doing fast food. If you eat a sandwich at your desk while you keep working, you are doing fast food.
You buy fast food at a grocery store when you pick up frozen meals you can eat after a few minutes in the microwave. Or any of the so-called convenience foods that come in a can or box.
Fast food has too much fat, sugar, and salt to be healthy. It’s tasty enough to be addictive but can’t compare in flavor to a good home-cooked meal or food from a sit-down restaurant. The packaging alone contributes tons of waste to our landfills. And we lose the social aspect of preparing and enjoying a meal with other people.
Actually, as the Slow Food Manifesto points out, fast food is only a symptom of a fast and hasty lifestyle. It doesn’t let you slow down for anything. You can’t enjoy your food if you don’t take the time to notice the color, taste, and texture. You can’t really enjoy anything if you’re always in a rush for the next thing.
A fast lifestyle both robs you of enjoyment and adds stress to your body. It slowly wrecks your health. Even a fast-food meal becomes less unhealthy if you take the time to enjoy it.
Other problems with our industrial food system
The idea of slow food has broadened since the movement began. Beyond the problem of fast-food restaurants, it addresses our food production system.
As early as 1936, George Washington Carver noted that produce grown with chemical fertilizer lacked both the flavor and nutritional value of produce fertilized by compost. The agricultural establishment ignored that warning.
Consumers care more about animal welfare than they did when industrial practices first became established. Industrial meat and poultry production confines animals in small spaces. Their excrement could be composted to make excellent fertilizer. Instead, it is stored in lagoons where, among other problems, it creates a vile smelling health hazard.
More recently, we have learned that industrial farming contributes about 20% of the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change.
Basic principles of the Slow Food movement
The Slow Food movement promotes three related principles: good, clean, and fair. Good means high quality, flavorful, and nutritious food. Clean means sustainable means of food production that do not harm the environment. It also means minimizing food waste. Fair means fair working conditions and adequate pay for the people who produce the food.
The idea of slow food is not strictly organic or vegetarian, but it encourages limiting meat consumption and disapproves of many of the chemicals industrial farming depends on.
Behind these principles, the Slow Food movement seeks to promote mindful eating and the joy of savoring good food. A leisurely meal time can be a wonderful social occasion, whether entertaining guests or having a family meal. Preparing food at home––from scratch––and cleaning up after the meal can likewise encourage bonding and personal closeness.
The Slow Food movement encourages local food. It advocates buying food grown on nearby farms, preferably family-owned farms. Some grocery stores tout their relationships with local farmers, but slow food shopping usually means visiting a farmers’ market.
Local food means foods that are in season. Foods out of season must travel long distances, which increases their carbon footprint. The movement also places a high value on local food cultures and traditions—and the stories behind them.
Some knocks against the Slow Food movement
Cooking from scratch ought to be less expensive than buying packaged convenience foods, but the Slow Food movement has so many restrictions on what counts as suitable that slow food restaurants cost much more than regular sit-down restaurants. Most people, in fact, can’t afford to eat in one.
Strictly speaking, slow food principles require specialty ingredients. These include heirloom varieties of produce instead of ordinary grocery-store offerings, grass-fed beef, free-range chickens and eggs, and so on. Therefore, strictly following slow-food principles for eating at home can be much more expensive than ordinary grocery shopping.
The kinds of stores and farmers’ markets that offer suitable food tend to be in affluent neighborhoods. Meanwhile, people who live in “food deserts” have enough trouble finding a reasonably nearby grocery store. They can’t afford to travel even farther to get to Whole Foods. And they can’t afford the prices there, anyway.
Slow food can also seem snobbish and elitist. Its advocates often lecture people on the virtues of slow food. Slow food snobs make a point of letting everyone know that they would never eat anything that fails to live up to their ideals of good, clean, and fair.
One slow food worker’s experience
As a graduate student in public policy, Suzanne Zuppello developed a commitment to nutritious food from farms that didn’t overuse antibiotics and hormones. So she worked in two farm-to-table restaurants in Brooklyn.
The owners valued such concepts as sustainable sourcing of food more than keeping costs down. Adherence to the Slow Food movement requires restaurants to purchase all food from farms no more than 200 miles away. What’s more, the farms must conform to the movement’s ideals of good, clean, and fair.
A place like Brooklyn has comparatively few farms within that radius and fewer that would meet all the other requirements of the movement. Their products cost more than those of other farms. Most people, therefore, find it prohibitively expensive to patronize those restaurants.
Zuppello spent her 15-hour work days giving minutes-long talks to patrons touting such ideals as heirloom produce and making food in small batches. But, she notes, it’s impossible for most of the world to eat that way. And not everyone who can afford to eat according to the principles of the Slow Food movement would want to. It excludes too many kinds of healthy and tasty foods. Why should a Midwesterner not eat seafood just because it isn’t local?
Finally, Zuppello recognized
Working for a restaurant with such strong and strict values, like those of the Slow Food movement, can be exhausting. You’re not only the priest, but the disciple, as well. I needed to live the values we impressed upon our guests, but occasionally, I wanted to eat food without suffocating rules as to where it came from or the speed with which it was prepared.
In other words, she craved McDonalds. For years, she would buy food there every few weeks and take it home hoping no one she knew would ever catch her. It took years before she could publicly confess that not only did she sometimes eat fast food, but she actually enjoyed it.
How to participate in slow food without its excesses
It helps to think of slow food more as an attitude than a set of requirements. Therefore, this list of tips starts with thinking about food and how to experience it. Then, it considers the process of shopping before, finally, considering cooking itself. Finally, I provide some “advanced” tips that will help you get deeper into the Slow Food movement if you want to.
1. Start small
The Slow Food movement started out as a protest against the fast pace of life as exemplified by restaurants like McDonalds. It has gradually enlarged its scope to additional issues. As I said earlier, it has acquired a reputation as a movement for appealing to the affluent and snobbish.
If you want to slow down your life and adopt some slow food principles, you don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, unless you want to formally join a local chapter of the movement, you don’t have to follow it in every detail.
As with everything else in living more sustainably, pick a few changes to your normal routine. When they become part of your normal routine, pick a few more changes. If you never adopt some slow food ideas, that’s fine.
2. Plan to enjoy your food
The fast-paced lifestyle of our modern society hardly leaves time to stop and enjoy anything. As the cliché goes, we need to take time to stop and smell the roses. Or, in the case of slow food, take time to notice the appearance, aroma, and the taste of your food.
You can take time to enjoy and savor a fast-food meal, for Pete’s sake. Many sit-down restaurants—and not only the most expensive—put a lot of thought and effort into the presentation of food on the plate. Maybe you haven’t been in the habit of noticing and appreciating all the appearance, aroma, flavor, and texture of your food. In that case, mindful eating is a good way to start your journey into slow food.
3. Make family dinner a priority
Nowadays, it’s rare to have a day when the whole family is home at meal time and someone doesn’t have to dash off to some activity afterward. That and having the television on and everyone having cell phones in easy reach make it hard to foster close family relationships.
Try to find at least one day a week when everyone agrees to sit down together to share a meal and plan to stay at the table for about an hour, with the television off and the phones all in another room. You can start to notice not only the sensory appeal of your food but also appreciate each other.
Agree among yourselves that meal time is not a time to gripe and complain about anything but rather a time for enjoyment of the food and each other.
4. Make meal preparation and cleaning up afterward chances for togetherness
There’s no reason why the same person has to prepare all the meals or than anyone has to prepare the meal all alone. Also, the person who prepares the meal shouldn’t have to clean up afterward. That, too, can be a time when a few people work together. The chores won’t take as long that way and won’t seem like burdens.
5. Eating alone can still be a slow food experience
If you live alone, eating at home can’t be a social occasion unless you have company. But you can still practice mindful shopping and eating. Cooking for one is less expensive, healthier, and better for the environment than subsisting on fast food. Your food probably tastes better, too.
And don’t be afraid of soups, casseroles, and other recipes that make four or more servings. Leftovers make quick and efficient meals. (I can’t quite say fast in this context, can I?) Have some empty jars that hold a single serving. If you get tired of something before you’ve eaten it all, freeze it and enjoy it a week or so later.
Some foods don’t freeze well. Potatoes, for example, become remarkably vile. Does that mean you can’t fix stew or vegetable soup? No. Just use a rutabaga or turnip instead of potatoes. They suffer much less in the freezer.
Family-size packages of chicken parts and other meats cost less than smaller packages. So cook everything at once and freeze most of it for other fast quick and efficient meals.
6. Stock your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer with healthy staples
Staples form the building blocks of whatever home-cooked meals you create. So you need to make sure that you have them on hand. These include
- breads and buns
- various kinds of macaroni and pasta, as well as the sauces that go with them.
- rice and/or other grains such as couscous and quinoa
- dried beans
- flour(s)
- baking soda and baking powder
- milk: fresh, evaporated, and powdered
- eggs
- cheeses
- frozen vegetables and fruits
- canned tomatoes, tomato products, and other fruits and vegetables
- canned tuna
- peanut butter and jellies
- salad dressings
- oils for cooking or salad dressings
- vinegars
- seasoning sauces, such as soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, Worcestershire sauce, mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard
- spices
- salt
- sugar
I haven’t mentioned fresh vegetables and fruits as staples because you’ll have to buy them every week. You’ll also want to plan meals in advance before you go shopping. You will buy most of your meat, poultry, and fish as a result of this planning, but you’ll probably also keep some kinds of them in your freezer.
With the right staples, you have ingredients on hand for a lot of impromptu meals for when you don’t have a planned menu or for some reason you can’t follow it.
7. Buy only the amount of meat, produce, and dairy products you’ll eat before they spoil
Food costs less per pound in larger packages than smaller ones, but the larger packages are not a good deal if you can’t use all the food before it goes bad.
Sales can also be a trap for the unwary. Maybe one week a store offers three-pound bags of apples as buy one, get one free. If most of one bag rots before you can use it, it’s not a good deal.
8. Prefer unpackaged or minimally packaged foods
You might notice that one brand of something comes in a plain cardboard box. Another brand of the same food has the box wrapped in a plastic film. Buying the second one means that you have two kinds of junk to discard instead of one once you have eaten the food.
The produce section of grocery stores seems to have the most egregious excess packaging. Individual potatoes come wrapped in plastic. Two green peppers come in a Styrofoam™ tray wrapped in plastic film. Why? If enough consumers refuse to buy them, stores will stop offering them.
The bulk food section, if any, is a great place to avoid packaging. The store will probably offer plastic bags or other plastic containers, but you don’t have to accept them. Prefer paper bags if the store has them. Take your own jars and have them weighed. Then fill them with whatever bulk foods you want to buy. The cashier will weigh your purchases and deduct the weight of the jars.
9. Redefine what it means to cook
I once heard of a woman who went to a grocery store after work, looked at half a dozen frozen entrees, and put them all back. Then she muttered, “I don’t feel like cooking tonight, anyway.”
For people who don’t cook, preparing a meal from scratch might seem like a huge chore. Some recipes are, after all. Making a stir fry, for example, requires chopping meats and vegetables, which takes a long time before any of them see the inside of a frying pan or wok.
That might be why the grocery stores have so many varieties of Hamburger Helper™ and other prepared convenience foods” in boxes. Those meals can be on the table within half an hour.
Probably not many people define “cooking” to include nuking a frozen entrée, but plenty of people define it include making meals from those boxes.
In fact, you can make all the same meals from scratch in about the same time. Therefore, moving to slow food means leaving most prepared “conveniences” behind.
If you cook from scratch, you control what seasonings you use and how much. And especially, you control how much salt you use. Plus, you use mostly the staples that you always have on hand.
You don’t have to learn a lot of different procedures, either. Once you learn to make a simple white sauce, you can modify it to make cheese sauce, curry sauce, chop suey sauce, Alfredo sauce, and various kinds of pan gravy. It only takes a few more simple procedures to make a lot of different soups.
Also, a slow cooker is your friend. Fill it with wholesome ingredients in the morning and turn it on. Go on about your day, and supper will be ready when suppertime rolls around with little more effort from you.
10. Look for simple recipes
You can find cookbooks for any kind of cuisine you like. I have said stir fry and other Asian foods can be a big production. So can French cooking. The cliché that good food takes hours to prepare describes any number of really complicated recipes. If you have the cooking skills and the time for any of that, go for it.
If you are easing into slow food and just learning to cook, though, you can find lots of cookbooks with simple recipes. Sometimes churches will compile recipes that their members contribute. Most of them will be simple enough.
The More with Less Cookbook is a great way to find healthy recipes that are not only easy to prepare but also show concern for taking care of the planet.
11. Cook in bulk
Slow food means, in part, cooking and eating at home. It doesn’t mean cooking every night. Leftovers are your friend. If you are a family of four, make eight-serving casseroles. Eat half of it right away and reheat the other half a few days later.
Also, you can double cook some ingredients. That is, if a recipe calls for cooking a cup of rice, plan on another recipe later in the week that uses rice. Cook two cups of rice for the first meal so you don’t need to cook any for the second.
12. Look for real conveniences
Products such as Hamburger Helper™ are not the only questionable convenience foods.
Stores offer precut cooked chicken, likely as not cut into larger than bite-size pieces. Instead, buy some chicken breasts and bake them at 350º for about an hour. Cut them into whatever size you want and freeze them. Chicken you cook and cut yourself becomes one of the staple items you always have on hand.
I consider boneless chicken breasts a real convenience. On the other hand, if you buy bone-in chicken, you can make your own broth, put it in serving-size containers, and keep it as a staple in the freezer.
Stores also offer hard-cooked eggs with the shells removed. And, of course, they have to package them in plastic. Hard cooked eggs spoil faster than raw eggs. So why not cook them yourself, pencil an X on the shell, and put it back in the carton?
On the other hand, you can make your own pasta and cook your own pasta sauce, but that can be a chore. Store-bought pasta and sauce are genuine conveniences.
So are frozen vegetables and fruits. They are picked and frozen at the height of their freshness. You don’t have to peel them, chop them, or otherwise take time and effort to prepare them for cooking. And you can get glass jars of minced garlic in the produce section.
Real conveniences save time and effort without adding a lot of unnecessary packaging, salt, sugar, preservatives, etc.
13. Take leftovers for lunch
Most jobs offer a limited amount of time to eat lunch, sometimes as little as half an hour. You certainly won’t have time to prepare anything, but you don’t have to settle for fast food restaurants or whatever you can get from a vending machine.
On the other hand, I took sandwiches for lunch every day from first grade through graduate school. Then I saw someone heating leftovers in a microwave. It was probably at least fifteen years before I willingly ate another sandwich!
If your workplace offers a break room with a microwave oven, take food you have made at home. Don’t forget to eat in mindfully and enjoy it.
14. Investigate local food resources
Here’s where the more “advanced” tips start. You’re beginning to look beyond ordinary grocery stores.
I suggest two kinds of resources you ought to be able to find in most communities: farmers’ markets and co-ops. You know that anything you buy at a farmers’ market comes from no more than a couple of hours away. It’s local food. The produce in a co-op is probably also local. The co-op will probably also have a more extensive bulk food section than anywhere else.
Either of these two resources probably carry heirloom varieties of produce, varieties that grocery stores probably don’t carry. They are less common and possibly available only in limited geographical areas. Eating them both provides unique flavors and promotes biodiversity.
Some communities offer community gardens or community composting. You may find nearby farm-to-table restaurants to patronize.
15. Plant a garden
There’s nothing fast or convenient about planting your own garden, except maybe being able to go to your back yard to pick your produce. But gardening encompasses all the principles of the Slow Food movement: good, clean, and fair.
If you don’t have a yard where you can plant a garden, you might be able to grow food in a community garden. You can at least grow your own herbs in window boxes if you want.
16. Support local food initiatives
Worldwide, the Slow Food movement has more than 1,500 local chapters called communities. If you are so inclined, you can join the nearest community—or maybe start one. Slow Food communities organize events and activities for both education of the public and advocating for access to good, clean, and fair food.
Suggestions for further reading:
Enjoying the Slow Food movement / Gemma Alexander, Earth911. May 1, 2023
Slow Food International website
Slow food’s elitism only fueled my craving for McDonald’s / Suzanne Zuppello, Eater. October 18, 2018
Food waste in America: 12 ways to help reduce it
The world wastes about 1.4 billion tons of food every year, but estimates of food waste can vary wildly. According to Feeding America, Americans waste about 59.5 billion tons of it every year, worth $408 billion. Meanwhile, one in six Americans suffer food insecurity, including a lot of school-age children. What can we do about food waste in America?
Continue reading →Sustainable products: is reusable always better than single use?
Marco Verch via Flickr
The question seems so simple. At least for those of us who want to be eco-friendly. But once we get beneath the surface, all environmental questions become more complicated. So what are truly sustainable products for the home?
Single-use plastic items are an environmental menace. It would seem that substituting reusable or biodegradable versions of the same product is better for the environment. Some recent research has called that thought into question.
A study of reusable vs single-use kitchenware
Researchers at the University of Michigan compared the lifetime environmental impact of single-use kitchenware products with their reusable counterparts. They examined the energy and water needed both to produce and use it in order to assess global warming potential.
The manufacturing a single-use product has much lower environmental impact that making a reusable counterpart. And much of the environmental impact of the reusable products comes from the water and energy it takes to wash them after use.
A reusable product may have to be used, say, two hundred times before it has no more impact than the same number of single-use products. After that break-even point, the reusable product becomes the more sustainable choice.
The study compared four reusable and two single-use straws, two reusable and three single-use sandwich storage options, three reusable and two single-use coffee cups, and one single use and three reusable forks. It assumed five uses per week.
It found that bamboo drinking straws, beeswax sandwich wrap, and silicone bags never break even. At least in the case of the bamboo straws and the beeswax wrap, they must be washed by hand. That requires water, detergent, and the energy needed to heat the water.
The other products tested eventually broke even, but with some caveats. Limit purchasing reusable products.
A metal straw, for example, passes the test in this study, but only if you commit yourself to using the same one. If you keep one at home, one at the office, and one in the car, the break-even time triples. One ceramic coffee mug easily beats a mound of disposable cups. A whole collection of them does not.
Accumulating too much stuff is not eco-friendly. Not even if you’re accumulating too many sustainable products.
The trouble with this study and others like it
I have earlier written about similar studies comparing single-use and reusable shopping bags. Estimates of how many times it’s necessary to reuse a cloth bag to break even vary widely. Some appear to be heavily influenced by the plastics industry.
Studies like these have one fatal flaw: They consider only the global warming potential of manufacturing and using the products. They do not consider the environmental impact of disposing of all that single-use plastic.
Environmental sustainability also requires looking at more than simply global warming potential. It also requires that products be made from renewable resources and that they do no direct harm to the environment.
Single-use plastic products fail on both counts.
The world has depleted all the petroleum that was easy to get to. Now, we have to drill on the ocean floor. Drilling inevitably leaks oil into the water even without such spectacular mishaps as the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Or, we have to resort to fracking to extract oil from otherwise depleted fields. And that, too, has potential for great environmental harm.
Proper disposal of single-use plastic products takes up valuable landfill space for hundreds of years. And chemicals from the plastic can get into the leachate. Improper disposal of them endangers wildlife. Plastic bags in streams can clog them and increase flooding risk.
Single-use plastic products are not sustainable products. Period.
What makes a product sustainable?
Sustainability has three pillars: environmental, economic, and social. Determining which products are sustainable, then, is a lot more complicated than considering the energy and water needed to make and use them.
Still, we shouldn’t assume every reusable product is the most sustainable choice. Another reusable option may be more sustainable.
So are reusable products always more sustainable than single-use products? Once we take issues of waste into account, yes, they are. But it’s not as simple a question as it appears at first.
The way we use sustainable products matters, too. If you like beeswax wrap, for example, maybe you can get away with a quick rinse instead of a sudsy wash. Or wash it only after you have accumulated enough other things that you have to wash by hand.
Sources:
The truth about reusable kitchen essentials / Angely Mercado, Popular Science. July 16, 2021
What makes a product sustainable? / Jenna Cyprus, Earth911. July 7, 2020
Leather, faux leathers, vegan leathers, and the environment
Genuine leather has some environmental issues. In addition, it raises ethical issues for some people. Decades ago, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals persuaded numerous luxury brands to remove fur from their offerings. That was before I ever heard the word “vegan,” but militant vegans continue the crusade and take aim at meat and leather.
I don’t know where these people find their definition of “ethical.” But making leather has some important environmental downsides. Two varieties of alternative leather exist, one made of some kind of plastic and the other made of more natural substances. What environmental advantages and disadvantages do they have compared to leather?
As with plastic shopping bags vs cotton, the questions are surprisingly complicated. Production of materials raises one set of environmental issues. Eventual disposal raises different ones. It’s not only a question of real leather vs faux leather (plastic leather). New plant-based leather substitutes, known as vegan leathers, appear to pose fewer risks, but they’re too new to have made much of a dent in the marketplace yet.
Environmental issues around real leather
Jason Lam via Flickr
To make leather, first slaughter an animal and skin it. For some people, that makes it completely unacceptable. But every part of the animal gets used for something. Nothing gets wasted.
Environmental issues have more to do with the life of the animal than with its death. It requires considerable farmland to grow their food. Factory farming uses lots of petrochemicals for fertilizers and pesticides. Much of our farmland was once forests. Although most of those were cleared long before modern industrial agriculture came along, critics of leather have raised deforestation as another issue.
The animals themselves defecate. Too often, the manure simply gets pushed into lagoons, where it stinks for miles around. They also breathe and fart. In the process, they release a lot of methane into the air—a potent greenhouse gas.
It appears that adoption of regenerative farming can go a long way toward solving these problems, but raising farm animals is only part of the problem with leather.
Turning animal skin into leather requires tanning. Most commonly, the tannery soaks the skins in a bath of chromium salts, which are highly toxic. Most developed countries have strict environmental standards for the process. Improperly managed tanneries contribute to water pollution and put their employees at risk of serious diseases.
Chrome tanning has only been around since the middle of the 19th century. It’s faster and cheaper than the vegetable tanning processes used for centuries before its invention. Vegetable tanning raises fewer environmental issues, but it doesn’t produce leather as soft or as consistent in color as chrome tanning.
Genuine leather is sturdier than the various artificial leathers. Therefore, it lasts much longer. Still, it wears out eventually. It’s biodegradable, sort of. With chrome-tanning, some chrome remains in the leather. There’s not enough left to make it hazardous to the end-user, but it complicates disposal.
Environmental issues around faux leather
Wikimedia Commons
I’m not saying “vegan” leather here, because some vegans make a distinction between older artificial leathers and some newer ones. The very first faux leather originated n 1920 at the U.S. Rubber plant in Naugatuck, Connecticut. It was a vinyl-coated fabric with the brand name Naugahyde. Others have followed, made either from polyvinyl chloride or polyurethane.
Plastics are made from oil. I will not take the space to describe the environmental impact of exploration for oil fields, extracting it from the ground, or transporting crude oil. Oil is not sustainable.
You may have polyvinyl chloride plumbing pipes in your house. Polyurethane can be just as rigid. So to become leather-like substances, it’s necessary to soften these plastics. The processes require using various toxic substances. Nonetheless, vegans will say with enthusiasm that making these faux leathers is environmentally friendlier than making genuine leather.
The problems come at the other end. These plastic substitutes are not as sturdy as real leather. They are much less expensive, which can make owners value them less. In other words, people are less likely to take good care of something that doesn’t seem valuable. And since it doesn’t last as long under the best of circumstances, faux leather products get discarded and replaced sooner than comparable leather products.
A leather jacket or handbag might last a lifetime. It might even become an heirloom. How many faux leather pieces would someone buy, wear out, throw out, and replace while the leather piece still retains its value?
And since they’re made of plastic, faux leathers raise some of the same environmental issues as discarding plastic bags or water bottles. They won’t end up as litter along the side of the road or make their way out to sea, but they’ll never biodegrade or cease to be plastic, either.
Newer vegan leathers
Desserto brand vegan leather from cactus fiber /
screen shot from YouTube
Not all vegans regard faux leather as vegan leather. In recent years, some manufacturers have introduced lab-grown leather alternatives made from plants. These include recycled coffee beans and plants, banana leaves, apple pulp waste, grape wastes from wine making, pineapple wastes, cactus, etc. By any definition, these are all vegan leathers. They have the great advantage of turning these residues from a waste disposal problem to raw materials for useful products.
That’s not all. It is possible to make vegan leather from mycelium, the root-like structures of mushrooms and other fungi. I have even read of leather substitutes made from rocks.
The technologies to make vegan leather are so new that it remains to be seen if any manufacturer can scale them up for mass production.
It also remains to be seen how sturdy they will be, how long they will last in the environment, and whether enough consumers will find them attractive. It will be difficult to get any of them to compete with plastic leathers.
Most of these vegan leathers still require combining plant fibers with polyurethane. None are yet completely biodegradable. Product developers are looking for ways to replace the plastic.
Don’t hold your breath looking for anything to be perfect. There will inevitably be some environmental impact of making, using, and disposing of vegan leather products.
On the other hand, they already rescue agricultural wastes from landfills and bodies of water. They don’t require the harsh chemicals needed either to tan real leather or make and soften plastics for faux leather. They deserve to succeed.
Sources:
Faux leather vs vegan leather / Sara Philips, Leafy Souls
Is vegan leather a more sustainable option? The answer is complicated / Leah Thomas, The Good Trade
The leather debate: is vegan leather a sustainable alternative to the real thing? / Ellie Pithers, Vogue. April 24, 2019
These companies are making vegan leather out of plants instead of plastic / Sophie Hirsh, GreenMatters. March 6, 2020
Inconvenient convenience food, or, Tuna doesn’t need help
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Our society has become addicted to convenience in general and convenience food in particular. But is it really as convenient as it seems? Let’s look at products such as Tuna Helper™, Hamburger Helper™, and Chicken Helper™. Open a can of tuna or cook some hamburger or chicken and everything else you need is in the box.
When you buy complete meal in a box, you are buying a lot of packaging, which you must discard. Meanwhile, our landfills are filling up. Incinerators inevitably contribute to air pollution. It’s not sustainable. The best way to help solve our solid waste problem is not to buy a bunch of stuff you’ll just throw out.
What’s more, you’re paying for all the people who make and transport the boxes and what goes in them, not to mention the packaging that gets the individual boxes from the factory to the warehouse to your store. And the salaries of all the executives and support staff that oversee the manufacturing process. Oh, and let’s not forget advertising and marketing.
Continue reading →Should you make homemade cleaners?
When you look at the cleaning aisle in a grocery store or big box, you’ll see all kinds of products that clean only one thing. Some of them have harmful ingredients. And nearly everything comes in plastic. Reasons enough to think of homemade cleaners.
Not everyone who has tried the DIY route has stuck with it, however. Some question how much value they get for the effort. For people who want green cleaning products and don’t want to make them at home, what options are available?
The rise of commercial cleaning products
All those commercial products started to become popular after the Second World War. Advertising made housewives distrust the simple products they had used for generations.
I vividly remember one commercial for Windex. It showed a woman mixing ammonia and water and wrinkling her nose at the stench. Then she had to carry the bucket to the windows, sloshing the ammonia water out of it with every step. With Windex, all she had to do was spray and wipe. Much easier and much more convenient.
The public knew or cared nothing about volatile organic compounds or toxic chemicals in cleaning products. No one thought at the time of the environmental implications of the plastic bottles or all those paper towels most people used, either. That commercial probably aired in the 1950s or 60s. It was certainly before the first Earth Day in 1970.
But you know how companies always tinker with their formulas. Years after the last time I saw that commercial (but I think still before Earth Day), I had to laugh when I saw a new Windex label. It proclaimed, “now with ammonia”!
Besides the plastic and the chemicals, so many of these products only do one thing. You need one detergent for laundry, another for washing dishes by hand, and another for washing them in the dishwasher.
Windex cleans windows and mirrors. You need something else for counters, something else for floors, etc. All those specialized cleaning products add up to a lot of clutter.
Ingredients for homemade cleaners
In recent decades, people have started to care more about environmental issues. They don’t want all the chemicals and plastic waste associated with the commercial products. More and more people want green cleaning products instead.
More and more people have started to investigate the more natural cleaning products my grandmothers used for years and then eagerly avoided. Some of them can do some cleaning just fine by themselves. Most often, though, it’s necessary to combine them.
- white, distilled vinegar
- baking soda (or washing soda)
- salt
- borax
- Castile soap
- hydrogen peroxide
- lemon juice
- olive oil (or vegetable oil)
- essential oils (to make the homemade cleaners smell good without dangerous VOCs)
Here are 25 recipes for homemade cleaners. I haven’t tried them.
What if you don’t want to do it yourself?
Some people who used to make their own homemade cleaners have stopped. For one thing, it takes too much time. For another, all the different tools need to mix the various ingredients can clutter a cabinet almost as much as the variety of commercial stuff.
Deciding not to make homemade cleaners doesn’t mean you have to go back to products with questionable ingredients. Some companies sell more natural, eco-friendly products.
I am familiar with two brands. If Seventh Generation makes something I need, that’s the brand I usually get.
I also admire Clorox. It’s signature product, chlorine bleach is unhealthy. Avoid using it indoors like the plague or it will pollute the air in your house. Other companies that make dangerous products have fought their critics and issued all kinds of misleading research to portray their products as safe. Think of the tobacco industry.
Clorox, on the other hand, decided to issue its own line of eco-friendly cleaning products, Green Works, which contain no bleach. They worked well enough for me, but they couldn’t compete. You can’t find Green Works in stores anymore. Clorox could have decided to get out of the green products business entirely. Instead, it decided to sell them online through Amazon.
Some warnings about green cleaning products
I need to give two warnings about commercial green cleaning products:
First, just because something is labeled “natural,” “green,” or “plant-based” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe. Beware of greenwashing.
Second, don’t expect fully sustainable products just yet.
Jeffrey Hollender founded Seventh Generation with the intention of embedding sustainability in a corporation that made and sold green cleaning products. After 23 years, the board of directors decided he was out of step with their vision for the company and fired him.
Was it because he pushed too hard for sustainability and failed to make enough profit? No. He got fired in part because he had “failed to create a truly sustainable brand.” Later, in an important speech, he admitted,
Seventh Generation was never a sustainable brand, not even close. I struggle to find any truly sustainable brand, though I continue to look. The problem is that we’ve confused less bad with good. The fact that we make chlorine free paper towels with 100% post consumer waste doesn’t make the product good- it’s just less bad….
That said, however, we as consumers have to be content with being less bad for the foreseeable future.
And we have to reject the absurd notion that, somehow, we can live on this planet and have no impact on it. We have been looking for less bad for at least the past fifty-five years. If anything will ever be fully sustainable, we’ll only get there incrementally.
Homemade cleaning products may be one way to get there. Products by companies pursuing sustainability may be another. Your choice.