Put On a Frowny Face for Starbucks

Ok y'all - time to bust our your trombone to play a big Debbie Downer "Whaaah-Whaaaaaahhhhh".

I know knowledge is power, and we can't make better choices if we don't have accurate information. But don't you sometimes wish you didn't know? Wish for a do-over so you cold proceed in blissful ignorance? I've found out all kinds of routine-shaking, life-altering info on this quest for a healthier, greener, more responsible path. But THIS info goes into the category of "I kinda wish I didn't know."

100 Days of Real Food just posted this article about the nasty side of Starbucks.  And it is nasty, my friends.

I had already heard that the coffee you get from your smiley-faced Barista is NOT organic or fair trade, even though you can buy bags of organic fair trade coffee to make at home. And I know that Starbucks has been touting their "Trans Fat Free" stuff and "All Natural Ingredients" for a while now. I've even gawked in slack-jawed horror at the nutrition info for the stuff I occasionally noshed on while picking up my latte (no organic milk available BTW). But I really wasn't ready for the hard truth: that stuff is SCARY. Scary. Read the article and see for yourself. Spoiler alert: One of their Frappuccino ingredients requires a "substance known to cause cancer" label in California.

KNOWN.

To cause cancer.

Well this revelation couldn't have come at a better time for me, since our No Buy July scheme has succeeded  well enough from a "stuff" standpoint, but failed miserably from a budget point of view. We suspect that in our quests to avoid acquiring more stuff, our tendency to want to purchase things just shifted to categorize more things (ie: lattes and "healthy" snacks for me, other food/beverages for Les) into the NEED category. Our stuff purchases have been practically nil so far, but our overall budget hasn't shown much improvement because we've compensated for the magazines and cool new eco kitchen scrubbies (oh, the things we overbuy) by shopping for loads of food. And going out for burritos.

So Starbucks, now would be a good time to part ways. I can't afford you and you are killing me softly. And I never did bring Sock Bottle back to the counter. Whaaaah-Whaaaaaaaaahhhhh.

October Gray Update and The Scariest Challenge Yet

So here is a camera phone shot of my October gray hair:

Not the most flattering photo of me, and yes, I am sitting at my desk taking random snaps with my camera phone, but I've been wearing my hair like this A LOT lately (messy bun, teeny-bopper elastic head band), and I think you can really see the silvery stripes quite nicely. Anyway, I'm diggin the stripes. I like the messy bun so far. But I'm eager to have an actual hair style rather than just a thick mass of hair, so I'm excited that I finally made a hair cut appointment for Oct. 22. Yay.

But really, the gray is the least of my worries these days. Because today marks my official first day as a 5-day-a-week Vegan.

Yep. 5 days on, with 2 days of wiggle room.

I'm going "mostly vegan" for the month of October. The idea has been stirring around in my head for a while now, and it actually part of a larger effort to overhaul my sugar-fat-cheese-crap laden diet and see if I have more energy and sleep better than I currently do. And force me to get deliberate about my protein management. And it was one of those things where all of a sudden it seems like reinforcement for your inkling idea just keeps flying at you from the universe. The farm that sold us our Happy Eggs at the farmers market told us this weekend that they are no longer "doing eggs". And while generally my cheese consumption is over the top ridiculous, we are actually out of all our usual cheese products at the moment, so I'm just not going to buy any more. For a month.

And I'm reading "The Emperor of All Maladies"  about cancer. And last month I finished "In Defense of Food" which, while not promoting veg or vegan eating, still smacked me in the head with all kinds of plant-based encouragement. But what really pushed me over the edge was when I sat down at the laptop last night to distract myself from some other life stresses and Netflix suggested "Forks Over Knives" for me to watch. So I did. And right there, I decided that the vegan experiment was a go. It's not that all the facts and figures in the movie are unquestionably accurate (there are plenty of online critiques you can read about how the material was presented, and the facts on which they base their claims). It was just the last nudge I needed to look at my fridge, my waistline, my cupboards full of processed food, and my values about creation care and animal welfare and decide to try something different.

It's almost time for lunch, and I know just where I'm going to go. Wow Bao is an Asian food place with several delish vegan options. And I'm going to take some vegan cookbooks with me to lunch and make a shopping list.

So, wish me luck! I'm pretty excited, actually. I'm pretty bored with all of my current food ruts, so bring on the Veg!

Word Nerd! - What is a "Paraben", and why should I care?

PARABENS

I am a word nerd through and through. I want to know what words mean, where they came from, and how to use them. In undergrad, I took gleeful advantage of our free student membership to the OED Online and could spend hours trolling through the history and subtle nuances of a word's meaning. (Cut me a break, I was a Linguistics major).

But I confess that when it comes to health, science, technology, and general greeny-ness, I often throw words around without having even the slightest clue what they mean. Except maybe a dull sense that something is "bad" or "good". And so, to expand my own working knowledge of the buzz words and phrases relevant to the G3 experiment, I'm going to try to post a Word Nerd feature once a week.

This week, we're gonna start with PARABENS.
My general sense is that Parabens are BAD. But if you had asked me yesterday what they are and why we should chuck them all out of our shower caddies and cabinets, I would have said something like: "...umm... because they are BAD!".  And this confidence in their badness is largely derived from the fact that the expensive greeny shampoos often proudly proclaim that they are PARABEN FREE! So, I guess if they are really proud of that then that means that things without parabens are better, right?

Anyway. I did a little websurfing for us, and I found that while some studies say that parabens are not really that harmful, there are still some pretty sucky potential dangers, including possible links to cancer and messing with your hormones. The simplest explanation for all the fuss was found, of course, on Wikipedia, which explained that parabens can mimic estrogen. And, presumably (this is my editorializing), fake and/or extra estrogen seeping into your delicately balanced body is BAD!

Parabens are used as preservatives in products like shampoos, moisturizers, some pharmaceuticals, and even toothpaste. Some foods also use parabens as preservatives. Wikipedia calmly reminds us that some parabens occur naturally in foods like blueberries.

Seeking some non-wiki information, I turned to the good peeps over at Discovery Health, who have quite a bit of info about parabens and the controversy surrounding their relative danger and/or safety. They are much smarter than I am, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

If you'd like to read a more conspiracy-theorist-style take on the "Is my shampoo really giving me cancer??" debate, check out this article at the Huffington Post. While not specifically about parabens, it's chock full of good old fashioned scare-you-into-using-only-puppy-kisses-as-face-soap gloom and doom. I will probably come back to that article some other time after I've had a chance to read it critically and thoughtfully. Which I couldn't do today, because it is scary.

My Totally Unscientific Conclusion re: Parabens
There are paraben-free options out there that can work for my personal care needs, so why risk it? And parabens-in-food? I imagine that if I stop eating so much prepacked food, I will dramatically reduce my exposure to parabens-as-fungicide in the stuff that I eat. Because really, if it needs an anti-fungal ingredient, do I really want to be eating it?