June was the first month of our “carbon diet.” I hate the word diet, but I’ll use it here the same way I use it about food. This is about changing the way we use carbon, lifelong. It starts by seeing where we are now, deciding where we’d like to be, and moving there incrementally.
This month was pretty darn good, overall. I installed a clock in the shower and limited myself to 5 minutes. I thought this would be a pretty big deal for someone who loves hot water as much as I do, but it was actually not a problem. Doing this cut our hot water electric usage in half – from 180 to 90 kwh. (The water heater is on its own meter, so we can tell exactly how much we spend just heating water.) In addition, our household electric was also down, probably due to the great weather and needing neither heat nor a/c.
We drove the second car – my brother’s truck – about 30 miles. A third of that was hauling wood for winter heat and the rest was a trip to town for a last-minute work meeting and dumpster diving for pallets and sheet mulching cardboard on the way home. He’s been using our car this month to commute to work, so together we’ve gotten that gas-guzzler off the road for about 700 miles and 55 gallons of gas. And now the bad news…
When you eat out, how do you choose what to order? Most people would probably say “I just order what I want,” but is it really that simple? After all, there are many things we want from our food: good taste, nutrition, something that will “stick to our ribs” or something “light,” something within our budget or even something that will leave enough leftovers for lunch tomorrow. And I’m guessing if you’re reading this blog, food ethics also come into play: where was the food grown, how was it raised, and were people, animals, plants, or the environment unduly harmed on the trip to my table.
Given the recent flurry of activity on my 
I call this salad “theoretically local” because in theory, nappa cabbage, mung bean sprouts, carrots, and scallions could all be grown and bought in SE Michigan. As late as November, I could have bought them at the market – and all of these things keep pretty well into this part of the winter, so if I’d had my act together, I could have made it from local ingredients last night. However, being far from a perfect locavore, I’m guessing all of these ingredients actually came from California. I’m not such a fanatic that I refuse to let trucked-in produce pass my lips.
So today’s idea is that of the add-in. Start with a favorite commercially-prepared food – say, one of those frozen skillet meals with pasta, sauce, and vegetables. I generally find that these have 2-3 times as much pasta as vegetable and far too much sauce. So, next time you heat one of these up, add up to a cup of frozen vegetables. Need some protein? Add half a can of rinsed beans.
