Well hello again. Happy Not-So-New Year.
We took a little Food Party! break after holidays to regroup and clean out. I like the Dry January idea, but didn’t hear about it till month’s end. It’s always good to change up ones eating and drinking habits – makes us appreciate, and be more aware of, what we usually just stuff into our body. Weekly, I celebrate Dry Monday and Tuesday among others, but with a Hawaii trip coming in a few weeks, my new two-piece swimmer will look a whole lot better with a few drinks left behind if you know what I mean. So Dry February it is.
Let’s start off Food Party! 2019 with your annual New Year reminder to please remove the little stickers off your produce, before transferring peels, skins and other fruit and vegetable discards to the compost. Turns out those innocent-looking squares and circles continue to muck up municipal compost systems, and until one of your smarty-pants chick-a-dees invent a bio-compostable version for their 8th grade science project, we are all required to keep them out of the food waste system.
The soil microbioto thank you.
Also, I want to invite you to join the new year of Edible Education, a public lecture series and for-credit class, offered at UC Berkeley, bringing thought-leaders together for a semester of classes on food system awareness. The 2019 theme is Take Action - let's transform the food system to one that is healthy, sustainable and just. Quite a good showing of speakers are in cue, including course inspiration Michael Pollen, who returns to teach one evening. Classes can be watched online, and even in person, on campus.
Week One brought Stone Barn Farm Director Jack Algiere to town from New York, speaking on A Call for Food System's Transformation. Jack is a deep thinker who speaks poetically about the connection between humans, animals and the land. "The thing we are trying to sustain is a life worth living."
Last week, on the heels of a recently published report about the connections between obesity, nutrition, and Climate Change, Urvashi Rangan PhD, demystified the food system's complicated and often opaque regulatory structure with The Power of Transparency.
See you online. Here’s to a new year of fabulous Food Parties!
It is not fair to pass this task off on the public. Those little sticky things are hard to remove and they are on every single piece of fruit. How about a little responsibility on the sellers. Ban the stickers like plastic bags and straws. There should also be a ban on single use plastic. It is hard enough being a conscientious recycler when so many people and companies do not do anything but make a profit.
I am getting tired of doing the right thing.
You Go Member! I agree. Can you believe that we chose material that never biodegrades to create single use items? What idiot thought of that?
Agreed, those produce stickers are maddening! It seems perverse that they are so durable and non-compostable, given that they come attached to perishable foods, often consumed in days.
They can be a further problem on thin-skinned produce like tomatoes, pears, peaches. Once the fruit is fully ripe its skin becomes very soft and fragile, and then you can't remove the sticker without tearing the fruit skin. There must be a better way to get the info to the cash-register clerk!
The produce stickers are plasticized to withstand moisture; grocers frequently spray produce with water to extend the appearance of freshness.
An alternative is to buy as much produce as possible at your local farmers market. In addition to avoiding produce stickers you are also supporting local farmers.
With certain exceptions like tropical fruit, the local farmers markets have a wide variety of produce.