olympics, and dish soap in glass bottles

This has been an interesting week. I have lots to report, both good and bad.

First, the good. I found dish soap in a glass bottle! Definitely the event that made my week, this stuff comes in what is basically a milk bottle. I haven't used it yet, but I couldn't help buying it I was so darn pleased to find it! Unfortunately it does still have a plastic lid (as do the milk bottles filled with milk), but I'm still looking forward to cracking it open and giving it a try.

Actually, I have been quite enjoying using the bar soap I bought when we first ran out of dish soap a few weeks ago. It works surprisingly well, and I have definitely decided that this notion that liquid soap is necessary for clean dishes is one that is true only in my head, and not at all in real life.

I still bought the glass bottle though!

Discovering this dish soap also made me appreciate, once again, this beautiful city that I live in. I bought it at Capers, as plastic-free-friendly a place as you're likely to find, as the place is filled with organic and natural goodness. It also made me realize how unlikely it is that I could find this particular dish soap back home, in the small town in the interior of BC where I grew up, as stores like Capers really do exist only in bigger centres, and then only in "green" bigger centres like Vancouver. Then again, as I just pointed out, finding dish soap in a glass bottle isn't really necessary to give up dish soap in plastic bottles.

Coming back to this beautiful city I live in, we are presently hosting the Olympics and while I had been a little bit dreading it, expecting the city would go crazy and not in a good way, it has turned out to be a pretty fantastic experience all around. It's hard to stay resistant to the Olympics when you're surrounded by this infectiously festive atmosphere. It's not just a party, it's a tangible excitement. There are literally people from all over the world who are here, just to see the games. It makes me feel very ungrateful for not having been 100% supportive from day 1, whatever my reasons might have been.

My plastic experiences with the games are essentially all instances of me not being sufficiently prepared. The community band that I play with has been hired to entertain people as they enter one of the venues. The gigs have been amazing, and this is where I really experienced that excitement and energy I was just talking about! We have to be there for several hours, and there's not really much in the way of food available. Day one I was pretty unprepared, hadn't brought enough to eat, and basically ended up eating plastic-wrapped cookies out of sheer 'I have to eat or I will be extremely grumpy and feel like crap' edness. Day two I brought more food, but I wanted to bring enough for everyone and I decided on hummous with veggies and pita. Like I said, not sufficiently prepared, so the hummous was purchased at the store in, you guessed it, a plastic container.

As a follow-up to that, I later asked at the deli at this store, a Safeway, if I could get a spinach dip put into my own container, but they wouldn't do it. "Health concerns," they said.

Now, I have several problems with this situation. First, I find I am a little resentful of these "Health Concerns." Who is Safeway to tell me what I can and cannot put into my body, or what I can or can not store my food in? I feel it implies an assumption about my lack of ability as a free-thinking, independent adult, to make a decision about what is safe for me.

Mind you, there are plenty of free-thinking, independent adults who make plenty of poor decisions about what is or is not safe to put into their bodies, or store their food in every day.

But shouldn't we be free to make our own choices about that?

Furthermore, this sort of systemic problem could be so easily fixed, it almost hurts me that we don't already do it, although I do understand why we don't, I think.

If we all brought our own containers all the time, it really wouldn't be difficult for Safeway to sanitize them before filling them for us. Particularly if we were really clever and had a standardized container that we could exchange for a cleaned and sanitized, refilled container. See, it wouldn't even have to be our own, it could be someone else's that they brought in to exchange! Of course, these containers would probably have to NOT be plastic, since I'm pretty sure that for the most part plastic doesn't stand up all that well to that kind of reuse.

And then there is the somewhat ridiculous notion that the containers that Safeway will put the spinach dip into are in some way cleaner than mine. Now, I admit, they might be. I may not have cleaned mine as thoroughly as it should have been (I am using bar soap these days, after all), and presumably the big pile of plastic containers that Safeway has stacked on its counter all came freshly sanitized from the big plastic factory, wrapped in a sanitized plastic bag until they got placed in a stack on that sanitized counter by perfectly clean and sanitary Safeway-employee hands.

Does anyone else see anything wrong with that scenario? If any of you have ever worked in a grocery store, I am sure you will recall, as I do, how grotesquely unclean they actually are. Now, I will admit that it is probably still more likely that my home-washed plastic container has some harmful bacteria in it than that disposable Safeway container, but it's a chance I'm willing to take, and a chance I feel I should be free to make. Particularly since, while I'm inclined to believe in the sanitariness of the container, I'm not at ALL inclined to believe in the "safety" of that spinach dip. (I've seen behind that deli counter, folks, and it is not pretty).

This leads me to my final point, and one which may deserve a post all to itself.

I'm not at all comfortable with the obsession with safety and, indeed, "security" that is so prevalent in our culture, including our food culture.

I say this knowing it's a bit of a hard case to argue. After all, who wants to get sick from what they eat? And of course we all want to be able to trust our food sources. The less we prepare things in our own kitchens, the more we are forced to put our faith in others to ensure the quality of our food. But when ensuring food "safety" means using chemicals and materials that are harmful not only to ourselves, but also to our earth, I tend to think that maybe it's gone a bit too far, and grossly in the wrong direction.

Ok, I think I've rambled enough for one posting. I have more to say on this topic, and more to report on this week, but it will have to come later!

yogurt and metronomes

Hi all. I've been told I need to keep blogging. This despite feeling like I don't have much to say.

To follow up on the last post, yogurt-making attempt #4 was met with success! I haven't tried a fifth time yet, although I will need to do so soon because I am nearly out of yogurt. I think my biggest problem was incubating methods. For the successful attempt I used a cooler and I put a magic bag in the cooler with the yogurt both at the beginning and halfway though, after re-heating. I have also become much more confident in the heating and cooling process of the milk, which is speeding everything up overall. The first few times I did it I was so cautious it was taking me ages to bring the milk up to just below boiling and then to cool it down, and I was spending the entire time staring anxiously at the thermometer, checking if it was ready. But now I've got a much surer sense of when it's ready, so I just blast the heat on it, and then cool it in an ice bath. This makes the process is in general much less involved. Which only means that I am much more likely to actually go through with from time to time. Which means less plastic! Yay!

In other news, I had a terrible lapse of plastic-free consciousness the other day. I bought a metronome at a music store. Now, not only was the metronome made of plastic, but it was also (of course) WRAPPED in plastic. It honestly didn't even occur to me until I was out the store and halfway home, I was just so lost in all the beautiful instruments in the store, and focused on this idea of getting a metronome. Completely did not think it through.

I'm not sure I have the strength of conviction to keep this up. Some things have turned out to be fairly easy, like not buying food in plastic (except for cheese, I'm still buying cheese for now. But I think I may have found a good cheese supply that I will be able to get without plastic! Must go to the next farmer's market in two weeks to find out), but honestly, in order to find a metronome without plastic I'm pretty certain I would have had to really search... and it definitely wouldn't have done all the cool stuff this one did! Of course, I could possibly have found one second hand. But I didn't. Oh well.

I think that's about it for updates. I went to a conference this week and was worried I would have to be careful to avoid plastic there, but everything was already pretty plastic-free. They didn't use any disposable dishes or cutlery, and the only plastic that escaped my notice was the hanging name tag they gave me.