Green Interior Design

Last JanTerm I took an entire class about green design. With my classmates I learned all about what it takes for a building to earn LEED certification and all the different ways people could plan ahead to reduce their impact on the environment. That is why I was so interested to read this article in the Times Herald about all the strides being made towards making home furnishings more environmentally friendly. The article talks about how many carpet scraps are simply discarded in landfills. To combat this issue, there are new floor coverings made of corn-based polymers that use 30% less energy to produce and release 60% fewer emissions during their production. It also mentions paints with few or no VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), which damage the atmosphere and can cause health problems for people exposed to them for long periods of time. Finally, the article looks at lighting. It mentions the fact that beginning on January 1, 2012 light bulbs will have to use 25% less energy. This means that traditional light bulbs will not meet the mark and will have to be replaced by compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and light emitting diodes (LEDs), which are both 75% more efficient. This law will help to increase efficiency and sustainability but will mean that light bulbs will be more expensive and must be recycled, both things that might be seen as inconvenient to consumers. Overall, these improvements in interior design show that America is headed in the right direction concerning the way that we build and furnish our homes.

Unfortunately this week was too hectic for me to get in any dedicated exercise time. Hopefully things will calm down a bit over the next few weeks and I can resume my walks and bike rides.

A Better Way to Eat Sweet Potatoes

For most of my life the only time I ate sweet potatoes was at Thanksgiving when they were covered in butter and brown sugar, which is not really the way most vegetables (or foods in general) should be eaten! But then I came to Winston-Salem and started to notice sweet potatoes in the Refectory and on menus in almost every restaurant I visited. One day I tried sweet potato fries and I don’t think I have missed the butter and brown sugar version a bit. I prefer my sweet potato fries baked even though they don’t get as crispy. I think they are so good, especially because they are super easy to make. As an added bonus, sweet potatoes are almost always available locally and cheaply in the supermarket and they are great at any time of the year. I don’t follow a specific recipe to make sweet potato fries, I just cut fresh sweet potatoes into strips, season them with salt and a drizzle of olive oil and put them in the oven for about thirty minutes at 425 degrees. They come out perfectly and taste great!

This week I went for part of a bike ride with the class and also went for a walk with my younger sister over the weekend.

Promoting Travel to Local Farms

One thing I really miss about not living at home is getting to read the newspaper (in my case, Raleigh’s News & Observer) every day. Now I try my best to read the Sunday paper whenever I am at home, like I did this weekend. I was really thrilled to see this article on the back page of the Life section about travelling to different farms in North Carolina. The article is about a book written by Diane Daniel entitled “Farm Fresh North Carolina”. The book chronicles Daniel’s travels around the state going to different farms, farmers markets, roadside stands and other farm-related places. The goal of her book is to encourage readers to make day trips to some of the destinations included and to increase awareness of all the wonderful farms North Carolina has to offer its citizens. Daniel’s book is divided by region and she offers several different itineraries for each area. The article in the paper included ideas for people in Guilford county that mostly centered around Greensboro. They included visiting the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market (the oldest of its kind in the state, established in 1874), the Edible Schoolyard at the Greensboro Children’s Museum (a great way to educate young children about agriculture), and a number of different restaurants (such as Lucky 32). The article, and Daniel’s book, helps to let people know that there are places out there where they can spend some time learning more about their food and having firsthand experiences with how that food is produced.

This week I went to my yoga class and walked for about an hour. I am writing this before our class outing on Wednesday, but I am planning on biking when we go out on the trail.

Food or Fuel?

This week I read an article from the New York Times called “Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears” (which you can read here) by Elisabeth Rosenthal. This article sheds light on the growing biofuel industry and the way it impacts available food crops. There is a rush to convert energy use to biofuel, and in order to produce this biofuel companies need raw materials like corn and sugar cane. Using these crops for fuel rather than food reduces the amount of food available.

The article gives the example of Thailand and the cassava that grows there. Thailand is a developing nation and its cassava supply is an important source of food for its citizens. Unfortunately, cassava is also an important source of biofuel. In 2009, however, 98% of the cassava that was exported from Thailand was sent to China to be made into biofuel, meaning that there was much less of it available to be sold as food to people who depend on it. This contributes to world hunger and increases issues people in these smaller nations already have with nutrition. Additionally, this shrinking food supply increases prices because there is less availability. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Index estimates that food prices rose 15% between October and January alone. This increase put food prices at their highest since the group started tracking them twenty years ago.

Overall, I found this article very interesting because I had not thought about how the increase of the use of biofuel would impact people in different ways. There must be decisions made about whether these crops should be used for food for people in developing nations or if they should be used for fuel. I think that this is an issue that will need to be studied much more before any decisions can be made, but I also feel that it is important for the people growing these crops to benefit from them rather than seeing them made into fuel that they will not be able to use.

This week I went for a walk in my neighborhood for about an hour. I have also been taking a yoga class at Salem, which I really enjoy, in order to fulfill my physical education requirement.

Local vs. Regional

After Dr. Ferrier came to talk to us this week she made me really start to think about where the food we eat comes from. I looked in my family’s refrigerator and noticed an interesting trend. The majority of our food was produced in places other than North Carolina. In fact, most of our food came from places that seemed impractical. We had apples from Whole Foods that were grown in Washington, carrots from Whole Foods grown in Texas and milk from Target that was produced in Minnesota. We also had salad dressing that was supposedly from Biltmore House, which is in Asheville. I assumed that this meant that it would be produced in that general area, but actually it is produced in West Virginia. The only products in our refrigerator that were from North Carolina were butter and heavy cream from Harris Teeter, which were produced in Matthews, NC near Charlotte. Even though these were produced the closest to our home, they still came from outside of the 100-mile “local food radius” that we talked about in class. I was really perturbed by this, because I had never realized how illogical it is to eat foods that are not local. I decided that I wanted to find out more about this phenomenon, so I went to our local Whole Foods.

A new Whole Foods just opened near my house. Whole Foods presents itself as an alternative to big, national grocery store chains and lulls customers into believing that by shopping there they are being more responsible consumers. I always felt like I was doing the right thing by shopping at Whole Foods, and I was really surprised when I looked in my refrigerator and realized that the organic produce I felt so good about buying was coming from places that are so far away. The apples I bought came from the other side of the country. It does not make any sense for apples being sold in North Carolina to be grown in Washington when there are apples that grow in our state. When I went into Whole Foods I noticed that a lot of the fresh produce they were selling had signs advertising it as “local”. I decided to see just how true this was.

Looking through the different fruits and vegetables I noticed items from across the United States (California, Florida, Idhao and Washington were all popular places) as well as various countries (Chile, Mexico, Bolivia and Argentina). Obviously, these items are far from local, but they also are not being promoted as such. I decided to shift my attention to local and regional products.

I asked an employee how these labels were defined, and he told me that “local” products come from “the entire state of North Carolina and a small slice of Virginia” while “regional” items can come from “South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and a small bit of Florida, anywhere within a seven hour drive”. While this is more local and regional than California or Washington they are still shipping these products a long distance, adding to consumers’ overall footprint. I looked at the “local” products and found items that came from places twenty to one hundred miles away. I think that if Whole Foods wants to market these products as local they need to reconfigure just what that means for them and rein in these distances. The entire state of North Carolina is not “local”. In my opinion, that would be “regional”, but I think that this further proves that these terms are very subjective and do not have a particularly solid definition. Overall, my trip to Whole Foods proved to me that these terms are very loosely defined and that it is important to look closely at just exactly what they mean.

This week I took my dog for a walk in a local park because the weather was so nice. I enjoyed getting out in the nice weather and having an entire weekend that finally felt like spring!

On a Positive Note

This week I read an article entitled “Food: Six Things to Feel Good About” from the New York Times (which you can read here). The author, Mark Bittman, has a weekly column where he discusses different issues relating to food, health and nutrition. Generally, his columns revolve around something that he is upset about or that is particularly disheartening. In this one, however, he takes the time to look at some of the bright spots in the food industry. He looks at things such as the newfound power people are taking in deciding what food they should eat and where it should come from and the Wal-Mart initiative to make their offerings more health-conscious. I enjoyed reading this article because it helped me to see that there are some bright spots to this issue. For instance, I did not know that there are currently 6,000 farmers in the U.S. or that that number is a 250% increase over the number of farmers there were in 1994. I think that is a pretty impressive statistic and shows that people are starting to reclaim responsibility for the food we eat. I also liked hearing about the work that is underway to make school lunches healthier. It is important for good nutrition to be taught to children at a young age and this is a great way to show them how to eat well for the rest of their lives. Overall, I thought that this article touched on a lot of topics that I did not know much about.

Our service project is going well, we have a pretty solid survey created and I think that we have a clear outlook on just where we want to go with it. I am excited to show everyone where we are and see where everyone else is with their projects! I cannot wait to actually send the survey out to people!

Unfortunately, the weather this week has not been very conducive to getting out and biking or walking, so I have not done anything yet. Things are supposed to look better this weekend, so hopefully it will be warm and sunny so I can get in some time outside!

Spring Break!

Last week’s class outing was great! I enjoyed walking with Cassie, and liked getting to see the trails behind Salem. I had never been back there before, but now I think that I would be much more likely to use the trails, either on foot or riding a bike. I have also been taking advantage of the beautiful weather this week (between 70° and 80° in Raleigh) to get out and walk a lot, especially around my neighborhood and at different local parks. Overall, my spring break has given me more freedom to get out during the day and be more active! It has also made me even more impatient for the summer and more warm weather!

I am impressed by how well my group’s service project is coming together! Now that we all have a really clear purpose and objective I think that we can start to survey our target group and get our product developed. I am looking forward to this second half of the semester to find out what Salem’s needs are and how we can serve them!

Project Ideas

This week, we got to discuss some of our ideas regarding our service projects with Matt Gymer from Novant Health. It was a good opportunity to flesh out some of the ideas we had in our minds. Matt seemed intrigued by Cassie’s idea to create an app of some sort that we could use at Salem and expand to other colleges. I think that this is a great idea and that it would be really helpful to have an app that would keep track of my unique wellness rather than a generic one that does not necessarily have information specific to me. I can’t wait to get started working to figure out just what will be on the app and how we can make it applicable to all students. I also enjoyed the opportunity to see how SurveyMonkey works. I have received many surveys from it but I have never personally used it. After seeing just what it entails, however, I think that it should be fairly easy. I want to find out what our results will be and how we can incorporate them into our project to make something that will really help the Salem community.

Since the weather was so nice on Saturday, I decided to walk my dog at a local park. I think we both really enjoyed it and I was sore the next day from all the hills!

Philadelphia: One of America's Most Bike Friendly Cities

I chose to research Philadelphia for my top fifty bicycle friendly cities project. My family visits Philadelphia regularly and, in my experience, it does not seem like the most bike friendly place so I wanted to see just what is going on there that makes it so bike friendly. After doing some research, however, I realized that there is quite a bit of work being done to make the city a haven for bikers.

The majority of this work is being done in conjunction with the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, a non-profit organization which was founded in 1972 with the aim of making bicycling more attractive to residents as well as providing more resources for people who choose to bike. On their website I was able to find a number of important things that would help a person begin biking. I was able to gain access to information regarding bike shops, bike trails, biking clubs, commuter routes, bike rentals, laws regarding bicycling and bicycle education classes. All of these things help to create a vibrant bicycling community.

I looked at some of the maps for different commuter routes and was astounded by how easy it would be to bike through Philadelphia. This group has made biking in the city a much less daunting task. I think that the coalition is the single greatest asset to the biking community in Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, I did not continue with my bike riding this week. I did, however, take a long walk on Saturday. I enjoyed being outside on such a beautiful, sunny day!