All the kids are home from their various trips. Yesterday was major grocery shopping time. What to do? Shop at Whole Foods, within biking distance but horribly expensive. Or Trader’s Joe, a lot easier on my pocketbook, but too far not to drive to.
What would you have done?
This, folks, are the kinds of negotiations that take place daily in my life as a Green Girl Wannabe. I will keep you guessing as to what happened . . .
C’mon don’t keep us guessing…
I would’ve biked to Whole Food’s but that’s me, c’mon what’d you do?
Tara
Individual trips don’t matter – it is what you do over time, so if there is a need, just do it. We have a general rule that shopping has to be part of some other trip (like commuting) and we try to bundle as many trips in the car as possible. Over the past few years we’ve dropped from 15000 car miles a year to a bit under 6000 doing this, car pooling, walking and biking. This is too much to be considered “green” in my book, but we work with what we have given our location. It also doesn’t consider what we buy, its production and transportation,etc.
We consider 10 miles one way the rough limit of an errand on a bike, but regularly do more.
One of my old students is forcing himself to try a more sustainable lifestyle. He is limiting himself to 100 gallons of gas for a year starting Sept 1 and 2500 total miles of flying. He has limits for electricity too, but I can’t recall. Somewhat arbitrary numbers, but it should be a fun experiment. His friends are betting for and against him. He lives about 30 miles from Chicago and has a 10 mile commute to work, but Ill. has Winters.
Congratulations Steve! I would tend to agree with you. It is more the general attitude that matters, rather than each isolated behaviors. Although they do matter . . .
A big hurdle, I realize as I read your comment is the physical inertia that’s afflicting our increasingly obese population. Hence the car, and the least physically demanding solutions. This is where the work your athlete friend Colleen is doing with kids so important.
I have a hard time imagining this scenario in the first place. Having to think about food costs. I think I’d try to cut in my big expenses (house, car, vacations, eating out) to have the convenience to not think about food prices (while eating vegetarian, that is). I’d do anything to not have to think about the cost of groceries. I’d feel really poor when I would.
I’d personally like to know what makes Whole Foods so expensive in comparison to Trader’s Joe. If they’re really wasteful at some place in their organization, that could be reason not to shop there.
I don’t know anything about the cost structure of super markets. Their buildings had to be built at some point in time. Each square meter gives lighting and heating costs. Almost perfect supply of fresh foods might mean less efficient transportation. Who knows what else… On the other hand, maybe Whole Foods is just paying its employees better.
Steve has the right idea. It’s the overall impact which matters, not individual things like that.
You have to balance things up, though. If “green” is the only consideration, the closer but more expensive store is the way to go. But if you’ve a tight financial situation, then the further but cheaper store is the way to go – until fuel hits $20/gallon, anyway š
Another thing is to consider the impact of the foods themselves. The classic thing of buying organic food… wrapped in plastic and shipped from 3,000 miles away, hmmm, not really worth bothering with. Or if I walk 1km and buy 1kg of beef I’m having more greenhouse impact than if I drive 50km and buy 1kg of organic apples directly from a farm (about 20kg emissions vs 15kg).
I do recommend to you my Carbon Account thingo, it lets you look at your overall impact in those terms. Then you don’t have to weigh up one against the other, you just look at how you’re going overall, and it won’t be all theoretical anymore, you’ll have numbers for it.
Or if you’re more interested in overall environmental impact you could use an Ecological Footprint calculator (I’ve a detailed one I downloaded some time ago from the state’s EPA), or something like the Riot 4 Austerity calculator here – there are lots of way to do it.
Basically, with money vs green, you have to decide what’s important to you, how you’re going to measure what’s important to you, and then weigh things up that way. If you were a young single mother on welfare I would expect you to drive to the cheaper store; if in a dual-income no kids professional couple professing to be “green”, I’d expect you to walk to the more expensive but more “green” shop.
There’s no universal answer, because it’s up to you to decide what’s important to you, and this has to match your situation.
Whole Foods is more expensive because it can be. They market to a segment (environmentally aware shoppers willing to pay a premium) rather than compete in the general grocery market. I personally believe they’re taking advantage of their customers.
I’d drive, get all the groceries you want, and then spend the time and personal energy you save to walk through Stanford with a picket sign asking why they have a prof who is on ExxonMobil’s board.
The next day I’d do the same thing except visit the office of a key politician.
Of course, these things are easy for me to suggest, even as I haven’t done them (yet) myself. They are also just matters of personal style and choice.
But, sometime in the not-too-distant future, I’m going to try to begin a dialogue with the Stanford Daily, I think. And The Daily Californian at Berkeley. But, all that is still a month or so off.
Back to your question: I’d walk, but that’s partly because I need the exercise.
Cheers.
Yesterday morning, I had to/wanted to participate in a face-to-face meeting about a 40 minute drive from home. (I drive an old Volvo, sometimes wear Birkenstocks and warmed up some organic brown rice with steamed veggies for dinner tonight, for whatever that’s worth.)
On the way home, I completed 3 grocery errands = Peet’s coffee, Lassen’s health food store & Trader Joe’s = which I would have performed over the next week or two anyhow. (Whole Foods got bypassed after Peet’s for the cost reasons already mentioned.) By taking this combo-approach I saved several gallons of gas and about an hour or two of time; and time’s often turning out to be quite a bit more valuable lately.
Sometimes I feel like we’re exploring a sort of Zen state of learning how to maximize minimal fossil-fuel (and other entropy-accelerating practices) for ideal-like results. It’s a real-serious-game to leave minimal footprints. It’s FUN and we’ve got an almost immeasurable amount of wisdom to learn/gain in the process.
Thanks for all your support.
Ciao for now,
paul
P. S. – Jeff, re: your question yesterday about including a photo, and please correct me if I’m mistaken yet I believe Edouard may have offered to help when you raised a similar question here several weeks or a few months ago. I hope that may help if Meryn & Marguerite don’t figure it out first. If/when any of y’all ever find out how, kindly let me know, too. Thanks.
Having a picture here is really easy:
Go to http://en.gravatar.com/ and register with the same email addresss as you use here to post comments. You can then upload an image. The image will show up here and on all other WordPress blogs which have avatars.
These are daily choices that are difficult for us all. At Changeworks (http://www.changeworks.org.uk) staff set up a ‘Dirty Footprint Club’ as a fun and supportive way of helping each other wrestle with these issues. Perhaps the most important point is to be sure to congratulate yourself on the things you do well and be forgiving when you don’t do as well as you hoped – and non-judgemental peer support can go a long way to making things easier.
Maybe readers could set something similar up in their workplace – it’d look good in corporate social responsibility reports!
I am surprised how much discussion and great thoughts came out this little vignette. It shows the value of always anchoring climate discussion into the reality of people’s daily lives. Abstract thinking can only go so far.
Simon, are your familiar with Carbon Rally?
Meryn, thanks for helping Jeff! Great resource for all of you who do not have yet a pic with your comments.
Meryn, I think we all have different spending sensitivities. I just refuse to pay twice as much for fresh fruit at Whole Foods, as I would at Trader’s Joe. Gas is another one that’s interesting. I know people who have millions, and yet go nuts when gas goes up 10 cents. Personally, I don’t care.
PS- I just gave away the answer to my post š
Steve, Paul, thanks for reminding us that good planning can go a long way towards saving on car trips, and hence emissions. For the small stuff, I bike to Whole Foods. Big stuff, I drive to several other, cheaper stores once a week.
By the way, I just visited several ‘mommy blogs’. Lots of conversations going on right now, on how to maximize budgets, planning food shopping, etc . . .
Jeff, you are a providing a nice segway to my answer to Kyle. The whole issue of how to account for one’s carbon footprint is complex. What to count, what not to count? How to count it? How often?
Last week, I wrote about carbon calculators and carbon offsets, and shared my reservations:
Kyle, I like your concept of a personal carbon account. In principle, I think that’s the way to go. My big question to you relates to implementation. Personally, I am not big on filling out spreadsheets.
Any idea how to make it effortless for people to keep track of their carbon account?
Thanks for your comment on Strollerderby, LaMarguerite. In my case, TJ’s is close enough to be biked to but I don’t have a trailer (baby is too young) for the kiddies; TJ’s is around the corner from my daughter’s school and the Y so I do it on dropoff or pickup, or on the way home from the Y. And I am too damn poor to shop at Whole Foods anyway–if I’m going to be spending that kind of $$ on groceries I’ll head to the farmer’s market and be able to chat with the folks that grew it.
Where do you live, Amy? Here in Palo Alto, farmer’s market is even more expensive than Whole Foods. I have stopped shopping there.
“My big question to you relates to implementation. Personally, I am not big on filling out spreadsheets.
“Any idea how to make it effortless for people to keep track of their carbon account?”
I had the thought of creating a physical currency. You’d print it out, cut it out – there’d be green ones for your income, and red ones for any spending beyond that. Each note would say what could be bought for that, for example,
ONE Carbon
good for purchase of
– 20 miles by train
– 1/10 gallon gasoline
– 14 kWh renewable electricity
– 0.7kWh coal electricity
– 3lbs fresh produce
– 4oz meat
and so on.
The thing is that what you’re really saying is, “how can I achieve results without any effort?”
“How can I save money without bothering to keep track of what I spend?”
“How can I become fitter without a workout plan?”
“How can I save gasoline without knowing how much I use?”
etc
Sorry, you can’t get results without effort.
Top link Marguerite – and thanks for the farming one too – it was the accents that killed me. But what were they doing that took $60 worth of gas per day?? They’ve only got 40 acres.
Kyle, when I go shopping, I don’t need to think about currency. I know exactly how much I am spending. The same kind of situation needs to happen with carbon spending. The one with the answer will get very rich.
The way I see it, it can take form in several ways:
1) through carbon labeling – not as easy as it seems as proven by experiments so far
2) a clever Web mobile application
3) with collaboration from credit cards
The whole thing would become irrelevant with carbon tax of course.
This begs a lot more thinking.
Yeah Paul, you are right, I offered help to Jeff a while ago to help in on gravatar and other stuff.
My offer is still going on Jeff. if you want to set up a blog, I’d be glad to provide you some advices and help…
I really love this blog where so many people write to go in the same direction, with the same questions… even if I am sometimes lost with all your great respective works….
Keep it up people, and many many thanks to all !
Ah, I see now. I thought you were asking how you could keep track of these things. Really you are asking how society as a whole can do these things, if helped by government or corporations.
You were asking not what you could do now, but what could be done at some indeterminate time in the future by someone else.
I don’t believe in waiting. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing now. If it’s not worth doing now, it’s not worth ever doing.
Kyle, what I am really exploring is possibility of making your concept a reality, through Web/mobile technology. I am interested in mass solutions NOW. I also believe you have to make it easy for people.
admittedly i go to both, i despise the hit or miss of trader joe’s and so i go – see what i hit and save, and then do the rest at whole foods – my trick is to shop with a plan and go twice a month – from that perspective it’s the best i can do – i just don’t have the energy to do more
the additional truth being if good food and ingredients are in my home i am apt to eat well and cook well, if i get lazy then i do lazy things
eating well, nurturing that cellular health
all part of wellness – green-ness too
I would personally bike to Whole Foods — they get my money over Trader Joe’s. I don’t buy meat, dairy or prepared foods and limit my consumption of packaged foods so it is really more cost effective for me to get fresher, more “local” produce not wrapped in plastic wrap and trays at Whole Foods.
The produce at Trader Joe’s is so limited and the packaging ooks me out.