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Serious Grape: Back to the Barrels? An Old-Fashioned Proposal
On Fridays, Deb Harkness of Good Wine Under $20 drops by with Serious Grape. This week, she rethinks how we should make, package, and ship wine. Photograph from brewrat on Flickr Picture yourself walking into your favorite market. You've got your reusable grocery bags and a few wine bottles with screw caps. You do your shopping, you head to the wine section before checking out, and a nice person in the wine section takes your wine bottles. He or she either fills them with wine or cleans them and gives you replacements, filling the new bottles with wine and screwing on the cap. In a time when everyone is thinking about alternative packaging and the environment, why isn't anyone talking...France Now Taxing Plastic Cutlery
The country hopes to encourage its citizens to buy products that are more environmentally friendly....No Surprise Here: 'Glass Is Greener,' Says Glass Lobbyist
In response to Tyler "Dr. Vino" Colman's essay on boxed wine, Joseph J. Cattaneo says: Without a doubt, glass bottles are greener than wine boxes.Calculating a carbon footprint based solely on trucking capacity is myopic and fails to consider the carbon costs for extraction and manufacturing.Just envision the various elements that have to go into creating a wine box. It involves many more steps, materials and energy inputs than are required for making a glass bottle.As for recycling, most communities can handle glass, which is 100 percent recyclable. Good luck finding programs that handle wine boxes.The choice is clear: glass is greener. Setting aside the biases of the messenger (Cattaneo is from the Glass Packaging Institute), does this message ring...Eat Kangaroo, Save the Earth?
Photograph from uhuru1701 on Flickr According to Dr. George Wilson of the Australian Wildlife Services, we should switch from eating beef to kangaroos to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike cows and sheep, who produce harmful methane gas, kangaroos produce almost no methane gas. They also have cleaner poop and produce lean, free-range meat! But what does kangaroo tastes like? "It tastes excellent, not unlike venison—only a different flavour," says Dr. Wilson. If you've eaten kangaroo before, what do you think of it?...Soy Milk or Cow's Milk: Which Is More Eco-Friendly?
Whenever I admit to drinking soy milk, I immediately add a qualifier: "Only in coffee and cereal. Sometimes. I swear." I don't want to be pegged as a freaky full-time soy-milk drinker because at the core, I identify with "regular" milk. From cows. But every so often there's something about soy milk, especially vanilla, that adds a nice twist to an otherwise sludgy coffee. No offense to furry critters, but I don't drink soy milk for animal rights reasons or anything Mother Nature-related. I drink it because in certain contexts, it's really good. So when Slate reported this week that soy milk isn't necessarily better than cow's milk from an eco-perspective, I appreciated the insight but wasn't any less likely...China Bans Plastic Bags
In an effort to curb pollution and litter, the Chinese government has issued a ban on plastic bags, which went into effect June 1. Customers must now supply their own bags from home or pay a fee to get one, and shops found to be violating the ban will face a fine or risk having their goods confiscated. Given that China uses 37 million barrels of crude oil each year to manufacture plastic bags and produces up to three billion plastic bags a day, it's a smart eco-conscious move—and might even bolster China's reputation, which hasn't been doing too great with scandals every which way. China now joins the roster of countries who have gone plastic-free, like Ireland, Uganda and...Two Makes It a Trend: Guerrilla Gardening
May 29: The Los Angeles Times runs a story on guerrilla gardening. June 8: The New York Times Magazine runs one, too, but with videos....Guerilla Gardening
Think that ugly grass-covered road median could use a flower or two? Perhaps even stalks of corn? Transform ugly patches of neglected grass in public spaces to the beautiful and productive land it should be by becoming a guerilla gardener. The Los Angeles Times covers the prevalence of guerilla gardening in L.A. fronted by "green enthusiasts who plant without approval on land that's not theirs." While these gardens aren't always welcomed with open arms, some people recognize the benefit of "citizen gardeners helping cities turn wasted space into food and flowers" and encourage the activity. Long Beach's superintendent of grounds maintenance Ramon Arevalo wants to work with guerilla gardener Scott, who dedicates much of his time to cultivating a lush...Grease Thieves
Brewing illegal whiskey in a bathtub out back is so eighty years ago. These days, backyard stills in California are much more likely to be turning stolen restaurant grease into barrels of bootleg biofuel. Now that gas prices have gone up, a car that runs on used fryer oil sounds increasingly appealing. Unfortunately, this means that grease-haulers are losing thousands of dollars a year, prompting those in the business to look into locking their trash cans. But even locked barrels of grease are disappearing into the gas tanks of Californian cars. It's no wonder, considering that the price of soybean oil has tripled in the last three years. The liquid dripping off your French fries has never looked this good....Hot Topics: Technique of the Week | The Food Lab
Today's Specials
8 Delicious Chocolate Cakes and Pies for Valentine's Day
Some might say that chocolate on Valentine's Day is about as unoriginal as you can get. We all remember the first heart-shaped box of overly sweet chocolate bonbons from grade school Valentines. But chocolate gift-giving needn't be a cliché. This year, let's bake our sweethearts chocolate cakes and pies instead! Here are 8 delicious recipes perfect for celebrating your love (of chocolate.)
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