Making Your Own Baby Food Can Be Dangerous

As you saw last week in the video of A eating her first food we are starting to feed our daughter. The next step is carrots and sweet potatoes ground into the all too familiar baby food mush.

My wife and I always said that when A started to eat solids we would make our own baby food so we were a bit surprised when we saw the pamphlet our doctor gave us. On the back it had a statement that said it was not safe to prepare some baby foods at home, such as beets, turnips, carrots and collard greens, because they can cause an unusual form of anemia (Methemoglobinemia).

When I asked why this was I learned that it had to do to with a chemical found in the soil of food grown using conventional fertilizers.

So if you're telling me that it is unsafe to eat these as a baby then why am I eating these foods? Baby food manufacturers monitor this but I can buy a carrot off the shelf that was grown with conventional fertilizer and has these chemicals in it.

What else am I putting into my body that I shouldn't be or wouldn't want to if I knew about it?

It is finding these sort of things out that really makes me want to pack up, move to the country and live off the land so I can control what I am consuming.  But would that be enough?  I would still need to use water and air that is polluted from conventional farming and modern life.

If you are making your own baby food you should read more about it and everyone should take a second to consider what we are doing to this planet and ourselves.      

The Little Things We Take For Granted

We take things for granted all of the time. It is usually not until we have something taken away from us that we realize we have been taking something for granted.  

I was reminded of this recently when a water main broke and there was no clean drinking water in the greater Boston area. The water company started pumping water from the emergency back up system that was not fit to drink. The store across the street from us sold out of water almost immediately and we started to boil water so we could wash bottle parts for the baby.

All of a sudden cooking, cleaning, bathing and drinking had become a real pain. Still we were able get enough bottled water for the baby's formula, and we were able to boil water to cook and do dishes with.

It made me think of the millions of people around the world that have no access to clean drinking water. It reminded me of the millions of babies that die every year because of dehydration or water borne illnesses.

What can we do to help them?

For one thing we can stop wasting water at home.  
We should turn the tap off while brushing our teeth and get low flow shower heads. We should get energy efficient dish washers and washing machines that are also water efficient. We should fix leaky faucets and running toilets.

These are all cheap solutions that are easy to implement.  New efficiet washing machines and dishwashers will actually save you money.

And then there are the things we can do that will take a little bit more money to implement.   We should stop flushing millions of gallons of drinking water down the toilet ever year.  But installing gray water systems that use rain water or used sink water to flush your toilets will be more expensive to install. In some towns they gauge your water bill by home much water exits your home and not how much water you are taking from the pipe so the town will not be able to bill you properly if you start flushing rain water down the drains.

But problens like these can and must be solved. We are closer to a water crisis here in the US than most people realize. We are already upsetting ecosystems by using water from rivers and lakes from one region for drinking water in another. The Colorodo river is maxed out currently and the demand on it to produce more drinking water is growing.

If we can make these small changes at home maybe some how we will tax the earth a little less and it will have an effect on those people who are dying for a drink, literally.  Maybe that is wishful thinking but it is all I have at this point. Maybe some out there knows of something I can to do make a larger impact on them in a positive way. If so, please let me know so I can share it with everyone.     

Earth Day: Reducing Plastic Bottle Use

I am always looking for ways to reduce my carbon footprint and with earth day coming up I thought it would be a good time to try to reduce my consumption of drinks that come in single serve glass or plastic bottles. This will not only be good for the earth's health it will be good for mine and my wallet's.
Plastic bottles take a lot of energy and water to make. They don't break down but they do break into smaller pieces, very slowly and only to the point where they are ingested by smaller animals that are then in turn eaten by larger animals and then by us. The small plastic pieces collect and are in a giant floating pile in the ocean. There is also energy involved in shipping the raw materials to the plant that make the bottles, shipping the bottles to the bottling plant and finally shipping the finished product to a distribution center and then finally the store. If you drive to the store you can add that to the tally, as well as energy to bring the empty bottle to the land fill or recycling center. Recycling keeps the circuit closed but also takes some energy.
At work I will try to drink only water from now on and drink it from the water filter in a glass or reusable Nalgene or Sigg bottle. While out and about I will use my water bottle exclusively.
Cutting out sodas and iced tea will reduce my intake of sugars as well. All those empty calories can be replaced by fruit or other healthy snacks. Cutting one 16 oz soda a day out of you diet can account for 14 pounds lost in a year and if you drink one a day, even at a dollar, you will save around $350. If you drink two a day at a more realistic $1.50 you will save around $1,000.
This isn't the first time I have tried to cut these drinks out of my diet and bottles out of my footprint. I have cut back and I have stopped buying bottled water completely. My problem is the sugar. I am hooked. The caffeine is nice as well. But I don't need it. Not on a regular basis anyway. So today I start. I just finished a tea and I hope it will be my last.
I will think of an occasional Arnold Palmer as a treat, to be enjoyed once in a while, at a restaurant and out of a glass.
What will you, or have you done to reduce your footprint? Leave a comment and let me know.

Consume Less

There have been debates about what is better for the environment on a number of different topics.  Paper bags or plastic, washing dishes by hand or in the dishwasher, cloth napkins or paper napkins, traditional incandescent light bulbs vs. compact florescent light-bulbs (cfls)? Among a host of others.  Even the benefits of renewable energy sources such as wind and tidal have been weighed against the damage they may do to animals or other delicate ecosystems.

There are assumptions I make when I do something I feel is good for the environment that I cannot prove or disprove with the amount and quality of data that I have available to me.  The more research I do about the issues at hand the more confused I become.  So I say we stop debating about what is better for the environment and start doing the one thing that is definitely better for the environment:

Consume less.

While other methods of reducing our carbon foot print may have side effects that are just as bad, and in some cases worse than where we started, reducing consumption has no negative side effects on the environment.

Keep yours out for future post about how I have and will reduce my consumption.

A Special Package

The idea for this post comes mostly from my passion about saving this planet. It is scary to me that there are so many people that don't believe that climate change is man-made or that it doesn't even exist. The scariest thing is that the numbers of those people are growing. I am not here to debate about that.  I feel that regardless of which side of the debate you sit on you can do something to treat the planet better. We are growing in numbers in a way that cannot be sustained by this planet and the resources on it. Using and wasting less can only help the planet. 

The inspirational push I received to finally start posting to this blog, which is something I have been wanted to do for awhile came from an unexpected source. It was shortly after my daughter was born and the gifts we were receiving were flowing in at a steady rate. I pick one up from the mailroom curious about it's plain brown wrapper and looked at the return address. It was from my grandmother.

This package was special.

While I was unwrapping it I couldn't help but notice that the outer wrapping, the envelope, was a reused brown paper bag. The box inside was a gift box that you would typically put inside another box before wrapping. This reused brown bag and flimsy box made it from Florida to Boston with minimal damage to the box and no damage to the gift. It was very different from the other gifts we were receiving. Most of them in boxes wrapped in wrapping paper with ribbons and bows, all inside another box for mailing. The items that came directly from a store had boxes that were way to large for the gift and a bunch of packing materials as well as catalogs and junk mail. We were recyling more than our share of waste the weeks after A's birth.

I was happy about the way the gift arrived but was also pleasantly surprised with the items inside. For the most part they were typical baby gifts. A cute pair of tiny pants and a shirt. A few onsies. But there was also a small baby book. The kind that babies "read" with puffy cloth pages and it was four pages long. The pages were filled with colorful drawings of cute animals in different settings. The first page read "let's save the trees". The second read "let's clean the water". The final page simple said "Let's care for our home". The animals were dancing on top of the globe. Simple. To the point. Something a baby can understand. Save our trees, clean our water, and care for our planet.

But how? 

That is the problem I am struggling with. Everything you hear is tainted with politics, conflicting information and opinions. The best solutions we have to our energy and waste problems also have downsides. Nuclear energy has toxic waste that cannot be safely disposed off. Wind power is unsightly and dangerous to migrating birds and other animals. Even the simple light bulb has me wondering: Lower energy use vs toxic mercury?  There are no easy answers.

I will post my thoughts about what I think is the best way to save our trees, clean our water and care for our planet. My goal would be to leave no trace. Leave this planet with what I came with. This is not possible.  But I refuse to turn a blind eye and continue to live an unsustainable life. I would like for there to be resourses left for my daughter when she is my age.