Beauty products you can eat

I just got my hair cut, and yes it's super short again. I let it grow for three months, hoping to retain some length, but no one does what I want them to. This lady cut it and it looked cute and still didn't look too short. Then she shampooed it and brought me back and let it dry. She put product in it, I liked it! Then she showed me the back but the whole time I was looking in the mirror she was chopping away at the front! Then she used the blow dryer to get the pieces off. It was starting to look short but I thought she was done. Nope, snipping away at the sides at the speed of light, she asked me what I thought of the back. More product. More snipping! By the time I was done, it was only slightly less short than the last time. I guess I won't bother waiting three months next time.

Anyway, she washed my hair with shampoo and used styling product from this new line of beauty products, John Masters Organics. The packaging is biodegradable yet stylish and the products have enticing names and delicious smells. Everything is edible and organic and produced in an environmentally friendly and human friendly way. I love the way they made my hair look and feel and they have absolutely no chemicals! For salon quality products, they're really reasonably priced and much better than Aveda, whose products I never liked and were never all natural. He makes pet products too, endorsed by PETA if you can believe it. Check out his mission statement and video.


See, if you eat chemicals, your body has an army of protections working to save you before they reaches your bloodstream. When you put products on your skin and lips and hair, the chemicals in those products soak right into your bloodstream. It's more dangerous to put chemicals ON your body than it is to put them IN your body yet the FDA has much more lenient restrictions chemicals in beauty products than they do for our food. My friend blogged about this and mentioned a company called Terressentials, which I haven't tried. Either way, not only it is much better for us to stop polluting our bodies with chemicals, when you shower those chemicals go down the drain and into our water supply passing them on for someone else to drink or shower with.

This makes sense

Twenty flavors of Coffee Mate and only two presidential candidates?


I consistently find American's "choices" to be bizarrely inappropriate. On the one hand, some choices are severely limited even to the point of prohibiting things that should be ours to choose. On the other, it takes an hour to buy anything from the store because we are overwhelmed by choice. I didn't take a photo but there were also about fifteen flavors of rice cakes from the same brand. The only thing I could say was, "If it was real food it wouldn't need a flavor, it would just taste like food."

I have sprouts!

I just planted my garden on Tuesday and I already have sprouts! Nothing is more exciting than growing plants, especially from seed. Putting something in the ground that grows to make food? This is the stuff that civilizations are built on. Literally. I finally finished reading the 400+ page book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It's really dense, that's why it took me six months to read it. He's an academic and a scientist so he goes to great lengths to explain and provide evidence to support his theories but most of it can be summarized in a few sentences.


Basically he asks the question “Why do some civilizations grow to conquer other civilizations or groups of people and not the other way around?” The answer, he says is in dense populations. Dense populations require food production. Out of the 200,000 plant species in the world, a mere dozen, he says, account for 80% of our current crops and not a single major food plant has been domesticated in thousands of years. That some groups of people happened to live where these plants grew gave them an enormous leg up. Same story for domesticable animals which were much more prevalent in Eurasia. Out of those domesticated herds living in close proximity with people came most of the communicable diseases that became accidental weapons of mass destruction for civilizations conquered by Europeans. Actual weapons came from innovation and technology, a result of competition for land that again is borne of dense populations requiring land for food growing. In the sparsely populated Americas, traversed by hunter-gatherers, there was little need for technology.

Diamond describes food production as an autocatalytic process meaning that it "catalyzes into a positive feedback cycle" that goes faster and faster. I've heard that once you plant vegetable plants that they produce more year, especially if you continue to cultivate them. So last Friday, I went to the nursery and bought vegetable seeds, herbs and soil - peat moss, manure and planting mix. First, I blocked off my area (about 10x4') with cinder blocks to hold the soil (I ran out and used some stiff cardboard for the rest). Then I laid cardboard boxes over the soil (after removing the packing tape) and soaked them. I layered and layered the soil but had only covered about a half of an inch so I went back to the nursery. In the end, I built up the garden about two or three inches, and then watered it again. I tracked the sun to make sure I was getting at least five hours of sunlight before I planted.


I started to get a little freaked out. I haven't used a book and I'm pretty much making this up as I go. What if birds come and eat all my seeds? Or some little animals come and chew off the plants as they sprout? What if I can't find a job and have to move out before any veggies grow? A sign at the nursery about checking the PH balance of my soil made it sound like my seeds might be sizzling in acid in the ground right now instead of germinating. I also saw a lot of spiders in the garden and an army of ants, but a little Internet research informed me that both are very garden friendly.

I took a deep breath and planted my seeds. I put tomatoes with the parsley, basil and mint plants, a row of green onions and marigolds for bug protection for the entire garden, lettuces with radishes here and there to protect from critters, an assorted mix of summer squash and bordered the whole thing with cosmos, which are pretty and also keep bugs away. In the cinder blocks, I planted arugula, which apparently does well in containers. In the areas outside the garden, I planted a hummingbird flower mix and sweetpeas to climb the fence. The seed packages say they it 45-90 days to produce vegetables but I should have sprouts for everything by 5-15 days. I spent $140 total and if it provides four weeks' worth of vegetables, it will have paid for itself but I anticipate that it will produce much more than that and enough to give away to friends. I still have most of the seeds I bought so I can keep planting as long as the weather is nice.


An article in the New York Times said seed and food plant sales are up all over the country and not since the 1970's when inflation was high, have nurseries seen this kind of interest in fruit and vegetable gardening. A desire to eat better quality food and rising food prices are cited as responsible for the surge. The latest salmonella scare in tomatoes, they think caused by contamination upstream from another farm, makes me think that my city garden is potentially safer than an organic farm in a more rural area. And if food production really is the catalyst for civilization, then who ever controls food production will have power over us all. How cool would it be if we asserted our independence and expressed our liberty by starting a food growing revolution?

Lasagna garden

I've decided to plant a garden. I've lived in this apartment almost nine months, I'm not sure why it's taken me so long. My neighbor said the soil in our small patch of yard was shit but then I remembered it doesn't matter. Last year, I helped a friend of mine create a lasagna garden in her backyard. The idea is simple: You put layers of wet newspaper on top of any ground surface - grass, weeds, rocks, it doesn't matter - and layer peat moss and any organic material you can find like compost, manure, clippings, etc. Then you plant your garden! My mom always says that vegetables are the easiest plants to grow. People always complaining that they kill plants in their house don't have to worry. As long as you have light and water, veggies will grow. Fruits too!


The best thing about this method, other than the obvious ease of it, is that you leave the soil undisturbed. That means earthworms and other bugs that till the soil will find their way into your garden and keep it growing. I remember reading an article about a guy who turns lawns into food gardens. In the article, his company was rototilling this front yard and broke their machine on the grass roots and rocks. It was totally silly, renting that expensive machine and going through all that work, and killing all the sweet little earthworms! All you have to do is layer on top. The lack of light kills grass roots and anything else much easier than any chemicals or forceful extraction, the newspaper eventually gets eaten by worms and dissolves into the earth.

I've been mulling over this idea for some time. I can't see the garden from my apartment so it's easy to forget that there is a patch of land down there. Then yesterday, walking around, I saw that someone in San Francisco was growing vegetables in pots on the sidewalk! It really is that easy and I have no excuses. Here's how to do it.


Without getting into this too much, I believe that water and food are going to become serious battle grounds as people start to realize that mass production of food has driven it into very unhealthy directions. Big agribusiness is not likely to give up huge profits to make our food healthier and treat the earth better but we DO have control over our food - we can all plant vegetables. Power to the people!

Wired sells out to Monsanto

I picked up my new Wired magazine and immediately read their cover story, an inflammatory ‘environmentalists are full of shit’ piece. It really pissed me off. They end their series of anti-arguments based on facts focused around cutting carbon dioxide, with a “take it with a grain of salt" letter from the editor of Worldchanging.com. He basically says the article is a short-lens focus that could get us into even more trouble. Isn’t the damage already done with a cover like “Keep your SUV, forget organics and screw the spotted owl?” I suppose it would be okay if they were using it to get people reading but then dole out some actual wisdom inside, but they don’t.

Here are my reactions to the articles:

1) A/C is OK. Here they say it takes more energy to heat a house in a cold climate than it does to cool a house in a hot climate. Good point, but really do we want everyone to move to the Southwest? The area is already burgeoning and just beginning a mega-drought that could last up to 150 years, where are they going to get enough water to live? What about clamping down on cheap housing construction and passing ordinances requiring better insulation. We’ll all have to pay more per square foot but maybe it will have the doubly beneficial effect of making our houses use space more efficiently.

2) Live in cities. Yes, for the most part, urbanization is cool and better for the environment but they make an argument that exurbs are the same as living in a truly rural area surrounded by trees. People don’t live in exurbs to be closer to nature, they sprouted up because people (like in Los Angeles) couldn’t afford to buy houses in the city so developers bought cheap land 50 miles out of town in the desert and built affordable housing there. The article points a finger at lawnmowers (a product of the suburb/exurb) and I totally agree that lawnmowers are a waste of energy. But why not encourage people with land to plant trees and grow a garden to feed themselves instead of trying to get them to move to a city? Not everyone wants to live in an apartment.

3) Organics are not the answer. This one really burns me up. They say we should screw organic because it takes 25 organic cows compared to 23 industrial cows for the same milk and they put out 16 percent more greenhouse emissions. Are they f’ing kidding me? We should drink hormone-laced pus-filled milk from sick suffering cows for that differential? The only smart thing they say in this article, albeit stuffed in the middle, is that if you really want to do something for the environment, stop eating meat altogether. It’s true that we can’t go organic at our current rate of consumption but we (in industrialized countries) eat and waste too much food anyway. Instead, I think we should go organic 100% and patronize restaurants that serve reasonable proportions of quality food.

4) Farm the forests. The only good thing in this section is about culling dead wood out of the forests, it does prevent fires and with the climate heating up, we can’t afford the kind of fires it’s going to bring. But the rest of it, about becoming full time forest farmers and cutting down old growth trees is total bullshit.

5) China is the solution, not the problem. I agree! (See next post) China has become the number one producer of alternative energy solutions for export and use in their own country. Due to decades of rapid and untethered production and growth, their feet are now much closer to the proverbial fire than ours; they will likely find and implement environmental solutions quicker than us.

6) Accept genetic engineering. If I read one more thing about biofuel, I’m going to be sick. They just made the point that we should use more public transportation in the “move to the city” argument but now they’re talking about how we should embrace genetic engineering so we can grow more biofuel. They attack fertilizer and say nothing of chemical sprays, but fertilizer is necessary because of our addiction to monocrops (and profits). Thousands of years ago, farmers rotated crops and used trees and companion plants that naturally kept bugs away or attracted complimentary insect relationships (like worms) and enrich the soil to the benefit of certain crops. The author mentions Monsanto as some kind of wonder company here to save our lives. Monsanto is a chemical company that produces the world’s best-selling “herbicide,” a chemical that kills everything. They then got into the agriculture business producing 90% of the GMO crops on the planet, specifically engineered to resist their herbicide. Roundup kills everything except the crops they engineer. They are corporate bullies who use lawsuits and threats to wipe out local farmers. "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food," said Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications. "Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job." Unchecked, everything we eat will be engineered by Monsanto. If Wired really gave a shit about us and the environment, they’d do a full report on how they control our food supply.

7) Carbon Trading doesn’t work. I agree, good idea that needs improved.

8) Embrace nuclear power. There’s been a lot of talk that the only way we’ll produce enough energy for the billions of us on the planet in the future is from nuclear. They call it the cleanest of the fossil fuels because of the low emissions, uh, but what about the huge volume of nuclear waste produced? We already have tons of it buried in leaking containers under the ground in Washington and other states, we have no safe way to dispose of it and it remains toxic for thousands of years. Let’s focus on energy saving and efficiency before we make feeding our voracious appetites the top priority, eh?

9) Used cars not hybrids. Okay, I get the argument. New cars cost a lot of energy to make. If you’re driving a ten-year old fuel-efficient Toyota like my RAV, it’s better for the environment to keep driving it than to buy a new car. Except that my RAV will never end up in the landfill, there will always be someone waiting to buy it. They suggest (again, to be inflammatory) by the same logic you’re better off driving a Hummer because making a Hummer contributes less carbon to the environment (because of the nickel in Prius’ battery). They say nothing about the fact that cars in Europe are twice as fuel-efficient as ours and are the same as a Prius, which is why you don’t see hybrids there. It’s all a bunch of crap. We’re sold gas-guzzlers on purpose so the hybrids look good in comparison. While it doesn’t affect our carbon output, the quiet drive of the hybrids has many other benefits.

10) Prepare for the worst. Yes, things are going to get much hotter and much worse before they get better and we do need to accept that and prepare. They quote Stewart Brand who says, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" and suggest that we take over completely by using our technology to fix the things we've broken like helping birds migrate, for example. We're destroying their natural habitat, building over open spaces that break up long migration journeys, disrupting communication with our noise and killing them and their food with pesticides but the scientists are going to save the birds with assisted migration? Then again, they mention that Monsanto, who brought us Agent Orange, PCBs and Bovine Growth Hormone, will save us with genetic engineering. What is this issue sponsored by Bush and the chemical industry?

I agree we better figure out ways to adapt and continue to innovate but we are consuming and disrupting the natural order of the planet at an unsustainable rate and technology alone will not save us (or the birds). We need to continue to make our small but impactful changes like eating locally produced food, driving less, taking a tote the store instead of using plastic bags, planting trees and food in our yards if we have them, installing energy efficient appliances, using less energy by unplugging what we aren’t using, and continuing to pay attention, support innovation and demand responsibility from corporations and governments.

Here's the first part of a two hour-long show about Monsanto:

The World According to Monsanto 1 of 4 27min

Expanding food

I just got back from four days with the nephews and have some blogging to catch up on. My first day there we climbed to the top of Multnomah Falls on the Columbia River. Here's me in front of the falls with my youngest nephew.


It was one of a series of weekly "challenges" my brother, his wife and her family are doing as part of a group diet. At the end of the climb, they did a weigh in. The winner of the weekly weight in wins the pot of money they all put in. I thought it was very inspiring, a great way to support each other.

At home, their refrigerator was stocked with fruits and vegetables. We packed lunches every day to avoid eating fatty food out. My sister-in-law said, "it's not so much that we eat bad food, it's that we eat too much." Americans have long enjoyed a varied bounty of inexpensive food. When I got back from India ten years ago and made a trip to the grocery store, I was floored by the enormous fruits and vegetables in the store. After two months in another country looking at normal-sized produce, these genetically-modified, chemically-enhanced monstrosities seemed cartoon-like, blown way out of proportion.

I felt for my brother and his wife. What an uphill battle they're fighting. Everything about our culture encourages people to eat more. I've done a couple of cleanses/fasts and learned that you can't watch television on one. Every few minutes there's a commercial for fast food. I don't even notice them normally but on a diet, juicy burgers dripping with cheese and bacon suddenly become the most delicious-looking thing I've ever seen.

On the plane back to LA, there was an column in Southwest's Spirit Magazine called The Numbers. "The bagel has grown three inches since 1987" was the headline. I thought something was amiss! Our food has been expanding at such a steady rate that we hardly notice we're suddenly eating three times as much. "But I only ate one!" Up from 140 calories, the new bagel has 350. The muffin has increased from 1.5 oz to 4 oz since 1987. The cookie has grown 2 inches in diameter from 1.5 to 3.5. The 2.4 oz portion of French fries is now 6.9 oz (and has 8g of trans-fats.)

One of our picnics included smallish turkey sandwiches with tomato and sprouts, carrots and hummous, a single serving each of a potato salad with olive oil and orzo rice salad to share, a green salad and almonds. My brother felt like he ate a lot, "I just kept eating and eating but I didn't feel full," he said. I told him that the body can function without ever feeling full and in fact the feeling indicates that we've eaten too much. Because of the giant portions we're served in restaurants these days, we have come to believe we shouldn't stop eating until it hurts.

My sister-in-law lost eight pounds that week but didn't win the pool. Someone else lost twelve. Keep up the good work y'all!