Category: Food

So I guess I’m a vegan now

July 14, 2016Food, Video, Waste 5 Comments

Deb 8 parkIt was my friend Michael’s doing.

I’ve always been a huge fan of animals – I’m the one who shuttles the spider in my living room onto a slip of paper and releases her outside. But I’m also a huge fan of food.

When I was nine years old, and on a cruise to Alaska with my parents and my younger brother, my Dad let me try his frog legs appetizer. It was delish. So he gestured a waiter over and ordered another. When it came out, the waiter placed it in front of my Dad, who then pointed at little 9-year-old suburban me. “It’s for her,” he said. Needless to say, the waitstaff fawned over me for the rest of the trip.

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Not my friend Michael (but it kinda looks like him)

Since then, you name it, I’ve eaten it. Garlicky escargots, monkfish liver sashimi, oysters on the half-shell, steak tartare. I can pan-sear a mean grass-fed rib-eye (see pic at right for my current thoughts on that). I loved me some farm-fresh scrambled eggs over buttered grits. (Once when I listed my favorite foods as lobster, artichokes and popcorn, it hit me that it was melted butter that really had me.)

When I was in my 20s, I went vegetarian; it lasted a year. Bacon did me in. I just couldn’t. Not. Eat bacon. Which, as everyone knows, is a gateway meat. Soon I was eating cheeseburgers, fried chicken and carnitas tacos again like that pork was born in a corn tortilla. (You can take the girl out of L.A. . .)

In my 30s, I basically had to give up dairy, because it started giving me asthma. So no more thin-crust pizza or mac ‘n cheese. (Sad face.) I later heard that the year I started having asthma attacks was the exact year the U.S. dairy industry started using bovine growth hormones.

Anyhoo. Back to my friend Michael. He made being a vegan sound FUN! I’d follow his Facebook posts showing him happily doing marathons or whatever with his  “Vegan Power” teammates; mingling with chickens on a farm sanctuary (and writing music about it); and kvelling over the vegan chocolate-chip pancakes with coconut cream he’d discovered at a new spot. Then he posted this 3 1/2 minute video. It is NOT graphic AT ALL, but something clicked inside me: Read More…

A Handy-Dandy Guide to NonProfit Email Subject Lines

June 24, 2016Bad Guys, Climate Change, Food, Good Guys, Science, Solutions, Waste 3 Comments
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(Actual screenshot from my iPhone)

Apparently somebody found out I’m trying to save the world, because I get a crazy number of emails from cool organizations like WWF and Change.org and the League of Conservation Voters, asking for a signature, or a five-spot, or whatevs.

It can make one bonkers, trying to figure out who to help, and who to (guiltily, in my case) send to the Trash.

But two emails jumped out at me – one on Wednesday, and one last week.

The one from Wednesday got me glued to a live stream of Congress for much of the next 20 hours, watching a HISTORIC move by Democrats, as they staged a sit-in on the House floor to get Republicans to bring two gun measures to a vote. “No bill, no break,” they declared. It was some of the most riveting television I’ve seen in years, as each Representative spoke eloquently and passionately through the night and morning. More on that later.

trash cansThe other email, from last week, was an update on the Single-Use Bag Bill that New York City passed last month, instating a 5-cent fee for single-use shopping bags beginning this October. I was absolutely giddy about the idea of the city giving out five million fewer plastic bags a year (I wrote about it here). Well, it turns out New York State OVERTURNED the ruling – or at least postponed it to February while “amendments” are made. ARRRGGGHHH.

The rest of the emails I got became a big blur of worthwhile but overwhelming solicitations, though. I mean, of course we want to help. But do we have to read another email to do it??

Well, yours truly is here to save you from wasting your precious time (this is Waste Management: The Blog). Herewith, a succinct Guide to Nonprofit Email Subject Lines (with pictures!) that may have appeared in your in-box recently, as they have over here. It’s possible I got a few other emails mixed in there, too. I was gonna make the whole thing into a quiz, letting you match the subject lines with my pithy descriptions, but I decided to give your brains a break. I’ll start things off easy with the one I just mentioned and move on (pun intended) from there . . . Read More…