Do You Like It in the Can?

I think I'll be talking about beer in cans a lot more here, pretty soon. The craft beer world is increasingly switching over to cans and in Virginia, there's even a mobile canner who will bring his machine to your brewery and can your beer in a day. It's pretty remarkable to see.

One day in Germany about ten years ago, they thought it was a good idea to start charging a deposit on all aluminum cans: 25 cents!!! It was part of an aggressive tactic to curb the amount of curbside and countryside garbage that had been accumulating. Bottles had a ten-cent deposit that kept most people from just throwing them in the street when they'd drunk all their beer, but aluminum had always gotten a pass. I think it was because of interests like Coca-Cola. Anyway, the huge deposit worked, but it also kind of backfired.

Greedy gas stations and the like demanded that you bring back your can with a token to that exact location. So, say you bought a can of beer from a 7-11, you couldn't just bring back your beer can to any old 7-11; you had to bring it to the same one, which really sucked if you were on a road trip. You just lost 25 cents a can, and the 7-11 just got free money.

Most places just stopped selling cans. See, bottles in Germany are where it's at. They reuse the bottles as many times as they can before recycling them. It's a great system, but Americans hate to reuse anything for some reason. They'd rather just skip to the recycling part. It's annoying for hardcore environmentalists to see this, but it is what it is. Americans refuse to reuse bottles and Germans place too large a burden on aluminum. But there's good news for the USA:

Aluminum is one of our most abundant and most easily recyclable resources!

In fact, I heard on NPR a while back that if we all just recycled everything aluminum, we could cease all mining operations of that material right now! And unlike plastic, we can recycle the same can an almost limitless amount of times.

And that's why I personally love the canning of beer and applaud the continued acceptance of it.

Is Gluten-Free Sexy?

What if we're eating too much of something? Shouldn't we stop even if it seems innocuous?

Kings and queens stored wheat and other grains as a commodity, as a way to control their subjects. It was like gold and oil and anything else worth fighting over. Wars were fought over wheat, riots sprang up for wheat. It's always been considered an important part of the western diet—maybe the most important.

It's currently one of the most subsidized crops in the United States, and when I was a kid it was one of the main things, next to meat and dairy, people were supposed to be eating. So we did, we ate a lot. Along with dairy and meat and corn, Americans eat hundreds of times more wheat than people did just fifty years ago.

Coincidentally, we're getting sicker. We're living longer, but we're suffering more. We take more medicine to mask our symptoms and live less healthy lives. Asthma, obesity, mental illness, muscular and neural disorders, and cancer are all up and are rising.

"Post hoc, ergo, propter hoc" I don't want to use chopped logic here, but there does seem to be a correlation to what we consume and what afflicts us. Some people, folks often scoffed at by medical professionals, think that there are direct correlations regarding certain foodstuffs in developed nations and the diseases that plague the people living there.

Some people think that gluten affects, exacerbates, and maybe even causes asthma. What if they're right? Is it worth giving up wheat, rye, and barley for 30 days to find out if gluten is an enemy?

Could it really be the case that the staple of western cuisine is its own enemy? I love bread, but could gluten be poisoning us? I mean, there's a ton of evidence of the nasty things meat does to us. . . and the government told me to eat a lot of meat and still does. It's one of the reasons I'm vegan. I'm thinner and healthier without it.

So is going gluten-free sexy? I don't know. I know that asthma is not sexy. What if I stop eating it for 30 days and my asthma symptoms go away? I've tried everything else, and I'm still medicated. What if I can get off the meds? How incredible would that be? It would be a miracle. . . a miracle that I performed on myself.

I'm in.

Some Links and a Super Short Review of Transsiberian

I wrote a blog post at my green blog about the treesitters, and there's a picture I took there.

I found an interview with Larry Bishop. I wish I could meet him. What he says about successful motorcycle movies is how I feel about poetry.

Follow up on the Hadron Collider can be found here: hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com
Mary Diaz gave me that link.

Transsiberian is the most frustratingly claustrophobic film ever made, and it seems to be about woman's inability to adhere to any sense of loyalty or honesty. It takes place on a train in Russia, which is visually interesting and frightening. Everyone in it does an amazing job, all the peoplpe are realistic. It's written well, but I don't like the ending and I don't like any of the characters. Everyone in it's bad, and the one good guy is a schmuck and a sucker. So it is all right to call something good without actually liking it? Everyone else is.

Drought

I grew up in LA during its worst drought. Water conservation is something we all just did. There were police making sure we were conserving, so there wasn't much choice, but we made it through.

I live in Berkeley now. It's nice here. Something surprising recently happened, though: we were mandated to lower our water consumption. My landlord stuck a note under my door saying basically "conserve or else." I think I use very little water, but the mandate is for everyone to lower their consumption regardless of how conservative they have been in the past. So, if you were someone who was conserving water before the shortages, you have to lower your consumption as much as everyone else now, effectively being punished for being green when it mattered most, before the crisis was here.

The whole thing is scary. I don't think anyone ever thought that Northern California was going to start running dry. I am worried about the price of water going up, so I am taking drastic measures. I only flush the toilet twice a day now. I live alone, so it isn't as gross as it sounds, and I flush if I have company. I just don't know how I am supposed to reduce my water consumption any more than I already do. I rent an apartment, so I can't put new hardware in the building. My water habits are already so conservative having grown up in a drought.

Barbara Boxer sent me an email a few days ago. It's basically a bunch of links that you probably won't find interesting. They tell us how we can conserve energy as consumers, which apparently means buying new hardware. Buying more crap won't really help, though, will it? If we don't change our lifestyles, all the new gadgets in the world won't help. If Ms. Boxer wants to make a difference, though, perhaps she should tell us what she is personally doing to help solve the problem. Blaming global warming isn't enough. Really, even with global warming, we should be able to come up with ways to recycle or desalinate water while coming up with new ways to conserve. But before we figure all that out, we need to change the way we live. Not one of the sites she sent, for example, says anything about the fact that meat-eaters require 4,000 gallons of water a day; compare that with a vegetarian's 300 gallon-a-day water dependency. Perhaps California senators can live by example. I am going to write her an email right now linking this blog post.

Parthian: California has a lot of cows. If we stopped raising cows for food, we would have a lot more water for people. Vegetable use less water than cows, so we won't starve. If senators started going veg, maybe more Californians would. If Arnold came on TV and said, "we're in a drought. I care about this state, so I am going vegetarian and using less water through this and other sacrifices," that would tell us something, that would get us all on the same page. It makes me a little sick how government officials act like monarchs in this country; they want the masses to do the lifting while they sit on our shoulders.