It's EARTH DAY today and it's a great time to think about how we use our resources every day. Some environmental experts have said that by 2050 there will be shortages of certain foods in the World.Lately my focus has been Food Waste because I have noticed I have wasted more food than I could afford to for the cost and what the effects on the environment are. I struggle with this every time I take a bag full of expired food to the garbage or a bag full of plastic containers to the recycle bin.
Donald Trump likes to say that there isn't any truth to Climate Change and it's not cause by people. But it's hard to see what's happening in the world and not wonder what's happening. It's now the 22nd of April and we are finally getting normal spring temperatures after an extremely long winter but we almost had an ice storm as crippling as the one in 2013 in Toronto. Many people lost power from downed trees but it didn't last as long as the last time but just as crippling for the people affected by it. Around the world the droughts, floods, hurricanes, tsunami's, earthquakes and more are getting more extreme each year and the polar ice caps, the coral reefs and the shore lines are decreasing. It's really hard to see the big picture when you are just trying to live your life everyday but what kind of world are we leaving for our children? A life of GMO food and constant environmental disasters that become normal life?
What can we do? Try and make decisions that will have lasting effects. If corporations produced less plastic products that never break down and pollute our landfills and oceans maybe they can think about innovative ways to change their products and productions and people have to choose products that have less of an environmental impact if they can. I know this is challenging because sometimes we don't have a choice on how the products we use are sold in stores.
We can also teach our children about food. Yesterday I showed my friend's 3 year old daughter how to regrow vegetable scraps in water by letting her help fill the containers of water. Hopefully she will watch it sprout over the next few weeks and get excited about it. Even if we don't grow our own food it's important to be mindful of where it comes from and who is producing it. If you can go to a great Farmer's Market where the farmers are on hand selling their food then that's a great step in supporting the people that make your food. If you have a balcony or garden and can grown some food then that's a great thing because you will purchase less packaging and will waste less food.
At the beginning of April I placed a carrot top in a small bowl of water and now 3 weeks later you can see how much it has sprouted. It can be planted in earth when the weather is a bit warmer. I tried to see if I could get avocado seeds to sprout but that hasn't been successful. I am going to try and see what happens to a sprig of cilantro. The easiest one to regrow is Green Onion. There isn't much to do except make sure it has clean water at about the height of the white end of the onion and placed in sunlight it will just regrow and sprout up from the centre.
Tomorrow I have organized an Earth Day event to do the same thing and have my coworkers learn how to regrow certain vegetable bits that would normally get discarded I will turn the wasted bits into the food waste soup I have been making through the past year and we will also attempt to plant some seed packets into one of the small greenhouse boxes that I picked up from Canadian Tire. This is new to me so I don't know how well it will do but I wanted to try and plant a seed or start something in our current office before all of us move to a new office in May and hope to have a communal little food area that we tend to that can feed the soups and lessen the waste produced by our office. The building we are going back to is a Leed certified building so we should consider what we contribute to it.
I am constantly trying to improve my bad habits about what I buy, toss and repurpose and hope that more people be mindful of the impact to our future generations from our daily actions.
