"environment" news and stories

• Our pockets empty while our bellies fill with booze: "Canadians boosted alcohol sales by 4.3 percent [this year], funnelling more than $18.8 billion into the economy."
• SeaChoice now offers a downloadable sushi guide about locating sustainably sourced fish, but brace yourself -- the beloved unagi and hamachi are on the list.
• Laiterie Charlevoix's Le 1608 cheese -- the "pleasant tang of the long finish clinches this cheese's spot as a new Canadian favourite."
• Miga restaurant in Mississauga, Ontario, a favorite due to "wannabe luxe comforts."
• A guide to that Twitter cooking shorthand we've seen so much.
• Wine on a budget -- a general rule for which wines to grab and which to avoid.
  
• Au Petit Chavignol in Vancouver -- serious cheese, an amazing wine list and full meals.
• Next time you spy bubbles, it might not be club soda -- Ontario's about to get Camitz Sparkling Vodka.
• A talk with Kevin Kent, "possibly Canada's great prophet of Japanese knives."

The folks over at Grist, an environmental watchdog blog, have taken Mark Bittman -- a cook and food writer for The New York Times whose work boasts a huge, passionate following including the Grist blogger himself -- to task for listing red snapper, a fish many consider endangered, in one of his recipes. A fascinating conversation follows in the comments section including a response from Bittman (aka The Minimalist) himself. Check it out -- but maybe not over a fish dinner, as you may lose your appetite.

My mom likes to tell stories about how, when she was pregnant, she would always put her food in the microwave, press the "start" button, and run away as fast as she could so as to not irradiate the fetus.

Of course microwaves do not actually irradiate anything (even my mom knew that, on a rational level), but a lot of people still consider them vaguely evil. At the very least they don't enjoy the best reputation for producing healthy or delicious food.

But they may be better for the environment, at least in certain circumstances. As an interesting Slate story found, using a microwave for cooking small portions is much more energy efficient than using an oven. Making a single baked potato in an oven took 9.5 times as much energy as it did in a microwave; making four portions of baked potato in a microwave took 2.5 times the energy. The efficiency ratios are skewed depending on whether you have a gas or electric oven -- gas ovens produce fewer carbon emissions per units of heat than electric ovens.

Good to know, though until they make microwaves that can brown the top of a half-eaten casserole, I'm going to have to stick to my oven for certain reheating jobs.

How often do you use your microwave versus your oven?

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At Slate, Nina Shen Rastogi answers the question of whether or not it's necessary to thoroughly wash out recyclable containers before tossing them in the bin. As someone who's often tempted to secretly trash empty peanut butter jars rather than spending ten minutes cleaning them with soapy water (I never do, don't worry), I was glad to hear that the answer is, apparently, no. "Recycling facilities are well equipped to handle dirty cans and bottles, so some caked-on tomato sauce and the occasional stray chickpea won't significantly hinder the process," she writes. Still, it's better to rinse out containers, especially smelly ones like mayo and tartar sauce, before binning them, if for nothing else but a courtesy to the workers. Rastogi suggests using a small spatula to swish out most of the residue before giving the containers a quick rinse.

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In the interest of diminishing their carbon footprints, a few hardy souls on the frontier of the sustainable living movement have decided to ditch their refrigerators, reports The New York Times. Although 99.5 percent of American homes have at least one fridge, anti-fridge advocates say they make do just fine without.

One couple lives with just a small freezer and a cooler, kept chilled by two frozen soda bottles of water, which are rotated back to the ice chest when they begin to melt. I guess this would work OK, assuming you're home enough to rotate the bottles regularly - that might but a damper on your social life ("Oh, I'd love to stay, but I've got to go home and rotate the ice bottles!"). They say fridge-free living makes them more conscious of what they eat, relying less on packaged foods and planning ahead more so that meat from the freezer has time to defrost.

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