How Many Calories Is That?

  • The study showed that in some cases, dishes had twice as many calories as they were supposed to. (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

Counting calories is easier
to do now that more restaurants
are publicly posting calorie
information about their food.
But Samara Freemark
tells us why those numbers might
be misleading:

Transcript

Counting calories is easier
to do now that more restaurants
are publicly posting calorie
information about their food.
But Samara Freemark
tells us why those numbers might
be misleading:

18% – a new study says that’s the average amount that restaurants underreport the calories in their dishes.

Researchers at Tufts University analyzed the calorie content of meals from chain restaurants. Then they compared those numbers to the calorie counts posted publicly by restaurants on websites and menus.

Susan Roberts is the senior author of the study. She says in some cases, dishes had twice as many calories as they were supposed to.

“You just assume that the numbers are right, you don’t really think about, well, is this number only half what it really is? To have the calories on the web or in the restaurant, that would be a great thing. But they do have to be accurate.”

Roberts says the biggest culprit is portion size – restaurants serve larger amounts of food than advertised. She says the researchers also found that many restaurants served extra side dishes that weren’t included in posted calorie counts.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Farmland Goes Idle

  • Rice harvesting in Fort Bend County, Texas (Photo by David Nance, courtesy of the USDA)

The US is not farming as much land. Kyle Norris reports farmland equal to the size of the entire state of West Virginia has been taken out of production in the last few years:

Transcript

The US is not farming as much land. Kyle Norris reports farmland equal to the size of the entire state of West Virginia has been taken out of production in the last few years:

The United States Department of Agriculture surveyed farmers from 2002 to 2007.

During that time farmers stopped planting more than 16 million acres of farmland.

In some cases farmers retired. Or they just decided not to plant crops. Or sold the land to developers in sprawling areas.

Don Buckloh is with the American Farmland Trust. He says what happens to farmland should be important to people.

“They should be interested in whether good farm land is remaining available to produce the food they’re interested in eating. And then secondly just how strong is agriculture in the community as an economic force.”

While less land is being farmed, the USDA says there are more farms. The survey counted 291,000 new farms during that time. Most of those new farms are smaller operations.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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Energy Efficiency Often Overlooked

  • A new report says energy efficiency is often overlooked (Source: Jdorwin at Wikimedia Commons)

A new study suggests we could reduce our
energy use by 15% a decade. But Lisa Ann
Pinkerton reports many people don’t realize it’s
an option:

Transcript

A new study suggests we could reduce our
energy use by 15% a decade. But Lisa Ann
Pinkerton reports many people don’t realize it’s
an option:

Experts call energy efficiency the invisible powerhouse. They say people and policy
makers don’t notice efficiency as an energy solution, because its impacts aren’t
tracked. Plus, it’s an option that’s built into things like energy efficient windows and
appliances.

“Energy efficiency is imbedded in all of the products that we use every day that we don’t
generally see it.”

That’s Karon Ehrhart-Martinez, co-author of a new report from the American
Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

She compiled data from 2004, the most recent available, and found 300 billion
dollars of investment saved the same amount of energy that 40 power plants could
generate in a year. Ehrhart-Martinez says that’s just a fraction of the energy we
could save, if we chose more energy efficient options when we buy.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lisa Ann Pinkerton.

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Development Mangling the Mangroves

  • Mangroves at Mary's Creek, St. John (Photo by Frank Olivier)

If you were a tropical fish living in the
Caribbean, there’s a good chance you would have spent
your youth darting between the roots of mangroves.
Those saltwater plants guard young fish from predators.
Mangroves also protect shorelines from erosion and
hurricanes. But now it’s the mangroves that need
protection. Ann Dornfeld reports:

Transcript

If you were a tropical fish living in the
Caribbean, there’s a good chance you would have spent
your youth darting between the roots of mangroves.
Those saltwater plants guard young fish from predators.
Mangroves also protect shorelines from erosion and
hurricanes. But now it’s the mangroves that need
protection. Ann Dornfeld reports:

It’s a brilliantly sunny, gusty day on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. Stanley
Berry has backed his motorboat into an opening in this quiet mangrove bay. He’s
one of the island’s traditional French fishermen. He’s lean, bronzed and bare-
chested.

“I going yellowtail snapper tonight. I’m doin’ night fishing. See if I can catch
something tonight, God spare life.”

Berry says the red mangroves that ring this bay serve as a sort of daycare for the
young fish he’ll eventually catch.

“If you have to snorkel around and check it out, you’ll notice that all these little
fishes are different type of grouper, snapper, you name it all comes and all the
baby ones come and hang around in there so the big fish don’t eat ’em. It protects
’em. It’s real good for the fish to come and spawn in here and stuff.”

Mangroves’ dry branches are home to birds and lizards. Their roots prevent sediment
from the land from seeping into the water. And mangroves provide a buffer zone that
protects inland areas from storms moving in from the ocean.

As important as they are, these mangroves are at risk. David Olsen is director of the
US Virgin Islands Division of Fish and Wildlife. He says island natives understand
the value of the mangroves. But he says developers aren’t as appreciative. One
company wants to rip out the red mangroves on this bay for new construction.

“They would basically line the entire area with condominiums, have docks
basically filling the entire bay, eliminate all the traditional use, and plant a little
fringe of black mangroves.”

Olsen says developers have to leave some mangroves in their plans, because the
islands have a no-net-loss policy for wetlands. But the black mangroves they want to
plant don’t grow in the water. That means they wouldn’t serve as fish nurseries.

This is hardly an isolated incident.

“We have lost, in the Virgin Islands, probably 50 percent of our mangrove areas
over the last half a century.”

Rafe Boulon is Chief of Resource Management for the Virgin Islands National Park.
He says mangroves are often filled with dirt for new construction.

“Anytime people fill land, typically they’re filling mangroves because they’re
selecting nice calm bays and that’s where the mangroves are.”

Boulon says mangroves are in much better shape here on St. John, a 30-minute ferry
from St. Thomas. That’s because most of this island is a national park.

If you want to see firsthand why mangroves are so important, all you need is a mask
and snorkel. The water is kind of murky and golden from fallen leaves. But it’s rich
with sealife.

“Okay, so we just got out of the water, and we saw probably a dozen different
species of juvenile varieties of the fish you see when you snorkel or dive out in the
deep water. And they’re darting among the mangroves and chasing each other –
really, really playful.”

Boulon says for people new to the islands, mangroves can seem like a swamp. They
release methane as leaf litter decomposes. And the roots collect trash that floats in
from sea.

“So hence, if they’re dirty and smelly there’s no really good purpose for them –
however, they’re very, very important ecosystem here.”

The trick is to convince the scores of people who are building new homes on the
Virgin Islands of the value of mangroves, including a new wave of retiring baby
boomers.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld in St. John.

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A Lighter, Brighter Christmas?

  • Author Bob Lilienfeld suggests that we find ways to express our love for each other in less material ways. (Photo by Denise Docherty)

The message from advertisers this holiday season seems to be: buy more because you and your family deserve it. Retailers are hopeful we’ll all spend just a little bit more to make the holidays shiny and bright. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham went to the shopping mall with a guy who thinks we ought to scale back our spending during the
holidays:

Transcript

The message from advertisers this holiday season seems to be, buy more because you and your family deserve it. Retailers are hopeful we’ll all spend just a little bit more to make the holidays shiny and bright. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham went to the shopping mall with a guy who thinks we ought to scale back our spending during the holidays:


Bob Lilienfeld is one of the co-authors of a book called Use Less Stuff. As you might guess, he’s an advocate of using fewer resources, including buying less stuff during the holidays. We asked him to meet us at a big shopping mall to talk about why he thinks buying less means more.


Lilienfeld: “I want you to go back to when you were a kid. Think about the two or three things in your life, the things that you did that made you really happy. I guarantee none of those have to do with physical, material gifts. They have to do with time you spent with your family or things you did with your friend. But, it wasn’t the time you said ‘Oh, it was the year I got that train,’ or ‘the year I got those cuff links,’ or ‘when I got those earrings.’ That’s the principle difference. We’re trying so hard to be good and to let people know that we love them, but the things that we love about other people and that they love about us have nothing to do with material goods.”


Graham: “There’s a certain expection during the holidays, though, that we will get something nice for the people we love and here at this mall as we’re looking around, there are lots of enticements to fulfill that expectation.”


Lilienfeld: “That’s true, but we’ve been led to believe that more is better, and to a great extent more gifts is not better than fewer gifts. Quality and quantity are very different kinds of thoughts and we’ve been led to believe economically that quantity is more important. But, in reality it’s the qualitative aspects of life that we long remember and really are the ones we treasure.”


Graham: “Now from the news media, I get the impression that if I don’t do my part during the holidays in shopping, that it’s really going to hurt a lot of Americans, the American economy. $220-billion during the holiday season. It’s 25-percent of retailers’ business. So, if I don’t buy or if I scale back my buying, won’t I be hurting the economy?”


Lilienfeld: “It’s always been 25-percent of retailers’ business, even if you go back 30 or 40 years, and that’s probably not going to change. It comes down to your thinking through what’s good for you, what’s good for your family, what’s good for your friends and not worrying so much about what’s good for the economy and what’s good for big companies.”


Retailers are expecting sales to be better this year than last year. So, that simpler lifestyle that Lilienfeld is talking about is not widespread enough to have any real impact on the overall shopping season. But apparently the economy isn’t strong everywhere.


We talked to some shoppers about their holiday shopping plans and the idea of simplifying things. Many of them told us that the economy was forcing them to cut back on gift buying…


Shopper 1: “Well, because of my limited budget, I have to buy, like – I have a list – and I have to buy one at a time, so, being pretty poor is being pretty simple. I’m kind of already living that way.”


Shopper 2: “I don’t need to celebrate Christmas by buying people gifts. And I can give people gifts all year long. And I — Christmas is kind of sham-y to me.”


Shopper 3: “This year, yeah, my family is like, ‘Don’t get me anything.’ I’m going to do something, but hopefully it will be smaller and less expensive and all that.”


Shopper 4: “Well, I don’t feel compelled to buy something because an economist says it’s my part as an American. And I think people are going to get smarter and smarter about how they spend their money and the almighty dollar.”


With the constant messages on television, radio, the Internet and newspapers to spend, there’s a lot of persusive power by advertisers to buy now and think about the cost later.


Since Bob Lilienfeld is such an advocate of a simpler lifestyle, it makes you wonder about his own shopping habits.


Graham: “Do you ever find yourself in the shopping mall, buying stuff for the folks you have on your Christmas list or your holiday list?”


Lilienfeld: “All the time. But, what I try to do is two things. One is think about the fact that more isn’t necessarily better. But the other thing I really try and do is look for gifts that are what I call ‘experiential’ as opposed to material. Tickets. Things where people can go to plays or operas or ball games so that they have an experience. Same thing with travel. I mean, if I could give my father a gift or if I could help him afford to go somewhere, like to see me and the kids, that gift is probably worth a lot more to both of us than if I just gave him a couple of bottles of wine.”


And Lilienfeld says you don’t waste as much wrapping paper when you wrap up tickets.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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