Revealing the relationship between the natural world and the everyday lives of people
Women who consider themselves feminists might be shocked to hear what some are calling the new wave of feminism: women heading back to the kitchen – and the garden. Julie Grant reports:
When Shannon Hayes was finishing her PhD, she made a list of all the female professors she’d ever had. There wasn’t one who had tenure who was also married with children. Hayes wanted a husband and family, and realized that if she wanted a big university job…
“I was not going to have these things. And they were as important to me as having a career. In fact, in truth they were more important to me.”
So, much to the dismay of her PhD committee members, she headed back to the northern foothills of the Appalachian mountains near the family farm where she grew up. She bought a teeny house with her husband. People whispered. What had gone wrong?
Once there, Hayes couldn’t even get a job interview. To make things worse, her husband lost his job two weeks after buying the house. So, they fell back on their domestic skills.
“Well, if something broke, we fixed it. If something ripped, we mended it. I was very good at canning, so any food we didn’t grow on the farm or didn’t grow in our gardens I wold go to the local farmers when it was in peak season and I would can it, freeze it, lacto-ferment it.”
Hayes says her idea of success changed. Spending time with her parents and children, cooking family meals – those are her successes.
And she’s found that more people are realizing the power of homemaking.
Hayes has now written a book called Radical Homemakers – which profiles twenty families that are saying “no” to regular jobs, and are instead raising chickens and growing veggies.
Hayes says homemaking is a new route for women who consider themselves feminists.
“I think that a lot of feminists are realizing that the family home life is extremely important. I do think that this is part of the next wave of feminism.”
One feminist blogger asked with disgust:
Are you telling women to get back in the kitchen?
Traditional feminists don’t like the sound of this one bit.
Brittany Shoot is another feminist blogger. She’s concerned with calling homemaking feminism. Shoot writes about eco-feminist issues for Bitch Media and The Women’s International Perspective. She says just because some women are doing it, does NOT make it feminism. She says Hayes’ message could be considered a step backward for women.
“I can’t imagine saying to my grandmother, ‘I’m going to stay home and just hang out.'”
Shoot says her grandmother struggled to attend university, and didn’t have nearly the choices Brittany has for a career. She would want Brittany to make the most of her opportunities.
“We’ve come so far. Why would you make this decision when you have the ability to have a career that may not only be lucrative, but fulfilling.”
But Shannon Hayes says we’ve been conditioned to want the money and status of a big job and that’s proving to be as empty for many women as it is for many men.
Hayes says being a housewife in the ‘50s and 60s was limiting. Back then, when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, women were depressed by their role as homemakers. Women were losing their own identities to serve their husbands and children. But Hayes says women today are losing their identities to the workplace. She also says corporations have largely taken over in the home.
She says when women left the kitchen to join the workforce, that’s when everyone started eating processed, unhealthy foods.
“I think everybody should get back in the kitchen, not just women. But that’s because I don’t think you should be buying processed foods, and I don’t think you should be supporting industrial agriculture, and don’t think that you should be supporting food traveling thousands of miles.”
Hayes says becoming a homemaker isn’t abandoning feminism, it’s redefining it on her own terms. She’s sharing homemaking with her husband… and both are finding more balance between home life and work.
For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.
San Francisco already leads the
nation in recycling. Now, that
city has the first mandatory
composting law in the country.
Emily Wilson reports that’s got
some people worried about “garbage
cops”:
Putting recyclables into the blue bin is second nature for people in San Francisco.
But this new law now means also putting coffee grounds and eggshells into a green bin.
There are some people who are concerned about Big Brother looking through their garbage. And then there’s the $100 fine.
Mark Westlund at the Department of the Environment says ‘no worries.’ Not much is going to change.
“Well, we get a lot of calls from people who are worried about garbage cops and that frankly is not going to happen. For years now we’ve been looking in peoples recycling to make sure they’re doing it correctly and if not, they get a tag and if they continue misusing it, they get a letter and a follow up call and then a visit.”
So there are warnings before the fine.
Cities across the country will be watching San Francisco’s mandatory composting law to see how it goes.
For The Environment Report, I’m Emily Wilson.
One city’s new program is taking the mucky sink-clogging grease from restaurants and converting it into fuel for its fleet of vehicles. As David Gorn reports, it’s the first effort of its kind in the nation:
It’s 6 in the morning, and a San Francisco sewage treatment plant is already in full gear.
(sound of a truck motor)
Workers are unloading a tankful of used cooking oil from local restaurants.
(sound of a man shouting)
But soon they’ll also be picking up something a little nastier from restaurants.
“Brown grease is culled out, pumped out by grease haulers and taken out of the city, often to landfills.”
That’s Karri Ving, biofuels coordinator for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. She says, instead of carting that grease off to a garbage dump, it will now be converted into biofuel.
“That material, that food material, is what we’re going to condense into a putty that gets converted into road-worthy biodiesel.”
Ving says San Francisco expects to process about 10,000 gallons of the
stuff every day.
For The Environment Report, I’m David Gorn.
Most people probably don’t enjoy
cleaning. But we’ve all got to do it.
And if you’ve ever looked at the household
cleaner aisle in the grocery store, you
know there can be some pretty strong
chemicals involved. Karen Kelly reports
on a cheaper, chemical-free alternative:
(sound of store)
I’ve just arrived at my neighborhood grocery store with a plan: to find what I
need to make my own household cleaners.
I head over to the cleaning aisle and pull out a list of ingredients I got off the
internet.
I see borax and
washing soda on the shelf.
They`re both made from naturally-occuring minerals and cost about five bucks
each for a 4 to 5 pound box.
I look around for soap flakes – to make my own dish soap – and find a big bar I
can grate myself.
The only thing missing is castile soap. It’s a biodegradable soap used in a lot of
these recipes.
I’ll grab that next at the natural foods store.
To be honest, I never paid that much attention to the ingredients in household
cleaner – until I used something with dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride on
my bathtub. It comes with warnings.
I rinsed it and took a bath. My 4-year-old also took a bath.
And we both ended up with a very itchy skin rash.
That convinced me. I had to find a safer way to clean the tub that, number one,
worked. And number two, wasn’t too expensive.
Which pretty much meant I’d have to make it myself.
We decided to start with the all-purpose cleaner.
Karen Kelly: “Okay. We need borax, which we have, castile soap, hot water.”
Child: “We have that! We can just turn on the sink and make hot water!”
Kelly: “And vinegar.”
Child: “We have, do we have vinegar?”
Kelly: “Yes.”
Child: “And Mom, we have hot water.”
We mix up a recipe I found on the David Suzuki Foundation’s website.
(sound of stirring and banging)
They’ve got a whole bunch of do-it-yourself recipes for bathtub scrubbers,
laundry soap, furniture polish, you name it.
Lindsay Coulter is the person who devised these concoctions.
She says a lot of people forget that you don’t need fancy products to get your
house clean.
“You know, if you talk to your grandmothers or your great-aunts, you’ll find that
they too used things like washing soda, baking soda, white vinegar, and a basic
castile soap. Things like vinegar – it’s acidic and helps lift grease and
deodorizes. A lot of the things you’re cooking with anyways, so you probably
already have it in your kitchen. And the benefit? Just peace of mind that you
know what goes into it.”
But does it work? It’s time to find out.
(sound of spraying)
We spray. We wipe. The bathroom sink shines.
Next, we try the bath tub scrubber. It’s a mix of castile soap, vinegar – which is
a natural disinfectant – baking soda, and water.
(sound of cleaning the tub)
The tub looks great, actually. And you know what? This is a lot cheaper.
Brand name all-purpose cleaning sprays are about 4 bucks a bottle where I live.
It cost me just a dollar – and about 5 minutes – to fill that same bottle with my
own mix.
So it’s cheap, it’s easy to make, and, best of all, I don’t have to worry about chemical reaction after a soak
in the tub.
For The Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.
Child: “Is it recording? Okay.”
A couple in their eighties has spent the last sixty years running
a summer camp for kids old enough to be their children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. Kyle Norris has the
story of how the couple has stuck to the old ways of summer
camp, from outdoor activities to food:
What you arrive at Varsity Day Camp, you’ll see a ton of kids
running around outside. They’re doing all kinds of fun kid
activities. Like this one:
(Sound of pogo stick)
Pogo stick jumping. Jane Selner is the assistant business manager at Varsity. Her
parents, the Wizniewskis – or Mr. and Mrs. Wiz for short – have
run this camp for nearly six decades:
“We pretty much keep it down to earth. No electronics. No cell
phones, no Game Boys. That type of thing. We like them to
really discover nature. The birds, the trees, the animals, the
frogs and fish.”
Varsity is known as an old-school camp. Its campers are
supervised but their day is pretty much unstructured. They’re free to roam-
about the camp’s twenty-or-so activity stations. And everything
happens outside at this South Central Michigan camp. Kids can
choose activities like archery, tetherball, a miniature hockey
game I didn’t really understand, swimming, and arts and crafts.
Mr. Wiz helps supervises the activities, and Mrs. Wiz cooks all
the food from scratch, just like she’s done for the past 58 years.
She says it’s your basic standard camp food. Here she is breezing
through the week’s menu:
“Sloppy joe’s, and we have PB & J sandwiches, celery sticks,
Kool-Aid and chocolate chip cookies (I make all my cookies).
Turkey salad with lettuce, peanut butter and jelly. Tortilla
strips. Warm cinnamon coffee cake, which we’ll have
tomorrow. Grilled cheese, the kids love grilled cheese. They’ll
sit down an hour before we eat. I’ll say we’re going to feed you –
I want to be first and dill pickles…”
Mrs. Wiz’s cooking is pretty popular with all the kids I’ve talked
to. Campers have been known to eat three, four, sometime even
five helpings of her lunches.
But the food is just your basic camp fare. Mrs. Wiz, doesn’t use
any special cooking techniques or fancy-pants ingredients. But
you know what, the kids just rave about the food. They just
love the stuff:
“I’ve had a mother call me and said, ‘Mrs. Wiz, how do you do your
hot dogs?’ I said I put them in a pan of water and boil them. It’s
just they’re so hungry out here. That they play so hard, that it
tastes very good to them.”
Down at the waterfront, eleven-year-old Mitchell is hanging out
with a couple of pals. He’s got sandy-blond hair, surfer shorts,
and a faded t-shirt. He tells me I picked a good day to come to
Varsity, because today is sloppy joe day. Mitchell says – and
this is a direct quote from his mouth – that the sloppy joe’s taste like a little
piece of heaven:
“I’ve been coming here for 5 years and everything’s good…I
think it has something to do with like cooking all day ’cause
they cook all day in morning and cook desserts and it’s all day
cooking, I think it’s made good.”
Six-year old Julia jumps out of her canoe and onto the sandy
beach. Julia says the sloppy joe’s are her favorite thing at camp,
hands-down:
“It’s good because it’s very sweet and hot. It’s very good.”
The sloppy joe’s, like everything else, are cooked in the camp’s
tiny kitchen. Mr. and Mrs. Wiz could easily ship in food from a
food service. Or hire other people to do their cooking. “No way,
no how,” they both say. For them, homemade is the way to go:
“Summer camp food should be enjoyable, homemade I think. Because it
tastes good.”
Mr. and Mrs. Wiz not only want the kids to enjoy good food,
but they want them to enjoy time that’s unscheduled and not
filled with violin lessons, after-school clubs, and busy life
activites.
“There’s no pressure, free to choose activity, free to choose
whatever they want lunch, that’s the entire philosophy, that they enjoy themselves and don’t get hurt…And eating is part of the enjoyment.”
Through good food, fun activities, and the great outdoors, Mr.
and Mrs. Wiz teach the kids to open their senses. And to just be
kids in a simple place.
Oh, and as for the sloppy joe’s, I tasted them and they were
really good.
For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.
New homes in America keep getting bigger and bigger. The average new
American home is about 2400 square feet. Moving up to a bigger house
can seem like a sign of success… or it might feel necessary for a
growing family. But in the face of pressure to buy big… some people
are choosing to downsize their homes… way, way down. Rebecca
Williams visits some of the tiniest houses on the block:
(Sound of door opening)
“C’mon in!”
Andru Bemis lives in a little house on a corner.
“Here it is, you’ve just about seen it. You’re standing looking at the
kitchen, you’re standing in the living room, there’s a study, and
there’s a bathroom behind that wall and somewhere above the bathroom there’s a
bed.”
It takes a hop, skip and a jump to cross from one end to the other.
That’s because his house is 300 square feet. Total.
Andru Bemis says a little house is better:
“I’m not owned by it, that’s one of the biggest things. I’ve only got
one sink I’ve gotta keep running, I’ve only got one of anything, don’t have an entire house to
take care of. I also leave town a lot and don’t have to leave an
entire house and worry about it.”
Bemis is a musician. His love of music explains the 5,000 records
lining one wall of his house and taking up precious space.
Of course he also makes room for his banjo.
(Sound of strumming)
You just don’t see tiny houses that much any more. Some, like Andru
Bemis’, are remnants from the early 20th century. His tiny house is in a sleepy
neighborhood that used to be the factory district. He’s seen other
little houses like his get torn down to build bigger new ones.
“Bigger is better, I guess. Bigger means you’ve achieved a lot more.
But as far as I’m concerned bigger generally means you’re working a
whole lot harder.”
That’s one reason people are choosing to live small. They’re after a
simpler life with less stuff. A smaller house costs less to buy and
maintain. And some people argue smaller homes make better use of
resources because they just use less of everything.
Jay Shafer says building small is the greenest thing you can do with a
new home. He owns the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. He designs and
builds super small houses. He started with his own home. It was
really tiny – 70 square feet. That’s 7 feet by 10 feet.
“It’s a huge challenge – it’s much harder than designing a large house.
There’s just no room for error. And if you want to do it well and get
the proportioning right you have to consider everything as part of
everything else.”
Shafer says to live in a tiny house, you have to figure out how much
elbow room you need. Turns out, 70 square feet was a tad too small for
Jay Shafer. So he traded up to 100 square feet.
Shafer says tiny houses are a tough sell for most Americans. But some
people just love small little spaces. Shafer calls himself a
claustrophile. He’s built 10 tiny houses and sold dozens more plans.
Gregory Johnson is one of Shafer’s converts. He’s a computer
consultant in Iowa City. He lives in one of Jay Shafer’s high tech
tiny houses. It’s just 140 square feet. But with a little bit of
magic, one room turns into three.
(Sound of sliding panels)
“You can take what was an office and in about 20 seconds it converts into
a dining area with a sink off to our right because that’s the kitchen.”
Gregory Johnson says his tiny house has changed him. He says he had
his doubts at first, like the time he visited Jay Shafer at the construction
site:
“He showed this little hole I was supposed to crawl through, the
passageway to the upstairs to the loft and I thought I might have to
lose some weight to get up in there (laughs).”
Johnson says he started really scaling back. He realized if he had a
refrigerator, he’d just fill it up with ice cream and pizza. Things he
really didn’t need. So to save energy, he doesn’t have a fridge at
all. He started eating nuts and grains and fruit. By shrinking his
life down to match his house he lost 100 pounds.
Johnson says tiny spaces don’t work for everyone. But he says he has a
fulfilling life with a whole lot less stuff and space to put it in.
Many tiny house owners such as Andru Bemis want their miniature homes
to make a statement: size does matter.
(Andru Bemis song: “my house is a very small house it’s the littlest
house there is/it’s bigger than yours”)
For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.
Some hospitals are trying to heal the food that they serve. The GLRC’s
Stephanie Hemphill takes us to one hospital that making efforts to spice
up their menu:
(Sound of elevator)
St. Luke’s is the smaller of Duluth’s two hospitals. Their motto could be
“we try harder.” Several years ago, the hospital put two chefs in charge
of the housekeeping, laundry, and food.
In the kitchen, there’s the usual industrial stoves and dishwashers, and a
long assembly line where workers fill the trays for patients, based on
what they’ve ordered.
“The patient fills out the menu, I’ll have this entrée and that salad and this
beverage; then as the tray moves down the conveyor belt, they look at the
menu and put on the appropriate products.”
Mark Branovan was a gourmet chef at restaurants in California’s wine
country. In that part of the world, they take their fresh fruits and
vegetables very seriously.
“We did very little of our produce buying from the big distributors; we
had local guys that would grow lettuce for us, and herbs for us, and tomatoes…
anything we wanted. So that just kind of rolled over for us into, if
we can do it for a restaurant, why can’t we do it for a hospital?”
It’s harder to do in this part of the country, where you can grow lettuce
for about half the year and you’re lucky to get a tomato at all. But
Branovan and his colleague, LeeAnn Tomczyk, decided not to let that
stop them.
Tomczyk was a chef in a trendy restaurant in Wisconsin before she took
the job at the hospital. She says when she first came here, she was
appalled at some of the things on the menu.
“YOu know the patient was able to pick a jell-o salad and a piece of cake.
Well, to me jell-o is a dessert but to them it was their salad and that
was their vegetable, and that wasn’t right.”
Tomczyk and Branovan started to add more fruits and vegetables,
including organic items, to the menu, but they learned to pick their
battles.
“When I tried to change some of the casserole dishes, and some of the
traditional northern Minnesota fare, I was met with some serious
resistance from our customers and our patients who said, ‘Yeah, we have
tater tot hot dish on our menu because we like it.'”
One of the first items to change was the milk. Now the hospital serves
hormone-free milk to patients in the rooms and workers in the cafeteria.
Tomczyk says she’s convinced hormone-free milk and organic food are
healthier. She says an organization devoted to helping people heal, like a
hospital, needs to think about healing in broad terms, even globally. She
says buying local food avoids long-distance transportation, with its heavy
reliance on polluting fossil fuels.
“And the introduction of pesticides and herbicides, and that getting into
our water systems, it’s that whole cycle, and we’re using more and more
these days, and I think it’s just got out of hand.”
The hospital is also committed to reducing waste. It freezes unused
portions and gives them to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. It sends
its food waste to the city compost pile.
St. Luke’s is a member of a hospital buying group that negotiates prices
with big producers like Pillsbury. Each hospital is supposed to buy a
certain percentage of its food through the buying group. When Branovan
and Tomczyk asked the distributor for hormone-free milk, the distributor
didn’t carry it.
“We had to actually get a waiver that says they will allow us to buy off-
contract.”
Branovan got a similar waiver to buy organic fresh fruit, and greens for
the cafeteria salad bar. He hopes to add more organic and locally-grown
foods.
Branovan says St. Luke’s is the first hospital in the region to ask the
buying group to supply hormone-free milk and organic vegetables, but
hospitals and schools on the west coast and east coast are doing it on a larger
scale.
James Pond is editor of Food Service Director, a trade magazine.
He says the movement will grow.
“The pricing advantages will in some ways level out, where if it becomes
important enough to the clientele, the food service operators will respond
by providing products in this manner.”
Some hospitals organize a farmer’s market to serve their workers, as a
way to introduce them to organic and local foods. Then they add those
foods to the cafeteria and patient meals. At St. Luke’s, they feature
organic food at company parties.
For the GLRC, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
Composting has always been a part of farm life, but a growing
number of city folks are trying it as well. The GLRC’s Karen
Kelly is one of those city dwellers, and she found if composting
isn’t convenient, it doesn’t get done:
“So we’re going to put in our banana peels, and the oatmeal that
nobody ate, and I’m going to break some of this up because apparently
it breaks down faster if it’s in smaller pieces. So right now we’ve got,
half a scone, a bowl of oatmeal, some banana peel… ”
It’s just after breakfast and my kitchen is covered with dirty dishes.
Some of the food is heading into the garbage, the rest I’m going
toss into the composter. It kind of looks like a brown garbage can
with a lid, but it takes about half my garbage and turns it back into
soil.
I started about a year ago, when I finally got a small backyard
where I live here in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. First, I asked
my friends Connie and Dan how they do it.
“How would you guys describe your approach?”
“Laissez faire.”
“Yeah. It’s really a shame that everybody doesn’t do this because it can
be really easy. Just put it in a box and let it sit there.”
I liked the sound of that hands-off approach, but I was also
wondering what to put in and what I needed to leave out. So, I gave
George Reimer a call. He’s the city of Ottawa’s composting expert.
“ust stick with kitchen scraps, vegetables, fruit scraps…plants that
you have from the gardening season, that type of thing.”
“Okay, okay. So no animal products basically?”
“Exactly.”
Once you have a good mix of kitchen scraps, leaves and grass, the
best thing for compost is to mix it around on a regular basis. When
you add that oxygen to the microorganisms already in the garbage,
it breaks the waste down even faster.
It’s not as easy as it sounds – especially if you compost in a plastic
drum. Just imagine sticking a pitchfork into your garbage can and
trying to flip over a pile of wet dirt.
So, armed with that information, I asked George if he could take a
look at our progress after our first week of composting. He stooped
over to pull open a sliding door at the bottom of the container.
“Oh, you haven’t got anything in there, have you?”
“Well I did put some things in there…”
“Yeah, you need to put a slab down or dig it into the ground
because obviously something’s gone in there and removed it all.”
“Yeah, there’s no food in there. Okay. All right then. That was
a week’s worth of squirrel feeding.”
“Yeah exactly.”
(Sound of bricks laying)
So, the next day we go to a big box store to get some bricks. We
lay them all around the base of the composter. The squirrels are defeated.
A few weeks later, I see a huge raccoon shuffling across the backyard.
It knocks the top off the composter and climbs in.
We drive back to the big box store and buy some flat, heavy bricks
to lay on top of the lid. We also buy a few bags of fertilizer, of
course because we still have no compost. I think, this is starting to
feel like work and to be honest – I find it disgusting.
(Sound of brick noise)
“So now, it’s even more challenging to do this.”
(Sound of dumping)
“Ewww. A lot of it is sticking to the pot, which is disgusting but
alright. Uhh, brick back up, auxiliary bricks, okay.”
Now that I had to move those bricks, I was less likely to run out
with just the dinner scraps, and we weren’t mixing the compost very
often, either. So, I tried to remind myself of why I started doing this.
For one, it seemed like a shame to throw vegetable scraps into a
plastic bag and send them to a landfill. Especially when landfill
space is so tight that some Canadian cities are shipping their
garbage to the U.S.
Plus, we have a garden, which could use the nutrients from the
compost. According to George Reimer, those nutrients stick
around a lot longer than the ones found in commercial fertilizer.
I knew all that, and yet, on a stinking hot day in July – and the
composter was stinking because we rarely turned it – I officially
stopped. For a while… for six months. Until recently, when my
guilty conscience prodded me out the door with a bowl of kitchen
scraps.
(Sound of walking in snow)
“We’ve got snow on the ground and a bowl of fresh vegetable
scraps. Umm, interesting. It’s about a third full so there must be
compost under there somewhere.”
Last time I looked, the container had twice that amount in it.
Which makes me think that most of the food has broken down into
something we can finally use on the garden. It gives me an
incentive to start over. Plus, in a few years, I’ll have to compost.
Ottawa will join at least 18 other Canadian cities where residents
are required to throw food scraps into a separate container, and
hey, if all else fails, there’s nothing like a new law to get you
motivated.
For the GLRC, I’m Karen Kelly.
Communities across Great Lakes region are suffering from an overabundance of Canada Geese. In many cases the solution is to chase them away. Some communities kill the surplus waterfowl and send the meat to food pantries. But in one Wisconsin community the unwanted geese are so full of PCBs the city has had to treat the birds as toxic waste. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Gil Halsted reports:
