The 100 Mile Meal: A Homegrown Thanksgiving

  • Reporter Dustin Dwyer found all the ingredients for his Thanksgiving dinner within 100 miles of his house, including the turkey (poor thing). (Photo by Dustin Dwyer)

Thanksgiving is about family, friends, and ridiculous amounts of food. But the food we buy can have a big impact on the environment. And a lot more people are starting to look for local ingredients to put in their meals. One movement encourages people to get all their food from within 100 miles of their home. Dustin Dwyer tried to find out how practical that could be for his Thanksgiving feast:

Transcript

Thanksgiving is about family, friends, and ridiculous amounts of food. But the food we buy can have a big impact on the environment. And a lot more people are starting to look for local ingredients to put in their meals. One movement encourages people to get all their food from within 100 miles of their home. Dustin Dwyer tried to find out how practical that could be for his Thanksgiving feast:


I like to look at labels on my food. I don’t care so much about the nutritional info, I just want to know where it came from.


But there’s a problem with that. Even if I know where something is packaged, I still have no idea where the actual ingredients come from. I mean, where the heck do they make partially hydrogenated soybean oil?


I have no idea. And so, for one meal, for the most important meal of the year, I decided to try to get all my food, and all the ingredients in my food, from within 100 miles of my apartment in Southeast Michigan.


If you’re impressed by my ingenious and creative idea, don’t be. I stole it from someone else. Alisa Smith and her partner James MacKinnon were on a 100 mile diet for a year, and they’re writing a book about it. I called up Alisa for some help.


Dwyer: “So my wife and I are going to do the 100 mile Thanksgiving, and I want to ask some advice.”


Smith: “Oh, great! For doing a single meal you picked a very good time to do it because it’s the harvest bounty, so that makes life a lot easier.”


I’m thinking, excellent, this could be a piece of cake. But I’m worried about a few tough ingredients, such as salt. Alisa says salt is a problem for a lot of people.


“I think in the end, you probably will find that salt isn’t available. And not being able t o make it yourself you might just say ‘okay salt is going to be an exception for us.'”


Ok, fine, but I still wanted to make as few exceptions as possible. I’ve got to have a challenge here, somehow.


That said, our menu would be simple: just turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and pumpkin pie. Turkey turned out to be easy.


“Roperti’s Turkey Farm.”


Christine Roperti has been living on her family’s turkey farm in suburban Detroit all her life. Farms like this one are getting crowded out more and more by suburban sprawl. There’s even a brand new subdivision next door to Christine’s place. There have been offers for her land too.


“Yeah, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I like the farm, and like raising my turkeys.”


I liked knowing that Christine actually enjoys this, and cares about it. It made me feel good. And that’s important, because I was also paying a lot more for her turkey than the store-bought stuff.


Anyway, I was flying high, and things were going really well. My list of exceptions was firming up, and it was mostly spices: salt plus all the spices for the pumpkin pie.


Then, while I was bragging at work about how I’d be able to get almost everything but salt for my local dinner, someone reminded me that there are actually salt mines under the city of Detroit.


Like a good journalist I looked into it, and ended up on the most absurd shopping trip of my life.


“Okay I’m headed over the Ambassador Bridge, going from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. They do have salt mines in Detroit, but they don’t sell that salt as food salt in the US, they only sell road salt. So in order to get food salt that’s made within a hundred miles of my house, I have to go to Canada.”


Because of some trade regulation I don’t understand, table salt from this mine can’t be commercially shipped into the US. So I ended up in a city I barely know, looking for a grocery store. I went into the first, and then the second without finding the right brand of salt. Then an hour or so later, in the third store…


“Finally! Windsor salt.”


So, I wasted a lot of fuel putting this dinner together. It’s probably still an improvement over what the Sierra Club says is an average two thousand miles of driving that goes into each ingredient for my usual dinner.


But here’s the thing: if all this local stuff is available, I think I should be able to get it at the grocery store down the street. I should probably let them know that, and let them know I’m willing to pay more for it. I mean, that’s better than driving to Canada for salt, anyway.


But making that happen would take a lot more effort, a lot more voting with my pocketbook, and a lot more than just checking labels.


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

Related Links

Bark Beetle Forest Fire Risks

  • The bark beetle (pictured) is native to forests in the Rockies. (Photo courtesy of the Colorado State Forest Service)

In much of the West populations of the bark beetle have exploded. Trees
are dying, and the risk of forest fires is huge. Some ecologists are
saying that global warming is responsible, but forests will survive.
Steve Zelaznik reports the risk of fire is forcing communities to balance fire
prevention, and ecological preservation:

Transcript

In much of the West populations of the bark beetle have exploded. Trees
are dying, and the risk of forest fires is huge. Some ecologists are
saying that global warming is responsible, but forests will survive.
Steve Zelaznik reports the risk of fire is forcing communities to balance fire
prevention, and ecological preservation:


(Sound of trail)


We’re surrounded by forest, mostly lodge pole pines. The bark beetle is native to forests in the Rockies. The landscape is a patchwork of green and red. The red trees have been
killed by the bark beetle. Jan Hackett with the Colorado State Forest
Service says many of the green trees are also infected:


“Well I’m just pointing to the pitch tubes, and those are fresh hits
from this year’s beetles. The beetles are flying right now. This is a
result of this year’s flight, a successful hit. This tree will be red
next year.”


This means the tree will be dead. Dominick Kulakowski is a biology professor at
Clark University. He says climate change has caused warmer temperatures so the beetle can survive the winter and spread, but he says insect outbreaks like these are normal, and
the forest will recover:


“There have been very extensive, very severe outbreaks of bark beetles
in Colorado long before Colorado was even a state. Large disturbances
are a normal function of the ecosystems of the Colorado Rocky
Mountains. So while we may look out on this and be concerned by the
amount of mortality, what we need to remember is this may be
unprecedented based on what we’ve seen over the past hundred years, but
that’s partly a function of our relatively short temporal perspective.”


From an ecological perspective, Kulakowski just isn’t worried about the
beetles. But the dead trees increase the risk of fire. And with homes
nearby, the forest can’t be left to burn.


Driving up a winding road to a nearby subdivision, I’m in the car with Barry
Smith. He’s the emergency manager for the adjacent Eagle County. He says
roads like these make his job difficult:


“This is one of those subdivisions like many of our mountain
subdivisions that, from a fire safety perspective, this is the only road
to get into our out of this subdivision, so if we have a large fire
here, you’re trying to get fire equipment in and get homeowners out at
the same time and that’s going to create a lot of problems.”


So government is forced to protect nearby homes from fire, and also
preserve the health of the forest.


Increasingly, governments are addressing the problem by clearing dead
trees. State and federal governments have thinned eighteen thousand
acres in Colorado. This compares to the seven hundred thousand acres
infected.


Rob Davis is the president of Forest Energy Colorado. His company
takes dead trees, and makes wood pellets to heat homes. He says an
opportunity exists to improve the health of the forest and make a
profit:


“This is an extremely valuable resource,
do we want to use it? You know if this goes into energy and displaces
fossil fuels, it helps global warming. It helps climate change that is
one of the problems that we have with these forests. So are we going
to keep the narrow point of view that says ‘Oh! It’s got to stay
exactly like it was historically,’ or do we want to open our mind and
say ‘We can actually use this to help global warming, we can use this
in cases as long as remember that first thing is the health of the
forest…’ we can use it.”


But removing dead trees may have ecological costs. A 2002 study by the
University of Colorado concluded that harvesting forests leads to soil
erosion, loss of nutrients, and warmer ground temperatures. Professor
Kolikowski says the effects of harvesting might be worse than the initial
disturbance.


“That’s not to say that harvesting or salvaging is inappropriate, we
just need to be clear about what it is we want to do and why.”


And local governments may not have the money to do it all… to curb the
population of bark beetles, protect homes from fires, and preserve the
ecology. Tom Fry with the conservation group the Wilderness Society
remembers work he did on the Front Range. In the ten-county area, it
would have cost fifteen million a year for forty years to do risk
reduction and forest restoration:


“I think one of the messages here is we won’t have that money. We’ll
never have that money. So we as a community, and that community
includes all of us, need to be hyper strategic and surgical in where we
look to apply what resources we have.”


For the time being, governments are choosing to use their resources to
thin the forests to reduce the risk of fire from the beetle.


The U.S. Forest Service (White River National Forest) just auctioned
the right for timber contractors to remove dead trees from another
thirteen hundred acres. The work will begin by the end of the summer.


For the Environment Report, I’m Steve Zelaznik.

Related Links

FIGHT FOR AMERICA’S LONGEST RIVER (Part 1)

  • Wing dams along the Missouri River force the flow of water to the center, scouring the bottom of the river. Environmentalists say the Missouri has been turned into little more than a big ditch for barges. They support management plans that restore habitat for wildlife. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Rivers have been the life-blood of commerce in the United States since the
nation’s beginning. In 200 years, the machines of trade have evolved from flat-
bottomed wooden boats to today’s steel-hulled river barges. The rivers link
America’s natural resources with the industrial cities that propel its economy.
Decades of damming and dredging have turned the big rivers into shipping
channels. But in recent years, competing interests have argued in defense of
other uses of the rivers. In the first of three reports, Kevin Lavery looks at how
those groups seek to balance the economy and ecology:

Transcript

Rivers have been the life-blood of commerce in the United States since the
nation’s beginning. In 200 years, the machines of trade have evolved from flat-
bottomed wooden boats to today’s steel-hulled barges. The rivers link
America’s natural resources with the industrial cities that propel its economy.
Decades of damming and dredging have turned the big rivers into shipping
channels. But in recent years, competing interests have argued in defense of
other uses of the rivers. In the first of three reports, Kevin Lavery looks at how
those groups seek to balance the economy and ecology:


Long before interstates and over the road trucking, America moved its goods on
the water. River barges carry just about any kind of commodity. They emit less
pollution than trucks and trains… and the river route is cheaper than both the road
and the rail.


The nation’s farms, coal mines and quarries depend on rivers like the Mississippi,
Ohio and Missouri to keep their products moving. Business is healthy on the
Mississippi and the Ohio. But on the Missouri, barges carry just a third of the
cargo they did 30 years ago. Many shippers say drought and overregulated dam
releases make the water levels too unreliable to plan the big hauls that bring in
the most profit.


Paul Davis runs Interstate Marine Terminals, 200 miles upstream from where the
Missouri River meets the Mississippi, near St. Louis. He ships and stores
fertilizer from his dock. But Davis says when the river runs low, barges are not
his best option:


“The real adjustment that I’ve made is going from river to rail.”


Logistically, the adjustment is easy. The Union Pacific railroad line runs just a
few feet from Davis’ dock. But it costs him about 15 dollars more per ton to move
goods by rail. Davis says river barges might be profitable again if old feuds over
water management would end:


“There’s business out there. It could come back if people quit fighting and start agreeing
and confidence would return to shipping on the Missouri River. But I can’t afford to wait
and see… I’ve got to make adjustments.”


The fighting puts business against the environment. Shippers want enough
water to move freight. But environmentalists want the river to rise and recede
like it did before the Army Corps of Engineers started changing it.


The conflict goes back to the 1930’s. Congress ordered the Corps to make the
river safe for barges. That meant clearing snags and sandbars from a 735-mile
stretch from Sioux City, Iowa to St. Louis, Missouri. The Corps also confined the
river with earthen levees. Opponents say it turned the Missouri into a
characterless ditch.


The Corps spends 7 million dollars a year to maintain the channel. Spokesman
Paul Johnston says despite the dwindling volume of river traffic, the Corps is
mandated to keep the river open:


“The Corps of Engineers, like any federal agency, does not have the option to pick and
choose which laws it’s going to obey and not obey.”


But critics say wildlife has paid for the Corps’ mandate. Over the years, dams
and channels eliminated a half a million acres of wetland habitat. Birds lost their
sandbar nesting grounds, and fish no longer found shallow backwaters to lay their
eggs.


Among the hardest hit animals is the pallid sturgeon. It’s a long, flat-nosed fish
that dates back to the T-Rex. It’s been around 70 million years, and for the last
17, it’s been on the endangered species list.


Chad Smith directs the Nebraska field office of the environmental group
American Rivers. He says the pallid sturgeon’s fate shows the whole river is in
jeopardy:


“When it starts to decline, you know, that kind of creature that’s so in tune with the
Missouri as it was, is an indicator that maybe something’s not right, and it’s going to be
the first thing to fall.”


So Congress told the Corps to take on a recovery mission. The agency spends
more than 50 million dollars a year to rebuild shallow water habitat for fish and
birds. The Corps hopes a water resources bill pending in Congress will increase
its habitat restoration budget to 80 million dollars.


In 2006, the Corps launched its most controversial restoration program to date. It
released extra water from a South Dakota reservoir to mimic the natural flood
pulse that occurs on the Missouri River every spring. That triggers the sturgeon
to spawn.


Conservationists herald last year’s man-made spring rise as a long overdue sign
of progress. But barge companies on the lower Missouri are upset. They say
the spring rise brings a drop in the river’s depth in the summer… which means
less cargo they’re carrying and less money they’re making.


For The Environment Report, I’m Kevin Lavery.


ANCHOR TAG: Tomorrow, Kevin reports on the commercial barge
industry’s concerns over the Army Corps of Engineers’ control of the big
rivers.

Related Links

FIGHT FOR AMERICA’S LONGEST RIVER (Part 3)

  • Finding a balance between natural habitat and commerce on America's rivers is causing problems. (Photo by Lester Graham)

When Lewis and Clark traveled up the Missouri River 200 years ago, they
recorded the abundant wildlife they saw along their way. Fur trapping was a
thriving industry on Frontier Rivers. But it took another 100 years of over-hunting
for the US to realize it was wiping out its wildlife. Today, conservation,
commerce and tourism all intersect on the nation’s big rivers. Each of those
industries relies on a steady supply of water. In the last of three reports, Kevin
Lavery looks at how all of those interests share – and struggle – over water:

Transcript

When Lewis and Clark traveled up the Missouri River 200 years ago, they
recorded the abundant wildlife they saw along their way. Fur trapping was a
thriving industry on Frontier Rivers. But it took another 100 years of over-hunting
for the US to realize it was wiping out its wildlife. Today, conservation,
commerce and tourism all intersect on the nation’s big rivers. Each of those
industries relies on a steady supply of water. In the last of three reports, Kevin
Lavery looks at how all of those interests share – and struggle – over water:


The Missouri River is known as the Big Muddy. Sure, it’s muddy at its mouth
where it joins the Mississippi River near St. Louis. But a thousand miles
upstream, the Missouri cuts a gleaming blue ribbon through Bismarck, North
Dakota. It looks like paradise to Mike Peluso… and with a broad smile, he rushes
his boat smack into the middle of it.


Peluso grew up fishing on this river. It’s a place brimming with history. Lewis
and Clark camped here in 1804. As he’s fishing, Peluso points to a frontier-era
fort that now sits within a state park:


“That’s actually where Custer started off, right up there before he went to his final… Here’s
a bite!”


Peluso lands a 4-pound walleye. It’s the most abundant fish species in the upper
Missouri system, and he wants to keep it that way:


“Just going to let her go down. You know, hopefully my kids at some point in time will get
to enjoy the same thing I just did. (SPLASH). Oh yeah… she took off. Perfect.”


Fishing on the Missouri River is crucial to North Dakota’s economy. In the 1950’s
the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River 80 miles north of
Bismarck. The formation of Lake Sakakawea gave rise to a 150 million dollar
annual recreation industry.


That industry largely exists because of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The
Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery breeds 80% of the state’s game fish.
There’s about 70 million walleye eggs in one building alone. But officials here
also care for fish that are never meant to be caught.


Rob Holm is with the Fish and Wildlife Service. He watches several pallid
sturgeons circling an 8,000 gallon tank. Each five-foot fish weighs about 60
pounds. The pallid has survived for 70 million years. But Holm says threats to
its habitat have made it an endangered species:


“If we can change things just enough to give them a fighting chance, I think it’s a good
thing. They’ve been around since the time of the dinosaurs. If we miss a beat on it now…
they’re not going to be there in 10 years.”


The pallid sturgeon was harvested for its caviar before it was federally protected.
But illegal catches still happen. Environmental groups see the pallid as a
barometer that gauges the overall health of the Missouri River. Chad Smith runs
the Nebraska field office of American Rivers:


“We lose the pallid sturgeon, that’s an indication that we may start to see problems with
the catfish and the paddlefish and the mallards and the bass, and then people are really
going to start screaming.”


The pallid sturgeon needs deep water to lay its eggs. In 2006, the Army Corps of
Engineers released extra water from a South Dakota reservoir to mimic the flood
pulse that cues the fish’s reproduction. It was a highly controversial act 15 years
in the making:


“I’m uncomfortable with the Corps playing God.”


Paul Rhode is with the national shipping advocacy group Waterways Council,
Incorporated. He says the artificial rise meant dropped water levels later in the summer.
That hurt commercial barge operators. Rhode questions the Corps’ methods:


“I hope there are studies going on to try to capture whatever it is that they’re doing to justify
having a spring rise. In past years it was to stimulate least tern and piping plover
populations, and then it was discovered that there was no science behind that. That was
just guesswork.”


The interior least tern and the piping plover are two birds that are also protected
by the Endangered Species Act. Spokesman Paul Johnston says the Corps has
evidence that its methods are working:


“Near Ponca, Nebraska we dredged out an old channel that had been closed off to create
shallow water habitat for the sturgeon and created an island. It was still being groomed
when the terns and plovers began nesting on it. We had to shut the bulldozer operator
down.”


The Corps says it understands the needs of all the different interests along the
Missouri River. That’s why it’s agreed to pay for an independent scientific study
of its habitat construction program. That study is expected to begin this fall. The
Corps says it’s still committed to trying to find a balance between nature and
business on America’s longest river. But barge owners, sportsmen and
environmentalists will try to tip that balance in their favor.


For The Environment Report, I’m Kevin Lavery.

Related Links

Greener Lawncare

  • Lawncare can be one of the most polluting and wasteful activities at a home. Simple actions can reduce the impact. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Polls indicate the majority of people want to do better toward the environment. One
of the most polluting activities at many homes is lawn care. Lawn sprinklers can use massive
amounts of water. And over-use of fertilizer can pollute nearby streams. Lester Graham looks at simple things you can do to reduce waste and pollution and still
have a green lawn:

Transcript

Polls indicate the majority of people want to do better toward the environment. One
of the most polluting activities at many homes is lawn care. Lawn mowers spew out
emissions that pollute at a higher rate than cars. Lawn sprinklers can use massive
amounts of water. And over-use of fertilizer can pollute nearby streams. Lester Graham looks at simple things you can do to reduce pollution and still
have a green lawn:


It figures that the day I went to talk to a turf expert about mowing and lawn care, it’d be raining.


“Well, we needed it. So, I guess that’s the good thing about it.”


Tom Smith is the Executive Director of the Michigan Turfgrass Foundation. He’s got
all kinds of recommendations for how to properly prep soil for beginning lawns, but we wanted
to limit this story to some simple, practical things we can do with an existing lawn to
reduce the impact to the environment:


“One of the first things and easiest things you can do is mow high. In fact, I tell most
consumers, most residential facilities, mow as high as you can set your mower.
Because, what that will do is you’ll get a better root system, you’ll get more shading
of that soil and you’ll have far less water loss.”


Smith works closely with the Michigan State University’s turf grass research
program. One of the things they’ve learned there goes against some of the advice
you might have heard in the past about watering. In research that’s been going on
since 1982, they’ve let Mother Nature take care of one plot. Another gets deep
waterings a couple of times a week, and a third gets daily watering, light rates, in the
middle of the heat of the day.


The plot that looks best year after year? The one that
gets light watering, daily during the middle of the day. Most of the water evaporates,
but it reduces the heat stress on the grass so it doesn’t go dormant and brown. And
Smith says it actually uses less water:


“In that research, we were able to reduce water use by about half by doing daily
watering at light rates in the middle of the day compared to that deep infrequent
watering.”


(Graham:) “Now, there are going to be some people who say ‘Look, I don’t want to
use water in a cosmetic way at all. Is there a grass that doesn’t use the kind of water
that most grasses we know do?”


(Smith:) “Actually, there is one of our grasses that we recommend called Turf Type
Tall Fescue. Turf Type Tall Fescue is our most drought-tolerant grass. In most
summers it will stay green without any supplemental water.”


And Smith says before you start spreading fertilizer on your lawn, you should get a soil
test to see exactly what you need. It’s an eight to ten dollar test that can be done by
your county extension office, and it’s good for about three years. If you put fertilizer
down without knowing, you’re probably adding to the phosphorous and nitrogen
pollution problems in the streams and lakes in your area and beyond.


Keeping your equipment running well also helps reduce pollution: an oil change in
the lawn mower, cleaning the air filter and sharpening your mower blades.


(Sound of grinding)


Mark Collins maintains the turf plots at Michigan State University’s turf grass
program. His crew sharpens their blades every third mowing, but they’re probably
mowing a lot more than you do:


“Probably a homeowner should at least once a month. Just keep the blade sharp.
That’s the biggest thing. If it’s a sharp blade, then it cuts the grass cleanly and you
don’t get a frayed edge on the grass blade.”


And Collins says a mulching mower is best because it cuts the grass blades into tiny
bits that help fertilize the lawn, and reduces the need for bagging your clippings.


So, using less water, planting hardy grass, using only the fertilizer you need, keeping
your machinery in good working order and buying the least polluting models all help.
But, there are soulutions, such as planting more drought resistant shrubs and trees
so there’s not as much grass to mow. And if you’re really adventurous, you
can get a manual reel mower, one with no engine. It just uses the energy you
provide by pushing it.


(Sound of reel mower)


For the Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

The 100 Mile Meal: A Homegrown Thanksgiving

  • Reporter Dustin Dwyer found all the ingredients for his Thanksgiving dinner within 100 miles of his house, including the turkey (poor thing). (Photo by Dustin Dwyer)

Thanksgiving is about family, friends, and ridiculous amounts of food. But the food we buy can have a big impact on the environment, and a lot more people are starting to look for local ingredients to put in their meals. One movement encourages people to get all their food from within 100 miles of their home. Dustin Dwyer tried to find out how practical that could be for his Thanksgiving feast:

Transcript

Thanksgiving is about family, friends, and ridiculous amounts of food. But the food we buy can have a big impact on the environment. And a lot more people are starting to look for local ingredients to put in their meals. One movement encourages people to get all their food from within 100 miles of their home. Dustin Dwyer tried to find out how practical that could be for his Thanksgiving feast:


I like to look at labels on my food. I don’t care so much about the nutritional info, I just want to know where it came from.

But there’s a problem with that. Even if I know where something is packaged, I still have no idea where the actual ingredients come from. I mean, where the heck do they make partially hydrogenated soybean oil?

I have no idea. And so, for one meal, for the most important meal of the year, I decided to try to get all my food, and all the ingredients in my food, from within 100 miles of my apartment in Southeast Michigan.

If you’re impressed by my ingenious and creative idea, don’t be. I stole it from someone else. Alisa Smith and her partner James MacKinnon were on a 100 mile diet for a year, and they’re writing a book about it. I called up Alisa for some help.

Dwyer: “So my wife and I are going to do the 100 mile Thanksgiving, and I want to ask some advice.”


Smith: “Oh, great! For doing a single meal you picked a very good time to do it because it’s the harvest bounty, so that makes life a lot easier.”


I’m thinking, excellent, this could be a piece of cake. But I’m worried about a few tough ingredients, such as salt. Alisa says salt is a problem for a lot of people.


“I think in the end, you probably will find that salt isn’t available. And not being able t o make it yourself you might just say ‘okay salt is going to be an exception for us.'”


Ok, fine, but I still wanted to make as few exceptions as possible. I’ve got to have a challenge here, somehow.


That said, our menu would be simple: just turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and pumpkin pie. Turkey turned out to be easy.


“Roperti’s Turkey Farm.”


Christine Roperti has been living on her family’s turkey farm in suburban Detroit all her life. Farms like this one are getting crowded out more and more by suburban sprawl. There’s even a brand new subdivision next door to Christine’s place. There have been offers for her land too.


“Yeah, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I like the farm, and like raising my turkeys.”


I liked knowing that Christine actually enjoys this, and cares about it. It made me feel good. And that’s important, because I was also paying a lot more for her turkey than the store-bought stuff.


Anyway, I was flying high, and things were going really well. My list of exceptions was firming up, and it was mostly spices: salt plus all the spices for the pumpkin pie.


Then, while I was bragging at work about how I’d be able to get almost everything but salt for my local dinner, someone reminded me that there are actually salt mines under the city of Detroit.


Like a good journalist I looked into it, and ended up on the most absurd shopping trip of my life.


“Okay I’m headed over the Ambassador Bridge, going from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. They do have salt mines in Detroit, but they don’t sell that salt as food salt in the US, they only sell road salt. So in order to get food salt that’s made within a hundred miles of my house, I have to go to Canada.”


Because of some trade regulation I don’t understand, table salt from this mine can’t be commercially shipped into the US. So I ended up in a city I barely know, looking for a grocery store. I went into the first, and then the second without finding the right brand of salt. Then an hour or so later, in the third store…


“Finally! Windsor salt.”


So, I wasted a lot of fuel putting this dinner together. It’s probably still an improvement over what the Sierra Club says is an average two thousand miles of driving that goes into each ingredient for my usual dinner.


But here’s the thing: if all this local stuff is available, I think I should be able to get it at the grocery store down the street. I should probably let them know that, and let them know I’m willing to pay more for it. I mean, that’s better than driving to Canada for salt, anyway.


But making that happen would take a lot more effort, a lot more voting with my pocketbook, and a lot more than just checking labels.


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

Related Links

Locavores Sprout New Way of Eating

  • Holley duMond's daughter Zoe enjoys a local harvest. (Photo courtesy of Holley duMond)

Eating grapes and green beans in winter isn’t all that
novel. We’re used to buying whatever we feel like all year
round. But some people are rejecting what’s convenient.
They’re going on a diet that means they can’t get what they
need from the supermarket. The GLRC’s Rebecca
Williams explains:

Transcript

Eating grapes and green beans in winter isn’t all that novel. We’re used to
buying whatever we feel like all year round. But some people are rejecting
what’s convenient. They’re going on a diet that means they can’t get what
they need from the supermarket. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams explains:


When the snow flies, most of us will trudge to the store in heavy coats.
But Holley duMond will just be walking out to her freezer.


(Sound of footsteps and freezer opening)


“These are our fruits, we eat a ton of blueberries throughout the winter.
And all of that is ratatouille and then there’s corn. And then underneath here is the
beginning of our meat stores for the winter, but that will fill up to the
top.”


Holley duMond has her hands full. She and her husband have busy jobs and a
3 year old daughter. They also have a basement full of mason jars. As the
Michigan harvests come in, they spend four days a week buying locally-grown
cherries and sweet corn and squashes, and chopping and cooking and canning.


duMond says yeah, sometimes people call them crazy. But she’s proud that
even in the winter, her family gets half of their diet from local sources.


Holley duMond says at first, she just felt local food would be fresher and
healthier. Then, she says she learned how far most food travels. Some
recent studies say your average piece of produce travels 1500 miles from
field to store. duMond says she worries about the environmental costs of
shipping lettuce from California, or apples from New Zealand or China.


“We do believe that every dollar that we spend is a vote, and so I think politically
we’re helping to change some of the bigger systems that we just don’t like
and don’t appreciate.”


duMond says for her family, it’s been a gradual shift. They eat local meat
and produce but they still drink coffee and eat chocolate that’s shipped in
from far away.


But some local eaters make food buying sound like an Olympic contest. James
Mackinnon and his partner Alisa Smith spent a year on what they call the
100-Mile Diet.


“We were absolutely 100% hardcore about it by the end. In our house and
crossing our plates, by the end of last year there was absolutely nothing
that hadn’t been produced from within 100 miles.”


And that means every meal, every glass of wine, every spice, except for
salt. The couple started their experiment during a long cold spring in
their Vancouver apartment. Their first attempts didn’t exactly work out.
They ate potatoes and turnips and kale. They lost 15 pounds in six weeks.
They pulled all-nighters canning hundreds of pounds of vegetables.


But Mackinnon says things really started to turn around. Their 100-mile
diet grew rich on trout and salmon, fuzzy melon, wild mushrooms and
pumpkin-flower honey.


“A whole year of eating unprocessed foods made from scratch, picked at their
seasonal peak. We felt fantastic for the entire year. The year of the 100-Mile Diet was almost certainly the most diverse diet I’ve ever eaten.”


Mackinnon says he found nearby farmers growing delicious rare varieties of
tomatoes and apples that wouldn’t be economical for supermarkets to sell.


The ranks of local eaters are growing. A similar group of 100-mile eaters
sprung up independently in San Francisco. They call themselves “locavores,” as in local
and omnivore.


And there are the 80 thousand members of Slow Food, a movement to defend traditional
foods and ways of cooking. They’re all firing back against one-stop shopping, but these
people say being truly devoted to local food is like an extra part-time job.


That’s because our food systems are not designed to be local. Rich Pirog
heads up the marketing and food systems program at the Leopold Center for
Sustainable Agriculture. He says after World War II, farmers were
encouraged to expand and specialize in just a couple of products such as
corn and soybeans:


“We’ve seen our food system become more specialized, food is traveling
farther distances, and as we have moved into the last two decades, we’ve
seen that shift to be even more global.”


Pirog says chances are, your supermarket apples are more likely to come from
China than your local orchard. He says pushing back against the global food
system is no easy feat, but he doesn’t think most locavores want to cut off
global trade:


“But what they’re advocating is, I would say, is an incremental approach where
in season we provide more of the food that we are able to grow.”


Pirog says reviving 10 to 20 percent of local food sources could boost local
economies.


So, locavores near you are canning food instead of buying cans because they
think it might just be better tasting and it might be better for the earth.


For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

LOCAVORES SPROUT NEW WAY OF EATING (Short Version)

There’s a trend among some food buyers. People are
signing up for a diet that means they can’t get what they need
from the supermarket. The GLRC’s Rebecca Williams
explains:

Transcript

There’s a trend among some food buyers. People are signing up for a diet
that means they can’t get what they need from the supermarket. The GLRC’s Rebecca
Williams explains:


These people are setting out to eat only foods that are grown and produced
near their homes. A lot of times that means tropical fruit, chocolate and
coffee are off limits.


Writers James Mackinnon and Alisa Smith went on what they call the 100-Mile
Diet for an entire year. The couple wanted to challenge themselves to eat a
diet more friendly to the environment.


“Are we doing greater environmental good by eating out-of-season organic
apples from New Zealand in the winter? I would argue that that’s not a
compromise we need to make.”


Mackinnon says he worries about wasting energy by transporting food from far
away.


Farm researchers at Iowa State University say there are two opposing trends
at work. There are more people demanding locally grown food, but at the
same time, imports of produce from countries such as China continue to grow
steadily.


For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Looking Back on the “Slick of ’76”

  • Officials placed containment booms around the barge. Most of them failed to prevent the oil from floating downriver, contaminating dozens of miles of pristine shoreline. (Courtesy of the NY State Dept. of Conservation)

30 years ago, an oil barge ran aground in the St. Lawrence River. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of thick crude oil coated the shoreline of northern New York state. The accident remains one of the largest inland oil spills in the United States. It’s a reminder that freighters haul millions of gallons of toxic liquids across the Great Lakes. And many people worry about another spill. The GLRC’s David Sommerstein talked to witnesses of the 1976 spill:

Transcript

30 years ago, an oil barge ran aground in the St. Lawrence River. Hundreds
of thousands of gallons of thick crude oil coated the shoreline of northern New
York State. The accident remains one of the largest inland oil spills in the
United States. It’s a reminder that freighters haul millions of gallons of toxic
liquids across the Great Lakes. And many people worry about another spill.
The GLRC’s David Sommerstein talked to witnesses of the 1976 spill:


It was really foggy that morning. Bob Smith awoke to two sounds:


“You could hear the anchor chains going down, and next thing we know
there was a young Coast Guard guy knocking on the front door.”


The Coast Guard guy had driven up, asking around for a missing barge.
Smith remembered the anchor chains echoing across the water that woke
him up. He went outside to look.


(Sound of walking outside)


Thirty years later, Smith lives amidst cozy cottages on manicured lawns in
the heart of the touristy Thousand Islands.


“Just right about straight out there. See where that boat’s coming up there
now?”


That’s where a barge carrying oil from Venezuela had dropped anchor after
running aground. That morning Smith watched crude as thick as mud drift
out of sight downriver:


“If you’re born and raised here on the river, you don’t like to see anything go
in the river that doesn’t belong there.”


The Coast Guard placed booms in the water, but the oil quickly spilled over.
It carried 50 miles downstream. It oozed as far as 15 feet into the river’s
marshes. Tom Brown was the point man for New York’s Department of
Environmental Conservation. He says the spill couldn’t have come at a
worse time for wildlife:


“All the young fish, waterfowl, shorebirds, furbearers, were coming off the
nests and were being born.”


Thousands of birds and fish suffocated in black goo. As images of
devastation flashed on national TV, the spill killed the tourism season, too.
It was a summer with no swimming, no fishing, no dipping your feet in the
water at sunset. Really, it was a summer with no river.


(Sound of river at Chalk’s dock)


30 years later, everyone still remembers the acrid smell:


“When I woke up in the middle of the night and I could smell oil, I was
afraid I had an oil leak in my house.”


Dwayne Chalk’s family has owned a marina on the St. Lawrence for
generations. Chalk points to a black stripe of oil on his docks, still there
three decades later, and he’s still bitter:


“The Seaway has done this area, well, I shouldn’t say that, it hasn’t done any
good. To me it hasn’t.”


The St. Lawrence Seaway opened the ports of the Great Lakes to Atlantic
Ocean freighters carrying cargoes of steel, ore, and liquid chemicals. It
generates billions of dollars a year in commerce, but it’s also brought
pollution and invasive species.


Anthropologist John Omohundro studied the social effects of the 1976 oil
spill. He says it helped awaken environmentalism in the Great Lakes:


“The spill actually raised people’s consciousness that the river could be a
problem in a number of areas, not just oil.”


Groups like Save the River and Great Lakes United began lobbying for
cleaner water and safer navigation in the years after the spill:


“If a vessel carrying oil or oil products were in that same type of ship today,
it would not be allowed in.”


Albert Jacquez is the outgoing administrator for the US side of the St. Lawrence
Seaway. The 1976 barge had one hull and gushed oil when it hit the rocks.
Today’s barges are mostly double-hulled and use computerized navigation.
Jacquez says a lot has changed to prevent spills:


“The ships themselves are different, the regulations that they have to follow are
different, and the inspections are different. Now does that guarantee? Well,
there are no guarantees, period.”


So if there is a spill, the government requires response plans for every part of
the Great Lakes. Ralph Kring leads training simulations of those plans for
the Coast Guard in Buffalo. Still, he says the real thing is different:


“You really can’t control the weather and the currents and all that. It’s definitely going to be a
challenge, especially when you’re dealing with a real live incident where
everyone’s trying to move as fast as they can and also as efficient as they
can.”


Critics question the ability to get responders to remote areas in time. They
also worry about spills in icy conditions and chemical spills that oil booms
wouldn’t contain.


(Sound of river water)


Back on the St. Lawrence River, Dwayne Chalk says the oil spill of 1976
has taught him it’s not if, it’s when, the next big spill occurs:


“You think about it all the time. Everytime a ship comes up through here,
you think what’s going to happen if that ship hits something.”


Chalk and everyone else who relies on the Great Lakes hope they’ll never
have to find out.


For the GLRC, I’m David Sommerstein.

Related Links

Putting a Price Tag on Urban Trees

  • Volunteers with the Greening of Detroit plant about 4,000 trees each year in the city. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)

Money might not grow on trees. But researchers at a think tank devoted to saving America’s forests say dollar signs can be attached to all those oaks, maples, and sycamores. They’re hoping their environmental calculus can help convince local governments that it’s in their best interest to protect the trees they still have, and to plant new ones.
The GLRC’s Sarah Hulett reports:

Transcript

Money might not grow on trees. But researchers at a think tank devoted to saving
America’s forests say dollar signs can be attached to all those oaks, maples, and
sycamores. They’re hoping their environmental calculus can help convince local
governments that it’s in their best interest to protect the trees they still have, and to plant
new ones. The GLRC’s Sarah Hulett reports:


If trees could unionize, they’d be able to put together a pretty compelling case for hefty
compensation packages from the cities where they work. That’s the general idea behind a
series of reports put together by the advocacy group American Forests. The organization
looked at the amount of tree-covered land in several US cities and for each city, it put
together a dollars-and-cents case for their protection.


Trees in Detroit got a recent appraisal from the group. Trees shade more than 31 percent
of the city. Besides helping to keep the city cool, the report says Detroit’s trees take out
two million pounds of pollution out the air every year. That’s worth about five
million dollars. And it said if the city’s trees were gone, the city would have to build 400
million dollars worth of storm water drains. That’s because trees act as buffers during
heavy rains, and help control flooding.


Cheryl Kollin is the Director of Urban Forestry at American Forests. She says the bottom
line for politicians and city planners is money. She says they’re not going to save trees
just because they’re nice to look at:


“And I think it’s really building that awareness that trees — as wonderful and beautiful as
they are for their aesthetic qualities — it’s so important to connect the ecological
properties that they have and the economic benefits they provide. Because it really is going to
be that economic argument that makes decision-makers do things differently.”


Like a lot of cities, Detroit relies on a non-profit group to raise money for urban
reforesting. Today, the Greening of Detroit is planting trees around a recreation center in
one of the most polluted areas of the city, where diesel soot from heavy truck traffic
contributes to a high asthma rate.


Rebecca Salminen-Witt is the director of the Greening. She says this is a critical time for
this struggling rust belt city:


“We want to see some development in Detroit. We want to prove to outsiders that good things are
happening here in a visual way. Any development is good development, right? And, you know, that
is simply not true.”


Witt says as the city seeks to rebound, the focus can’t just be on new buildings. She says
it’s important that planners and developers figure trees and green space into Detroit’s
future and she says the American Forests’ economic data and satellite images will help
her make that case:


“Having those statistics, and having that visual representation of this is what it looks, you know, here’s your
heat island effect with trees and without trees.”


That visual picture of tree loss proved especially powerful in the nation’s capital.
American Forests surveyed Washington, D.C.’s trees in 1999. Its report said the city lost
nearly two-thirds of its tree cover between 1985 and 1997.


The Washington Post published the before-and-after satellite photos. They showed huge
swaths of black gobbling up what a dozen years earlier looked green from far above the
earth. It looked like a cancer had wiped out the healthy parts of the city whose slogan is
the “city of trees.”


“That got the attention of a variety of people. One person in particular was Betty Casey.”


That’s Dan Smith of the Casey Tree Endowment Fund. The group was established thanks
to a 50 million dollar contribution from Betty Casey, the widow of developer Eugene B.
Casey:


“And I believe the contribution was if not the largest gift ever for environmental action,
certainly one of the largest.”


That sort of cash gift is a dream for most cities. But the Greening of Detroit’s Rebecca
Salminen-Witt says she does expect to be able to use the information from American
Forests to raise money. And she says it will also help her small organization figure out
which parts of the city are the most in need of trees:


“We have to decide where we’re going to allocate our resources. And having a tool that makes
allocation of resources in an area where there’s a great need easier, or make more sense, is
really important to a non-profit organization.”


Witt says her first pitch will be to the corporations and civic leaders planning a
redevelopment along Detroit’s riverfront. Witt says the plans she’s seen call for some
trees and green space. But armed with satellite pictures and economic data, she hopes
she’ll be able to make the case for a few more trees.


For the GLRC, I’m Sarah Hulett.

Related Links