HOLIDAY
gifting
Shopping, Wrapping
&Giving H
SARAH WENTZEL-FISHER oliday time can be a celebration of abundance, or a time of extreme excess and waste. This year as you celebrate look for ways to reduce your budget and waste, reuse creatively to dress up your gifts and events, and recycle old stuff into clever decorations or presents. BY
According to the Use Less Stuff Report, edited by Bob Lilienfeld, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day Americans generate 25% more waste per week than during the rest of the year. We produce an additional 1.2 million tons per week, or an extra 6 million tons, for the holiday season. Some other interesting statistics from this report are: • According to the USDA, Americans throw away 25% of food purchased— 52 billion pounds each year, or 170 pounds per person! When you add in food waste from restaurants, retailers and other commercial purveyors, the University of Arizona estimates that the real amount wasted is closer to 50%. • If every American family reduced holiday gasoline consumption by just one gallon a week, the result would be an annual reduction in greenhouse gas production of 13 billion pounds (6.5 million tons) of carbon dioxide. • If American households reduced their holiday ribbon usage by just 2 feet, the result would be a savings of 50,000 miles, enough ribbon to circle the Earth twice. Do a little fall cleaning in preparation for the holidays. Clean out closets and drawers, keeping friends and family in mind who you plan on sending cards or gifts. Is there a box of scrap paper or fabric you can use for wrapping gifts or making decorations? Can you re-appropriate last year’s gift cards by cutting them in half, or gluing the front to a blank piece of recycled color paper? Here are some suggestions from the EPA website on really easy ways to reduce your holiday footprint.
BECAUSE THE PLANET
MATTERS!
• Thousands of paper and plastic shopping bags end up in landfills every year. Reduce the number of bags thrown out by bringing reusable cloth bags for holiday gift shopping. Tell store clerks you don't need a bag for small or oversized purchases. • Wrap gifts in recycled or reused wrapping paper or funny papers. Also to save or recycle used wrapthe remember ping paper. Give gifts that don't require gift o f much packaging, such as concert tickets FOOD or gift certificates. • Send recycled-content greeting cards to reduce the amount of virgin paper used during the holidays. Remember to recycle any paper cards you receive. You can also try sending electronic greeting cards to reduce paper waste. • About 40% of all battery sales occur during the holiday season. Buy rechargeable batteries to accompany your electronic gifts, and consider giving a battery charger as well. Rechargeable batteries reduce the amount of potentially harmful materials thrown away, and can save money in the long run. • Turn off or unplug holiday lights during the day. Doing so will not only save energy, but will also help your lights last longer. • Approximately 33 million live Christmas trees are sold in North America every year. After the holidays, look for ways to recycle your tree instead of sending it to a landfill. Check with your community solid waste department and find out if they collect and mulch trees. Your town might be able to use chippings from mulched trees for hiking trails and beachfront erosion barriers. • To help prevent waste from cutting down and disposing of live trees, you can buy a potted tree and plant it after the holidays.
Flash in the Pan: Holiday Gifts for an uncluttered
KITCHEN B
ARI LEVAUX ased on the variety of ice cream scoops on the market—1,529 available from Amazon alone—one might conclude the world faces a crisis of improperly or inconveniently excavated ice cream. I think it's more a symptom of our love affair with cooking gadgetry. Today's kitchens are bigger than ever, and can easily accommodate toys like turkey fryers, pizza stones, bread-making machines, and drawers of little hand tools. Every day we're inundated with images of picture-perfect food, and some people actually believe that an adjustable tip on their bulb baster, or a chef jacket with their name embroidered on it, will help them reach the next level. But at some point, even in the most super-sized of kitchens, the returns from accumulating this stuff will eventually diminish. Keep that in mind as we prepare for another seasonal round of buying each other more crap to deal with.
BY
Every piece of cooking gear you give someone effectively takes away space from their kitchen. If he or she doesn't have a lot of space to work with that can mess with their cooking flow. Just because, in the moment of presentopening, someone is pleased at the sight of a new set of egg-poaching baskets, doesn't mean it's in his or her best interest to keep it. What I want for Christmas is an uncluttered kitchen, with just the tools I need to do what I do. And when I'm at home, in private, what I do is pretty simple. I'm not after style points, or photos to post on my Facebook timeline. Food usually goes in a bowl ungarnished, spiced with some form of capsicum and greased with cheese or mayo if desired. I'll take good ingredients over kitchen gear any day. I can improvise from there. What I can't do is move a dough mixer out of the way every time I want to chop an onion. I can't untangle the spatula from the avocado slicer in a clattery, cluttered drawer. I can't waste my shelf space with gravy separators and pancake portion pourers. I'm not saying folks should go ill-prepared into meal prep. If you frequently enjoy soft-boiled eggs at home, you should probably own one of those medieval-torture-device-looking things that constricts a ring of blades around the tip of the egg with an easy squeeze of the handle, scalping off the shell and allowing your spoon easy access to the slimy innards. I do not need one of these devices, hence I do not have one. But given how often I write about food, I am admittedly shocked at times by how primitive my kitchen is. Until recently I was opening cans with a jackknife. I still don't own measuring spoons. My whisk gets more action as a mallet for a certain little drummer boy than I ever give it. Not one piece of my silverware matches another. But nobody leaves my table unfulfilled. No one can taste that the meal was cooked on an electric stove, or that my knives are dull.
Knives, in fact, can serve as a barometer for someone's obsession with kitchen tools.You can spend a lot of money on them, or almost none. Any knife can be kept sharp, or get the job done dull. If you are really into fancy knives, you probably have at least one ice cream scoop. If you're a pro, you pretty much need to spend money on knives. Otherwise, you really don't. It's interesting that Japan and Germany, our World War II enemies, seem to have the world market for fine knives cornered. Japan, at least, I can understand, because it has awesome food. But Germany? Japanese chefs say they need yanagi, usuba, and deba knives in order to properly float my boat of sushi, and I fully support them. But I also know full well that if I tried to use those knives at home I'd probably just hurt myself. I don't need knives like that. My favorite knife ever is one I got in Thailand. It's rectangular and very thin, with a wide, flat tip I can use as a spatula. I picked it up while on a motorcycle—taxi tour around some of Bangkok's widely dispersed open-air kitchensupply markets. My driver was helping me find a cro hiin, Thai for "big-ass stone mortar and pestle." I said cro hiin so many times that day it remains one of the few bits of Thai I remember, along with hello and thanks.
December 2012 12
• Have a create-your-own-decorations party! Invite family and friends to create and use holiday decorations such as ornaments made from old greeting cards or cookie dough, garlands made from strung popcorn or cranberries, wreaths made from artificial greens and flowers, and potpourri made from kitchen spices such as cinnamon and cloves. • Consider the durability of a product before you buy it as a gift. Cheaper, less durable items often wear out quickly, creating waste and costing you money. • When buying gifts, check product labels to determine an item's recyclability and whether it is made from recycled materials. Buying recycled encourages manufacturers to make more recycled-content products available. Holidays should be about quality, not quantity. Consider buying a little less than you think you need, and you might be surprised at how far you can make a little stretch. Plus you might be pleasantly pleased when you have less to clean up afterwards and when you look at what you have spent for the holidays. Celebrate the abundance of good company, intangible blessings, what you can do for others rather than what you can give them, and what you already have—HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
REDUCE
your holiday footprint!
We finally found my cro hiin at a stall in a market underneath an elevated highway. I bought both sets the guy had, because they were absolutely perfect: well-crafted from smooth, heavy stone. They were the size of tea kettles and about 20 pounds each—5 for the pestle, 15 for the mortar. Flying home, I didn't want to check them for fear they'd bounce around and destroy each other, and the rest of my luggage. But the airline wouldn't let me carry them on the plane, fearing I might use one to smash open the cockpit door. Luckily, airline personnel could see what was at stake and helped me package them appropriately. When I finally got my mortars and pestles home, I put one set straight on my counter, where it proved well worth the trouble. It pulverizes everything, large and small, hard and soft. The heavy pestle does all the work, and the mortar doesn't budge. The bowl is deep enough that stuff doesn't fly out and all over the kitchen. It consumes a bit of space, but it's worth it. That cro hiin remains one of the most important tools in my primitive kitchen. I gave the other cro hiin to friends as a wedding present. What better way to symbolize a marriage than the grinding action of pestle in mortar? As for presents to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, solstice, Kwanzaa, the retail economy, or whatever they're calling it these days, remember: Your friends probably already have an ice cream scoop. It's called a spoon.
GIVE the
necessary utensils!
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HOLIDAY food
DRIVE
S A N TA F E C O - O P L O C AT I O N Your donation of non-perishable food items will help the Food Depot provide meals to those in need.Thank you for your kindness! Donation box by Register 1 at the Santa Fe Co-op Location.