Green Girl Talk

The revised text of the lecture, back for your edification.

All right. We’re here to talk about periods. Who hates getting their period? Who was told by their mother the first time they got their period that it was a curse, that it would be the bane of your existence, that you now had to suffer for the rest of your life, or until you got pregnant or menopause, those blessings of female existence.
But wait. This lecture is supposed to be about the environment! What does this have to do with it? Well, a lot. For one, if you aren’t even comfortable talking about your period, you’re going to have a problem with most of the alternatives I’m going to outline. The reason we even ended up with the products most women use today is that women were uncomfortable with their bodies, uncomfortable with talking about them, and uncomfortable with finding out the facts. Not to mention, willing to let themselves suffer when it came to their periods. We expect it to suck, and therefore it does.




So let’s talk “feminine hygiene.” Disposables have only been widespread since the 1930s. The only way they became popular was that they allowed women to drop money in a jar on the counter without speaking to the clerk. Kotex introduced the equivalent of the disposable pad in 1921, while the self-adhesive pad wasn’t introduced until the 1970s. Before that, women used rags, fabric, wads of cotton, sponges, whatever worked best, and usually washed and reused the same rags each month. There were belts, suspenders, or sanitary panties with hooks or tabs to hold pads in place, because tight fitting underwear is a recent trend. For thousands of years, women have used reusable pads that they likely made themselves, and no one seemed to mind.
So how did we get stuck on disposables? Well, for years, women have been made to feel ashamed and dirty about the natural functions of their body. Early advertisements told women that disposable pads could help them hide their problems by disposing of the evidence. The same theory seems to persist in today’s advertising, when we’ve even gotten to the point of pads with “silent” packaging so the other women in the bathroom won’t realize you’re opening a pad. Our society expects us to hide our periods and pretend nothing is happening- like we’ve got some kind of terrible disease. If we’re buying “sanitary” products, we must assume we are unsanitary. Whatever embarrassment you feel probably came from negative advertising. Periods aren’t discussed openly. Very few of us had positive first periods. The usual response is, “oh, now you get to spend the rest of your life “inconvenienced” once a month.” Likely this has an effect on our periods- how much of PMS is really irritation that for five days you have to continue to deal with the world when you’d rather stay in bed all day eating chocolate and sleeping?
Many other cultures celebrate a girl’s first period with a party and gifts. Others hold menstruation to be a time for meditation and reflection, when women can take a break from regular life. Our culture still seems to think menstruation is a punishment from God. Long ago, women’s cycles followed the cycles of the moon, often menstruating during the dark of the moon and ovulating during the full moon. Even now, women with irregular periods are sometimes advised to leave a light on while they sleep to emulate the light of the moon- which will regulate their periods. This is known as the Dewan effect.
Tell me- what’s unnatural about your own blood? Knowing your own body and being aware of your cycles gives you self-confidence, especially the first time you observe all aspects of your cycle and are not only able to predict the exact time you will get your period, but feel when you ovulate, and, amazingly enough, this can also improve your health and destroy some of those symptoms normally associated with periods- fear, pain, agitation, etc. A positive outlook can go a long way. It’s no big deal if someone knows you have a period. Are you afraid they’ll find out you’re a woman?
Disposable pads are made of wood fiber, polypropylene, and polyethylene (#5 and #4 plastic). Tampons are made of a cotton rayon blend with a polypropylene cover, unless you buy those which are all cotton or have a cardboard applicator. In a woman’s lifetime she can use over 15,000 sanitary pads or tampons, adding up to about 250 to 300lbs of waste. There are 85 million women of menstruating age in America, throwing away about 13.5 billion pads and 6.5 billion tampons per year (2001). Can you even picture 13.5 billion pads? These fill landfills and clog the sewer systems, and can take over 500 years to degrade. Over 170,000 tampon applicators were collected along US beaches in one year.
In addition, both tampons and pads can contain traces of dioxin, a carcinogen. This is left over from the bleaching process, and over time can accumulate in the system, causing, surprise, cancer. Have you ever noticed how the ingredients aren’t listed on a box of tampons? Tampons also put you at risk for Toxic Shock Syndrome, which occurs when bacteria build up in the vagina from the fluid absorbed by a high-absorbency tampon. The FDA uses research provided by tampon manufacturers to tell the public that tampons are completely safe- even though there are no federal standards of quality or absorbency that could determine which are less likely to cause toxic shock.
Now for some solutions. You could start with all organic non-chlorine bleached tampons, though that does nothing to solve the waste problem. The cost is about the same or a little more than regular tampons. There are also reusable options. If you feel the need to use a reusable coffee cup in the morning, there is no reason not to use reusable pads or a tampon alternative. These include cups like the Keeper or Diva Cup and natural sponges. The Diva Cup is a small silicone cup that collects blood and is emptied when full. It usually can stay in up to 12 hours, and will last 10 years if properly cared for. The come in different sizes, to accommodate a variety of vaginas. The initial cost is $35, which over ten years amounts to about 29 cents per month. Natural sponges are animals that live on the ocean floor, which are dried out and cleaned and can be reused for about six cycles. They are, however, dead animals and have to be scraped off the ocean floor, which is not exactly an environmentally friendly option.
Reusable pads come in an amazing variety of options. You can purchase them from one of many female run companies such as Glad Rags or Lunapads. A starter kit costs anywhere from $30 to $150. Or you can make your own out of scrap fabric. They are usually cotton with a terrycloth liner; some also have a piece of nylon for extra protection. They come in all shapes and sizes and colors and if you make your own you can of course customize for the best fit. They’re bigger than normal pads because they wrap around, but they’re also more breathable and are highly recommended to women that have problems with frequent irritation or infection, which can be caused by the plastic backing of disposable pads.
There are always issues with any choice. Just look at tampons- in some countries they’re sold with little plastic finger covers so that women don’t have to touch themselves. That sounds strange until you realize that some countries don’t sell tampons with applicators. You don’t have to make the switch all at once- people will start by using reusables at night or at home, which can cut over 1/3 of the waste. Yes, you have to clean them yourself; yes, you have to get over touching your own blood. People will see them and wonder. Reusable pads will get stains, but if you soak them in cold water and wash them the stains will be minimal, and stains do not mean they are dirty. They make special bags so you can carry them around during the day, though Ziplocs work just as well. You can generally wear them longer than disposables because the cotton is more absorbent (and also less likely to leak). You really only lose from 2tbsp to one cup of fluid during each cycle. Plus, you never get the adhesive stuck to your hair.

“To make the switch from disposables to reusable products requires an attitude change from being able to throw away the mess (or is it the evidence?) of our menses and perfume and deodorize at the same time, to accepting the reality of this natural part of our bodies.”

I also wanted to bring up, at least briefly, birth control. I never used to discuss this in my lecture because, well, for a long time I thought the benefits of not getting pregnant outweighed the downsides of birth control. But as there are alternatives, and birth control becomes more and more of an environmental issue, I wanted to at least mention it.
There are two reasons this topic is important for girls. One, like pads and tampons, there is an environmental concern in regards to birth control. There have been a lot of rumors circulating in regards to hormones ending up in our water supplies, and whether these are all true or if we really have to worry yet, no one seems entirely sure. It’s typically safe, when it comes to pollution, to err on the side of less pollution is better.
The second, and this has been subject to even less research, is that birth control in its many conventional methods has not been proven to be entirely safe for all women. Most methods haven’t been out for a long period of time, and several have been pulled from the market after they were discovered to have negative effects on our systems, such as Norplant, and suspicions have been raised about many of the other forms- though no one has bothered to figure out what exactly all the side effects are.
I’m not going to go extensively into alternatives, because this is an area where you have to choose for yourself. Some people don’t seem to have the same bad reactions to hormones as others, and some people have a harder time counting days and paying attention to their own bodies. And sometimes accidents just happen. Believe me, I have contemplated going back on regular birth control for the convenience more than once. But I am one of those people who can’t tolerate hormones in my system. Even aside from the risk factor, I do not personally like to be dependent on pills to take care of my body any more than I like being dependent on pads made of plastic that come from the drug store. If there is a more localized alternative, that gives us control over our own bodies, and puts the knowledge of how they work back into our own hands, then that’s the option I’m going to take.
When it comes right down to it, the real question is, do you love your body? One of the most radical things you can do, for yourself and for the environment, is to care about yourself, and to be attuned to what’s going on. I mentioned before that with practice you can literally feel yourself ovulating. That kind of power can change your life. And if you care about yourself, and your body, you’re going to treat it right- and that means not tormenting it by trying to shove your period to the side, and trying to hide from the simple fact that you are a girl and you menstruate and I am here to tell you this is beautiful and amazing.
And, to not lose sight of the theme of this lecture, I strongly believe you can’t love the planet while you’re hating yourself. Look at the damage we do to the environment and how much of it has to do with how much we just don’t care about its effects on ourselves- thousands of kids get asthma every year from power plants, but we let it slide- thousands of people get cancer from pollutants in the air, in the water, and we do nothing… because we don’t know how to love ourselves, dirty and chaotic and imperfect animals that we are. If you can change that, you’ll be surprised how quickly everything else falls into place.

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In Defense of Food

I recently finished Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. In it he argues that eating well is actually relatively simple, once you cut through the combined forces of the food industry, food scientists, and the media (which is maybe not so easy to do). I thought at first this book was not going to be as good as his last few (how could you top Omnivore’s Dilemma?) and in a way it’s not. It lacks the narrative that drives Omnivore’s Dilemma, the actual human drama of searching for a meal- something that we can all, on a very intrinsic level, relate to.

Though In Defense of Food is based more on science than human interest, it remains profound in that it is really a culmination of Pollan’s work to date. Starting with the story of the deeply symbiotic relationship between humans and certain plants in The Botany of Desire and progressing through how we get those plants to our plate in Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan finally comes full circle in his latest book, looking again at our relationship with plants from the biological perspective of nutrition, and combining this with how the way we raise our plants affects the nutritional quality of our food. It is worth reading if only to see these pieces fall into place. A quote:

“Health is, among other things, the product of being in these sorts of relationships in a food chain… It follows that when the health of one part of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the other creatures in it. If the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk from them.”

In addition, the book provides up to date information about the fallacies of nutritional science that will have you throwing all your other “nutrition” books out the window- and rightfully so, as it has always seemed absurd to eat by attempting to figure out the nutritional content of food, when for thousands of years people have got on by eating based on food combinations their culture has worked out, over thousands of years. The olive oil/ tomato combination, for example: olive oil makes the lycopene in tomatoes more available, but when it comes down to it, who the hell cares? The two work well together, and people have survived for centuries eating those two foods in combination. As Pollan says:

“You would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy. And while it is true that most of us unthinkingly place the authority of science above culture in all matters having to do with our health, that prejudice should at least be examined. The question we need to ask is, Are we better off with these new authorities telling us how to eat than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted?”

Really, as he concludes, you only need nutritional science if you are eating industrial, processed foods, which don’t have much in the way of nutrition- unless you extract it from something else and add it in. His rules for eating well are sensible and don’t require a calculator, or much in the way of label reading, because when it comes down to it, if it has a label, it’s probably not something you want to be eating. I most enjoyed the rule of thumb, don’t eat it if your great grandmother wouldn’t have recognized it as a food, as this is one of my personal rules of thumb. He means, of course, if you took your great grandmother to the grocery store and handed her a tube of Go-Gurt, or whatever the hell it’s called- would she recognize it as a food?

Probably not. And maybe, neither should you.

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King Corn, Pt II

Among the many, many things we discussed last night after watching King Corn- in what seems to be a constant and never ending discussion of the food system, and eating, and what to do about it all- one thing in particular stuck out. It’s all damnably complicated.

And that’s just it: a hundred years ago food came from the farm, to you, without a lot of steps in between, and food was, well, food. Not food plus 30 unidentifiable ingredients. Bewildering does not even begin to describe the number of food choices we have, not to mention the complexity of a system that moves food all over the globe to your plate, with a dizzying array of steps in between. This is why movies like King Corn focus on one thing, like corn- and even then can’t fit more than a small percentage of the issues into one film.

But I was struck last night by the context the filmmaker put this in. In many places, people have given up on trying to make sense of the overwhelming complexity of the food system, and taken matters into their own hands: joining coops, building gardens, right there in their backyards, even in cities, discovering alternative ways of growing and raising food that make sense for both us and our environment. Essentially, this is what all of us who protest “the system” are doing- taking things back into our own hands, making them into a manageable size, and handling them on a person or community sized scale, where we can make decisions that are best for the people in that area, and not- well, I’m not even sure who’s benefiting from the way we’re making decisions now.

That’s really the devilish thing about the mess we’re in, and, at least in my opinion, a large part of why there’s so much apathy toward doing anything to change it. When faced with something as complex as our current food system, it seems completely impossible to create any change. The web of cause and effect is too dense to untangle, and pulling one string leads to yet another knot of issues and tangles. You can’t blame farmers, who are just as trapped as we are, and are trying to keep their families fed just like the rest of us. You can try and blame the consumer, but it’s not like consumers stood up and said, yes! Give us refined sugar and nutritionless food! Destroy our environment and our health! Not only are consumers often not given much choice in the foods available for purchase, but they’re also bombarded on all sides by the mixed messages of the media, who can’t seem to decide from day to day what’s “best” to eat. And if you try and blame the corporations, someone will inevitably counter that they wouldn’t be making all these unhealthy food products if we weren’t buying them (though they spend an awful lot of money convincing us we want them).

It’s enough to make anyone throw up their hands in defeat. How can we ever get ourselves out of this mess if we can’t even look at the whole thing at once? Well, after our conversation last night, I’m prepared to offer at least one way out of the labyrinth. The beauty of this way out is that it is small, manageable, and widely variant depending on who and where you are: and that, in itself, is part of the solution, because diversity is what makes the world go round. It was trying to make everything the same that got us into this mess in the first place.

Step One: What do you value? What do you really, deep down, value, above all else? Your life? Your health? The lives of your loved ones? Once you know the answer to this question, you can answer every other question accordingly, and define your goals. Is cheap food, for example, still valuable if it compromises your health? Or is cheap food the ultimate goal?

Step Two: What are you going to do about it? You decide that you want high quality, nutritious food that will maintain the health of yourself and your loved ones. You know that this sort of food is whole food, not manufactured food products with their diverse array of unknown ingredients (which include any number of suspect chemicals), you know that food grown with consideration for the environment and the soil also happens to be higher in nutritional content (well, if you didn’t know that you do now), and you know that food grown this way is also less likely to be sprayed with toxic chemicals, and if it’s grown locally, will maintain more of its quality in freshness.

All right, you know all this, so what are you waiting for? You don’t know where to get it? Well, the food system isn’t offering it- and you could ask the supermarket owner, or the CEO of the food company, or the government for it, but that’s no guarantee- and more likely absolutely nothing will change. Or, you could go to the source: the land. Which is a little easier to do through the medium of the farmer. If there isn’t a farmer? Do it yourself. And before you start going on about time and money, I’ll ask you again: what do you value? What’s worth giving up, if the thing at stake is your life?

Of course, eating like this means large corporations can't make a profit off your hunger. If it turns out a more traditional diet is healthier after all, and they can no longer sell novelty food products, where does that leave them? Not to mention that whole foods come without packaging, and when grown locally don't have to be transported long distances, and when grown sustainability don't require massive inputs of petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers- but that's really just the icing on the cake.

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King Corn

Most likely I should have posted this before we showed the movie, but better late than never.

King Corn

A definite watch for anyone interested in how our food system truly functions (ie, poorly). It's on netflix, as well, though if you buy it these nice fellows will get some money out of it. They based their work on Michael Pollan's investigation of the corn economy in Omnivore's Dilemma, though they actually went out to grow an acre of corn and try to find out what happened to it. Watching the reactions of everyone last night, most people are disgusted to find out all the problems with corn: how hard it is on the farmers, most especially, how it, along with other commodity crops, has destroyed the family farm, how cheap corn has lead to confinement lots for cattle (and cheap, fatty grain fed beef), how cheap corn has lead to the availability of cheap sweeteners, including high fructose corn syrup, which provide empty calories, little to no nutritional value, and are proving to be more and more deleterious to our health... well, we've talked about all these things on this blog before. Watch the movie!

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Totally Disgusted

Seriously, that's the last time I buy something without reading the label.

So I was in the grocery store, and decided to get some nuts or something to keep in my desk drawer, because I'm a grazer and like to eat more or less constantly throughout the day, and what's better than some healthful, high protein nuts? Only when I was standing in the store I saw roasted, shelled sunflower seeds, which have always been a weakness, and I pounced.

Later on, sitting at my desk eating some seeds, I happened to look upon the label of the jar. Now, you'd think, the ingredients of roasted sunflowers seeds would be roasted sunflower seeds, and maybe salt and a little oil or something. But no. The ingredients of the sunflower seeds are as follows:

shelled sunflower seeds, salt, sugar, modified corn starch, monosodium glutamate, torula yeast, corn syrup solids, paprika, spices, hydrolyzed soy protein, natural flavor, onion & garlic powder.

Ok, I can handle onion and garlic powder. Corn syrup solids? Strange things I can neither pronounce or identify? Let's wiki some of these and figure out what they are:

monosodium glutamate = MSG

"USE Torula, in its inactive form (usually labeled as torula yeast), is widely used as a flavouring in processed foods and pet foods. It is produced from wood sugars, as a by-product of paper production. It is pasteurized and spray-dried to produce a fine, light grayish-brown powder with a slightly yeasty odor and gentle, slightly meaty taste." -wikipedia

"Hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP, is produced by boiling cereals or legumes, such as soy, corn, or wheat, in hydrochloric acid and then neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide. The acid hydrolyzes, or breaks down, the protein in vegetables into their component amino acids. The resulting brown powder contains, among other amino acids, glutamic acid, which consumers are more familiar with in the form of its sodium salt, monosodium glutamate, or MSG. It is used as a flavor enhancer in many processed foods." -wikipedia

Natural flavors, of course, can mean almost anything. Thanks, Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, purveyors of sunflower seeds.

This is another example of how we can't just eat whole foods anymore, they have to find all kinds of strange things to ADD to the foods, because otherwise the corn refiners association would go out of business. Well, they can stuff it. I'm not buying any more corn syrup coated sunflower seeds. Seriously.

Serves me right for not reading the label, I suppose. How do most people shop?

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Waste Not, Want Not

An intriguing article: Click here.

Waste is a unique concept.

It really only came into use within the last century. Prior to that point, everything that wasn’t used more or less decomposed. Except, you know, pottery. And rocks and things.

But things are no longer so balanced. Even when we produce biodegradable materials, we produce them in such quantity that they can’t possibly be reabsorbed into the natural ecosystem. Take the so-called biodegradable plastics they’re producing now. Mostly they just break down into really tiny pieces, which is not actually biodegrading so much as- well, as getting really small. But all those tiny, tiny bits of plastic are still there- and what’s worse, they get eaten by tiny little creatures and then passed along up the food chain. Even to you.

Don’t believe me? Take mercury, for example. Mercury is a great example of why I get really irritated when people start the natural vs. artificial argument. “But mercury is natural!” they say. Yes, well, mercury is naturally occurring in the ground. It is not natural for it to be dragged up to the surface in massive quantity and pumped back out into the air. Yes, a stubborn person (and I know many) could even argue plastics are natural- they’re made out of petroleum, which is technically a natural substance. But plastics do not spontaneously occur in nature, we rearrange the molecules of petroleum to produce them. Therefore they are not natural, by dint of their rearranged chemical structure.

At any rate, mercury, in the small quantities that it exists in nature, is fine and dandy and does its thing. But when released in large quantities into the air- mostly from industrial sources- it falls back down to the earth in rain, where it flows into rivers and streams and eventually the ocean, and is absorbed by the plants in the water, which are in turn eaten by fish and other organisms, which are eaten by bigger fish, which are eaten by us. And on each step upward the quantity of mercury increases- because a big fish eats a lot of little fish, all of them contaminated. So when we eat a big fish- well, it's why you get those mercury warnings on seafood.

Plastic, at least for me, is even more horrifying. The numbers of how much plastic is currently in the environment are unbelievable. In the last fifty years humans have produced something on par with 1 billion tons. And it will never, ever, go away. At least not in any amount of time we can comprehend. And all of that will slowly move up the food chain, into our bodies, and remain there after we die. Pleasant thought.

So now we have all this waste, and nothing to do with it except wait for it to overcome us. But we (humans) are perpetrators of this mess we’re in (literally). We could stop producing plastic at any time. Oh, I realize this thought sounds horrifying to most people, and the typical response I get is a very mature, “Not-uh!” But we started making it, didn’t we? What’s keeping us from stopping?

Or we could keep going, and wait for the day when our own mountain of waste comes crushing down on top of us.

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Sweet... Surprise?

Recently there have been a slew of commercials on TV paid for by the Corn Refiner’s Association, “the national trade association representing the corn refining (wet milling) industry of the United States” (http://www.corn.org/). These ads are meant to disprove the ever-growing rumors that high fructose corn syrup (hfcs) is responsible for the spate of obesity and health problems plaguing our country. They fail to mention that the flux of hfcs into the market was immediately followed by the flux of cases of obesity… insisting instead that hfcs is all natural and healthy, with the caveat that it is consumed in moderation.

That’s all well and good. I’m a big proponent of moderation. Personally, I probably consume about a cup of sugar (200 grams)… about once a month. That’s mostly used for baking cupcakes. But then again, I’ve been aware of the problems of sugar consumption for some years now, ever since a waiter friend came home and told me he’d had a customer who was on a no-sugar diet. Intrigued, like the health nut I am, I started looking into the issues surrounding the consumption of sugars. Here are the basics:

Many foods, particularly fruits, naturally contain sugar known as fructose. Others, such as vegetables and grains, contain varying degrees of other, typically more complex sugars, including glucose, sucrose, and starch. Sugar, as in the crystallized stuff from the store, is typically derived from sugar cane or sugar beets, which are boiled, after which the liquid evaporates, leaving behind sucrose, which crystallizes. What I would call natural sucrose is lumpy and kind of brownish; what the FDA calls natural sucrose is bleached (usually with phosphoric acid or calcium hydroxide) and processed with charcoal, usually from ground animal bone, to make the superfine sugar you’re used to seeing from Domino.

High fructose corn syrup, and this I’m getting directly from the Corn Refiner’s Association, is made from corn, which is first soaked in sulfur dioxide, then processed into fructose and glucose using a variety of mysterious sounding ingredients and processes (check it out). Now, the FDA may call this natural, but by definition arsenic is also natural. I personally wouldn’t go about eating that. I say anything that is processed beyond recognition should at least be subject to a few raised eyebrows.

It’s quite possible that hfcs actually is ok for you, if, as the commercials say, you consume in moderation. However, one soda can contain over 13 grams of the stuff. And that’s presuming you only have the one soda. Hfcs is also found in ketchup, yogurt, bread, candy, peanut butter, processed baked goods, crackers, most beverages… well, try finding something packaged in the grocery store that doesn’t have it. Go ahead. I wish you luck.

In addition to sneakily finding its way into most processed foods, high fructose corn syrup is also harder for us to digest. Different studies suggest different things, but keep in mind that many of these studies are paid for by ye ole Corn Refiner’s Association. The truth is, sucrose, ie sugar, breaks down in acidic environments, like your stomach, making it fairly easy to digest. Hfcs is designed not to break down in acids, hence its use in salad dressing. I’m going to let you put two and two together here.

Most people like to be very wary where these health things are concerned, and wait for about nine million studies to be conducted before they conclude one thing or another. Therefore, no one has conclusively linked hfcs to obesity, and it could be that indeed, in moderation, whatever that is, it won’t hurt you. I, however, prefer to figure people got along perfectly well for millions of years without eating highly refined foods, and what’s good enough for them is good enough for me. The suspicious sounding ingredients involved in the processing of corn into yellowish goo are enough to keep me away.

Do the research, and decide for yourself.

Sugar Coated (from the San Francisco Chronicle)
Sweet Surprise.com
Corn Refiner's Association
Wiki on High Fructose Corn Syrup
Wiki on Sugar

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