Beam Reach

A New Kind of Diet

Last Monday, Val and I, plus guests Bob and Kathy Francis, were graciously treated to dinner with Beam Reach students and instructors cooking at S1 at the Friday Harbor Labs. I’d been requested to bring a salad to complement the delicious veggie lasagna, garlic and cheese bread, and apple crisp. No problem – I’ve been living on salads for years. I love the fresh ingredients and creativity options a salad provides. Salads can often be low-calorie, too, which is great for one who has had to diet for years. Val says that I’m a recipient of the “thrifty gene” which supposedly was devised for early (wo)man to eat when food was plentiful and store extra food as fat reserves to be used when times became lean. Unfortunately, most of us no longer live in lean food times, but we thrifty-geners still have to carefully monitor what foods we eat and how much of it we consume. So salads have become my potluck saving grace…….

At dinner that night I had an interesting conversation with a Beam Reach student named Emily. She’s from Philadelphia, and comes from an area familiar to me because of some of my relatives hailing from the same region. Emily and I became engaged in a sustainability conversation, with the basic question being “How can we live more sustainably on a daily basis?” Our talk centered on transportation, fossil fuels, hybrid automobiles, flex cars, and even becoming “carless” (a move our daughter Laura has recently made) instead of “careless” with our precious energy options. I left the dinner that night convinced that I needed to do more than things like driving my Prius, urging guests to conserve water when they visit, buying organic foods and using eco-cleaning products.

That night, after my low-water bath, I picked up the Sept./Oct. issue of “Sierra”, a publication of the Sierra Club. An article by Seth Zuckerman titled “My Low-Carbon Diet” caught my eye because it related directly to my discussion with Emily on the issues of living in a sustainable way. With the subtitle of “From gas gluttony to fuel fitness in three weeks”, I read quickly to see how Seth had learned how to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide he contributed to the earth’s atmosphere.

With the help of a California-based climatologist and energy expert, Seth sampled three carbon dioxide “diets”, and aimed at: the daily average of 122 pounds/American carbon dioxide emissions; the 24 pounds of the average worldwide carbon dioxide emissions; and the 9 pounds that would not raise carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere. Doing things like driving a gas-guzzling <span class=”caps”>SUV </span>for a week and giving up on riding his bike or taking the bus didn’t even get the energy-conscious Seth near the American excess average. It’s well worth reading the article to see how he amusingly tried a high-carbon diet. During the second week, Seth tried to get his carbon dioxide emissions to the average of the world. He changed his lightbulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents, among other things, and he came out well below the worldwide average. Finally, he visited a friend who managed to live off the grid with the help of solar photovoltaic cells and hydroelectric help. Unfortunately his friend Michael couldn’t get his carbon emissions down to what the earth can absorb, regardless of his simple lifestyle.

I, like Michael, am trying to stay on a sensible low-carbon diet, one planned step at a time. Those apples in the tasty dessert Monday night were hand-picked by Jason’s wife Wendy at a Beaverton Valley farm. Using local produce is a small step, but such steps minimize dependence on fossil fuels and help in living a bit more sustainably. It’s a diet worth trying!

*Note: interested in trying this new diet? Check out sierraclub.org/sierra/diet.

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