Every time I walk into the grocery store lugging my assorted collection of shopping bags I am hopeful. Upon entry I anxiously scan to see if others shoppers are carrying a collection of bags as well. So far, since the beginning of the new year, it’s been a futile search. I know there must be others out there who bring their own bags but I just haven’t seen them.

When I made my new years’ resolution to bring my own shopping bags, it took me almost a year to make good on that resolution. I could never remember to take my shopping bags with me to the store. It would hit me when I was checking out. This would happen many more times until I figured out that I should put my bags in the car. Then when I got to the store it would take me several more times before I would remember to take them with me when I got out of the car. And then, after I had actually used them and brought groceries home in them, it would take me several more times to remember to put them back in the car again. The short story is free plastic bags are a hard habit to break, and no one helps you to remember to bring your shopping bags.

Plastic bag use is unconscious. No one thinks twice about taking a shopping bag to the store to bring the things that they’ve purchased home. The stores automatically provide shoppers with free bags that advertise their store. Some stores even insist on bagging your purchase, so they know you have indeed, purchased the item. A free bag with purchase is a right for every consumer. It is a deeply ingrained habit in America’s consumer culture and is a modern convenience that is completely taken for granted.

Plastic grocery checkout bags are probably used on average for about fifteen minutes at the most, and then they are thrown out. At least at my experience that’s how long it takes me to get home from the grocery store. According to an article on WorldWatch Institute’s website, Americans throw away some 100 billion polyethylene plastic bags a year, and only 0.6 percent of plastic bags are recycled.

Plastic bag use is one of the most wasteful, hazardous, environmentally expensive and totally correctable habits modern humans have, and in reaction, cities like San Francisco last year have resorted to a plastic bag ban and other countries like Ireland charge a plas tax of twenty cents per bag used.

I think we should be creative and start a new holiday tradition. In February, one automatically thinks of Valentines, in March its shamrocks and in April it should be shopping bags. On Earth Day April 22, we should all bring our reusable shopping bags to the store. If everyone, for one day, brought their own shopping bags just think how many plastic bags would not be used and not dumped in the land fill, or not become liter in our forest and streets and not be a threat to our wildlife. It would be a lot of bags. It could catch on and people might remember. Earth Day April 22nd – BYOB, bring your own bag.

Thank you for Shopping

The essay by Jeffrey Goldberg, "Selling Wal-Mart, Can the company co-opt liberals?" tells the story of big business public relations spin. The fictional story that Chris Buckley tells in the movie "Thank you for Smoking" is the real life story of Wal-Mart and the real Leslie Dach who is the executive vice president for Wal-Mart corporate affairs and government relations office.

Goldberg writes an in depth report about how Wal-Mart is trying to "scrub its muddied image" by hiring a people with "ethical ambidexterity" such as Leslie Dach, who has had professional as well as personal association with environmentalism and democratic causes. His investigation and visit to Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas give you a very good picture of the immense economic muscle that Wal-Mart wields and the ominous corporate culture that dominates it.

Regardless of the PR spin anyone could put on this liaison between an environmentally conscious democratic public relations man and Wal-Mart, it is always about money in the end. Morality has nothing to do with it.


Goldberg, Jeffrey. “Selling Wal-Mart –Can the company co-opt liberals?” The New Yorker 2 April 2007, 28 February 2008 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/02/070402fa_fact_goldberg

"Why I Write" by Joan Didion

Didion, Joan. "Why I Write." The Writer on Her Work. Ed. Janet Sternberg. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980. 17-25.

In the essay, "Why I Write" by Joan Didion, she explains her writing as a coping mechanism and professes that the lack of the ability to grasp the abstract is a handicap. I was put off her smug attitude that the pictures in her head "tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you...what's going on in the picture." But with a closer read, setting aside my own fears on writing and my ineptitude with grammar, I realized what she was trying to get at was her connection to and comprehension of the world. For her, it is the lyrical sound of words as they flow and the sensory perceptions of the world around her that reflect and flow back to create meaning. Perhaps it is the only way someone who plays grammar by ear can do it. From my abstract artist perspective, it has given me insight into the mind of a writer and the words they write.

Garrison Keillor distracted by moral rhetoric

I am a great fan of Garrison Keillor and have often listened to "A Prairie Home Companion" with pure delight at his wit and self deprecating pronouncements about Catholics and Minnesotans. I can relate coming from a Catholic family, educated in a Catholic school and living in Alaska. But I was a bit confused as to his point in his essay till the very end."We're failing our kids"(No Child Left Behind has plenty of flaws, but throwing it out because it's a Republican plan is morally disgusting.)p1-2.(www.Salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/01/30/education/print.html)

I think he gets distracted by his rhetoric and reduces this complex issue to a sound bite of Republican versus Democrat. He makes alot of assumptions, pronounces moral judgements and ends with a prayer to St. Michael. It must have been a bad day.

Virtual Beef Tallow...yum!

"Why the fries taste so good? by Eric Schlosser was a very interesting read.
This essay is an in-depth look at the American icon of fast food, the McDonald French fry and the incredible story of J.R. Simplot’s rise from eighth grade drop-out to multibillionaire powerhouse and the technology, science and social circumstances that got the potato to grow in the Idaho desert and become the mega rock star of the food world.

The story of J.R. Simplot is an amazing tale and the epitome of the whole American dream idea of dogged determinism, innovation and unlimited resources to exploit. You have to admire a man who has accomplished that much. It is those types of people who move in the entrepreneurial spirit that are the innovators of progress. But within the same thoughts of awe and admiration, I wonder when it is enough? It seems by the consumer culture we live in today the answer is “it’s never enough,” economic growth or profit or fries, we just can’t get enough.

I ‘m not really surprised by the revelations of the flavor industry. I think science can break anything down into its component parts and all be labeled as a volatile chemicals, but has certainly brought a new light to the way I read and interpret ingredients.


The science and conveniences of modern life has eliminated much of the “doing” of life. You no longer have to slave over a hot stove to get a tasty meal. It’s great in this fast paced life to have fast meals. But I think that in losing the physical act of making things for yourself; you lose a connection, a satisfaction or accomplishment and perhaps maybe the reason why you do what you do. Why do we eat McDonald’s fries? because they taste good.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All American Meal. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 111-113.

What are you eating?

It is difficult to “go to the matt” with Pollan’s essay Unhappy Meals when it confirms a lot of my general beliefs about food, science and western culture.

He begins his essay by taking apart many of the assumptions we currently have about food and all the studies, statistics and science that we accept as truth. Just because its science, it doesn’t mean it is true and he illustrates this point repeatedly from citing the conflicting conclusions by the prominent organizations of The Institute of Medicine and Harvard, to the flawed data used in the federally financed Women’s Health Initiative and to science itself. He points out that “scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool (that) can mislead” and especially when taken out of context in complex organisms such as the human. Most things are often more than the sum of their parts and the simplified parts and pieces science of nutritionism has very limited value in meaning without context.

It is pretty clear that the western technological advances of man have far exceeded his physical and mental ability to evolve and keep up. We have solved the problem of feeding ourselves and now we can’t stop. Food is more than sustenance, it has become entertainment, a hobby, a TV network show (The Food Channel), an obsession. We have excelled at producing and extracting food, but haven’t physically evolved to handle it. With diabetics in my family the analogy by a nutrition expert, that “we’re in the middle of a “national experiment in mainlining glucose” “was a striking mental image for me. Diabetics need to stay away from sugar, so in order to enhance flavor, many sugar-free products compensate by increasing the fat content. Fat, by the way, gets turned into sugar in the body. But it said sugar-free.

Western culture in American has no historical food culture to fall back on. It’s too young a country; there are no rules or boundaries, everything is bigger and better and there is more of it. That is the mindset, that’s what we were built on and what people from other countries come here for. The traditional American meals ; bacon, eggs and potatoes for breakfast, hamburgers and fries for lunch and meatloaf and mash potatoes for dinner were meals for the working farmer family. We no longer physically work for our food, but it is our tradition to eat like we do. We need to make some new traditions.

I think Michael Pollan has some very fine rules of thumb about food and eating at the end of his essay, but they are still someone else’s rules. It has made me think even more about what I chose to eat and what I chose to believe. But ultimately in the end, after all this rhetoric, it is down to the individual, because really it’s up to you what you put in your mouth.

Pollan, Michael. "Unhappy Meals." The New York Times nytimes.com 28 January 2007. 11 January 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html.

Learning how to rant and rave

UAA English 214 - Persuasive Writing - Little did I know that this would mean going public on the second day of class.