For those of you “Locavores” (people who like to buy their food as locally as possible), then this article from the New York Times might interest you.

I’m interested in trying to buy locally, watching my carbon footprint for items (I’d love to start my own garden) and trying to find delicious meat substitutes that I will love and never tire of.

That being said, only eating locally to save energy may not be as significant as your everyday activities:

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me.

Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy.

Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy.

That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure.

Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits.

Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

SO….COULD YOU LIVE WITHOUT A FRIDGE?

I’ve pondered getting rid of the fridge altogether. BF and I lived without it for a month, and while it was inconvenient at times, as we like to cook in advance, it could be possible.

What we did was place the fridge on a switch and at night before sleeping, we’d move everything into the freezer and shut the entire appliance off.

Everything stayed fairly cool in the freezer (especially if you leave a large freezer block in there to help keep things cool), and nothing, save for delicate temperature-sensitive items, went bad.

SO….COULD YOU LIVE WITHOUT “COOKING”?

I suppose if I went vegan and raw, I could “live” and “cook” without cooking on a stovetop for example, but I’d need to be able to use my immersion blender and dehydrator.

That being said, I’d really miss my fluffy white rice the most.

Still, it’s an interesting thing to consider — cutting down our energy consumption when we cook and being as efficient as possible when we cook, rather than wasting energy without thinking.

We could always use smaller appliances like toaster ovens to cook our food on pans rather than heating up a whole oven and only putting in a small dish to cook or heat up.

Or a two in one: cook your food inside your rice cooker — you steam your food and make fluffy white rice at the same time.

What do you think?

Just a friendly reminder to everyone who uses reusable shopping bags (thank you!) to please hot wash them on a regular basis.

This seems to only apply if you buy raw meats.

Tests on shoppers’ bags revealed half contained traces of E.coli, a lethal toxin which killed 26 people in Scotland in 1996 in one of the worlds worst food poisoning outbreaks.

Scientists also found many were contaminated with salmonella.

Researchers blame the fact that consumers do not realise reusable bags need to be washed regularly at high temperatures to kill off bugs deposited by raw meat packaging.

They warned the levels of bacteria they found were high enough to cause a wide range of serious health problems and even death.

The results showed the hotter the climate, the worse the contamination.

“Consumers are alarmingly unaware of these risks and the critical need to sanitise their bags on a weekly basis.”

A poll revealed 97 per cent of shoppers who used eco-friendly bags never washed or bleached them. (Source)

Even though we haven’t been buying any meat lately, I wash them once a week to be on the safe side.

Utrecht, Netherlands, the 4th largest city in the country.

33% of all their transporation is done on bikes.

I am not sure if they get the same amount of chill, snow, ice & wind as we do here in the winter, but this is a great option for 3/4 of the year!

I wish we had something so bicycle-friendly.

Via Superforest, shared by Erin in my Google Reader Shared Items

THIS, is re-using at its best.

Use Instructables for the instructions on how to fill up your toilet tank with water that you are going to be using to wash your hands, ANYWAY.

You can reuse what you were going to allow to drain away, for another purpose.

Via Re-Nest

…Instead of having to heat up your shower water using an electric heater, it introduces friction and vibration to the tiny fibers embedded within these thin pipes, creating piezoelectricity that warms the water, so by the time the water spurts out from the top, you’ll be enjoying a hot shower. The electricity generated is also capable of powering a waterproof touchscreen controller that counts the number of minutes that you’ve been in the shower and the amount of water used.

Via Ubergizmo