Mendolonium

After he’s slurped down the last drop of apple juice, after he’s polished off the last morsel of string cheese; Thomas goes over to the trash can to throw “away” the empty juice box and the barren cheese wrapper.

If you live in Pasadena, Altadena, Glendale, South Pasadena, Sierra Madre, or San Marino this is “away”:  the Scholl Canyon Landfill.  Think about the name for a moment, the Scholl Canyon Landfill.  Beginning in the early 1960s the communities of the San Gabriel Valley along with the city of Los Angeles took a canyon in the foothills above Glendale and Eagle Rock and began to fill it with page after page of old Los Angeles Times, an unfathomable number of dirty diapers, water bottles galore, and everything else that we, as a community, have decided we no longer have any use for.   Our next door neighbor tells of how when he first bought his house he would have to drive down into the canyon to dump a load of trash.   Now Jeff, who has been to the landfill a couple of times cleaning our yard and house of all the items left by the previous owner, tells me that the canyon is essentially no more, filled to the brim.  The city of Glendale estimates that the landfill will be full by 2020.  It is not clear where our trash will go “away” to after that.

Last year Jeff and I talked about making a New Year’s resolution to try and go “zero waste”; to throw nothing away.  We quickly realized that doing so was a radical life change, something we couldn’t accomplish overnight.  Over the past year, we’ve made many small changes to eliminate waste.  Last week we made a change which might seem trivial to some, but to us was significant.  Those of us with children know the value of having convenient, healthy, snack food; two of our favorites are string cheese and apple juice boxes.  But, you know what…an apple and cheese slices packed in a reusable container are just as convenient and don’t fill up a canyon.   There will be no more string cheese, each piece individually sheathed in plastic, each group of eight bagged in another casing of plastic bought in this house.  There will be no more cute little boxes of juice, each with their own straw, each “family” of four sheathed in a plastic wrapper.  Giving up string cheese and juice boxes won’t save the world from environmental degradation, but it is a few more things that won’t go in a canyon to hang around long after we are gone.  I also hope that I am teaching our children that there is no such thing as throwing it “away”.

I’ve got plenty of food stored in the house to sustain us (and my sister*) through an earthquake, zombie siege, or comet strike – whatever apocalypse du jour may come, but there are some products that you just can’t store – like cream.  When I went to make some much desired yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting this afternoon I realized that the cream (called for in my frosting recipe) in my fridge was far, far beyond cream at this point.  I contemplated going out to the store, however, organic cream is at a minimum a 1 mile walk + train ride and then back again or a car trip away.  I thought about going without frosting as well, but that just wasn’t going to satisfy my craving.  I didn’t want to waste the time and energy going to the store and I didn’t want to go without.   So I did what we’ll probably all have to do more of in the future – I made do.  Thomas and I got together and came up with a fabulous, creamless  recipe.  Should you ever find yourself without cream, but with a hankering for some chocolate frosting here’s what you can make do:

Ingredients:

• 6 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 8 Tablespoons (1 stick) butter, cold
• 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 2 Tablespoons milk

Directions:

1. Melt the chocolate using either a microwave set to 50% power (stirring every minute) or a double boiler.  Stir until smooth and then set aside.
2. Mix the butter, sugar, and milk together until light and fluffy.  An electric mixer on a moderate to high speed works best.
3. Slowly pour in the chocolate (while mixing) and mix until frosting is smooth and homogeneous.

Yield:  Enough to spread a thick layer on 16 cupcakes.  If I was going to pipe the frosting on I would likely make a double batch.

Today’s lesson is that in a world of constrained energy and resources I need to remember to make do with what we have more often.  And the bonus is that I came up with a fabulous frosting recipe that I never would have made otherwise.  Sometimes making do is making it better.

*I assume Sara Ann would definitely want to hang out here during the end of days, and besides, we’ll need someone to nanny for the kids while we rebuild a new utopian world.

I’ve never gone hungry, never wondered how I would procure my next meal, never had to deny my children dinner but I know that every day I walk among those who have.  I can’t imagine many things worse than not being able to provide for one’s family; it is a physical ache – the desire to take care of those we love.

I went to the grocery store this week and outside stood a man with a sign “Family of 4.  Living in a motel.  Please help.”  He wasn’t much older than I was and he looked shy, embarrassed.  He didn’t call out to the people bustling in and out of the store.  He just stood there.  I’ve never given money to anyone on the street.  I’ve certainly had the opportunity, but I remember what a family member who has been homeless once said “Don’t give them any money.  They’ll just use it for drugs and alcohol.”  I am sure that many people do, but still, I want to help.  I can donate to food pantries and support politicians who talk of helping the homeless but the machine that is our economy keeps on spitting people out with no where to go.  Over the past year I’ve seen the number of people begging on the streets of our city increase.  There is now typically someone stationed at every corner of the freeway interchange nearest our house.  Some of those people, I am suspect of:  what is the young man with the nice bike doing begging?  Others, like the woman who is probably 40 but looks 70 and talks to herself, I feel deeply sad for.

One day soon, Thomas is bound to realize that there is something not quite right about the man outside of the restaurant with a cup asking for change.  He’ll ask “Who is that man?” and I wonder how to answer.  We walk by homeless persons all the time.  In fact, there are a couple of guys that have a  spot on our way to/from preschool that greet us regularly, commenting on our super stroller.  We respond with a “Good morning” and Thomas has never seemed to think it out of the ordinary that the men sit on the curb with shopping carts piled high with all their worldly belongings.  Perhaps, it is because we often seem to look like “bag people” ourselves; walking about the city with groceries spilling out of the stroller baskets and  bags hung over the handle.  He will ask though and I don’t know how to tell him that there are people with no homes, no mother to bake them cookies, no bed to sleep in.  Because when you think about it; the fact that there is anyone in this country at all that doesn’t have a place to go if they want one is wrong.  Just plain wrong.

As I left the grocery store, I went up to the lonely man and gave him a loaf of bread out of my bag.  He smiled and thanked me.  I walked away with a faint smile and a question in my mind of how to do more.  Modern society may not be kind, but we as individuals and communities can be…I’m just not sure how to go about it yet.

It feels somewhat hypocritical to me to buy commit to raising as much as our food as possible, purchasing organic, sustainably produced, local, and/or used food and goods, and then go off and buy a big tube of commercially produced toothpaste, laden with artificial sweeteners, potentially tested on animals, and packaged in non-recyclable packaging.  The “natural” alternative didn’t seem much better.  It takes rather like baking soda and costs $4 for the privilege.  So I decided if I was going to go natural, I was going to go cheap and package-free and make my own.  Here’s the recipe:

Homemade Toothpaste

• 6 T baking soda
• 30 drops peppermint oil
• 20 drops tea tree oil
• enough water to form a paste

Mix all ingredients and store in an airtight jar.

My opinion:  a definite keeper.  The toothpaste tastes fine, it costs pennies a jar, and it took less time to make than a trip to Target to pick up the store-bought stuff.