The Green Thing....

So, I am watching an episode of Oprah yesterday....which I admit was only because I saw that Julia Roberts was on it, I know...shallow. Anyway, I had actually DVR'd it a week ago and it was the "Earth Day" episode so it was all about living Green. Now you know this is like the "in" thing to be.....green, right? I am not one of these types that gets all gung-ho into anything really, except blogging (haha). Really though, I am concientious of the environment. I truly want to make the world better and healthier, the problem is how do people afford it. Let me back up. The first segment of the show talked about how horrible our food is and how we should buy organic everything. Great. I would love to, can you lend me an extra 'grand' every month so that I can afford it? Most average parents out there would love to feed their children organic foods free of pesticides and growth hormones. I have a son who is allergic to peanuts and suffers from really bad allergies and asthma. I firmly believe that eating healthier foods would help that situation for him but when I compare eggs for instance.....$1.35 for regular eggs, $3.25 for free range, brown, organic eggs....well, there just isnt any way for me to justify that. Chicken and Beef too.....an extra $3 minimum for the better meat. It really is unfair. I could go into my whole conspiracy theory about the FDA and Government trying to keep Americans fat and unhealthy but I wont get on that soap box today. In defense of the wealthy "guests" on Oprahs show, they did give a cool recipe for a veggie wash that rids your "non-organic" veggies of most of the pesticide residue. I plan on trying it.....

So, the next thing on the show.... grocery shopping bags. Plastic or Paper? Apparently neither. I wholeheartedly agree with the plastics issue. I watched a show that was about where plastic ends up and it really disgusted me. There is this place in the ocean....somewhere in the Pacific around Hawaii I think, that all the currents kindof come together there. It is hundreds of miles of plastic bottle wasteland. You have never seen anything so gross. Of course the marine life end up ingesting it and you get the picture. Also a beach in Hawaii that doesnt make the tourist mag's happens to be where a lot of this oceanic plastic washes up. It is miles long and the sand is basically plastic chips. It is horrible. When I watched that, I decided that day to never buy bottled water again. We used to buy cases of it because I hate tap water but we havent bought a case since. I have occasionaly bought a bottle of water for work....mostly because I cant keep my re-usable water bottle at my desk. But, we have not purchased bottled water since that show. Our fridge has filtered water and the next place we live I will buy a filtration device for my tap. So, back to grocery bags. Your supposed to say no to paper too because of all the trees that are butchered to make the bags. So what do you do? You use re-usable bags. You know the kind you can buy at the grocery store? Here the problem I have with that. When we grocery shop, we have to use 2 carts to fit everything in. How the heck am I supposed to do re-usable bags? I would have to bring like 50 of them in order to fit everything! Ridiculous. So, I guess I will just have to continue the way I am and feel guilty for the dead trees or the plastic wasteland.

This really isnt a rant, I really do believe that we should take steps to be more aware of the environment and do our best to help clean it up. We recycle.....I try to remember to throw anything in our big blue bin that is recycleable. We dont use plastic water bottles. I have replaced a lot of my light bulbs with the those swirly ones that dont emit that stuff that is bad for the air....(you can see how well versed I am in the green terminology) So, I feel like I am contributing. Would I consider myself green? No. Turquoise maybe.....I'm working on it. When I hit the lottery, then I will replace my vehicles, get solar panels on my home, buy a compost machine, and buy only the best, organic foods for my family.