Cool Art and Cool Clothes Fight Global Warming

  Detail from mural at El Paso Earth Day Celebration 2013 (photo: Sabiha Khan)

With Earth Week drawing to a close, I wanted to share some cool projects in the border region.

My favorites are the ones that combine green thinking, culture, and social change. I found two like that at last weekend's Earth Day Celebration in El Paso.

One has to do with wheels and the other with rags.

So first, wheels.

Culture in a Bottle: 5 Things You Should Know About Yogurt and Its Fermented Friends

Photo: MIKI Yoshihito/CC BY 2.0)

So lately I’ve been thinking about and eating a lot of cultured dairy products. Yogurt, kefir, sour cream, crème fraiche. Almost every culture (get it?) seems to have its own version of fermented moo juice. And it’s not just out of vanity or culinary boredom that you see such a common treatment of dairy across continents. I imagine this is how folks preserved their dairy for as long as possible before the advent of refrigeration.

My newest discovery since moving to the border is crema Mexicana. It’s a nutty, pourable soured cream that cradles the smoke of cumin and the spike of chile and lime. Way tastier than the flaccid tubs of sour cream we Greengos from the non-border states are forced to ingest with our nachos.

The One Cleaning Tool You Can't Live Without

The Best Brothers' Patent for a Mop Wringer, May 18, 1897

  photo: Mcapdevila/CC BY-SA 3.0 and GFDL

I usually don't wax poetic about cleaning supplies. I'm neither a devotee of the Swiffer nor a convert to the waterless microfiber method.

I tend toward the more old-school implements largely because they're plastic-free, simple, and therefore sustainable. I'm perfectly content dragging the stiffest corn broom across my floor. They're cheap and easily available.

Sure, they're not the best at picking up fine sediment, but it's a matter of principle. I'd rather have a few stray dust bunnies than a precise cleaning tool that will outlive the Apocalypse.

So generally speaking, I'm pretty easygoing about cleaning supplies as far as performance goes. Except for one thing.

Introducing the New Greenga!

Hi Folks! 

La Greenga is back. 

Only, she's not the one you might be used to.

        ***Drum roll*** 
                              Introducing...

Will El Paso ever get pawpaws?

There are several things that make me long to live on the East Coast again. I could see the musical The Book of Mormon, for instance. And I could eat pawpaws, Americas' mango.

NPR had a story on them this morning. They are not grown commercially (why?), so people have been foraging for them. They taste like mango custard, supposedly.

Also check out the Ohio Pawpaw Festival that I would have considered going to if I lived on the East Coast. Unless I had tickets for the Book of Mormons.

(Photo is from the blog Temperate Climate Permaculture.)

If meat was grown in a lab, would vegetarians eat it?

Lab-grown meat, grown independently of an animal, might be a reality soon, with one scientist estimating that he is six months away from creating a sausage, a year from a hamburger. But would vegetarians eat it? That was the question asked by Slate magazine here.

What do you say vegetarians and vegans? Would you eat cruelty-free meat?

Behold the pisco

I drank pisco the other night at Thyme Matters. It's from Peru and it's supposed to be all the rage...