Month: January 2010

Mariners Know How to Cook – and Clean!

- Adam Clare

When out at sea one must make the most of what one has, so chefs are put into a situation in which they need to ensure all their cooking gear and serving gear survives rough seas. It’s lucky for us that they have shared their tips for keeping equipment clean and in ship-shape! These tips are good for anyone who uses a kitchen!

Dishes or Plates:

Cracked: For hairline cracks, put the plate in a pan of milk and boil for 45 minutes. The crack should disappear: if not, it was probably worse than you originally thought.

Greasy: Soak in hot water with baking soda. Chemically, baking soda plus grease equals soap, not soap to wash the baby mind you, but soap just the same.

Smelly: Wash them in salty water, or use a little ammonia in hot soapy water. You can also add a little ground mustard to the water.

Stained: Soak overnight in a mixture of hot water and soda. Then rub in a vinegar moisten cloth dipped in salt. This works very well with tea stains.

Read more tips at Marine Catering – Best Practices

Energy for All, All the Time!

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Today I just want to remind readers that there is indeed enough renewable energy out there to power the needs of humanity on the planet. In fact, wind, solar, and other renewable power sources can provide enough energy to power us and have extra juice to spare.

The shift from our current fossil fuel based economies to sustainable renewable energy economies is usually presented as a great challenge. That is also the message coming from the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Oil companies tell us that it can be done but that we need decades to get there. The numbers tell a bit of a different story. Total world energy consumption is about 15 terawatts (2005). All that energy can be generated by today’s solar panel technology on a sunny piece of land of about 550 by 550 kilometers (340 square miles). That is for instance about 3% of the surface of the United States and China, 4% of the surface of Australia, 3.5% of Brazil and 9% of India. And we just need to capture about 20% of the solar energy that hits such an area. Of course the beauty of solar energy is that it can be generated locally. So we are not going to see such a centralized production. But the numbers clearly convey that the challenge is not as huge as it is often presented.

Keep reading at the Huffington Post.

Cruelty Free Shopping Made Easy

- Fono

Happy New Year! To celebrate 2010, I got you a website that makes it easy to find out which cosmetic / toiletry / household good companies don’t test their products on animals.

Here’s the site, and here’s why:

In cosmetics and household products research, painful experiments are carried out on hundreds of thousands of animals every year in the UK, including dogs, rabbits, pigs, mice, rats, guinea-pigs, fish and birds. This includes tests for skin or eye irritation, skin sensitisation (allergy), toxicity (poisoning), mutagenicity (genetic damage), teratogencity (birth defects), carcinogenicity (causing cancer), embryonic or fetal genetic damage and toxicokinetics (to study the absorption, metabolism, distribution and excretion of the substance).

Every year is a good year for ethical consumerism!

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