Category Archives: Good Fact

A List can Cut Down on Food Waste at Home

Smart people have been following the advice from health officials to limit trips outside the home to slow the spread of COVID-19, which means bigger grocery trips. This sounds innocuous until you realize that since this is a time a lot of people are regularly cooking at home they don’t know how to manage their filled fridges. Produce goes bad faster than expected and people might by stuff with good intentions only to forget about it.

How do we deal with this increase of potential food waste? Make a list.

Keeping your fridge stocked without much of its contents ending up in your compost bin (note: this is also a great time to get a compost bin if you don’t already have one) isn’t hard, but it does take a modicum of effort. To that end, I made up a very basic, fly-by-night system to organize yourself, your groceries, and your cooking. You can basically modify it however works for you! The idea is just to keep track of what you buy and when it will go bad using lists, and keeping that information in plain sight on your refrigerator.

The system is extremely low-tech, and it’s based on a series of lists: picking out a few exciting things you want to try cooking before you go to the grocery store, putting ingredients for those meals on your grocery list, writing down when all the food items you’ve purchased will start to go bad, and then making a cooking schedule to accommodate all those (approximate — we’re all guessing) expiration dates. I suggest putting these lists in plain sight, like on your fridge, to keep your meal plan front-of-mind.

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This Guy Only Ate Food He Grew for One Year

The video above tells a story about a person who grew in his garden enough food to eat for a year. Even with a small plot of land one can grow a lot of food. At our house we find that we have food to give away at the end of the summer.

Right now is a perfect time to start planning your garden to get some free food.

I hope that you are inspired to plant some food and support local farmers and growers in your area! We definitely can’t all do what I did, nor do we need to, but in the times we live in we all certainly do something to improve the world around us while increasing our own health and happiness.
If you got inspiration from this join me on my channel for more great videos:
http://youtube.com/robgreenfield
And on Instagram @RobJGreenfield https://www.instagram.com/robjgreenfield/
Health and happiness to you all!

Eating Locally isn’t as Important as you Think

Diets make a difference in your individual health and our total global health. If we all eat healthier then the planet’s health will also improve, and the best way to do this is by eating foods with low green house gas (GHG) emissions. It turns out the best way to reduce your carbon footprint with food isn’t to eat local – it’s to change what you eat. The transportation of food is a negligible amount of the total GHG emissions from our processed food system.

For most foods – and particularly the largest emitters – most GHG emissions result from land use change (shown in green), and from processes at the farm stage (brown). Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers – both organic (“manure management”) and synthetic; and enteric fermentation (the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle). Combined, land use and farm-stage emissions account for more than 80% of the footprint for most foods.

Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.

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Thanks to Delaney!

Keeping Cool While the Planet Warms

Berlin

Air conditioning demand is expected to triple by 2030 which means that the energy demand from cooling is to rise sharply. As the planet warms the need for air conditioners for survival will (ironically and understandably) increase globally. Obviously we need to switch to 100% renewable energy as quickly as possible to limit the ongoing harm from AC units. We can also produce more efficient and environmentally friendly AC units, and that’s exactly what some organizations are trying to do.

If we could make the most commonly sold, entry-level RACs four to five times more energy efficient and use low or no global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants, we could mitigate the need for an additional 2,000 GW of power generation capacity – a figure equivalent to the total global coal-powered plant capacity in operation today. 

The Global Cooling Prize – which was launched by RMI, the Government of India and Mission Innovation in 2018 – set out to do just that. The prize invited innovators from across the globe to submit their ideas for an affordable breakthrough cooling solution that had at least five-times less climate impact than the most commonly sold RAC on the Indian market today. More than 2,100 teams from 95 countries registered for the prize. Out of 139 detailed technical applications submitted by teams from 31 countries, the top eight solutions were shortlisted as finalists by the prize coalition in November 2019. Collectively, the finalists comprise around 25% of the total market share of RACs globally and have the potential to drive massive transformation in the industry.

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Swearing is F*^%ing Good

Before you judge someone for cursing think about why they’re cursing and listen. Researchers have found out that swearing can be a good thing for people in rather surprising ways. I’m sure you’ve yelled a curse word after hurting yourself, and that act actually increases your pain tolerance in the moment. That use of swearing is pretty easy to understand, other benefits of cursing aren’t as obvious. It turns out you should trust people who pepper their speech with the occasional swear.

Damn Honest 

Beyond swearing’s impacts on the body and mind, research has shown that cursing can influence our social dynamics, too. A 2012 study found that swearing can enhance the effectiveness and persuasiveness of an argument. In addition, cursing can also convey an emotional reaction to something without us resorting to physical violence. 

And while many might consider swearing less than savory, a recent study revealed that people who curse often actually lie less and have a higher degree of integrity. 

After the scientists surveyed how often participants use profanity, they conducted a series of tests to determine how truthful an individual was. The research team found a positive link between profanity and honesty. Cursing was associated with less deception on an interpersonal level, and higher levels of integrity overall.

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