Skip to main content

Gas For Food

I was at the farmer's market for vegetables and fruit when J spied the big bin or corn and clamored for me to buy some. There were pathetic looking ears of corn, about one fourth their usual size then there was sticker shock of the price. That much for plain old corn ?

I told J we'll make to with the frozen corn we still have left in the fridge and give the fresh corn a shot some other time. She was a little disappointed but recovered quickly after getting a sample of Camembert cheese to taste. Near the checkout line there were freshly baked chocolate cookie samples which was only more help.

Later in the evening I was reading about the DYI ethanol pump in Wired magazine. A sugar based backyard fuel pump sound like a good idea until the price of sugar goes the way of corn with everyone making their own backyard ethanol. Those sample cookies would be the first to disappear and then dessert would become and unbelievable luxury.

Using garbage as the starting product might be far more sustainable. Turning perfectly edible food into fuel to run a car seems extremely wrong-headed to folks like me who were born and raised in developing countries. We know if there is any food there is always more than one mouth waiting to be fed. It makes sense to address that need before filling up a gas tank.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Gas prices are on the rise and do not seem to be slowing down anytime soon. The state of the enviro. is deteriorating to an almost irreversible degree. Using bio fuel at this point seems to make sense. Yes people are struggling in third world countries, but will the earth survive the damage if we chose to continue using regular gas for our fuel?
11:46 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more